In Shanghai that year he told cadres that ‘if by national day next year, Shanghai’s schools are able to launch a third-grade rocket to an altitude of 300 kilometres, they should get three marks... A third-grade rocket with a satellite should get five marks. This is very easy. At New Year, the [ordinary] Shanghainese fire rockets, so surely the schools can launch [real] rockets!’7
Trained scientists such as Professor Qian Xusen, the American nuclear physicist who returned to serve Mao and help build China’s nuclear bomb, gave credibility to this optimism. He wrote articles and gave lectures to agricultural experts stating that it was quite realistic to increase crop yields ten or a hundred times. Qian said that one small plot of land could yield over a dozen tonnes of grain if just a small percentage of the energy from sunlight were properly utilized.8
Such carelessness with the truth shocked even visiting Soviet scientists like Mikhail Klochko. He discovered first-year chemistry students at a teacher training school rewriting their organic chemistry textbooks as they went along. For example, the students had decided they would only learn about copper, because they lived in Yunnan province which is rich in copper ore, so there was no need to bother with the other metals and elements.9 This approach to science mirrored that in Soviet Russia when Stalin launched his first five-year plan. Then, the message of countless books and articles was the same: the impossible could only be achieved by ignoring the advice of timid experts, the ‘bourgeois specialists’ who lived in ivory towers, pedantically inching their way forward. True scientists were peasants filled with intuitive knowledge and led by Party members driven by revolutionary fervour – that was how miracles were achieved. The Soviet novel Izbrannoe (The Select) by I. Babel, for example, contains a discussion in which a noted oil expert is reprimanded by a young Party member who says: ‘We do not doubt the knowledge or goodwill of the professor... but we reject the fetishism of figures which hold us in thrall... We reject the multiplication table as the basis for policy.’
In the Great Leap Forward, much the same happened in China, only in real life. The People’s Daily reported how students in one faculty of science and mathematics showed their disdain for basic theory by putting decimal points in the wrong place while others deliberately made mistakes when calculating square roots.10 Still worse, the message was put out that science was so simple, even a child could excel at it. A propaganda book, They Are Creating Miracles, described how children at a primary school ‘developed ten more new crops on its experimental plot’, a feat presented as hard fact: ‘It’s a story out of a science-fiction book! But, no, my young friends, it is not! This is a true story. There are no fairy-tale magicians, no white-bearded wizards of never-never land. The heroes of our story are a group of Young Pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school.’11
All over China in 1958, the Party created thousands of new colleges, universities and research institutes, while real scientists were imprisoned or sent to do manual labour. In their place, thousands of untrained peasants carried out ‘scientific research’. Many kinds of miracles were announced but the Great Leap Forward was above all about creating huge increases in grain and steel production. These were the ‘two generals’ that Mao said would modernize China.
Just as Stalin saw a huge increase in steel production as the cornerstone of his crash industrialization programme, Mao envisaged a doubling or trebling of steel output within a year. The entire country, from peasants in remote villages on the Tibetan plateau to top Party officials in Zhongnanhai in Beijing, set up smelters in 1958 and 1959 to create ‘steel’ in backyard furnaces. Everyone had to meet a quota by handing over their metal possessions. People handed in bicycles, railings, iron bedsteads, door knobs, their pots and pans and cooking grates. And to fire the furnaces, huge numbers of trees were cut down. In the countryside people worked day and night fuelling these furnaces. While they did so, they could eat as much as they wanted out of the communes’ collective food stores. The lumps of useless metal that emerged were supposed to be used in the mechanization of agriculture. Had China really produced a lot more steel then it could have been used to make the necessary tractors, ploughs, threshing machines, trucks, diesel engines and pumps. Instead the peasants relied on tu fa – literally ‘earth methods’ – to mechanize their work by inventing hundreds of Heath Robinson-type contraptions of pulleys, ropes and cogs, all made out of wood, not steel. Propaganda photographs showed wooden conveyor belts, wooden threshing machines, wooden automatic compost-appliers – a sort of wheelbarrow with a box on top – wooden rail tracks, wooden railcars, wooden rice-planting machines, wooden wheat harvesters, wooden jute harvesters and, in Shandong, a whole truck made of wood. They were all a great credit to the considerable ingenuity of the Chinese peasant but, in the end, perfectly worthless. Not one has survived in use. Yet, for all the waste and folly of the backyard furnace campaign, it was never more than a minor contributory factor to the starvation that was to result from the Great Leap Forward.
Rather, it was the half-baked ideas on growing more grain, Mao’s second ‘general’, which he insisted the nation should follow, that led to a substantial decline in grain yields. Many Chinese believe his ideas were rooted in traditional Chinese peasant lore, but though this may explain their appeal to a peasant’s son like Mao, in fact he merely adopted them from the Soviet Union. To understand what happened in China, therefore, one must first step back in time to the Stalin years and examine the theories of such pseudo-scientists as Lysenko, Michurin and Williams.
