Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  China is not going to sink into the sea and the sky won’t tumble down simply because there are shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap. Imbalances and market problems have made everybody tense but this tension is not justified, even though I am tense myself. No, it wouldn’t be honest to say I’m not tense. If I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills and then I feel better. You ought to try sleeping pills if you feel uptight.

  Using a singularly inappropriate metaphor, he castigated low-ranking officials for impetuously rushing things: ‘There can be no room for rashness. When you eat pork, you can only consume it mouthful by mouthful, and you can’t expect to get fat in a single day. Both the Commander-in-Chief [Zhu De] and I are fat, but we didn’t get that way overnight.’

  Mao expanded this line of argument by urging the others to recognize that they all shared the responsibility for any mistakes: ‘Comrades, you must also analyse your errors and you will feel better after you have broken wind and emptied your bowels.’ He even tried to persuade the Politburo that ignorance was actually an asset in this audacious endeavour: ‘An illiterate person can be a prime minister, so why can’t our commune cadres and peasants learn something about political economy? Everybody can learn. Those who cannot read may also discuss economics, and more easily than the intellectual. I myself have never read textbooks!’

  The debate went from the almost comical absurdity of these remarks to a bitter and acrimonious row as Peng Dehuai’s short temper exploded. Peng accused Mao of acting despotically, like Stalin in his later years, and of sacrificing human beings on the altar of unreachable production targets. He said that troops were getting letters from home that told them of terrible food shortages and that this could cause unrest. He warned that ‘if the Chinese peasants were not as patient as they were, we would have another Hungary’. If there was an uprising, the loyalty of the troops could not be relied upon and the Soviet Army might, as in Hungary, have to be called in to restore order.

  Mao retaliated by accusing Peng of being a ‘rightist’ and a ‘hypocrite’ and of trying to ‘sabotage the dictatorship of the proletariat, split the Communist Party, organize factions within the Party and spread their influence, to demoralize the vanguards of the proletariat and to build another opposition party’. The attacks culminated in a furious exchange when Peng, referring to a much earlier argument, shouted: ‘In Yanan, you cursed me [literally ‘fucked my mother’] for forty days. Now I have been fucking your mother for eighteen days and you are trying to call a stop – but you won’t.’12

  Peng had only the timid backing of a small group of supporters, and most senior leaders avoided siding with him. Zhou Enlai, who a few months earlier had expressed concern that the reports of a great harvest were being falsified and that ‘the lies are being squeezed out of the lower cadres by a higher level’, did nothing. According to one biographer, he sat as silent as a stone and then returned to his room to drink ‘until he was stuporous’.13 Liu Shaoqi did not come to Peng’s rescue and neither did Chen Yun. Deng Xiaoping was fortuitously away in Beijing nursing a broken leg.

  By contrast, Mao enjoyed strong backing from his supporters, amongst them Zeng Xisheng, First Secretary of Anhui; Wu Zhifu, First Secretary of Henan; Ke Qingshi, the Shanghai Party boss in charge of the Eastern China Bureau; Xu Tong, First Secretary of Shandong; and cronies such as Kang Sheng and Chen Boda. These men denied that there was a famine and urged Mao to continue with the Great Leap Forward. Mao’s trump card was the loyalty of the military chiefs who were summoned to a meeting and asked one by one to stand up and say whom they supported, Mao or Peng. Mao warned that if the Party were to split into two, he would organize a new one among the peasants, and that if the army were to split, he would go into the hills and recruit another army. The generals backed Mao.

