Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  In interviews, peasants readily acknowledged that they had witnessed cannibalism at first hand. ‘It was nothing exceptional,’ a local official told me in Anhui, while in Sichuan the former head of a village production team said he thought it had happened ‘in every county and most villages’. Official Party documents bear this out. In one county in southern Henan, Gushi, the authorities recorded 200 cases of cannibalism in a population of 900,000 at the start of the famine. In Anhui’s Fengyang county, with 335,000 people in 1958, the Party noted 63 cases of cannibalism in one commune alone. Interviewees also spoke of cannibalism occurring in Shaanxi, Ningxia and Hebei provinces. Former inmates of labour camps personally witnessed cases of cannibalism in camps in Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu and Heilongjiang. In the Qinghai prison camps, prisoners regularly cut the flesh off corpses and sold or ate it. Outside the camps, it was the same. A Tibetan peasant from Tongren county in Qinghai remembers that among the youths from Henan who were settled there, one girl killed an 8-year-old child and ate the corpse with three others. All four were arrested. In another case, a Tibetan family was caught eating the flesh from a child’s corpse.

  There are enough reports from different parts of the country to make it clear that the practice of cannibalism was not restricted to any one region, class or nationality. Peasants not only ate the flesh of the dead, they also sold it, and they killed and ate children, both their own and those of others. Given the dimensions of the famine, it is quite conceivable that cannibalism was practised on a scale unprecedented in the history of the twentieth century. Moreover, it took place with the knowledge of a government which is still in power and which wields considerable influence over world affairs. This startling fact is all the more plausible when one looks at the documented history of cannibalism in China and other parts of the world.

  In the West, cannibalism is considered the ultimate taboo, the worst act of savagery, but it is far from unknown. Greek literature and the records of ancient Egypt frequently mention famine-related cannibalism. In Western Europe it often occurred during famines and the wartime sieges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this century, two major incidents of recorded cannibalism in the West stand out: those in the Nazi concentration camps and in the Ukraine.

  At the trial of the Treblinka concentration camp commandant after the Second World War, a former British internee testified that while clearing away dead bodies, he and his staff noted that a piece of flesh was missing from as many as one in ten cadavers:

  I noticed on many occasions a very strange wound at the back of the thigh of many of the dead. First of all I dismissed it as a gunshot wound at close quarters but after seeing a few more I asked a friend and he told me that many of the prisoners were cutting chunks out of the bodies to eat. On my next visit to the mortuary I actually saw a prisoner whip out a knife, cut a portion of the leg of a dead body, and put it quickly into his mouth.3

  The cannibalism which occurred during the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3 has closer parallels with China during the Great Leap Forward. Faced with an almost identical set of circumstances, Ukrainian peasants behaved much as the Chinese were to do nearly thirty years later. The Italian Consul in the then capital of Kharkov wrote in June 1933 to his embassy in Moscow that ‘at present some 300 cases of cannibalism have been brought before a tribunal in Kharkov. Doctors of my acquaintance have noticed human flesh on sale at the market place.’4

  An eyewitness who testified in an inquiry into the famine held by the US Congress in 1988 said that ‘if a person was selling meat, the police would immediately seize the meat to check if it was human or dog meat. There were people who had no qualms about cutting off a piece of flesh from a dead body which they would sell in order to get money for bread.’ Cannibalism was so common that the secret police, the OGPU, issued instructions on how to deal with it. In May 1933 the Vice-Commissar of the OGPU and the chief procurator of the Ukraine told their subordinates:

  The present criminal code does not cover punishment of persons guilty of cannibalism, therefore all cases of those accused of cannibalism must immediately be transferred to the local branches of the OGPU. If cannibalism was preceded by murder, covered by article 142 of the Penal Code, these cases should be withdrawn from the courts and from the prosecution divisions of the People’s Commissariat of Justice system and transferred for judgment to the Collegium of the OGPU in Moscow.5

  The Italian Consul reported a number of cases in which parents were arrested for infanticide and subsequently went mad:

  Very frequent is the phenomenon of hallucination in which people see their children only as animals, kill them and eat them. Later, some, having recuperated with proper food, do not remember wanting to eat their children and deny even being able to think of such a thing. The phenomenon in question is the result of a lack of vitamins and would prove to be a very interesting study, alas one which is banned even from consideration from a scientific point of view.6

  Such terrible thoughts were prompted by a famine in which over 5 million died. Yet the Ukraine has some of the richest agricultural land in the world and famine there, although not unknown, was rare. By contrast, famine was such a regular occurrence throughout Chinese history that there existed a sort of ‘famine culture’ passed down through the generations. As many observers quoted in Chapter 1 pointed out, people knew what sort of wild vegetation could be eaten, what should be sold first to raise money and which members of a family should be sacrificed before others. Anhui peasants even believed that they knew how to detect cannibalism – those who ate human flesh smelt strange and their eyes and skin turned red.

