Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  9 Unpublished Party document.

  10 Instructions given by the Central Party Committee following the Xinyang Prefectural Party Committee Report on ‘The Movement of Work Style Rectification, Commune Reconstruction and the Organization of Production and Disaster Relief, unpublished.

  11 Su Luozheng, July Storm—The Inside Story of the Lushan Conference, p. 360.

  12 These figures appear in Su Luozheng’s July Storm, Su Xiaokang’s Utopia and Ding Shu’s Ren Huo.

  13 Confidential documents.

  14 ‘Bai Hua Speaks His Mind in Hong Kong’, Dongzhang, No. 45/46, December 1987 and January 1988.

  15 Interviews with the author.

  16 Interviews with the author.

  17 Confidential sources.

  18 Jack Gray, Rebellions and Revolutions, p. 290.

  19 Frederick Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China, p. 276.

  20 See also Su Luozheng, July Storm—The Inside Story of the Lushan Conference, p. 358.

  21 Interviews with the author.

  22 Interviews with the author.

  23 Su Luozheng, July Storm—The Inside Story of the Lushan Conference, p. 358.

  24 Su Luozheng in July Storm claims that Wu also attacked the ‘conditions only theory’, the ‘pessimism theory’ and the ‘mythology theory’ (p. 359).

  25 Su Luozheng, July Storm—The Inside Story of the Lushan, Conference, p. 359.

  26 Su Luozheng in July Storm claims that people had starved to death even in November 1958. By the spring of 1959 many in eastern Henan were suffering from oedema and the number of deaths was increasing (p. 358).

  27 Unpublished Party documents.

  28 Unpublished Party documents.

  29 Daily Telegraph, 6 August 1963.

  30 Interviews with the author.

  Chapter 9: Anhui: Let’s Talk about Fengyang

  31 A flower drum, or huagzi, was used by travelling beggars to call for alms.

  32 Wang Lixin, Agricultural Reforms of Anhui—A True Record, p. 269.

  33 Interview with retired Anhui official.

  34 Wang Lixin in Agricultural Reforms of Anhui—A True Record includes the story of how a team of oxen ploughed 36 mu in one evening (p. 270). He also points out that at the end of the Great Leap Forward 38 per cent of the arable land had been ruined and 36 per cent of the draught animals had died.

  35 Wang Lixin in Agricultural Reforms of Anhui—A True Record claims that 97 per cent of the population ate at the county’s 2,641 canteens and that often they served only half a pound of grain per person per day (p. 270).

  36 Thirty Years in the Countryside contains this passage (p. 194): ‘Some villages had to hand in their mouth food [daily consumption grain] and seed grains... some brigades had no grains to cook but county Party Secretary Zhao still ordered the digging up of possible grain stocks. Zhao convened a big meeting of all county cadres to get more grain by struggle. In the struggles some cadres were physically beaten. After the meeting, similar struggle meetings took place all over the county. Special grain-hiding investigation teams were set up in many brigades, and teams were sent to search every household. The masses were strung up and beaten. People’s mouth grains and grains grown on the private plots were taken away. Even the leaves of sweet potatoes, eggs, etc. were confiscated in the name of “anti-bourgeois” struggle.

  37 The interviewee insisted that her name and that of her village remain confidential.

  38 These figures and quotations are taken from Thirty Years in the Countryside (p. 195), but also surface in a number of books published in mainland China, including The Later Years and Months of Mao, and Wang Lixin, Agricultural Reforms of Anhui—A True Record.