  In his memoirs Dr Li Zhisui recalled: ‘Mao did want to be told the truth. Even in my disillusionment I still believe that had he fully understood the truth early in the Great Leap Forward, he would have brought a halt to the disaster long before he did. But the truth had to come to him on his own terms, from a modern Hai Rui. He could not accept it when it included criticism of him, or when it came from conspiring ministers...’14

  Hai Rui was the subject of a Hunan opera performed when Mao had toured the province before the Lushan conference. The opera, called Sheng si pai, tells the story of the upright Ming dynasty official Hai Rui who risks his life to intervene with the Emperor to stop the execution of a woman wrongly accused of murder. Hai Rui himself is nearly executed for daring to challenge the vainglorious and misdirected Emperor. The subtle message of the opera was lost on Mao, who failed to grasp the connection between his own situation and that of the Emperor misled by the flattery of lying courtiers, but he was taken with the theme and encouraged other works about Hai Rui. Though he probably realized that some of his officials were exaggerating the success of his Great Leap Forward to curry favour, yet he never doubted that it was a success.15

  Before the Lushan meeting, Mao had also gone back to his home village in Hunan, Shaoshan, where he felt his kith and kin would tell him the truth. Listening to their complaints, he disarmingly suggested that they could dismantle the collective kitchens, water conservancy projects and backyard furnaces if they did not work. His remarks were not published but the news spread to other Hunan villages. For a while parts of Hunan began to abandon the Great Leap Forward. But after the Lushan summit when the province’s First Secretary, Zhou Xiaozhou, was dismissed as a rightist, his successor Zhang Pinhua reinforced all these measures. In Hunan the collective kitchens lasted in all three and a half years, longer than almost anywhere else.

  Mao was willing to recognize that there were defects in what he was doing but his belief that there had been huge harvests remained unshaken. Before the Lushan meeting, he had ordered provinces to step up deliveries of grain to the centre and had approved new and higher targets for state grain procurement. As he remarked at Lushan, ‘Achievements are great, problems are considerable but the future is bright.’

  The Lushan meeting ended in a complete victory for Mao. The Party leadership resolved to return to the policies of the Great Leap Forward with redoubled energy and voted to condemn Peng as an ‘anti-Party element’ and a ‘right opportunist’. A month later, Peng wrote a humbling self-criticism and was put under house arrest in a village outside Beijing where he grew vegetables. In the Cultural Revolution he would be imprisoned, tortured and killed.

  Within a few weeks of Lushan, a new purge of ‘right opportunists’ began across the country. In the People’s Daily, Deng Xiaoping made Mao’s counter-attack clear to everyone:

  Some of the rightist elements in our Party do not wish to recognize the remarkable achievements of the Great Leap Forward... They exaggerate the errors that have occurred during the course of the movement, which the masses have corrected. They use these errors as a pretext to attack the Party line. The movement of 1958 hastened our economic development. But the rightists ignored this and insisted that the movement manifested catastrophic consequences. The people’s communes work well but the rightists ignored this, and attacked this movement as a step backward. They contended that only by abolishing the communes could the living standards of the population be raised. The masses, on the contrary, believe they have made great strides forward... The rightist opportunism quite obviously reflects the bourgeoisie’s fear of a mass movement in our Party.

  The provincial leaders returned from Lushan to institute a campaign of terror. All over the country large numbers of low-and high-ranking officials were dismissed or arrested as ‘little Peng Dehuais’ if they had betrayed even the slightest doubts about the Great Leap Forward. In Anhui, for example, Zhang Kaifan, a senior official who had written to Mao about the terrible famine in Wuwei county, was named as a ‘right opportunist’ by Mao. In the Anhui purge anyone whose conscience had pricked them was rounded up as a ‘small Zhang Kaifan’. Throughout the countryside, large numbers of peasants were put in priso
n where they would starve to death in the next phase of the famine. No national figures for the victims of this campaign are available but it was one of the worst in the Party’s history and extinguished any hope that the next and most awful stage of the famine could be prevented.

  Instead, a new hysteria about the Great Leap Forward was whipped up. Higher and yet more absurd grain targets were put forward and still greater successes announced. Sichuan declared that its sputnik fields were producing 7.5 tonnes of grain per hectare, ten times the normal grain yield. More and more effort went into farming the experimental plots, while in provinces such as Henan and Sichuan officials were ordered to reduce the area sown with grain. The Party did quietly abandon the backyard furnaces so that the peasants were freed from the burden of mounting round-the-clock steel-making, but by then there was in any case almost nothing left to melt down because the peasants had already been stripped of everything they owned. And the collective kitchens were resumed in those parts of the country which had abandoned them in the wake of Mao’s remarks at Shaoshan.

