In stark contrast to the Ukrainian famine when some diplomats and journalists did find out what was happening and reported what they saw and heard, none of the foreigners in Beijing between 1958 and 1962 seem to have had any idea that millions were starving to death. The Chinese authorities were far more successful at keeping foreigners in the dark than had been the Soviet authorities. From 1960 to 1963 they restricted the movements of resident journalists and diplomats to the main cities and halted the circulation of provincial papers outside the country.
In such circumstances, the British press tended to assume that China was telling the truth about the natural disasters. The Times earnestly reported the theory of Lu Wo, the Deputy Director of the Central Meteorological Bureau, that China’s climate was changing. Lu Wo said that there were so many floods and droughts because China had entered a different cycle of weather. The weather story was largely accepted even though meteorologists in neighbouring countries such as Japan noticed nothing unusual.16 Other papers gave wide coverage to Chinese claims that the food shortages were caused by deliveries to the Soviet Union. The Hong Kong-based magazine Far Eastern Economic Review gave little credence to the horror stories related by refugees who had crossed the border into Hong Kong. After all, in 1958 and 1959 China had stepped up its food exports to the colony. One of the Review’s contributors, Colin Garratt, commented: ‘It is clear that many millions of Chinese are very, very short of food. Unlike some of their neighbours in South Korea, very few of them, if any, seem actually to be starving to death.’17
Refugee interviews formed the basis of academic research by Americans such as Richard Walker and Ivan and Miriam London who tried to raise the alarm.18 Their reports became more credible when in early 1961 the Chinese government reversed itself and began to admit grave food shortages. As a result, offers of aid came pouring in. The Kuomintang in Taiwan said they were ready to give 100,000 tonnes of grain. Japan, too, offered help. All sorts of luminaries, among them the philosopher Bertrand Russell, signed letters demanding that something should be done, and the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke of the crisis in the House of Commons. Left-wing papers such as the New Statesman and the Guardian urged the United States to send food aid.19 The Labour politician Michael Foot said that Washington with its overflowing granaries should not allow ideological differences to prevent it from delivering aid and US senators such as Hubert Humphrey took up the cause.20
From the start, China ruled out accepting aid from America. In February 1961, the Foreign Minister Chen Yi told Japanese visitors that China would never ‘stoop to beg for food from the US’.21 Later, President Kennedy also rejected the possibility, saying: ‘The Chinese Communist regime is extremely hostile to us in their propaganda and so on. There are no indications they want the food, and they have never asked for it.’22 The debate on food relief continued in 1962. One British MP compared the situation to the Soviet Union in 1926 and argued that if the West had done more to end the famine there, then the Russian Communists would have lost power and the course of history would have been changed. Western politicians had other motives for wanting to help.23 Unrest and even civil war in China were greatly feared, particularly by the British government, which was alarmed by the flood of refugees arriving in Hong Kong in 1962. Some speculated that the refugees might be a Trojan horse to enable Beijing to overthrow British rule. The Hong Kong police started to send the refugees back to China on trains and even Taiwan began to refuse to accept them.
Whatever people outside China said or did, there was nevertheless little that the West could do. China rebuffed all offers of assistance, even those by neutral international bodies such as the League of Red Cross Societies. The Chinese Red Cross Society sent a cable to Geneva saying that although ‘our rural areas have suffered from serious natural calamities in the past two years there has never been famine’. It went on to say that the nation was ‘fully capable of overcoming temporary difficulties caused by these calamities’.24
China would not stoop to accepting charity from foreigners but she did begin to buy millions of tonnes of grain from Australia, Canada and other countries, and imports peaked in 1964 at 6.4 million tonnes. Beijing also appealed to overseas Chinese to send food parcels and donations to buy chemical fertilizer.25 The Hong Kong press reported that China had offered to give a banquet to any of her citizens who persuaded their relatives in the colony to make a foreign exchange donation to a mainland bank. Hong Kong Chinese queued for hours to send food parcels and in the first half of 1962 alone sent packages worth £2.5 million.26
However, as the food shortages eased and the flood of refugees diminished, the world’s interest in what had happened in China faded. China’s agricultural crisis became an issue restricted to the narrow circles of the China-watchers and the grain traders.
Even now in the West the famine is still not accepted as a historical event. Sufficient doubt was cast on the allegations of Alsop and others at the time for those who later wrote books on China to feel confident in dismissing the famine in a few lines; and this applied both to those sympathetic to Beijing and those mistrustful of the Communists. In his 1966 biography of Mao, the British academic Stuart Schram devoted little more than a sentence to the famine: ‘The winter of 1960-61 was a bitter one in China. An extremely efficient system of rationing spread the hunger equally over the entire population but in order to attenuate the famine it was necessary to make large grain purchases from Canada and Australia.’ In 1972, a much more critical and hostile work by the American journalist Stanley Karnow, Mao and China: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution, took a similar line: ‘Through their strong, pervasive control network, however, the Communists were able to equalize the food shortages by maintaining a strict rationing system. Widespread famine, which had so often afflicted China in the past, when the death toll during lean years ran into millions, did not occur.’ Those who, like Karnow, tried to comprehend the Cultural Revolution were handicapped by this failure to accept the enormous scale of the famine. In fact it was the key to the puzzle.
