Mao's Great Famine

Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 by Frank Dikötter, Walker Books, 2010. 

China and the Soviet Union

Mao saw himself as a competitor with Khrushchev and the Soviet Union for the leadership of the Communist movement. Mao Zedong was upset about Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin, because it implied that it was now permissible to criticize the leader of a Communist country. In fact, in late 1956, the CCP moved in the direction of greater collective leadership. When China started having economic problems during the Great Leap Forward, it was too ashamed to ask the Soviet Union for help, because it would losing face. Because Mao saw China and the Soviet Union in competition for the leadership of anti-imperialist movements in the Third World, China continued to give large amounts of foreign aid to the Third World, even when China could not afford it. 

Socialist High Tide

Mao’s 1955 Socialist High Tide, also called the Little Leap Forward, was an early effort to promote collectivization of agriculture. Peasants were permitted to sell their grain only to the government and only at a price determined by the government. Peasants resisted collectivization by hiding their grain and slaughtering and eating their farm animals. In late 1956, Mao’s Socialist High Tide was ended at the Eighth Party Congress by Zhou En-lai and Chen Yun. Mao accused the critics of the Socialist High Tide of being an anti-party clique.

Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957

The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 was a way to remove them. First Mao encouraged people to speak up, with his “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” campaign. Those who did speak up were arrested and sent to forced labor camps.

Dams, Reservoirs and Irrigation

The Great Leap Forward started in 1957 with dam and reservoir projects. These projects were performed with hundreds of thousands of manual laborers, due to a lack of earthmoving machinery. Thousands of workers died from exhaustion and accidents. The transfer of men from the fields to the water projects caused a drop in agricultural output and, consequently, widespread famine. Irrigation projects caused salinization of farmland soil. Hundreds of thousands of villages were required to relocate because their village would soon be underwater. From 1958 to 1962 an effort was made to move the Tao River uphill, over the mountains, to provide water for Gansu province. The project was abandoned unfinished in 1962.

Steel Furnaces

Steel was a simple way to measure a nation’s progress towards industrialization. In 1958, the leadership decided that in addition to large steel plants, peasants would make steel in small, backyard brick furnaces. However, much of the steel produced in these backyard furnaces was of poor quality and unusable. Also there was a shortage of iron ore, so peasants were required to sacrifice their agricultural and kitchen steel implements as scrap metal to feed their furnaces. Forests were cut down to provide fuel for backyard furnaces. Agricultural production fell, because men were busy with steel production, instead of farming. 

Farm Collectivization

In 1958 Mao again tried to collectivize China’s farms. Farm animals, agricultural implements, and even kitchen ware had to be surrendered to the collective. Peasants who objected were beaten or sent to forced labor camps. The agricultural sector of the economy was managed by top-down planning. The Communist Party hierarchy chose which crops the farmers should grow. The Communist Party also promoted several irrational farming practices: (a) Planting seeds too close together, (b) ploughing too deeply, and (c) allowing too many fields to lie fallow.

Lushan Conference

At the Lushan conference in Jiangxi in July 1959 several leaders of the Communist Party criticized Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The most prominent was Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, who was known for being outspoken. In contrast to Mao’s position, which that the Great Leap Forward was 90% good and 10% bad, Peng asserted that the Great Leap Forward had done more harm than good. Other critics of Mao’s policies included Zhang Wentian, Zhou Xiaozhou and Huang Kecheng. Mao called his critics rightist opportunists and bourgeois democrats. Lin Biao supported Mao publicly and was critical of Peng Dehuai. But in later years, Lin Biao revealed that at the time, he had had unspoken reservations about the Great Leap Forward. By the end of the conference, Mao had forced Peng Dehuai to recant and admit that he was wrong in criticizing Mao. After the Lushan conference, there was a purge. All over the country, those who had criticized the Great Leap Forward were hunted down, removed from their jobs or driven to suicide. 

Household Registration

A household registration (hukou) system classified China’s people into city dwellers and peasants. City dwellers were given a higher priority for receiving food than were the peasants, because the city dwellers were directly helping China’s industrialization by working in factories.   

Starvation

Because of excessive grain requisitions by the government, China’s peasants went hungry. Not just food, but also cotton for clothes were in short supply for the peasants because of government requisitions. The peasants also suffered from reductions in the rations of meat and edible oil, which were exported. Many peasants turned to eating green (chiqing), eating grain before it was ripe and harvested. Many women stopping menstruating or suffered from prolapsed uterus. Birth rates dropped greatly during the famine. Because of poor central planning, there were also large loses in transit and storage. Rats, insects, and fire destroyed much of the grain held in storage. Gangs of hungry peasants raided government granaries and freight trains.