  In the autumn of 1959, the grain harvest dropped by at least 30 million tonnes over that of 1958 but officials reported that it was higher, much higher. (This estimate takes into account sweet potato plantings, so the fall in real grain output was in fact still sharper.) To make their lies stick, local officials began to requisition all the grain they could find. The state procurement targets were set at 40 per cent of total output, the highest level ever, and in many places the entire harvest was seized. Sometimes, officials reported a harvest so big that even after taking away everything they could find, including all livestock, vegetables and cash crops, they still continued to search from house to house. Mao had ordered officials not only to deliver the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks and eggs. Party leaders went from village to village leading the search for hidden food reserves. It was a brutal and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and beaten to death.

  In China, most peasants practise subsistence farming, so most of the grain grown is consumed at home by the peasants themselves. Only a small part is normally delivered in taxes or, under the Communists, to meet procurement quotas. Thus, when their grain was seized, the peasants knew they had nothing left to eat. Most hoped that under socialism the state would provide for them but since no grain had been forthcoming the previous winter, many feared they might be left to die. In the countryside, mere survival became a desperate struggle. By the end of much of the peasantry was starving to death but the hardest time in the entire famine came in January and February when the greatest number perished.

  Throughout this period Mao continued to claim that the peasants had buried the grain deep in the ground and that they stood sentry guarding it.16 To throw the search parties off the scent, he said, they ate turnips by day and after dark secretly ate rice. In fact, the peasants ate only the gruel served up by the communal kitchens which was mixed with grasses and anything else they could forage that was edible. The peasants, as they queued for food, began to resemble the inmates of concentration camps, skeletal figures dressed in rags, fighting with each other to get equal portions.

  The People’s Daily suggested at the end of 1959 that ‘the peasants must practise strict economy, live with the utmost frugality and eat only two meals a day – one of which should be soft and liquid’. In other words, one meal was to consist of buns of maize or wheat, and the other, a watery soup. The Party described this as ‘living in an abundant year as if it were a frugal one’. Mao himself made a small gesture by giving up eating meat. Meanwhile, the country’s main grain surplus provinces – Sichuan, Henan, Anhui and Shandong – delivered the most grain to the centre and it was in these regions that the peasants starved in the greatest numbers.

  At the same time a bizarre political situation existed. Most of the Party leadership clearly knew what was going on but no one dared acknowledge the famine until Mao did so. Chen Yun, who had been to the Henan countryside and had realized what was happening, decided to retire to his villa in picturesque Hangzhou. He told Mao he was suffering from ill-health and, accompanied by a nurse, took up the study of local opera. He did not return to Beijing until 1961.17 Liu Shaoqi, President of China and another member of the Politburo Standing Committee, also withdrew from the scene, in this case to the semi-tropical island of Hainan where he spent much of 1960, claiming that he was studying economics.18 Deng Xiaoping appears to have spent most of his time involved in the growing ideological dispute with Moscow. The final rupture between the two fraternal Parties came in July 1960 when the 15,000 or so Soviet experts at work in China suddenly left. It is quite conceivable that Beijing wanted them to leave so that they could not report to Khrushchev that the entire country was starving.

  After their departure, China lapsed into an eerie isolation. Few Chinese leaders travelled abroad and few foreign guests were made welcome in China. The foreign community was reduced to a smaller number than at any other time in a century. From the beginning of 1960, the Party banned any domestic publication from leaving the country apart from the People’s Daily and the bi-monthly magazine Red Flag.19 The world could only guess at what was happening to a fifth of humanity. Those inside the country knew as little as those outside. All mail was controlled by the local authorities and checked to prevent news of the famine spreading. Few Chinese had telephones and domestic travel came to a standstill. The number of flights and train departures was cut by half because there was no fuel. Travel by any other means was difficult without ration tickets that were valid nationwide.

