Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  Before 1949 it was reckoned that in Britain one person could grow enough food for himself and four urban dwellers but in China it took four farmers to produce enough for themselves and one city-dweller. If only China could reach the same rate of productivity as Britain, she could easily feed herself. Yet plans to modernize Chinese agricultural methods, rationalize ownership, provide cheap credit through co-operatives and build roads, railways, irrigation canals and dykes, were frustrated by the greatest problem of all – political instability.

  At the end of the nineteenth century the Empress Dowager Ci Xi crushed efforts to modernize the country, fearing that it would open the door to foreign influences that would undermine the remaining authority of the imperial court. In 1911 the Qing dynasty was overthrown and China became a republic. Yet the opportunity to modernize foundered once more when power was seized by one of her generals, Yuan Shikai, who tried to establish a new dynasty. After his death in 1916, the empire disintegrated into a mass of fiefdoms run by warlords, and the central government was reduced to impotence. By 1928, however, a new ruling party had risen to power, the Nationalists or Kuomintang (KMT).

  The KMT had been founded as a revolutionary party by Sun Yat-sen with the support of Marxists sent from Moscow who also nurtured the birth of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Strongly nationalist and anti-imperialist, the KMT attempted to unite China and to import Western scientific ideas and methods of government. In 1925 Sun died and the KMT fell under the control of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The following year he launched the Northern expedition to suppress the warlords. However, he was soon faced with another threat to his power in the shape of the growing Communist Party. Initially, it had functioned as a branch of the KMT but it soon began to establish itself as a rival.

  Lenin himself believed that to become Communist, China must first pass through a stage of bourgeois revolution, but after his death the Chinese Communists took a different tack. In 1927 they launched a series of agrarian and urban uprisings against the KMT. In response Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Communists and destroyed their urban organizations, especially in Shanghai. Thereafter the Communists became a largely agrarian movement controlling small areas, or soviets, in the mountains, often on the intersection of provincial borders. In 1930 Chiang Kai-shek launched the first of several campaigns to eradicate these soviets and, in 1934, encircled the largest stronghold, finally forcing the Communists to break out in what has since become known as the Long March. On this epic journey Mao Zedong seized control and led his dwindling band to a new base in Yanan on the borders of Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces.

  The Nationalists were never able to establish proper control of China. The most important coastal cities such as Shanghai were run by the foreign powers. In Manchuria, the Japanese imperial army set up a puppet state, Manchukuo, and from 1937 invaded China south of the Great Wall, forcing the Nationalists to retreat. The capital was moved from Nanjing inland to Chongqing in Sichuan province and the Nationalists steadily lost control over most of China. During the Second World War, the Communists infiltrated behind Japanese lines and established their grip over the rural hinterlands in the north. After Japan’s defeat, civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists broke out once more and the Nationalists were finally defeated in 1949, retreating to the island of Taiwan.

  Between 1912 and 1949, the shifting alliances of the warlords and, later, the constant movement of armies, whether Communist, Nationalist or Japanese, reduced many parts of China to near anarchy and starvation. Millions of landless or impoverished peasants enlisted in the armies of local bandits and warlords or in the forces established by the Communists and Nationalists. A study of Shandong province in 1930 estimated that there were 192,000 regular troops and an additional 310,000 militia and bandits living off the countryside.13 An earlier report, produced in 1929 by the International Famine Relief Commission in western China, concluded that famine was less the result of natural disasters than of man-made events. The millions of armed men in China fed themselves by seizing food from the peasants, taking their sons and animals, and demanding taxes years or even generations in advance. If the peasants refused to pay, then the troops would seize their entire belongings, creating more desperate men whose only recourse was banditry. Wherever the troops went there was starvation: ‘the famine areas corresponded almost exactly to the main billet areas and lines of march of the armies retreating from, and advancing to, the civil wars in the East’.

  The American Red Cross drew the same conclusions about a famine in north-west China which began in 1929. It started with a severe drought but the ensuing destitution was caused by the ‘crushing exactions of the warlords, the depredations of bandits and the enforced payment of confiscatory taxation’. The solution, it said, lay in the establishment of a strong, stable central government which could ‘command the power and resources and continuity of policy necessary to lead China out of her condition of disorder into a new era of peace, security and prosperity’. It predicted that ‘disastrous conditions leading to continued suffering will constantly recur until such a government comes into being’.

  In the spring of 1943, an American reporter for Time magazine, Theodore White, was covering the war between the Japanese and Nationalist armies in Henan province, central China. Millions were fleeing the Japanese advance but White discovered to his horror that it was not the fighting itself which was killing most people but hunger. ‘The blood was not my chief distress – it was my inability to make sense of what I was seeing. In a famine where no one kills but nature, there are no marks on the body where people die: nature itself is the enemy – and only government can save from nature. I could not understand this at the beginning.’