  The consumption of human flesh in China was not, however, limited to times of famine. Indeed one authority on the subject has concluded that cannibalism holds a unique place in Chinese culture and that the Chinese ‘have admired the practice of cannibalism for centuries’. The American academic Kay Ray Chong has found numerous references to the practice in Chinese historical records and literature as well as in medical texts. In Cannibalism in China, published in 1990, Chong looked at cannibalism under two main headings: ‘survival’ cannibalism which took place as a last resort; and ‘learned’ cannibalism undertaken for other reasons. It is the latter which sets the Chinese apart. They are, he writes, ‘quite unique in the sense [that] there are so many examples of learned cannibalism throughout their history’. In many periods of Chinese history, human flesh was considered a delicacy. In ancient times, cooks prepared exotic dishes of human flesh for jaded upper-class palates. Enough accounts of the various methods used to cook human flesh have been preserved for Chong to devote a whole chapter to them. For example, a Yuan dynasty writer, Dao Qingyi, recommends in Chuo geng lu (Records of Stopping Cultivation) that children’s meat is the best-tasting food and proposes eating children whole, including their bones. He refers to men and women as ‘two-legged sheep’ and considers women’s meat even more delicious than mutton.

  Chinese literature is filled with accounts of Epicurean cannibalism. One of China’s most famous works of literature, Shui hu zhuan, or The Water Margin (also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men are Brothers), contains frequent references to the sale of human meat and descriptions of cannibalism. Cooking methods are described in graphic detail. For example, when one of the main characters, Wu Sung, visits a wine shop, he is led into a room ‘where men were cut to pieces, and on the walls there were men’s skins stretched tight and nailed there, and upon the beams of the roof there hung several legs of men’.

  Human flesh was regarded as part food, part medicine. In 1578, Li Shizhen published a medical reference book (Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medico) which listed thirty-five different parts or organs, and the various diseases and ailments that they could be used to treat. Some parts of the body were especially valued because they were thought to boost sexual stamina. In the Ming dynasty, powerful eunuchs tried to regain their sexual potency by eating young men’s brains. During the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, numerous Western accounts te
stified to the Chinese belief that drinking human blood would increase a man’s sexual appetite. Whenever a public execution took place, women whose husbands were impotent would buy bread dipped in the fresh blood of the executed. As late as the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for Chinese executioners to eat the heart and brains of criminals.

  Cannibalism was also a gesture of filial piety. Records from the Song dynasty (AD 420-79) talk of how people would cut off part of their own body to feed a revered elder. Often a daughter-in-law would cut flesh from her leg or thigh to make soup to feed a sick mother-in-law and this practice became so common that the state issued an edict forbidding it.

  Throughout Chinese history, cannibalism was also extremely common in times of war. Not only was it the last resort of inhabitants trapped in besieged cities or fortresses, but in addition, prisoners of war or slain enemies often became a staple source of food. Under the Emperor Wu Di (AD 502-49) prisoners were purchased in cages. When there was a demand for meat, they would be taken out, killed, broiled and consumed. During the Yellow Turban rebellion in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907), thousands were butchered and eaten every day. A century later Wang Yancheng of the Min kingdom was said to have salted and dried the corpses of enemy soldiers which his men would take with them as supplies.

  Such practices continued into modern times. During the Taiping rebellion of 1850-64, the hearts of prisoners were consumed by both sides to make them more bold in combat. Human flesh and organs were openly sold in the marketplace during this period and people were kidnapped and killed for food. Chinese soldiers stationed on Taiwan before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 also bought and ate the flesh of aborigines in the marketplace.

  Cannibalism is also an expression of revenge and was recommended by Confucius. It was not enough, he said, to observe the mourning period for a parent murdered or killed in suspicious circumstances. Heaven would praise those who took revenge. Killing alone, however, was not sufficient. Enemies should be entirely consumed, including their bones, meat, heart and liver. Chinese historical records are littered with examples of kings and emperors who killed and ate their enemies, among them some of the greatest figures, such as the Emperor Qinshihuangdi, who first unified China. Liu Bang, the founder of the succeeding Han dynasty, distributed small pieces of his enemies for his vassals to consume as a way of testing their loyalty. Traitors were chopped up and pickled. In some cases, the victor of a struggle would force his enemy to eat a soup made from his son or father. Even buried enemies were not safe.

  Little had changed by the nineteenth century. James Dyer Ball in Things Chinese recorded what happened when Cantonese villagers fell out over water rights in 1895. After armed clashes, the prisoners who had been taken were killed. Then their hearts and livers were distributed and eaten, even young children being allowed to participate in the feast. During the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists in the 1940s, there are also recorded instances when prisoners were killed and eaten in revenge.

