by Bill Schutt
Rather than focusing on one of the smaller linguistic groups, like the Wari’ of Brazil or the soon-to-be-discussed Fore of New Guinea, to whom cannibalism was apparently not a taboo, I chose instead to examine a culture with a lengthy, exquisitely detailed, and well-studied history. That culture belongs to the Chinese, and while their enormous country may not have been completely isolated from Western influences, its leaders have been obsessive in maintaining what is apparently the world’s longest unbroken historical record. How, then, did the Chinese deal with cannibalism—historically and in modern times? Are Western-style taboos present and, if not, what, if anything, does that tell us about humans as a species?
There is a general agreement among recent scholars that China has a long history of cannibalism.31 The evidence comes from a range of Chinese classics and dynastic chronicles, as well as an impressive compendium of eyewitness accounts, the latter providing some unsparingly gruesome details about some of the most recent incidents.
In Cannibalism in China (1990), historian and Chinese cannibalism expert Key Ray Chong specified two forms of cannibalism: survival cannibalism, which might occur during a siege or famine; and learned cannibalism, which the author described as, “an institutionalized practice of consuming certain, but not all, parts of the human body.” He went on to describe learned cannibalism as being “publicly and culturally sanctioned,” making it synonymous with the term “cultural cannibalism.”
As we have already seen, survival cannibalism was not unique among the Chinese, but the practice is worth discussing for several reasons—not the least of which was the frequency with which it occurred in China, coupled with a succession of governments whose responses varied from turning a blind eye to something close to official sanction. Perhaps the saddest and most surprising case (and the one with the greatest death toll) actually occurred in the mid-20th century, when starvation and cannibalism were only two aspects of a national calamity of unprecedented scope. It was a tragedy about which, until recently, much has been hidden from most Chinese citizens—and the world.
First, though, Chong’s investigation provided three examples of siege-related cannibalism recorded in Chinese classical literature. The oldest took place during a war between the states of Ch’u and Sung in 594 BCE and occurred in the Sung capital city. It was also notable because it was apparently the first time that starving Chinese began exchanging one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives—a practice made permissible by an imperial edict in 205 BCE. The other examples took place in 279 BCE in the besieged cities of Ch’u and Chi-mo, and in 259 BCE in the city of Chao. In the latter instance, soldiers defending a castle reportedly cannibalized servants and concubines, followed by children, women, and men “of low status.”
In total, Chong’s exhaustive research efforts yielded 153 and 177 incidents of war-related and natural disaster–related cannibalism, respectively. With no statistical difference in the numbers reported from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) to the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), incidents of cannibalism (in which varying numbers of people were consumed) seem to have been a fairly consistent occurrence throughout China’s long history—until recently, that is. But rather than the decrease in reports of cannibalism one might expect to find in modern times, the opposite turns out to be true. The greatest number of cannibalism-related deaths in China came as a direct result of Mao Zedong’s “The Great Leap Forward” (1958–1961), a disastrous attempt at utopian engineering.
This government program eventually morphed into what some consider the most far-reaching case of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of mankind. It also produced what may have been the worst famine in recorded history—a continent-spanning disaster in which at least 30 million, mostly rural, Chinese died of starvation. Those who wrote about the catastrophe often did so at their own peril, but what they uncovered was truly shocking. For example, in the 2008 book Mubei (Tombstone), Yang Jisheng wrote that famine-starved “people ate tree bark, weeds, bird droppings, and flesh that had been cut from dead bodies, sometimes of their own family members.” The author, who lost his father to starvation, also believes that 36 million deaths is a more accurate number, although some estimates run as high as 46 million. In brief, this is how it all came about.
In an effort to transform China’s primarily agrarian economy into a modern communist society based on industrialization and collectivization, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the People’s Republic, ordered nearly a billion farmers to move from private farms to massive agricultural collectives. More often than not, these communal farms were run by government officials who had no farming experience at all. Making matters even worse, Mao had them institute an anti-scientific agricultural program that had sprung from the brain of semi-literate Soviet peasant Trofim Lysenko in the late 1920s. Lysenkoism (as it came to be called) initially led to a deadly purge of Russian scientists and intellectuals. Eventually it set the Soviet Union’s agricultural system back at least 50 years and resulted in millions of starvation-related deaths.
Lysenko rejected an array of selective breeding techniques, especially those based on Mendelian genetics. Instead he proposed his own muddled version of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s early-18th-century claim that environmental factors produced needs or desires within an organism that led to new adaptations. Lamarck’s infamous giraffes, their necks stretching and lengthening in an effort to reach leaves in an ever-higher tree canopy, remain a common misconception of how variation in traits like color or size could be generated in any given population.
Lamarck, trained as a naturalist, believed that the giraffes willed these changes to occur—changes that would then be passed on to future generations. In Lysenko’s interpretation, the organisms exhibiting these needs and desires were crop plants like corn, wheat, and vegetables. In that regard, Lysenko boasted that he could grow citrus trees in Siberia by cold-storing the seeds the previous year. These sorts of preposterous claims went on for decades, with those who questioned Lysenko’s program either eliminated or afraid to make their voices heard. In the end, what Lysenkoism did prove was that reality does not yield to wishful thinking and truth cannot be established by a political party (or any other organization for that matter).