For twenty-five years Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko ruled over Soviet agricultural scientists as a dictator. Those who opposed him were shot or perished in labour camps, and his victims were not rehabilitated until 1986 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.12 Until then, Lysenko’s portrait hung in all scientific institutions. At the height of his personality cult, art stores sold busts and bas-reliefs of him, and cities erected statues in his honour. When he gave a lecture, he was preceded by a brass band and people sang songs in his honour:
Merrily play one, accordion,
With my girlfriend let me sing
Of the eternal glory of Academician Lysenko.
Lysenko dismissed the developing science of genetics as an ‘expression of the senile decay and degradation of bourgeois culture’. Instead, he advocated a mumbo-jumbo of his own which muddled up Darwin’s theories on evolution and the competition in nature between different species and among members of the same species. His school rejected the ‘fascist’ theories that plants and animals have inherited characteristics which selective breeding can develop. Lysenkoists believed that, on the contrary, environmental factors determine the characteristics of plants and animals. Just as Communists thought that people could be changed by altering their surroundings, so Lysenko held that plants acquire new characteristics when their environment is changed and that these changes are transmitted to the next generation. As one observer pointed out, this was tantamount to saying that lambs would be born without tails just because you cut off their mother’s tail. Yet Lysenko asserted that he could make orange trees flourish in Siberia, or change them into apple trees, not by selective breeding but by following Stalin’s unintelligible teachings on evolution. As the Lysenkoist journal Agrobiologiya put it: ‘Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realisation of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another.’
Lysenko was a semi-literate peasant from Azerbaijan whom Pravda praised in 1927 as a ‘barefoot scientist’ after he claimed to have found a way of growing peas in winter. These peas, he said, would green the mountains of the Caucasus in winter and solve the problem of winter forage. His next, and equally bogus, achievement went under the name of ‘vernalization’ (from the Latin, vernalis, for spring). Most Russian wheat is sown in winter but the seeds are sometimes damaged by severe weather. The yield from spring whea
t is higher so when Lysenko claimed he could turn winter wheat seeds into spring seeds, he was promising to raise yields in many parts of the Soviet Union. His method was simple: change the environment of the seeds by soaking them in very cold water and they themselves would change.
The second verse of the Lysenko song, quoted above, also commemorates another Soviet hero, Michurin:
He walks the Michurin path
With firm tread.
He protects us from being duped
By Mendelist-Morganists.
If the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel and the American scientist Thomas Morgan are the fathers of genetics, then I. V. Michurin, an impoverished nobleman turned tree-grafter, is the true founder of Lysenkoism. He first rose to fame in the early 1920s when a Soviet leader praised his hybrid creations, including a part melon, part squash vegetable, on show at the First All Russian Agricultural Exhibition. Michurin claimed to have created hundreds of hybrid fruit trees, and because he had received only primary education, he qualified as a genuine peasant hero. The whole nation had to follow his methods, although he insisted that ‘intuition’ was as vital an element in matching his success as his theories. Michurin dismissed real scientists as ‘the caste priests of jabberology’, especially those who espoused the theories of Mendel.
Although Michurin was later conclusively shown to be a fraud, he was hailed during Stalin’s first five-year plan as an example of what could be done with the correct attitude to science. The daring, untrammelled spirit of his thinking was evoked in this call to arms published in the magazine October: ‘Knock out sleepiness with punches, with demands, with insistence, with daring. With daring to master and transform the earth, nature, fruit. Is it not daring to drive the grape into the tundra? Drive! Drive! Drive! Into the furrows, into the gardens, into the orchards, into the machines of jelly factories... Faster, faster, faster, comrade agronomists!’
Another hero of the Lysenko school was the son of an American engineer, Vasily Williams, who became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought that capitalism and American-style commercial farming based on the application of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the brink of catastrophe. This was in the early 1930s when American farmers in Oklahoma saw their fields turn to dust. Williams believed that the answer was to rotate fields as medieval peasants had done, growing grain only every third year. The rest of the time the fields would be left fallow, allowing nitrogen to accumulate in the roots of clover and other grasses which would enrich the soil. He was opposed by other experts, among them Pryanishnikov, who stressed the importance of mineral fertilizers and shallow ploughing, but Williams dubbed them ‘wreckers of socialist agriculture’. Khrushchev later explained: ‘The debate was essentially decided on the basis of capital investments. Pryanishnikov’s theory of mineral fertilizers would have required enormous capital investments in order to build fertilizer plants and new machinery. We were short of capital at that time and so Williams’ theory was more attractive. That is how Williams’ grasslands theory came to reign supreme.’13
Khrushchev was one of those who supported Williams, but he admits in his memoirs that ‘the fact of the matter is that Williams’ system didn’t work. Even after it had been consistently implemented throughout the Ukraine, there was no improvement in our agricultural production.’
Stalin also turned to the ideas of Terenty Maltsev, a pupil of Williams, who recommended ploughing furrows four or five feet deep as a way of improving the soil texture and obtaining higher yields. New ploughs to do this were designed and manufactured and Stalin gave Maltsev the Lenin prize for science.