  Under Communist rule, cannibalism to obtain revenge continued, notably during the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi province in the far south of China. According to official documents obtained by the Chinese writer Zheng Yi, in some schools students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate their bodies to celebrate a triumph over ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Government-run cafeterias in the province are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees. One document relates that ‘There are many varieties of cannibalism and among them are these: killing someone and making a big dinner of it, slicing off the meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each person takes a large chunk home to boil, roasting the liver and eating it for its medicinal properties, and so on.’7

  The documents obtained by Zheng Yi suggest that at least 137 people, and probably hundreds more, were eaten in Guangxi. The cannibalism was organized by local Communist Party officials and people took part to prove their revolutionary ardour. In one case, the first person to strip the body of a school principal was the former girlfriend of the principal’s son. She wanted to show that she had no sympathy with him and was just as ‘red’ as anyone else. Harry Wu, in Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, records a similar incident while he was at the Wang Zhuang coal-mine in Shanxi. A prisoner called Yang Baoyin was summarily executed by firing squad for writing the words ‘Overthrow Chairman Mao’ and his brains were eaten by a Public Security cadre.

  In Cannibalism in China, Chong concludes that cannibalism probably occurred on a massive scale in times of great convulsions. There is every reason to believe that this also holds true for the Great Leap Forward, a dark and secret legacy of China’s ancient culture which few inside or outside China wish to confront. This chapter began with an extract from a short story by one of the most famous twentieth-century Chinese writers, Lu Xun. Since it is written in the style of Nietzsche, Western readers assume it is allegorical, but Chinese readers would surely read it as a tirade against the unchanging realities of life in China.

  15

  Life in the Cities

  ‘There were tens of thousands of people roaming the streets and looking for food. When you sat down to eat... all these people would be watching you.’ Interviewee, Chengdu

  The gulf between town and country in China is so wide that most city-dwellers were only dimly aware that people were dying in the countryside during the famine. One member of a group of Shanghai students who went on holiday to Gansu to visit the sites of the Silk Road at the height of the famine recalled that when they saw emaciated wretches dying in the streets they simply assumed that this was normal. Even the journalist Zhu Hong, wife of the dissident Liu Binyan, failed to grasp that millions were starving to death in Sichuan when in 1960 she was sent to Chongqing to research an article about the spirit of self-reliance. And a former student in Beijing is still stricken with guilt because he encouraged his girlfriend to go back to her home in the countryside since he was worried that she was losing weight. Months later a letter arrived informing him that she had starved to death.1

  The barriers separating the 90 million people privileged to live in the cities and the rest of the population – around 500 million – went up within a few years of the Communist victory in 1949. The state undertook to provide those living in the cities with food, housing and clothing. With the introduction of food rationing, the corollary measure, the internal passport, became essential. This ensured that anyone registered as living in a village could not enter a city without permission and could not obtain state grain rations. Urban or rural status was determined at birth and was usually hereditary. In effect, the state had reduced the majority of China’s population to the level of passport-holders from a separate and foreign country.

  In the Soviet Union, Stalin had introduced the internal passport in 1932, as a way of dealing with the consequences of the famine. Without urban residency, starving peasants seeking food were turned back or arrested by militia posted at railway stations and checkpoints on all roads leading into the cities. The system served the same purpose in China and the results won praise from foreign visitors in the 1950s. They were no longer troubled by the sight of beggars and starving wretches on the streets of wealthy Shanghai as they had been before 1949, a sight which had come to symbolize the immorality of capitalism. Chinese city-dwellers, too, appreciated the change. Fixed rations brought security because the state would feed them no matter how bad the harvests were.

  Within the cities, not everyone received the same rations. Urban society was carefully stratified and high status was rewarded with higher rations. As in imperial times, a member of the state apparatus was graded on a scale from 1 to 24, according to his or her political loyalty; and depending on his or her grade, each individual was allocated one of three kinds of ration books. In all cases, women were given lower rations than men. Those in the top grades, from 1 to 13, were entitled to the largest grain rations and in addition received 4 lbs (or catties) of
pork, sugar, eggs and yellow beans, and four boxes of cigarettes a month. Second-class people received less grain, no sugar and half as much pork, eggs and beans. Those in the bottom class were given no pork or eggs, but one box of cigarettes and 2 lbs of yellow beans. Other food and goods could be bought in the marketplace with the pocket money given as wages, but during the Great Leap Forward the city markets were closed down.2

  In the push towards Communism, the number of goods distributed by the rationing system grew and grew. Cloth, cotton, matches, soap, candles, needles, thread, cooking oil, wood, paper, coal and other fuels, fish, meat, beancurd and so on could only be acquired with coupons. The soap ration was one bar per month and in some places a ticket was necessary to obtain hot water or a bath.

  This rationing system was complicated still further by the fact that some coupons were only valid in a certain province, city, county or commune. Local ration tickets often became worthless if they were not used within a month, a measure designed to prevent hoarding or trading. Other goods such as biscuits could be purchased with cash but only if accompanied by a voucher. The most precious tender was a national grain ticket because it could be used to obtain food anywhere and it amounted in effect to an alternative currency. A national voucher for a pound of grain was worth 2.5 to 3 yuan but in famine-stricken regions such vouchers became more treasured than gold. City-dwellers sometimes answered appeals from rural relatives by posting them grain vouchers but joy would turn to despair when, as sometimes happened, the recipients discovered that no grain could be obtained at any price.