Trade and Foreign Relations

China acquired a reputation among her trading partners for producing poor quality agricultural exports, infected with bacteria and insects. Mao was too proud to ask other countries for help during the famine, but China did turn to the Overseas Chinese for help. 

People who objected to ineffective agricultural practices were labelled Rightists and beaten.

Falsifying the Numbers

Local and regional officials inflated production figures to compete with each other. People who refused to make overly optimistic predictions of future grain production were persecuted as Rightists. There was a cumulative inflation of production figures as the the reports went up the chain of command. Current-day researchers cannot trust government archive grain numbers. 

Study Groups

During the Winter and Spring of 1960-61, the Communist Party Center in Beijing sent study groups to the provinces, because they didn’t trust official reports. Before the inspection teams arrived at a village, the local cadres (Communist Party officials) hurriedly hid the evidence of famine, to protect their jobs. For example, they locked up peasants with edema, buried people who had died from famine, and cut down trees whose bark had been eaten by starving peasants.

Forced Labor Camps (Lao Gai)

You didn’t need to steal to be punished, even work slow down and protesting were treated as a crimes. Most people who rebelled against the orders of the cadres were punished by beatings and food deprivation, not by incarceration. But more serious opponents were sent to forced labor camps, called Laogai (劳改). Prisoners did not just sit in their cells, they had to work long hours performing rigorous and dangerous work, while receiving meager food rations. Labor camps came in a wide variety: factories, quarries, coal mines, brick factories, salt mines, uranium mines, and, of course, farms. The Ministry of Public Security ran the reform through labor camps (laogai). Many of these labor camps were located in harsh regions: Qinghai, Manchuria, Gansu, and Heilongjiang. There were 1.8 million prisoners in Laogais in 1960.

Liu Shaoqi

At a meeting in Beijing during May 1961, Liu Shaoqi reported that Hunan peasants said the poor harvests were 30% the fault of natural disasters, and 70% the fault of CCP center policy errors. In July 1961 the CCP Central Committee held a meeting at the Beidaihe beach resort on the Bohai gulf of the Yellow Sea.  Li Fuchun described suffering in Shandong, Henan and and Gansu provinces. Li Fuchun said that the leadership had incorrectly implemented Mao’s policies, by trying to do too much too quickly. Li Yiqing reported that during the campaign in 1958 in Henan province 140 thousand tons of agricultural implements had been destroyed in backyard steel furnaces. At the seven thousand cadres conference in Beijing in January 1962, Liu Shaoqi said that the famine was the result of human error rather than natural disasters. Lin Biao defended Mao, saying that Mao’s ideas were always correct. Zhou Enlai accepted the blame for Mao, saying that he had incorrectly implemented Mao’s correct policies.

Fleeing the Famine

The amount of migration from the countryside to the cities varied over time, due to changes in Communist Party policies and the need for extra workers. When the urban labor needs were smaller, there were deportations of peasants back to the villages. For a month, May 1962,  the Communist government allowed many thousands of Chinese people to flee to Hong Kong. However, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United Nations were willing to accept only a small number of Chinese people fleeing famine. Many members of southern ethnic minorities were able escape from Yunnan to southeast Asia. Many Uyghurs (Muslim Turks) of Xinjiang escaped to Kazakhstan, which contained people of a similar ethnicity. 

Mao, the Paranoid Narcissist

Mao refused to listen to those who criticized him. He saw criticisms of his policies as a personal attack. Criticism of Mao’s policies was equated with treason against the Party. Mao saw reports that his ideas did not work as a conspiracy against him. Instead of carefully reasoned arguments, Mao preferred simple slogans. Mao blamed the Soviet Union for the famine, because he claimed that the Soviet Union asked for rapid loan repayment. But this was not true. The Soviet Union had not pressured Mao to repay the debt quickly. Mao repaid rapidly on his own initiative. Implementation was blamed, rather than policy. People were blamed, not ideas.  Many peasants believed that Mao was not at fault, but rather that local cadres were corrupt. 

Number of Deaths Caused by the Great Leap Forward

Number	Source
23 million	Peng Xizhi
32.5 million	Cao Shuji
36 million	Yang Jisheng
38 million	Chang & Halliday
45 million	Frank Dikötter
55 million	Yu Xiguang