  39 Wang Lixin, Agricultural Reforms in Anhui—A True Record, p. 275. I was unable to discover the fate of Zhang Shaobao.

  40 Thirty Years in the Countryside, p. 196.

  41 A book of photographs published by the Party to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China contains a picture of a hastily scribbled note by Zhou Enlai. The accompanying caption reads: ‘The errors of the “Great Leap Forward” and “Anti-Right Opportunist movement” caused serious difficulties to China’s national economy and vital damage to the state and people. Early in 1960, there was a famine and disaster in He and Wuwei counties. Also, it was a fact that people starved to death, so immediately Zhou Enlai wrote to Zeng requesting him to investigate the situation and report back:

  Comrade Xisheng,

  I am writing this letter to request you to send people to Shancun [words indistinct] to conduct an investigation, after you read this letter, to find out if there is such a matter. Perhaps this has been exaggerated. This sort of individual case happened in every province especially in those provinces where there were disasters last year. It is worthwhile paying attention to what Chairman Mao said in the document of the 6th-level cadres meeting in Shandong province. He stressed that we should take this seriously. Please when you make everything clear, send a reply.

  Best regards, Zhou Enlai 29 March 1960’

  42 Wang Lixin, Agricultural Reforms in Anhui—A True Record; Thirty Years in the Countryside, p. 275; and interviews with the author.

  43 One source claimed that 100,000 left Wuwei.

  44 Interviews with the author in Anhui, 1994.

  45 Interview with a former senior Party official, Chen Yizi.

  46 Thirty Years in the Countryside, p. 275.

  47 In Wudian 14,285 people died out of a population of 53,759. In the Guangming production brigade, 832 out of a population of 1,638 died and in the Banjing production brigade 1,627 out of a population of 4,100 died.

  Chapter 10: The Other Provinces

  1 Interview with the author.

  2 Interview with the author.

  3 Zhou Yueli, Zeng Xisheng’s former secretary.

  4 Peng Xizhe, ‘Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1987, pp. 645, 663.

  5 Peng Xizhe, ‘Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1987, p. 663.

  6 Stuart and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain—Travels in New Tibet, pp. 106-111.

  7 Judith Banister, China’s Changing Population. On p. 304, Banister writes: ‘During the period 1953-57 interprovincial movement appears to have been relatively great. Recipients of net in-migration during those years were Beijing and Tianjin municipalities and the northern provinces of Nei Mongol, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Qinghai, and Xinjiang, judging from their high annual growth rates.’ She also points out that ‘Figures on provincial populations at the beginning and end of this period may mask enormous temporary migrations in the interim’ and that ‘many other provinces recorded a population gain from 1957 to 1964, but the annual rate of growth was so low that there must have been enormous loss of life plus a net out-migration. Shandong was severely affected, as were Guizhou and Hunan.’

  8 Peng Xizhe, ‘Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1987, pp. 662-663.

  9 Interview with the author.

  10 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State, p. 241.

  11 Interview with the author.

  12 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State, p. 241.

  13 Interview with the author.

  14 Interview with the author.

  15 Interview with the author.

  16 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State, p. 241.

  17 Ding Shu, Ren Huo.

  18 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State, p. 243.

  19 Interview with the author.

  20 Letter to the author.

  21 Great War Literary Magazine, published in Henan prov
ince.

  22 Zhao died in Taiyuan in his home province of Shanxi in September 1970. He was noted for his many books about the local peasants and for his accounts of land reform. He had joined the Party in 1937, becoming editor of the Eighth Route Army newspaper, and was highly regarded within the Party.

  23 After 1949, the provincial capital, Lanzhou, was transformed into a major industrial centre. During the Great Leap Forward, huge numbers of peasants were dispatched to construct the massive Tao River scheme. Rain is irregular in Gansu so the Soviet-inspired planners designed a reservoir, a dam and hydro-electric plant, and a giant canal 120 feet wide as well as a network of irrigation canals.

  24 Frederick Teiwes, Politics and Purges, pp. 273-289.

  25 October, No. 5, 1988.

  26 Peng Xizhe, ‘Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces’, Population and Development Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1987, pp. 650-661.