  White, who later became the doyen of political reporters in America, was convinced that it would be the Communists, not the Nationalists, who would eventually provide this stable government. In his book, In Search of History, he described how the Nationalists dealt with the famine in Henan. At the time he was staying with a Catholic bishop and missionary in Luo-yang, the province’s capital.

  Missionaries left their compound only when necessary for a white man walking in the street was the only agent of hope and was assailed by wasted men, frail women, children, people head-knocking on the ground, grovelling, kneeling, begging for food, wailing ‘K’o lien, k’o lien’ (‘Mercy, mercy’) but pleading really only for food. The handful of missionaries who staked out the Christian underground in the area of famine were the only thread of sense – the sense that life is precious.

  What we saw, I now no longer believe... There were the bodies: the first, no more than an hour out of Luoyang, lying in the snow, a day or two dead, her face shrivelled about her skull: she must have been young; and the snow fell on her eyes; and she would lie unburied until the birds or the dogs cleansed her bones. The dogs were also there along the road, slipping back to their wolf kinship, and they were sleek, well fed. We stopped to take a picture of dogs digging bodies from sand piles; some were half-eaten, but the dogs had already picked clean one visible skull. Half the villages were deserted; some simply abandoned, others already looted. To hear a sound or see a person in such a village was startling; an old man tottering through the street all by himself; or in another village, two women shrieking at each other with no one else in sight, where normally there would be a crowd to watch them scold – and what were they arguing about in death?

  White found, too, that hunger had driven the peasants to break the ultimate taboo.

  So I saw these things, but the worst was what I heard, which was about cannibalism. I never saw any man kill another person for meat, and never tasted human flesh. But it seemed irrefutably true that people were eating people meat. The usual defence was that the people meat was taken from the dead. Case after case which we tried to report presented this defence. In one village a mother was discovered boiling her two-year-old to eat its meat. In another case a father was charged with strangling his two boys to eat them; his defence was
that they were already dead. A serious case in one village; the army had insisted that the peasants take in destitute children and an eight-year-old had been imposed on a peasant family. Then he disappeared. And on investigating, his bones were discovered by the peasant’s shack, in a big crock. The question was only whether the boy had been eaten after he died or had been killed to be eaten later. In two hours in the village, we could not determine the justice of the matter; anyone might have been lying; so we rode on.14

  White believed that this misery was caused not by war but by poor government. The Nationalists were relentless in collecting taxes to finance the war and since they did not trust the paper money that they issued as currency, the armies in the field were instructed to gather taxes in kind, mostly by seizing grain. White discovered that in Henan the Nationalist army had tried to collect more grain than the land produced. The troops had emptied the countryside of food, leaving the populace with nothing to eat. Peasants were forced to sell their animals, tools and homes. At the same time the civilian administration was trying to levy its own taxes.

  He also noticed that where army units were under strength, the army storehouses bulged with surplus grain which the officers sold for their own profit. This was the grain which the missionaries and honest officials bought to feed the starving. In Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek’s administration responded to reports of famine by declaring that it would remit the tax on next year’s grain harvest. Since this did not exist the gesture was meaningless; and the funds that it sent were equally useless because the paper currency had no value.

  White returned to Chongqing and found that Chiang had little knowledge of, or interest in, the famine. The various layers of bureaucracy had effectively shielded him from the facts. White finally managed to force an audience with the Generalissimo and showed him photographs of the starving and of wild dogs standing over corpses. Only then did Chiang believe him and take measures to end the famine. Trainloads of grain arrived from neighbouring Shaanxi province, the army opened its stores in Henan and the provincial government set up soup kitchens. The famine abated, although cholera and typhus still claimed many. In all at least 5 million are thought to have perished although even today no one knows the precise figure.

  The devastation caused by the Japanese invaders, the callousness of the Nationalists and endemic famine were, White believed, destroying traditional Chinese society:

  What was left was not a society, but a spongelike mass, a honeycomb of mashed cells in most of which some sting was left. Some villages supported the Nationalists, others the provincial government, and yet others supported the Communists – but they supported whoever could serve their need of protection best, who could save their women from rape by the Japanese, their men from impressment as coolies. The Japanese had come to kill; the Communists were the most efficient counterkillers.15

  After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Nationalists became the official government of China, yet the terrible famines continued. In 1946 famine gripped nineteen provinces and at least 20 million were starving. The British journalist John Ridley recorded what he saw in the same province, Henan: ‘It was a ghastly experience walking through those towns and villages. All around was the dreadful apathy of people slowly dying of hunger and disease who watched you, dull as cattle, their eyes large, luminous and sad in putty coloured skeletal faces. As you wandered among the ruined mud-brick houses there was always the stench of death.’