  In the China presented by Red Flag all was well. Mao wrote in September 1959 that the great leap in agriculture was even greater than in 1958. Henan’s First Secretary, Wu Zhifu, whose province was one of the epicentres of the famine, declared that rich peasants had instructed the rightists to make the collectives smaller but ‘now the masses feel much more comfortable’. In the first issue of 1960, he wrote again, saying that ‘although there has been a serious drought, the communes are still very prosperous and people are very happy’. A month earlier, the leader of Anhui, Zeng Xisheng, had remarked that production increases were not to be reckoned in a few percentage points but in double digits and that thanks to the Great Leap Forward natural disasters had been overcome.

  In the first half of 1960, Mao and his supporters were still calling for another great leap forward, including a giant jump in steel production. Mao ordered the mobilization of 70 million people to achieve a target of 22 million tonnes of steel, a ludicrous goal since only 8 million tonnes had been produced in 1957 and 11 million tonnes claimed in 1958. He even proposed raising total output to 100 million tonnes within ten years, but this time his orders were ignored.20 Mao also insisted that the peasants continue eating in the collective kitchens, describing these as the ‘key battlefield of socialism’. The fog of unreality with which he surrounded himself defied any efforts to penetrate it until the end of 1960. Much of what he did or said in this year still remains a mystery. Some accounts suggest that he retreated into his study for long periods because he could not bear to admit to himself what was happening.21

  Even in Beijing there was nothing to eat, while in the countryside just outside the capital peasants who had survived were too weak to plant the new crops or harvest them. In villages a few miles outside Beijing, most peasants were grotesquely swollen by oedema and were dying in sizeable numbers. Grain output plummeted. The reality must have been impossible for anyone to escape. Yet Mao refused to halt the continuing export of grain and rejected suggestions that grain be imported. An extraordinary paralysis gripped the Party. The peasants sank deeper and deeper into a pit of numbing horror as winter approached once more. They and the Party knew they would now die in even greater numbers. No one in a position of authority dared tell Mao the truth. One source claims that he only began to respond on receiving desperate pleas from members of his own family.22 He Xiaoqu, a cousin from his own village, reportedly sent his son together with other
villagers to see Mao and tell him of the famine. They thrust a handful of grain vouchers at him, saying ‘Unless you stop, we won’t go back home. We ask you to take these ration tickets and see what you get to eat with them in our village.’ The following chapters attempt to describe the extraordinary scale of the disaster for which Mao was responsible.

  Part Two The Great Hunger

  7

  An Overview of the Famine

  ‘The evil deeds of evil rulers are the source of disorder.’ Mencius

  The famine of 1958-61 was unique in Chinese history. For the first time, every corner of this huge country experienced hunger, from the cold wheat-growing lands of Heilongjiang in the far north to the lush semi-tropical island of Hainan in the south. It was a situation which, even during the famines of the 1920s, experts had said was impossible. They had believed that even if one part of the country suffered shortages, China was so big and varied that there would always be a surplus somewhere else. Yet this time people starved everywhere.

  Dynastic records describe how other great calamities had reduced the population of China by as much as half, but these were the consequence of great convulsions such as the civil war which followed the Qin dynasty’s collapse some 2,000 years earlier, or brutal invasions, like that of Genghis Khan’s Mongols in the fourteenth century. In 1959, China was at peace, unified under one government, with a modern transport and communications system. Moreover, the Communist government was the first since the seventeenth century to be entirely in the hands of ethnic Chinese acting independently of outside forces. The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty, who had regarded themselves as a separate race of conquerors, had been swept away. The Western powers’ influence had come to an end, and the Japanese invaders had been defeated. Even Russia, with the departure of her experts in 1960, no longer exerted any influence over the Chinese government. For the first time the Chinese Communist Party was free of the influence of the Comintern which supervised the affairs of other Communist Parties.