  27 Interviews with the author.

  28 Interviews with the author.

  29 Quoted in Ding Shu, Ren Huo.

  30 Yi Shu, ‘One Thousand Li Hunger’, Kaifang, August 1994.

  31 The dissident and democracy activist Wei Jingsheng has recalled that during his travels as a Red Guard he took a train along the Gansu Corridor around 1967. He was shocked to see starving and naked women and children begging for food in every railway station. His companion in the train, a cadre, told him that such sights were very common in these parts and said that they were former landlords and rich peasants, or just lazy, and that it did them good to be hungry. Wei refused to believe this and when he gave some of the beggars his food, they fought over it. A full account of what Wei saw is not available in a collection of writings by and about him which his sister made public in Germany in 1995.

  32 Ding Shu, Ren Huo.

  33 Interviews with the author.

  34 Jung Chang, Wild Swans, pp. 230-231.

  35 Judith Banister in China’s Changing Population (pp. 303-305) provides the following statistics: Sichuan’s population fell by 0.91 per cent from a population of 72.16 million at the end of 1957 to 69.01 million in mid-1964.

  36 One former production leader told me: ‘We were like slaves then. A man’s life was worth nothing. People crawled around on their hands and knees dying of hunger.’

  Chapter 11: The Panchen Lama’s Letter

  1 Interview with local official.

  2 Interview with local official.

  3 Another group of eastern Tibetans is also found in Yunnan province.

  4 Identified as Xiao Cheng in western Sichuan.

  5 Interview with former inmate.

  6 Rewi Alley and Wilfred Burchett, China: The Quality of Life, p. 43.

  7 Interview with former official. Another source claims the population fell by one-third.

  8 Interview with former official.

  9 Cited by former officials based on the Panchen Lama’s findings.

  10 Interview with survivor.

  11 See also John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows.

  12 Information provided by the International Campaign for Tibet.

  13 Jamphel Gyatso, The Great Master Panchen. The book was published in 1989 but was later withdrawn from circulation.

  14 Jamphel Gyatso, The Great Master Panchen. A copy of the Chinese text of the Panchen Lama’s report is in circulation outside China and confirms the magnitude of his anger at the severity of the crisis.

  15 Jamphel Gyatso, The Great Master Panchen.

  16 Dawa Norbu, Red Star over Tibet, p. 210.

  17 Dawa Norbu, Red Star over Tibet, p. 208.

  18 John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 237.

  19 The size of the garrison in the TAR also increased because of China’s border war with India.

  20 John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows.

  21 Tibet under Chinese Communist Rule. A Compilation of Refugee Statements, 1958-1975, published by the Information Office of the Dalai Lama, p. 56. The nuns, from Michungri monastery in the suburbs of Lhasa, arrived in Sikkim on 2 March 1961.

  22 Tsering Doije Gashi, New Tibet: The Memoirs of a Graduate of the Peking Institute of National Minorities, p. 105.

  23 Dawa Norbu, Red Star over Tibet, p. 208.

  24 Interviews with the author.

  25 It is not certain whether the Nationalist Commission includes the TAR population in its figures and, in the absence of census figures, has used an estimate. Inner Tibet was counted separately until 1965 when the TAR was formally inaugurated. It is frequently said that it had 1 million residents, or 40 per cent of all Tibetans within China’s borders. If the Nationalities Commission figures do exclude the TAJR population, then altogether there would have been about 4 million Tibetans before the famine, the figure claimed by a number of Tibetan sources. This would imply a still higher death toll.

  26 Press conference given by TAR officials at the National People’s Congress in April 1955.

  Chapter 12: In the Prison Camps

  1 Some were arrested for warning of the dangers of Mao’s agricultural policies. In Guangzhou, Zhang Naiqi was labelled as a rightist for writing letters drawing attention to the growing hunger among the peasants. One interviewee recalled that this was also why her father was sent to prison: ‘In 1956 my father heard our maid tell him about the hardship of the peasants. She came from Shunyi, a county outside Beijing. They earned so little grain per work point—20 fen a day—that there was nothing to eat. This maid said everyone in her village was dying from hunger so my father decided to go and see for himself. I remember he brought back the food they were eating—cakes of mixed leaves, weeds and cornmeal. At the Ministry of Culture he told a meeting that the peasants shouldn’t be suffering like this. People applauded him and shook his hand and said he showed the right concern for the peasants. Then, a few months later, he was accused of spreading anti-government stories and sent to a labour camp in the far North.’