Political analysts were not alone in making this mistake. An authority on Chinese agriculture, Dwight H. Perkins, wrote in Agricultural Development in China 1368-1969 (1969) that the Communists’ centralized control over the grain harvest had enabled them to cope with natural disasters:
The impact of this change was clearly demonstrated in the poor harvests of 1959 through 1961. The 15 to 20 per cent drop in grain production which probably occurred in the entire country would have meant in years past many millions of deaths in the areas most severely affected. Tight control, particularly an effective system of rationing, together with the past development of the railroads meant that few if any starved outright. Instead the nutritional levels of the whole country were maintained, perhaps not with precise equality, but with a close approximation to it. As a result, the regime averted a major disaster.
A belief in the achievements of Maoist agriculture extended to the doyen of American China-watchers, John K Fairbank, who in China Perceived (1974) stated that, ‘valued in the Chinese peasant’s terms, the revolution has been a magnificent achievement, a victory not only for Mao Zedong, but for several hundreds of millions of Chinese people’. Another even more influential American pundit, the liberal economist J. K. Galbraith, became convinced after a visit to China that the country’s agriculture worked well. As he wrote in A China Passage (1973), ‘There can now be no serious doubt that China is devising a highly effective economic system. Frank Coe and Sol Adler [who travelled with him]... guess that the rate of expansion in Chinese industrial and agricultural output is now between 10 and 11 percent annually. This does not seem to me implausible.’
Ignorant of the millions who had been sacrificed on the altar of Mao’s vanity, academics and pundits now held up China as a development model, and Mao’s policies began to cast a terrible and destructive shadow on the rest of the Third World. With unconscious irony, the Far Eastern Economic Review set the tone in an editorial p
ublished at the height of the famine in 1960: ‘We believe that what is happening in China is of momentous importance because if the authorities succeed in their social, economic and political ambitions they will offer to the world a new champion of the non-European majority, a new model for human society and a new method of overcoming poverty. ‘
In China Comes of Age, published in 1969, the French writer Jean-Pierre Brulé took this a step further and declared that ‘Peking’s unique experiment thus presents the hungry masses of Asia and Africa with a compelling example, as they struggle to find some way out of their own underdevelopment...’ A few years later, the China-watcher Leo Goodstadt wrote in Mao Tse Tung-the Search for Plenty that ‘when it came to agriculture, Mao was well ahead of other Asian leaders, and his ideas tally with the sort of thinking found among non-Marxist economists...’
One of those economists was the Deputy Director of the World Food Council and a former senior official at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Sartaj Aziz. In 1978 he devoted a whole book to praising the communes.27 His book and his message were promoted by another important influence on development thinking, Barbara Ward, the co-author of works such as Only One Earth — the Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, a report by seventy international development consultants. In the introduction to Aziz’s book she wrote that ‘The Chinese have found solutions to virtually all the major problems posed by the first stages of modernization... The Chinese achievement was contrived by ignoring the accepted beliefs of western development experts and the most sober tenets of orthodox Marxism.’
Most extraordinary of all, such books specifically credited Mao with having ended China’s famines. Brulé, for instance, says that ‘the fact that the regime survived the three black years in which natural conditions damaged harvests to an unprecedented degree proved to the Chinese that heaven had not withdrawn its mandate [from Mao]... there were no more of the horrible famines such as that in 1920-21 when half a million died and ten million were left destitute... Mao had fought the dragons and won.’
Others lavished praise on the great achievements of Maoist science. A team of Americans shown around Dazhai and other propaganda showpieces returned to publish China: Science Walks on Two Legs – A Report from Science for the People. This uncritical acceptance of Mao’s success passed into university textbooks such as Economics of Change in Less Developed Countries by David Coleman and Frederick Nixson (1978) which asserted that
China’s scientific and technological capabilities have been developed so as to improve the living standards of the mass of the population, increase agricultural and industrial production and modernize Chinese society... great stress is placed on national self-reliance in technological progress and the policy of ‘walking on two legs’ is aimed at avoiding the sectoral, geographical and social class divisions and inequalities characteristic of the majority of LDCs [Less Developed Countries].
China’s alleged egalitarianism was much admired, especially when compared with India. Egalitarianism was a key goal in development thinking in the 1970s and enshrined in several UN resolutions. In practice, this meant that policies which allowed some peasants to get richer than others were discouraged in UN-sponsored development projects. Indirectly, this approach endorsed the political persecution of rich peasants by Mao and earlier by Stalin. An Open University textbook by Gavin Kitching entitled Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective declares, for example, that ‘A total loss of individual peasant autonomy (in the use of land and labour power) has been the price of a continual rise in living standards and of greater equality both among peasants and between peasants and others.’ He goes on to claim that Maoist China was a success because it fed its people and ‘cut urban-rural migration to zero and indeed sent tens of millions of people out of urban areas into the countryside’.