All these ideas helped transform a rich farming nation into one beset by permanent food shortages. On the collectives, farmers could use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America was using to boost yields by 30 per cent. Furthermore, their fields were left fallow most of the time, and when the crops were sown, the ‘vernalized’ wheat did not sprout; nor did Lysenko’s frost-resistant wheat and rye seeds, or the potatoes grown in summer and the sugar beet planted in the hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted. One year, Lysenko even managed to persuade the government to send an army of peasants into the fields with tweezers to remove the anthers from the spikes of each wheat plant because he believed that his hybrids must be pollinated by hand. Under banners proclaiming ‘Greater harvests with less dung’, Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure by mixing humus with organic mineral fertilizers in a rotating barrel. This method removed the phosphate and nitrogen, and when the muck was spread on the fields, it was useless. Ignoring Lysenko’s repeated failures, the Soviet press continued to trumpet his endless successes: cows which produced only cream, cabbages turned into swedes, barley transformed into oats, and lemon trees which blossomed in Siberia.
Lysenko’s greatest triumphs came after the Second World War when he dreamt up the ‘Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’. To create a new and warmer climate in the vast lands of Siberia, Lysenko proposed planting millions of trees. The peasants had to plant the seeds and saplings close together because, according to Lysenko’s ‘law of the life of species’, individuals of the same species do not compete but help each other survive. Naturally all the seedlings died but not before the composer Shostakovich had written his choral symphony, The Song of the Trees, and Bertolt Brecht had penned this poem:
So let us with ever newer arts
Change this earth’s form and operation.
Gladly measure thousand-year-old wisdom
By new wisdom one year old.
Dreams! Golden if!
Let the lovely flood of grain rise higher!
In China, Mao became greatly taken with the theories of Williams, Lysenko and Michurin. He read Williams’ book on soil while still in Yanan and later frequently quoted both him and Lysenko. Mao, too, wanted the Chinese to plant seeds close together because, as he told colleagues, ‘with company they grow easily, when they grow together they will be comfortable’.14 Lysenko’s theories meshed perfectly with Mao’s obsession with class struggle. He readily believed that plants from the same ‘class’ would never compete against each other for light or food. While the Chinese Communists were still in Yanan, the chief Chinese Lysenkoist, Luo Tianyu, propagated the Soviet teachings: and in the 1942 rectification movement, a purge of Party members, Luo enthusiastically persecuted those who believed in genetics.15
After the Communist victory in 1949, Luo was put in charge of the new Beijing Agricultural University and Soviet-style science now reigned supreme. In the 1950s, all Soviet methods, textbooks and ideas had to be followed, while Western-trained scientists were either arrested or forced publicly to disown their ‘fascist eugenics’ theories. All research in genetics came to a stop. Lysenko’s Soviet disciples toured China giving lectures, and Chinese peasants studied his theories at Michurin societies. China had her own Michurin, a peasant called Shi Yiqian who became a professor at the Henan Agricultural College after he grew grapes on a persimmon tree, and apples on a pear tree. In schools, children also set up a Michurin corner in their classrooms to study how to create such hybrids. Some reportedly managed not only to graft one vegetable on to another but also to cross-breed animals such as rabbits and pigs.
Soviet ideas also dominated other fields, notably that of medicine. Perhaps the most absurd notion introduced to the Chinese was the work of Olga Lepeshenskaya, who supposedly proved that living cells could be created from non-living organic material.16 None of this could be challenged, as a former doctor in Beijing explained:
We were told the Soviets had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had to change textbooks and rename things in Lysenko’s honour. So the Harving Cushing Syndrome – a disease of the adrenalin gland – became Lysenko’s Syndrome to show it had been discovered by him. Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anaemia, even to students. This meant that all through Mao’s lifetime
there was no policy to stop people in the same family marrying each other and passing down their genes. A lot of idiots were born as a result.17
Adherence to Lysenkoism meant that when a potato virus struck large areas of China in the 1950s, nothing could be done because, as in the Soviet Union, the changes had to be attributed to environmental factors. Chinese scientists who had invested years of research into the blight were ignored, and their work was not published until 1979. Some believe that potato output in the Mao era was half what it might have been had the cause of the problem been correctly identified.
Lysenkoism reached its apogee in the Great Leap Forward when in 1958 Mao personally drew up an eight-point Lysenkoist blueprint for all Chinese agriculture. Every farmer in every commune in the country had to follow it. The eight elements of this ‘constitution’, as it was called, were:
1. The popularization of new breeds and seeds
2. Close planting
3. Deep ploughing
4. Increased fertilization
5. The innovation of farm tools
6. Improved field management
7. Pest control
8. Increased irrigation
The Popularization of New Breeds and Seeds
All over the country in 1958 people began to announce remarkable achievements like those of China’s Michurin, Shi Yiqian. In Guangzhou, children and teachers crossed a pumpkin with a papaya, and runner beans with soybeans. In Henan, they produced sunflowers crossed with artichokes. In Beijing, scientists crossed tomatoes with aubergines, corn with rice, and sorghum with rice. One of the most glorious claims was a cross between a cotton plant and a tomato – the result red cotton!18
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Page 8