  2 A further 10 million were imprisoned for other crimes, bringing the overall total to at least 50 million. Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, p. 17.

  3 Interview, South China Morning Post, 5 May 1993, after he left China.

  4 Thirty Years in the Countryside, p. 183.

  5 Interview, South China Morning Post, 5 May 1993.

  6 John R Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 263.

  7 In Qinghai, Han Weitian recalled that often his fellows were alive at night but would be dead by dawn. He, too, saw corpses piled up and said that every day more than 30 corpses were taken away by cart from each production team.

  8 Interview with the author in Hong Kong.

  9 John R Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 262.

  10 Dr Benjamin Lee has written an unpublished account of his experiences and his medical observations.

  11 David Patt, A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, pp. 184—185.

  12 John R Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 252.

  13 Harry Wu, Bitter Winds, p. 109.

  14 Harry Wu, Bitter Winds, p. 112.

  15 Zhang Xianliang, Grass Soup, p. 205.

  16 John R Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 262.

  17 David Patt, A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, p. 82.

  18 Interview with the author.

  Chapter 13: The Anatomy of Hunger

  1 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  2 Thirty Years in the Countryside.

  3 Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, Son of the Revolution, pp. 17-18.

  4 Interviews with the author.

  5 Emmanuel John Hevi, An African Student in China, p. 41.

  6 Dr Lee’s paper has not been published at the time of writing. It was rejected by a number of academic journals whose editors were unwilling to believe what he reported. For example, Dr. William J. Visek of the Journal of Nutrition, published by the American Institute of Nutrition, replied, saying ‘there is a lack of verification and quantitative information t
hat can be tested and which satisfies the policy of the Journal to provide new information about the science of nutrition in any species. On page 4 your manuscript states that two men would carry 200 kg of muddy earth on their shoulders with a shoulder pole up a slippery slope 100 times per day. This is equal to 440 lbs per trip. That seems unreasonable under any set of conditions.’ However Dr. Lee’s account is borne out by many other eyewitnesses and is undoubtedly accurate.

  7 I interviewed Dr Choedak in 1995 but have taken this from the account of his time in prison reported in John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 252.

  8 Harry Wu, Bitter Winds, p. 102.

  9 In fact, Wu Ningkun met Dr Lee in the camps and recalls his first conversation: ‘Lucky dog. We had to be brought to this wilderness because Qinghe was packed to bursting. Well, you’d better get back to your labour now. Come seem me at the clinic in the evening before the roll call, Professor. My name is Benjamin Lee, but just Lee here, for a Christian name will land you in more trouble.’

  10 Zhang Xianliang, Grass Soup, p. 82.

  11 David Patt, Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, p. 184.

  12 John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, p. 253.

  13 Interview with the author.

  14 Interview with the author.

  15 Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, Son of the Revolution, p. 17.

  16 Steven Mosher, A Mother’s Ordeal, p. 37.

  17 Interviews with the author.

  18 Interview with the author.

  Chapter 14: Cannibalism

  1 Literally, it means ‘swop child, make food’.

  2 Steven Mosher, A Mother’s Ordeal, p. 39.

  3 The details and quotations in this chapter are taken from Kay Ray Chong, Cannibalism in China, unless otherwise stated.

  4 There references are taken from the report of the US Congress Commission on the Ukrainian Famine held in Washington and issued in 1988.

  5 This was an internal communication but it appears that while the authorities allowed millions to starve to death, they also publicly tried to dissuade people from resorting to cannibalism. Harry Lang, a Western traveller in the Ukraine at the time, noted: ‘In the office of a Soviet functionary I saw a poster on the wall which struck my attention. It showed the picture of a mother in distress, with a swollen child at her feet, and over the picture was the inscription: “Eating of Dead Children is Barbarism”. The Soviet official explained to me: “We distributed such posters in hundreds of villages, especially in the Ukraine. We had to.’” See Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow.