Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  Gansu

  In all China the worst-hit province was probably Anhui, but poor and backward Gansu ranked a close second. The province straggles along what is called the Gansu Corridor to the far west and in 1958 it had a mixed population of around 12 million Han Chinese, Hui Muslims, Tibetans, Mongols and other minorities.23

  Before the Great Leap Forward, some local leaders, including the Deputy Governor Sun Diancai, had been expelled from the Party or demoted for resisting collectivization.24 Gansu’s First Secretary was another Red Army veteran, Zhang Zhongliang, who was devoted to Mao. After the Lushan summit, he wrote articles heaping praise on the Great Leap Forward and insisting that its policies were so successful that even his poor province had grain to spare. In the winter of 1959, Zhang went to Beijing to meet Zhou Enlai and offered to send his surplus to more needy provinces. Zhou took him at his word. When Zhang returned, he organized his urban officials into work teams and sent them out to collect grain from every village. According to one eyewitness the requisition teams adopted a strategy called ‘politeness first, forcefulness second’; he described what happened in one commune:

  The commune Secretary shouted at the peasants, telling them to hand in the grain in response to the Party’s and Chairman Mao’s call. The peasants kept silent but were clear in their minds that if they did so, it was as good as giving up their lives. This kind of mobilizing speech by the commune leader did not work. He saw in the eyes of the peasants anguish, sadness and disappointment. Actually, the commune leader himself was not at all happy with his superior’s order but he dared not disobey him. He knew how he would end up if he refused.

  Nevertheless, the work teams began their action. When they looted a village, it was termed ‘imposing grain levies’. The sound of crying, begging and cursing echoed everywhere. Afterwards, the peasants were consumed by anger and hatred and a sad feeling of impotence. They had only a very small amount of beans and potatoes left in their houses. Young people now left their home village while the elderly and children scavenged for grass seeds, tree bark and so on to eat. Within a month, the famine began to worsen. The villages became silent, bereft of human activity.

  In 1988 the Chinese magazine October published an article describing how the work teams in Gansu used 128 forms of torture to extract the grain: ‘People were either tortured or starved to death. Some were tied up and beaten, or left hanging until they died. People were not allowed to eat grains and [were] stopped from digging wild vegetables. All they could do was starve.’25

  An article by a demographer, Peng Xizhe, alleges that not only did Gansu have no surplus grain, it did not even have enough to feed its own population.26 In 1958, per capita grain output fell by 19 per cent. In 1959 it fell by a further 32 per cent. In the following two years it was half the size of the 1957 harvest, which had barely been sufficient. Even in 1965 the grain harvest was still 25 per cent below that of 1957. In some areas, a third of the population starved to death between 1958 and 1961. In the Zhangye region of western Gansu this amounted to 300,000 people, including some 40,000 in the city of Zhangye itself.27 There the local authorities set up a special department charged with collecting and counting the corpses. Ruan Dingmin, head of the Zhangye propaganda office, sent a daily report to Lanzhou which was read by Gansu’s Party Secretary Zhang Zhongliang. When, in 1961, Beijing sent Wang Feng, a senior official in the Central Committee’s Organization Department, to investigate the famine, he could not believe the contents of these reports and summoned Ruan Dingmin to testify in person. Wang Feng also dispatched a medical relief team to the area around Zhangye and one of its members recalled what they witnessed there:

  Early one morning, we stopped at a big village but found few signs of life around the low mud huts. A few people could be seen who were so weak, they could hardly beg for food. The team leader raised his voice, shouting: ‘Old folks, come out now! Chairman Mao and the Communist Party have sent us doctors to rescue you!’ He shouted over and over again. Eventually, those still alive crawled out of their houses. These were people struggling on the edge of death. If they fell over, they were unable to get up again.

  The team found one group of dead bodies after another. I pushed open the floor of one hut and had to draw back because of the stink. A low groan came from inside and I saw two or three people lying still in the darkness on a kang. At the front lay an old man and one of his hands pointed at something. Together with him lay a woman who had long been dead and whose decomposing body was the source of the stench. The old man’s hand was pointing at a small human body, four limbs spread out, mouth open wide. It looked as if the child was crying out but in fact the body had been lying dead for days.

  The medical team had brought syringes with them to inject a mixture containing glucose. The famine victims were then given sorghum or bean soup but this caused more deaths. The starving swallowed the food but their stomachs were unable to absorb it and burst. Most of them died.28

  Other severely hit counties in Gansu included Dingxi and neighbouring Tongwei. Zhang Shangzhi, a reporter from the Gansu Daily, recounted in an article how on a journey to his home village in Tongwei county, he saw dead bodies along the roadside, in the fields, indeed everywhere he looked. No one had buried the corpses. He reached his own village only to find that three members of his family had already starved to death. Around 100,000 people died of hunger in Tongwei.29

  In 1994 Kaifang, a Chinese magazine published in Hong Kong, reported that in the Longxi area of Gansu during the famine, people ate children including their own.30 The article relates a case where parents ordered their 7-year-old daughter to boil some water to cook their little son. When the baby was eaten, the daughter was told to boil some more water. Realizing that she would be next she knelt down, ‘begging her father not to eat her and saying “I will do anything if you do not eat me.”’ Such stories of cannibalism in Gansu have appeared in other Chinese publications, sometimes thinly disguised as fiction. One such novel, Hungry Mountain Village by Zhi Liang, describes how during the famine a Beijing journalist was exiled as a rightist to an unnamed province in the north-west. There peasants not only ate children but adults too.

  The report which Wang Feng drew up on the famine in Gansu led to the dismissal of Zhang Zhongliang but he was not otherwise punished. Later, the report fell into the hands of Red Guards who travelled across China to find him in Jiangsu province where they struggled him. He survived and, according to some sources, died peacefully on Hainan Island (and according to others in Nanjing) in the early 1980s.

  It is hard to find a reliable figure for Gansu’s death toll. The lowest figure of 696,000 out of a population of 12 million appears in Gansu’s official population statistics. Chen Yizi, whose team investigated Gansu after 1979, states that 1.2 million died. In a biography of Qian Ying, a senior Party official who accompanied Wang Feng on his visit to Gansu, a figure of 1.3 million is mentioned. I was told by other Chinese sources that the true figure is 3 million.

  Under Wang Feng, Gansu, like Anhui, became in 1961 a laboratory for experiments in private farming. Mao stopped these at the end of 1962 and four years later Wang Feng was toppled and severely beaten by Red Guards. Gansu once again became a bastion of ultra-leftism. It did not recover from the famine during the Mao era and there was another severe famine in 1974 and 1975 when peasants tried to flee elsewhere in search of food.31

  Other provinces in the north-west of China suffered equally during the Great Leap Forward but fewer details have emerged. The small neighbouring province of Ningxia to the north of Gansu seems to have been hard hit. Life in a labour camp there during the famine is powerfully described by the author Zhang Xianliang in his autobiographical book Grass Soup (see Chapter 12). He recounts that those outside the labour camps had less to eat than those inside. Travelling in Ningxia during the 1980s, I was told that during the famine cannibalism had become common among the peasants living in the barren mountains to the south of the capital, Yinchuan.

  In the adjac
ent province of Qinghai, the ultra-leftist Party Secretary Gao Feng was also dismissed in 1961. After an investigation by Wang Zhao, a senior official sent from Beijing, he was accused of causing 900,000 deaths. Qinghai is part of the Tibetan plateau and was at the centre of the Tibetan revolt described in the next chapter. Huge numbers of Chinese prisoners were sent to its bleak uplands to work in a chain of large labour camps. There they built roads, railways and the nuclear research centre, the Ninth Academy. At least 200,000 of the prisoners in these camps starved to death.

  The famine was no less harsh in the south-west of China. In Guizhou province, next door to Sichuan, out of a population of around 16 million, 1 million died. In the region of Zunyi, in northern Guizhou, the site of a famous Party meeting during the Long March, only one in eight survived. In other places, such as Jinsha county, a quarter of the population died. Most of the deaths occurred not among the province’s minorities but in the valleys populated by Han Chinese, such as the counties of Sinan, Yuqing and Yinjiang. The main cause was the violent appropriation of grain. An investigation by a team sent from Beijing later led to the execution of the Party Secretary of Sinan county and the suicide of two other leaders in charge of counties with large death tolls.32

  Sichuan

  The province of Sichuan was crucial to the success of the Great Leap Forward. If Mao’s agricultural policies worked there, then China would have huge surpluses, for the Sichuanese traditionally boast that in a good year they can produce enough to feed five other provinces. Equally, a famine in ‘Heaven’s Granary’, as Sichuan is called, would be hard to explain or justify. Within the province, Mao put his trust in a tough ultra-leftist called Li Jingquan. A Shanxi peasant who became Mao’s devoted follower during the Yanan period, Li had ruled Sichuan with an iron fist since entering the province after the Kuomintang’s defeat. Land reform was successful and popular but when in the early 1950s the state began to monopolize the important grain market, things soon began to go wrong. Party cadres banned private trading and imposed ever higher grain quotas. Li was determined to show that the first stages of collectivization would result in more grain. A violent and aggressive figure, he tolerated no dissent or opposition. Grain purchasing targets became excessive as the incentive to grow grain diminished. When the state exerted pressure on local leaders and peasants to deliver more grain to the state, some killed themselves or died in struggle sessions.33

  Li implemented the 1957 anti-rightist campaign in Sichuan vigorously and even wanted to raise the quota of arrests beyond that recommended by the centre. In some cultural units, two-thirds of the staff were labelled as rightists. Inevitably, Li also threw the province into the Great Leap Forward and dismissed any officials who questioned what was going on. One victim was the provincial deputy propaganda minister, Ye Shi, who is reputed to have said that the exaggerated reports of the success of the advanced co-operatives were like people who slapped their own cheeks to make themselves look healthier.

  In Sichuan, people seem to have begun to die in large numbers during the first winter of 1958-9. Cadres were sent to seize large amounts of grain but most of the autumn harvest was never collected. In rural Sichuan most of the men had to work round the clock making steel and building dams. Accounts of what happened in Sichuan mirror those from Anhui or Henan. For instance, in different parts of Sichuan I was told the identical story of how peasants artificially created an ‘experimental field’ by moving the rice or wheat plants closer together. A goose egg was then placed on top of the crop to demonstrate its density. This was what happened in 1958 when Mao visited the model Red Splendour commune. Li Jingquan went to great efforts to ensure that the truth behind this charade was not revealed. When, a year later, Liu Shaoqi went to the same commune, local officials locked up anyone who might have been ready to give the game away and hid them in an old temple. After an informant revealed this to Liu, he walked past the temple and asked to look inside. There he questioned the peasants but they were too terrified to do more than smile and mumble.34 Many of the peasants in this commune subsequently starved to death.

  As in Anhui and Henan, fantastic reports of bumper harvests, called the ‘exaggeration wind’, led in turn to the brutal seizure of grain. Those who refused to hand over all their grain were beaten and tortured. After the Lushan summit, Li Jingquan also set about trapping officials who might be guilty of disloyalty. On his return, he circulated a document containing Marshal Peng Dehuai’s criticisms and then asked all cadres at grade 17 and above whether or not they agreed (all officials are graded from 1 to 24, with 1 being the highest). Most realized what was afoot but some endorsed what Peng had said and were arrested as ‘right opportunists’. Sichuan officials who spoke out or tried to ameliorate the consequences of the famine later met with the most violent persecution. One such was the father of Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans. A dedicated revolutionary and a senior official in Chengdu, Wang Yu was horrified at what he saw in the countryside although local officials prevented him from seeing the worst. He later suffered from oedema and fell into depression. In 1961, he withdrew from his work and spent months in hospital. This was enough to provoke persecution during the Cultural Revolution when he was attacked for ‘the waning of his revolutionary will’. He died in 1974 half insane after a long period in a work camp.