  While he was walking through one village a boy fell down in front of him: ‘lying on the road he was a pathetic little figure, his stomach hideously distended, his face gaunt and pallid, his limbs thin and fragile as a bird’s skeleton’. Ridley picked him up and carried him to a nearby hospital. Half an hour later the boy died without recovering consciousness. ‘He died of starvation. We get dozens like him brought here every week,’ a hospital doctor told Ridley. Throughout the province, people were subsisting on grass, roots, leaves and even human flesh, and children were abandoned or sold for a handful of grain.16

  A mere twelve years later Henan province would embrace Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his promise to end starvation for ever with more enthusiasm than any other part of China.

  Yet the famine which followed the Great Leap Forward would be the greatest that the world had ever witnessed. To understand why one must first look at how the Chinese themselves proposed to banish hunger in the land of famine.

  2

  Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation

  ‘In China what is called inequality between poor and rich is only a distinction between the very poor and the less poor.’ Sun Yat-sen

  ‘Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earth’ The ‘Internationale’

  Revolution, democracy, freedom, Communism – all meant one thing to the peasants: the redistribution of the land. From earliest times, peasants had joined rebellions confident that the victors would divide up all the land and reallocate it. At the start of a new dynasty, the Emperor would invariably annul all debts, taxes, land leases and contracts. Even the graves of the old era would be ploughed under. The soldiers of the new emperor would be rewarded with a choice of the best land and the supporters of the old regime would lose theirs. The population explosion that occurred under the Qing dynasty, and the increasing shortage of land that it created, fuelled the peasants’ age-old desire for change. Their opportunity came with the rise of the Taipings who, in rebelling against the Qing, promised to establish the ‘land system of the Heavenly Kingdom’. Land would be given to those who tilled it and would be shared out equitably among all the families of the Taiping supporters according to family size.1 The founders of the Heavenly Kingdom also envisaged a proto-Communist state in which all food surplus to daily requirements would be kept in great common granaries while social order would be ensured by a ‘sergeant’ appointed to oversee the doings of units made up of twenty-five families.

  The Taipings were crushed in 1864 but when the Qing dynasty was finally overthrown in the 1911 Republican Revolution, the peasants still hoped that there would be a great redistribution of land. They were disappointed and gained little from the dynasty’s downfall, but the new rulers of China continued to promise that soon the land would be redistributed. Sun Yat-sen declared that ‘those who till the land should have the land’ and called his programme the ‘equalization of land ownership’. Before his death the Nationalists made the land question a central plank in their political programme. In 1924 the Declaration of the First National Congress of the KMT stated:

  China is an agricultural country and the peasants are the class that has suffered most. The Kuomintang stands for the policy that those peasants who have no land and consequently have fallen into the status of mere tenants should be given land by the State for their cultivation. The State shall also undertake the work of irrigation and of opening up the waste land so as to increase the power of production of the land. Those peasants who have no capital and are compelled to borrow at high rates of interest and are in debt for life should be supplied by the State with credit by the establishment of rural banks. Only then will the peasants be able to enjoy the happiness of life.

  While they were still in partnership with the Communists, the Nationalists set up a Peasant Movement Training Institute in which Mao Zedong, the son of a peasant landlord from Hunan, soon became heavily involved. In 1924 he was elected an alternate member of the KMT’s Central Executive Committee and appointed Principal of the Institute. Perhaps more than anyone else in the Chinese Communist Party he argued that ‘the peasant question is the central question in the national revolution’. The founders of the Chinese Communist Party were largely urban intellectuals with access to Western ideas who had studied events in Europe, especially in Russia. When they set up the Party they gave it a name in Chinese which would appeal to the peasants – the Gong Chan Dang, the ‘share property party’. However, the orthodox Marxist view was that the workers – the urban proletariat – would be the advance guard of the revoluti
on. Mao, on the other hand, believed that in China it would be the peasants who would bring the Party to power. As he later told the American journalist Edgar Snow, ‘Whoever wins the peasants will win China. Whoever solves the land question will win the peasants.’

  So in the countryside the Communists promised land reform, the equitable redistribution of land, the abolition of taxes and the cancellation of debts. And unlike the Nationalists, they not only promised this but also put it into effect in the areas that fell under their control. As Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State, observed in 1948 when the Nationalists were facing defeat, ‘Much of the propaganda of the Chinese Communists is built on the promise that they will solve the land question... the KMT has attempted to solve the problem by formulating land reform decrees but some of these have failed and others have been neglected.’2 The promise to provide equal shares of land to all brought the popular support which allowed the Communists to operate in rural areas and to enlist landless peasants in their armies. In a famous report on the peasants in his home province, written in 1927, Mao predicted that ‘in a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China’s central, southern and northern provinces will rise like a tornado or tempest – a force so extraordinarily swift that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break through all the trammels that now bind them and push forward along the road to liberation.’3