Not to be outdone by the Russians, Mao decided to install an “improved” version of Lysenko’s agricultural program in China, and his so-called advances might have been comical if their consequences hadn’t been so horrific. Instead of planting seedlings apart from each other, for example, Mao instructed that they be “close planted,” since rather than competing for resources like water and nutrients, the tightly packed plants would, like the farmers Mao had packed into enormous communal farms, help each other to grow. The seedlings invariably died, although farmers were coerced into pretending that mature plants were so densely compacted that children could stand on them. Photographs depicting this “miracle” were achieved by having the kids stand on a bench, hidden from view.32
Combined with forced collectivization and a purge of anyone who seemed to have a clue about anything, the Great Leap Forward ended in catastrophe. Agricultural output (mostly grain) fell significantly, even though local officials grossly inflated their actual production numbers to curry favor with Mao. This imaginary surplus led to increases in government quotas, so that most of what was produced was immediately confiscated by the state and even exported. Meanwhile, the farmers starved, as did anyone else not living in a city. Farm animals were eaten, then pets, and finally the bodies of the dead, especially children. Foreign correspondent Jasper Becker (former Bureau Chief of the South China Morning Post), wrote: “Traveling around the region over thirty years later, every peasant that I met aged over 50 said he personally knew of a case of cannibalism in his production team. . . . Women would usually go out at night and cut flesh off the bodies, which lay under a thin layer of soil, and this would then be eaten in secrecy.”
Critics of Mao’s system were imprisoned or murdered, and thousands of farmers
were accused of hoarding grain and were tortured to death in gruesome fashion. Fortunately, the Great Leap Forward, which was conceived as a five-year plan, was abandoned during year three. But although Chinese rulers looked the other way as starving populations consumed their dead, the cannibalism that took place during the Great Leap Forward was more of a necessity than a choice. These instances of survival cannibalism (albeit on a massive scale) do not, therefore, answer the question of whether or not something like the Western cannibalism taboo also existed in China.
It is under the banner of learned cannibalism that the Chinese appear to have exhibited attitudes toward cannibalism that differed significantly from the Western taboos. For a start, author Key Ray Chong provided a list of circumstances that might lead to an act of learned cannibalism. These were “hate, love, loyalty, filial piety, desire for human flesh as a delicacy, punishment, war, belief in the medical benefits of cannibalism, profit, insanity, coercion, religion, and superstition.” Some of these, Chong asserted, were uniquely Chinese.
As anyone who has ever visited China (or to a lesser extent, any big-city Chinatown) can attest, the Chinese consume a diverse range of creatures and their parts. Many of these, like scorpions and chicken testicles, fall outside the range of typical Western diets and, as writer Maggie Kilgore pointed out in 1998, some, like rats, snakes, shellfish, and things with paws, are specifically banned by Judeo-Christian law. Without our long list of forbidden foods, it’s not a surprise that the Chinese felt less strongly about consuming other humans.
Throughout their long history, body parts were such important ingredients in Chinese cuisine that Key Ray Chong devoted a 13-page chapter to “Methods of Cooking Human Flesh” with a subheading entitled “Baking, Roasting, Broiling, Smoke-drying, and Sun-drying.” And rather than an emergency ration consumed as a last resort, there are many reports of exotic human-based dishes prepared for royalty and upper-class citizens. T’ao Tsung-yi, a writer during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), wrote that “children’s meat was the best food of all in taste” followed by women and then men. In Shui Hu Chuan (The Tales of Water Margins), a novel written in the 12th century, there are numerous references to steamed dumplings stuffed with minced human flesh, as well as a rather nonchalant regard by merchants and customers over the sale of human meat.
Even if epicurean cannibalism isn’t limited to the Chinese, the extent to which it was set down in detail certainly was. Amidst information on “five regional cuisines” (Szechwan, Canton, Fukien, Shantung, and Honon), the San Kuo Yen Ki (Dramatic Epic of the Three Kingdoms), written in 1494, contained “many examples of steaming or boiling human meat.” Prisoners of war were preferred ingredients, but when they ran out (figuratively or literally), General Chu Ts’an’s soldiers seized women and children off the street, killed them, and then ate them. As recently as the 19th century, executioners reportedly ate the hearts and brains of the prisoners they executed, selling whatever cuts were left to the public.
Widespread epicurean cannibalism was still taking place in the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, although there was certainly an element of terror involved. Chinese dissident journalist Zheng Yi wrote the following in 2001:
Once victims had been subjected to criticism, they were cut open alive, and all their body parts—heart, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, elbows, feet, tendons, intestines—were boiled, barbecued, or stir-fried into a gourmet cuisine. On campuses, in hospitals, in the canteens of various governmental units at the brigade, township, district, and country levels, the smoke from cooking pots could be seen in the air. Feasts of human flesh, at which people celebrated by drinking and gambling, were a common sight.