  Many eyewitnesses have said that, as elsewhere, at the height of the famine in Sichuan the granaries were full even though some of the province’s grain and livestock was exported to other regions of the country. Just how much grain left the province remains a secret, perhaps because, unlike Gansu’s First Secretary, Li was not dismissed in 1961. Despite Sichuan’s huge death toll, he was protected by Mao and may have won the gratitude of other leaders for supplying them with food in their hour of greatest need. Li was also careful to keep a low profile when, in 1962, he freed his peasants from some of the restrictions of collective farming under a national policy that Liu Shaoqi introduced as the ‘three freedoms, one guarantee’, or san zi, yi bao.

  Sichuan’s death toll was enormous. Estimates range from 7 to 9 million out of a population of at least 70 million.35 The lowest figure revealed by official population statistics is 7.35 million but other sources, including Chen Yizi and the Chinese demographer Peng Xizhe, suggest a figure of around 9 million. This last estimate suggests a death rate among the rural population of close to one in seven. This seems plausible, for in just one prefecture, Yibin, there were 1 million famine deaths. Some villagers, living in a fertile part of the province, thought that 20 per cent or even a third of the population had died.36 Cannibalism was widespread, especially in the worst-hit districts such as Yanan, south-west of Chengdu. Even in Deng Xiaoping’s home village of Guang’an, peasants went to beg for food in the cities.

  Li Jingquan’s decision to implement Liu Shaoqi’s policies may explain why Mao encouraged his downfall in the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards waged particularly violent battles in Sichuan’s cities. Li survived, but one of his sons was beaten to death and his wife committed suicide. Li was rehabilitated and given an honorary position by Deng Xiaoping when he returned to power in 1978. Yet he was never allowed to go back to Sichuan, where public discussion of the famine is still taboo.

  11

  The Panchen Lama’s Letter

  ‘When we heard there was large-scale famine, it was a new thing. In Tibet food supplies had been sufficient for centuries. Agriculture was old-fashioned but sufficient. In the past, one or two individuals may have died from starvation, that is possible. Otherwise it was unheard of.’ The Dalai Lama, 1995

  In 1962, Tibet’s second highest religious leader, the Panchen Lama, wrote a report in which he came close to accusing the Chinese Communist Party of attempted genocide. No other group in China suffered more bitterly from the famine than the Tibetans, of whom perhaps one in five died during these years. In the birthplace of the current Dalai Lama, Ping An county in Qinghai province, at least 50 per cent of the population starved to death.1

  The Ti
betans have traditionally lived scattered across an enormous region that spills over the borders of present-day China, farming the valleys between the highest mountains of the world and roaming with their herds across a vast and desolate plateau. After the eleventh century, their conversion to Tantric Buddhism, imported from India, turned a warlike people into the most intensely religious society on earth. The focus of religious and economic life became the large monasteries subject to the rule of reincarnated lamas. This theocracy was little changed by the Mongols or Manchus who occupied China. When the British invaded Tibet in 1905, they found a medieval society cut off from the outside world. The Nationalists failed in their turn to impose their rule over Lhasa and the Tibetans lapsed into a self-imposed isolation that was only shattered by the invasion of the People’s Liberation Army in 1950-1.

  The Chinese Communists created an autonomous region in central Tibet and divided the rest of the Tibetans among different provinces. The majority now lived within the newly drawn borders of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. There they were subject to the same policies, the ‘democratic reforms’, which were applied all over China. The monasteries were dismantled, the land and livestock they controlled were given to the poor peasants, individuals were labelled according to their class and, after the initial stages of mutual-aid teams and co-operatives, communes were set up. Under the terms of a seventeen-point agreement that the Dalai Lama signed with Beijing in 1951, inner Tibet (which in 1965 would formally become the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR) was, temporarily, excused from introducing these democratic reforms. No such concessions were made to the rest of the Tibetans who rose in revolt, some as early as 1952. When collectives and higher collectives were established in the mid-1950s, resistance turned into large-scale bloodshed, especially among the Tibetans in Sichuan who are known as Khampas. Many retreated to Lhasa from where, in 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced to flee amid fierce fighting. The rebellion was put down with great brutality and up to 100,000 Tibetans fled to India where the Dalai Lama had sought sanctuary. For those who remained behind, the effects of the Great Leap Forward brought fresh hardships.