It is perhaps unfair to criticize such books in the light of later knowledge, but many of these judgements were based on little evidence. After the Great Leap Forward, China published few statistics and those figures that were made available merely consisted of percentages, none of which could be verified, let alone measured, against independent research. China was an intensely secretive, tightly controlled society, as even her admirers conceded. Too many scholars readily accepted propaganda as fact, and even though more details of the famine emerged in the 1980s, there has still been a deep reluctance to reconsider the question. Gavin Kitching’s book came out in 1989, several years after American demographers had announced that 30 million had died during the famine, and school textbooks such as Modern China by C. K. Macdonald also continued to promote the idea that the famine had nothing to do with the Great Leap Forward: ‘Between 1960-1962 famine hit China. This was due mainly to the bad weather. In some parts of China there were floods, in other parts drought... It is difficult to judge how many people died in the famine. But one thing is certain; the big improvements made in farming in the 1950s saved millions more Chinese people [from] starving to death.’28 Another children’s book, by Gladys Hickman, Introducing the New China published in 1983, ignored the famine altogether and lauded the communes even as they were being disbanded: ‘China has managed to do something almost no other developing country in the world has done: give everyone a better chance of a “good life”. The communes are the key to this success. It is through the communes that rural life in China is being transformed.’29
Writers with a far deeper knowledge of China have also hesitated to face up to the famine. In 1990 Oxford University Press published a history of China, Rebellions and Revolutions by Jack Gray, which still avers that the famine was not man-made.
It has been suggested in China that twenty million people died as a result of the agricultural disasters of these three bad years. If that is so, it was one of the greatest recorded famines in history. The figure is the result of indirect inferences drawn from the movement of China’s population figures and cannot be taken literally. But there is no doubt that the number of deaths from famine and the results of malnutrition were at least of the order associated with the great famines of the past.
Gray even argues that Mao was the first leader to recognize the existence of the famine and to issue orders to rectify the crisis.
Another textbook published two years later, Chinese Communism by Dick Wilson and Matthew Grenier, further minimizes what happened: ‘The bad harvest of 1959 following so closely after the fragmentation and disorganisation of the peasant economy, resulted in three years of the worst famine since the Communists came to power.’ And a recent biography of Mao by the Australian scholar Ross Terrill which was reissued in 1993 devotes only a few lines to the famine and stresses the positive side of the Great Leap Forward: ‘As therapy the Leap was not without benefit, each generation must find its own excitement, and 1958 provided some for millions of young farmers. Local initiative was sparked, communal spirit grew. The ordinary person felt anew his Chineseness and a new framework of rural government – fusing work life and civic life – came into existence.’
Only one book devoted to the famine has been published in English – Famine in China, 1959-61 by Penny Kane, a British academic. Though strong on demographics, elsewhere the author appears to sympathize with Mao. She argues that Peng Dehuai was wrong to challenge Mao in 1959 because this turned the crisis into a leadership battle and she goes on to support China’s decision to reject outside help and to praise the rationing system: ‘Even in 1959-61, it seemed probable that coordinated group activity and the sharing of any available resources helped to protect the most vulnerable from suffering disproportionately.’ She is also inclined to see the benefits of Mao’s policies: ‘Among the positive outcomes of the period of the Great Leap, now often overlooked, was that it was highly educational. Large numbers of agricultural scientists and technicians spent time in the rural areas instead of in laboratories and many experiments aimed at improving existing agricultural practices were attempted.’
Given these entrenched perceptions in the world
of academia, it is not surprising that Third World students working abroad became enthusiastic about Mao’s China. Many studied in China itself or visited it, including those men who would later play a leading role in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. In Somalia, Tanzania, Guinea and Ethiopia, revolutionary leaders tried to copy the agricultural ideas of Mao and Stalin. Traditional agricultural practices were abandoned, large-scale irrigation schemes were launched, the small peasant farmer was made a social outcast and various types of collectives and communes were attempted. As in China, the goal was the mechanization of agriculture but the tractors rarely materialized. Instead many of these governments found themselves grappling with a hostile peasantry, famine and civil war.
China’s close ally, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, for example, explicitly talked of creating a ‘Great Leap Forward’ when he resettled between four and six million of his subjects in collective villages and spoke of the need to prevent the growth of a ‘kulak class’. In Ethiopia, the revolutionaries who took power after overthrowing Emperor Haile Selassie were divided, some supporting Mao, others Stalin. Their debate over rural policy became so fierce that the different factions waged pitched battles in Addis Ababa during a period known as the ‘Red Terror’. The Maoists lost but Colonel Mengistu later moved the peasants into semi-voluntary co-operatives and then launched a three-year forced collectivization programme. As the programme was stepped up, Mengistu attacked the rampant ‘individualism’ of rich peasants, and the private plots allowed to peasants were reduced from a fifth to a tenth of a hectare.
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Page 34