Another form of cannibalism in China had nothing to do with persecution and punishment. Key Ray Chong reported that, “children would cut off parts of their body and make them into soup to please family members, particularly their parents.” This last example, and many others like it, led him to study what he considered a truly unique aspect of learned cannibalism among the Chinese—its association with the Confucian philosophy of filial piety. In general terms, filial piety is a highly regarded virtue in which it is the duty of younger family members to demonstrate respect, obedience, and care for one’s parents and elderly family members. In this case, however, it refers to an extreme act of cannibalism-related self-sacrifice, with relatives providing parts of their own bodies for the consumption and benefit of their elders.
Although by no means meant to be a complete list, Chong came up with a total of 766 documented cases of cannibalism-related filial piety, spanning a period of over 2,000 years. The practice took place primarily between sons and fathers, sons and mothers, and daughters and mothers.33 The most commonly consumed body part was the thigh, followed by the upper arm, both of which were prepared in a rice porridge called congee. Far less frequent, but recorded nonetheless, were instances in which a young person volunteered a part of their liver, breast, finger, or even eyeball.34
In each case, the practice was intended to provide nutrition to a starving loved one or as a treatment of last resort, to afford the sufferer some medical benefit. The concept of medicinal cannibalism will be discussed further in Chapter 15.
So is there any link between the practice of filial cannibalism in humans and that exhibited in the animal kingdom by species like mouth-brooding cichlids? One similarity is that, in both instances, the parent gains a benefit at the expense of the offspring. In humans, though, culture dictates that the offspring consciously initiate the act of filial cannibalism. Alternately, in animals it’s the parents that do the initiating—regarding their offspring as a handy food source should their numbers drop too low to expend further energy on them, or when other forms of nutrition are unavailable.
In addition to the historical record of cannibalism contained within China’s dynastic histories, the behavior in its various incarnations is also abundantly documented in plays, poems, and other works of fiction. For example, the 15th-century play, Shuang-zhong ji (Loyalty Redoubled) tells of a general coming up with the idea of turning his concubine into soup to feed his besieged and starving troops. Happily, for the general at least, the concubine volunteers for this duty, thus sparing the general from having to murder an innocent woman. The concubine’s devotion spurs the soldiers to fight on, which leads another servant (this one a boy) to volunteer his own body.
According to numerous sources, then, the practice of cannibalism in China was more or less accepted as a necessity during times of famine, as a right to be exercised during warfare and acts of vengeance, and as a way of honoring one’s relatives. And even though cannibalism wasn’t something the majority of Chinese ever looked forward to, the behavior apparently never had the same stigma attached to it that it did in Western cultures.
Many cultural and physical anthropologists vehemently disagree with writers such as Bill Arens that examples of cultural or ritual cannibalism were made up. They cite reams of ethno-historical data as well as physical evidence as proof that this type of behavior occurred across the entire span of human existence. But whether various acts of culturally sanctioned cannibalism existed or not (and it seems absurd to consider that they never did), the fact remains that for the vast majority of Westerners, our feelings regarding the practice have resulted (at least in part) from our exposure to a long list of influential writers beginning with the Ancient Greeks and extending into the 21st century.
In China there were no such widespread taboos regarding the behavior—which was carried out for a variety of reasons. Eventually, though, Western civilization came to dominate much of what the world saw and often emulated and, as Western influences made their way into Chinese society, the Greek and Judeo-Christian abhorrence for cannibalism began to rub off—at least outwardly. This may explain the current silence and stigma in China about the survival-related cannibalism practiced during China’s Great Leap Forward.
But if I’ve given you the impression that cannibalism did not occur in the West, that w
ould be an error. It was actually a common practice in places like Europe, where it was carried on in various forms into the 20th century. It is also being practiced today here in the United States.
* * *
30 In one of the most well-known TV episodes of all time, humanity realizes too late that the intentions of an advanced race of alien visitors are somewhat less than benevolent.
31 These authors include Key Ray Chong (1990), Jasper Becker (1996), Zheng Yi (1996), Lewis Petrinovich (2000), and Yang Jisheng (2008).
32 Another of Mao’s brainstorms led to war being declared on sparrows, with the subsequent success of farmers’ efforts reflected by a concurrent increase in crop-munching insect populations.
33 Rarely, this exchange took place between daughters-in-law and fathers-in-law, and between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law.
34 Although “an official edict in 1261 banned cutting out the liver or plucking out the eyeballs.”
15: Chia Skulls and Mummy Powder
The ancients were very eager to embalm the bodies of their dead, but not with the intention that they should serve as food and drink for the living as is the case at the present time.
— Ambroise Paré (1582), cited in Consuming Grief by Beth Conklin
As secretaries and colleagues began to move into Dr. Bill Arens’s office with greater frequency, I could tell that my interview with the anthropologist was drawing to a close. I decided to go for broke, pressing him for some acknowledgement that ritualized cannibalism existed . . . somewhere.
“So Dr. Arens, which example of ritual cannibalism do you find hardest to refute and why?”
“Well,” he replied, “it depends on the definition of ‘ritual cannibalism.’ Because if you think that grinding up body parts and using them for medicinal purposes is ritual cannibalism, then I would find that the most difficult to reject.”
