Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  When the villagers were too feeble to go out into the fields, the cadres came and beat them, trying to force them to go out and forage for food. And throughout that winter they were made to gather for frequent political meetings and to receive instructions on work quotas. There were health inspections, too, and she remembered how difficult it was trying to keep her hut clean. Many villagers suffered bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting from the strange diet. Others became constipated and had to use their fingers to pull out the hardened waste from their rectums. A few tried to eat earth mixed with grass but it solidified in their stomachs and they died.

  Above all, Mrs Liu recalled the end when the soldiers came in trucks and began throwing sacks of wheat on to the road. She managed to walk the six miles to the road and ate the grain raw. Out of the 300 people that had been in her village at the start of the famine, only 80 survived. Mrs Liu still believes it was Chairman Mao who saved them by sending troops to rescue them and that otherwise all would have perished.

  This book is the story of what happened not just in this one village in Guangshan county but in a million others throughout China.

  Part One China: Land of Famine

  1

  China: Land of Famine

  ‘What is important after all? Everyone must eat – that is important.’ Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist Party

  ‘In the wake of mighty armies, bad harvests follow without fail.’ Lao Tzu

  On a tomb in the capital of the Shang dynasty (c.1480-1050 BC), the first in Chinese history, is an inscription: ‘Why are there disasters? It is because the Emperor wants to punish mankind.’ Historical records show that China has always been the land of famine and the Chinese a people who have prostrated themselves before the wayward power of the Emperor, the Son of Heaven. The records of succeeding dynasties reveal that every year floods and droughts brought famine to some part or other of the empire. Indeed, researchers in the 1930s discovered documentary evidence that from the year 108 BC until ad 1911, China suffered no fewer than 1,828 major famines.1

  It was the greatest task of the Emperor and his ministers to control the floods and to intercede with Heaven to bring rain in times of drought. In the Zhou dynasty (c. 1122-221 BC), the Emperor held ceremonies in which young girls were cast into the rivers to prevent floods, and on altars and in temples he presided over sacrifices and ritual dances to placate Heaven. Five hundred years ago, in the Ming dynasty, the Emperor would walk barefoot to pray at the Temple of Heaven and sleep on the altar in his clothes to beg for rain. During the last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), each year the Emperor would order local officials to build temples and pray. Even in modern times little changed. Newspapers in the late 1930s reported how, as in many primitive societies, people still slaughtered animals to bring rain. The Nationalist Governor of Hunan province would go into temples to pray, throwing tiger bones into ponds to please the dragon in the waters and forbidding the slaughter of livestock for three days. Even the Panchen Lama was summoned from Tibet by the Nationalist government to recite scriptures and to pray for rain.2

  It was also the responsibility of the Emperor to levy taxes on the peasantry and to store surplus grain in state granaries. If in times of famine his officials failed in their responsibility or sold the grain for profit, the people starved or tried to flee to other parts of the empire. And when they had sold all that they possessed, they sold their children. Cannibalism was common and at times people even ate their own children. During the terrible famine of 1877 the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shanxi, Monsignor Louis Monagata, reported that ‘now they kill the living to have them for food. Husbands eat their wives. Parents eat their sons and daughters and children eat their parents.’3

  The terrible famines which devastated China in the nineteenth century convinced Europeans who witnessed them that Thomas Malthus had been right: in China the population was growing faster than the food supply. Chinese scholars have attributed this growth to imperial policies. When the Manchu tribes of Manchuria established the Qing dynasty, they abolished the poll tax and instead preferred to rely on land taxes. Thus people were not penalized for having more children and land ownership became more important than ever. The population grew at the formidable annual rate of more than 2.5 per cent: by 1762 it had passed the 200 million mark, by 1790 it had reached 300 million, and by 1834 it stood at well over 400 million.4

  The crisis created by the population explosion almost brought down the Qing dynasty. In 1851, a massive peasant rebellion erupted. Led by Hong Xiuquan, a peasant who believed himself to be the brother of Christ, the leaders of what became known as the Taiping sought to establish a ‘heavenly kingdom’ through social reform, the sharing of property in common and the equal distribution of land. Though the Manchus, with the help of the Western powers, eventually defeated the Taipings and restored order, they could find no way of ending the food shortages which steadily worsened. In 1876, three years of drought in northern China carried off some 13 million people. A decade later a further 2 million died when the Yellow River burst its banks, drowning many and inundating fields.

  Some Westerners saw famine as a necessary evil, nature’s check on overpopulation. The American A. K. Norton wrote in China and the Powers that ‘The numbers of the people must be cut down and if disease, war and plague are not sufficient, famine may be depended upon to fill up the toll. Herein lies the paramount reality of the China problem.’

  The Manchus tried to cope with the crisis by allowing their subjects to emigrate abroad and to migrate into Manchu and Mongolian lands. Until then they and their Inner Mongolian allies had forbidden Chinese to settle in the thinly populated steppes of their homeland. From the end of the nineteenth century millions of Chinese peasants crossed the Great Wall and settled in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and elsewhere. This ‘colonization’ policy met with the approval of some Westerners and was facilitated by the building of railways linking these regions to central China.

  The introduction of new crops from the Americas also helped an internal colonization of hitherto neglected parts of China. Maize, peanuts and sweet potatoes could grow in poor hilly regions and provide a living where before there had been none. Such gains, however, were short-lived. Intensive cultivation all too often resulted in environmental degradation and diminishing returns. A Western traveller, Graham Peck, wrote of what he saw in Shaanxi province in north-west China in 1941:

  The land was dying and its people with it. The first Westerners who travelled through Shuangshipu and wrote about it in the early nineteenth century had reported that this was wild empty country, heavily wooded with pines, holding only a few farmhouses along the torrential mountain stream. Now there were wretched little farms right up to the summit of the mountains. Except for the cherished domestic trees around the farmhouses, only a scruff of secondary domestic growth was left on the most inaccessible steps. Already the thin red and yellow soil of the hilly fields was clutched on every flank by jagged erosion gullies...

  The few acres of good farmland in the flatter valleys were slowly being covered by dry deltas of gravel and boulder, tumbled out of the ravines by the fierce, brief rains which came in the summer when they could also harm the mountain fields, washing out the new crops.5

  The thoughtless felling of trees was, he recorded, part of the ‘slow murder of the country’, accelerating both the erosion of the soil and the speed with which rainwater ran off the land. Today the same process is still underway, filling the main rivers with silt and increasing the risk of sudden floods.

  Chinese and foreigners like Peck observed, too, that overpopulation by the dead as well as the living was reducing the amount of arable land available for cultivation. Even in this region, Peck wrote, ‘on the mountains the homes of the living were outnumbered by the mounds which housed the dead and the shrines to appease local spirits. Each new grave, always placed in a good field, took more farmland from the survivors.’ Others noticed that many peasants were reluctant to leave their ancestral lands an
d seek a better life elsewhere because, as Walter H. Mallory, the Secretary of the China International Famine Relief Commission, complained, they felt impelled to stay and care for the graves of their ancestors.

  From the turn of the century Westerners in China became increasingly concerned with famine relief. When a major famine struck Gansu and Shaanxi provinces in 1920, missionaries helped launch an International Famine Relief Commission which raised money in China and abroad. At the same time the US President, Woodrow Wilson, appointed an American famine relief committee. Its chairman, a prominent banker called Thomas Lamont, collected US $4.6 million in America alone.6 Altogether 37 million Mexican dollars (the currency of China’s foreign trade) were raised, much of it from Western sources. The International Famine Relief Commission thought that its efforts were so successful that, of the nine and half million who might have died, only half a million perished.

  Even so the famines continued. M. H. Hutton wrote of his journey in 1924 from Sichuan to Guizhou province: ‘The famine conditions in this province are heartrending... Dogs feasting on human flesh. Skeletons in thousands to be seen everywhere. As we journeyed over the road, over and over again our chairbearers had to carry us over dead bodies of people who had died on the road. One very sad sight was a poor victim kneeling before an idol shrine – dead.’7 For many of those who became involved with China in the first half of this century, witnessing famine became the defining experience. One such was Edgar Snow, the American journalist who first interviewed Mao Zedong in his guerrilla base in Yanan, a famine-stricken region in Shaanxi province. (Ironically, Snow would return to China during the Great Leap Forward in 1960 and deny that a real famine was then taking place.) During the great famine which struck north-west China in 1927 and affected 60 million people, he travelled with a New Zealander, Rewi Alley, who would stay on in China and become an acolyte of Mao. At the time Edgar Snow wrote this moving description of what he witnessed:

  Have you ever seen a man – a good honest man who has worked hard, a ‘law-abiding citizen’, doing no serious harm to anyone – when he has had no food for more than a month? It is a most agonising sight. His dying flesh hangs from him in wrinkled folds; you can clearly see every bone in his body: his eyes stare out unseeing; and even if he is a youth of twenty he moves like an ancient crone, dragging himself from spot to spot. If he has been lucky he has long ago sold his wife and daughters. He has sold everything he owns, the timber of his house itself, and most of his clothes. Sometimes he has, indeed, even sold the last rag of decency, and he sways there in the scorching sun, his testicles dangling from him like withered olive seeds – the last grim jest to remind you that this was once a man.

  Children are even more pitiable, with their little skeletons bent over and misshapen, their crooked bones, their little arms like twigs, and their purpling bellies, filled with bark and sawdust, protruding like tumours. Women lie slumped in corners, waiting for death, their black blade-like buttocks protruding, their breasts hanging like collapsed sacks. But there are, after all, not many women and girls. Most of them died or had been sold.

  The shocking thing was that in many of those towns there were still rich men, rice hoarders, wheat hoarders, money-lenders, and landlords, with armed guards to defend them, while they profiteered enormously. The shocking thing was that in the cities – where officials danced or played with sing-song girls – there was grain and food, and had been for months.8

  Snow estimated that between 3 and 6 million perished in this famine. The sight of the starving was one horror but there were others. Human flesh was traded. Boys were sold as adopted sons. Girls were sold as wives, concubines, slave-girls or prostitutes. The 1927 report of the Peking United International Famine Relief Committee stated that ‘in many districts, the children sold during the famine were reckoned by the thousands... Shijiazhuang [a city south-west of Beijing] was found to be one of die largest centres of the traffic. One of the workers in the famine field speaks of the contrast seen on the same day between a train of cars loaded with grain going out to relieve the people and a car filled with girls, who had been bought out in the country and were being brought to the railway station.’9 Another report by Walter H. Mallory described what the starving peasants ate: ‘flour made with ground leaves, fuller’s earth, flower seed, poplar buds, corncobs, hongqing cha [steamed balls of wild herbs], sawdust, thistles, leaf dust, poisonous tree beans, sorghum husks, cotton seed, elm bark, beancakes, sweet potato vines, roots, pumice stone ground into flour...’10

  Both Chinese and foreign experts argued that if in the long term famines were to be prevented then communications must be improved. In India the British had been able to end endemic famine. As the Imperial Gazetteer of India stated: ‘the greatest administrative achievement of the last 20 years has been the extension of communications. Railways have revolutionised relief. The final horror of famine, an absolute dearth of food, is not known.’ China’s tragedy was that it had far fewer railways than India. If there was a surplus in one part of the country and a famine in another, it was impossible to transport grain from the one to the other. Yet, as the 1925 annual report of the China International Famine Relief Commission noted, ‘in such a vast country there is such a range of climate that a crop failure in all the provinces simultaneously is almost impossible. Even though four or five provinces are without a harvest there are still seventeen or eighteen where there is a yield and some of them are almost sure to have a bumper crop.’

  Past dynasties had tried to solve the problem by digging the Grand Canal to ship grain by barge from the south to the north. Grain could travel, too, along the major rivers. But in large parts of the country the only mode of transporting grain was on a man’s back. Animals were too valuable to use. In the 1920s China, with an area as big as the United States, had less than 2,000 miles of roads. Both men and goods were carried by coolies up and down hills and along narrow tracks for days on end. One reporter in China recorded that even if farmers in the interior of China gave their grain to mill owners in Shanghai for nothing, it would still be cheaper for the millers to buy American grain and ship it across the Pacific than to transport it across China.11

  The Qing dynasty had been reluctant to allow foreigners to build many railways, and after its downfall the new republic was too unstable and too short of resources to fund major roadbuilding or railway schemes. Aside from the main river valleys and the coastal belt, the vast interior of China is mountainous, making it costly to construct roads. Yet without good communications it was impossible to create a commercial grain market. Even successful farmers found that the cards were always stacked against them. Prices fluctuated wildly and since most peasants were smallholders, they possessed little capital and were unable to borrow cheaply. The peasant had to sell immediately after the harvest when prices were low while the trader could hold stocks until prices were high. To finance the period between sowing and harvest, the peasant often borrowed money. Local landlords and dealers would charge 60 per cent interest on mortgaged land, 30 per cent on money loans and 50 per cent on grain. Many farmers were perennially in debt as John Ridley, correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, observed: ‘The average Chinese farmer has a holding of one or two acres. Half of everything he grows is turned over to the landlord. Bad communications make production for a wide market impossible. The farmer has no incentive to put more land under the plough and increase the yield when he is unable to sell the additional produce. Primitive transport by oxen, mules or human beings is so slow that it is expensive as compared with railway charges.’

  The famines also prompted the first research into peasant life. Professor John Lossing Buck, an American academic, established a team at Nanjing University which produced detailed surveys of Chinese agriculture, while his wife Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Good Earth, the story of an Anhui peasant who is driven from his land by drought and famine. Researchers began to realize that famine was not just a periodic crisis but a permanent state for tens of mi
llions. In Land and Labour in China, published in 1932, R. H. Tawney wrote that ‘there are in China districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to his neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.’ Another writer, A. K. Norton, tried to calculate the numbers involved:

  It is estimated that thirty million Chinese are continually attempting to sustain life on less than the minimum required for subsistence. Thousands of these die daily; yet it is only when some great catastrophe such as a flood or a drought concentrates millions of starving in one area that we hear of a famine. Of the famine that is present every day we hear little: and the three million or more that die each year of starvation, due to lack of adjustment to changing conditions, are accepted as representing the normal mortality of the Chinese people.12

  Westerners argued that peasant agriculture must be modernized if China was to feed herself. A thousand years earlier China had been at the forefront of farming technology; now she was regarded as primitive. Many peasants were too poor to use draught animals and pulled a plough themselves. The ploughs were made of wood, not metal, and they barely scratched the surface of the soil. In places the peasants did not even use a plough but broke up the soil by hitting it with a wooden instrument shaped like a hoe. The Chinese peasant, observed one writer, was ‘twin brother to the ox’.

  The land itself was easily exhausted because there was not enough fertilizer, and land was too scarce and too highly taxed for it to be left fallow. After the harvest, the peasants would strip their land of every piece of straw to burn as fuel because there was no coal or wood, and instead used human waste to fertilize the soil. Englishmen travelling up the Grand Canal in the mid-nineteenth century had been astonished to see peasants running after them to take their faeces: ‘Whenever servants and soldiers left the junks, they would be pursued to their places of retirement with receptacles to collect manure for their fields.’