Hungry Ghosts

Hungry Ghosts: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by Jasper Becker. Holt Paperbacks (1998) 

Collectivization of the Peasant Farms

In 1950 Liu Shaoqi argued that the property of rich peasants should not be confiscated, because they were needed for Chinese agriculture to function effectively. In 1951 Liu attacked Mao’s plan for forcing the peasants into large collective farms as Utopian agrarian socialism. He believed that collectivization should occur only after China had advanced to the point of mechanized farming. Liu was supported by Bo Yibo. Mao prevailed. Mao said that the peasant who owned his own land was inherently capitalistic, and he forced four hundred million Chinese peasants to join collective farms. They were forced to pool their draft animals, tools and grain.  Zhou Enlai, a moderate, wanted to retreat from collectivization, because it was substantially depressing agricultural production. 

Hundred Flowers Campaign

The “Hundred Flowers Campaign” was a period of free speech  pronounced by Mao in 1957. After a few weeks of listening to those intellectuals who spoke out, he had them arrested as Rightists. He also arrested Communist Party officials who opposed collectivization. Khrushchev counseled Mao not to repeat Stalin’s mistake of rushing into collectivization too quickly, but Mao ignored his advice. Mao was overconfident and believed China could outdo the Soviet Union in the quickness and effectiveness of the communalization of agriculture.

The Great Leap Forward

Mao named his next step in the collectivization of agriculture “The Great Leap Forward” after Hegel’s assertion that progress comes in sudden leaps and bounds. Mao punished anyone who claimed that the Great Leap Forward was not working. So naturally, when Mao toured the countryside in the summer of 1958 to see how things were going, people lied to him, told him that agricultural production was way up, when in fact it was way down. The peasants were told that since there was so much more food than before, they should eat as much as they wanted. However, when the winter of 1958-59 arrived, the food began running out and people began starving. When Mao heard reports of famine, he refused to believe them, and instead accused the peasants of lying and hiding grain. The Communists went around the countryside beating peasants for the imaginary crime of hiding grain. 

Grain Requisitions

In Henan province in 1959 the communists required the reporting of much higher than actual grain harvest, and then used these inflated figures as a basis for determining the grain levy. So while according to the books only 30% of the grain was taken away by the government, in reality 90% was taken away. People who told the truth about the size of the harvest were beaten to death. The communists asserted that there was no shortage of grain, but that the peasants were the enemy, were rightists who were hiding grain. Peasants who had no grain to hand over were required to give their livestock to the government. They were also required to hand over their quilts and winter coats. Peasants were tortured by burning their hair; when they responded by cutting off their hair, the communists cut off their ears. The state granaries were full even while the peasants starved to death. The Party leadership ate well.

Wei Shaoqiao

Wei Shaoqiao, his wife and child were killed because he left a dam construction site and returned home without permission.

Famine

Because hygiene was maintained during the famine, people did not die quickly from disease, but instead suffered long, drawn out deaths. Ten to thirty percent of the rural population suffered from edema (dropsy).  The lack of protein in the diet caused fluid to escape from the blood into the connective tissues, causing swelling. Since the party line was that there was no famine, doctors were forbidden to give starvation as a cause of death, and instead had to blame fictitious diseases. Other symptoms of starvation included bloody diarrhea, severe flatulence, painful bleeding under fingernails, fissures in the teeth, and jaundice. Some people experienced an inward collapse of their chests.  People became so desperate that they ate grass, tree bark, corncobs, their clothes and their shoes. Some ate dirt, which clogged up their intestines and killed them.  Many women stopped menstruating. Some died in childbirth because they could not stop the bleeding. Mothers could not produce enough milk to feed their babies. Many women suffered from prolapse of the uterus. The children were often stunted in their growth or developed rickets. 

Concealment of the Famine

All mail and telephone calls were censored so that no one outside the region could find out what was going on there. Anyone attempting to leave was arrested (Becker, 1997, pages 112-120). During the Great Leap Forward, foreign journalists and diplomats were restricted to the cities, so they could not obtain any first-hand knowledge of what was happening in the countryside. The newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop wrote many articles describing the famine. Reports from refugees arriving in Hong Kong were one of his main sources of information. The French Socialist politician Françoise Mitterand was given a three-week guided tour of China in 1961 and came back proclaiming that there was no famine and that Mao was a humanist, not a dictator. Mao’s position was that the food shortages were caused by a drought (but, in fact, the weather was normal).  Reliable estimates for the number of people who died because of the Great Leap Forward vary between 30 and 50 million. 

Peng Dehuai

The Minister of Defense, Peng Dehuai, started life as a poor peasant and commanded the Chinese forces fighting in the Korean War. At a Communist Party meeting during the summer of 1959 Peng Dehuai spoke out against the Great Leap Forward, stating that it was responsible for creating a famine. He was put under house arrest. Mao then instituted a purge of officials who criticized the Great Leap Forward. 

Retreat from Radicalism

In 1961 Liu Shaoqi, with support from Deng Xiaoping, Premier Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun, forced Mao to retreat from the Great Leap Forward and reintroduce a limited amount of capitalism and private ownership of farming land among the peasants. In 1962 China accepted food aid from Hong Kong and even allowed a quarter of a million people to emigrate to Hong Kong. Kazakhs were allowed to cross over into the Soviet Union and the treatment of Tibetans improved. From 1962 to 1966 there was a battle between the moderates and Mao, with Mao eventually regaining his full powers in 1966 and launching the Cultural Revolution.