Party records list still more grotesque methods of instilling fear and terror. The Party Secretary of Qisi commune in Gushi county, Jiang Xue Zhong, is said to have invented a method of boiling human flesh to turn it into fertilizer and was rumoured to have boiled more than a hundred children. Subsequent investigations revealed that he had boiled at least twenty corpses. Equally harsh punishments were meted out to those working in labour gangs on various huge reservoir and irrigation projects within the prefecture. According to figures for Gushi county, of the 60,000 workers sent to work on one dam project, 10,700 perished from exhaustion, hunger, cold or beatings.
There was almost nothing the peasants could do to save themselves in the face of this terror. When the collective canteens ran out of grain, some began slaughtering the remaining livestock. Retribution was savage after Lu Xianwen denounced this as ‘sabotage of production’ and demanded the punishment of offenders. Cadres in Xiangyang Dian commune in Pingyu county ordered the culprits to be dressed in mourning. Some had their noses pierced and wire pulled through the nostrils. They were then forced to pull a plough in the field like an ox. Others were stripped naked and beaten, and an oxhide still covered in fresh blood was tied around them. When the hide dried, it was torn off, ripping the victim’s skin with it. An 18-year-old student, Wang Guoxi, was similarly treated when he was accused of stealing a sheep belonging to the Party Secretary of the Zhaoluo production brigade in Fan Hu commune, Xixian county. Strung up in the sheepskin, he was dragged from village to village for three days without food. When it was pulled off, the sheepskin, which by then had shrunk, took off much of his own skin as well and he subsequently died. An official account comments that
Various kinds of counter-revolutionary atrocities of unparalleled savagery took place in almost all counties and communes and, according to the records, they took place not only in rural areas but in cities, factories, government units, schools, shops and hospitals. Eight headmasters of Guangshan county’s 12 middle schools committed murder and it has been discovered that 28 teachers and students were beaten to death or forced to commit suicide in two middle schools.10
Even when, at the start of winter, it was clear that the peasants had nothing to eat but tree bark, wild grass seeds and wild vegetables, Lu Xianwen declared that this was merely ‘a ruse of rich peasants’ and ordered the search for grain to be redoubled. Party cadres were also incited to smash the cooking pots in every household to prevent them from being used at home to cook grass soup.
Some tried to flee but Lu ordered the arrest of such ‘criminals’ after seeing children begging by the roadside. Militiamen were instructed to guard every road and railway and to arrest any travellers, even those staying in hostels. All government organizations were given strict orders not to provide refuge to the fleeing peasants.11 In Gushi county, the militia arrested at least 15,000 people who were then sent to labour camps. In Huang Chuan county, the head of the Public Security Bureau allowed 200 to starve to death in prison and then dispatched the 4 tonnes of grain he had thereby saved to the Party authorities.
The most extraordinary aspect of these events is that throughout the famine the state granaries in the prefecture were full of grain which the peasants said was sufficient to keep everyone alive. Several sources have stated that even at the height of the famine, the Party leadership ate well. By the beginning of 1960, with nothing left to eat and no longer able to flee, the peasants began to die in huge numbers. In the early stages of the famine, most of those who died were old people or men forced to do hard labour on inadequate rations. Now, it was women and children. Whole villages starved to death. In Xixian county alone, 639 villages were left deserted and 100,000 starved to death. A similar number died in Xincai county.12 Corpses littered the fields and roads as the peasants collapsed from starvation. Few of the bodies were buried. Many simply lay down at home and died.
That winter, cannibalism became widespread. Generally, the villagers ate the flesh of corpses, especially those of children. In rare cases, parents ate their own children, elder brothers ate younger brothers, elder sisters ate their younger sisters. In most cases, cannibalism was not punished by the Public Security Bureaux because it was not considered as severe a crime as destroying state property and the means of production. This latter crime often merited the death sentence. Travelling around the region over thirty years later, every peasant that I met aged over 50 said he personally knew of a case of cannibalism in his production team. One man pointed to a nearby cluster of huts and said he recalled entering a neighbour’s house to find him eating the leg of a 5-year-old child of a relative who had died of starvation. The authorities came to hear of what he had done but although he was criticized, he was never put on trial. Generally, though, cannibalism was a secret, furtive event. Women would usually go out at night and cut flesh off the bodies, which lay under a thin layer of soil, and this would then be eaten in secrecy. Sometimes, though, the authorities did intervene. In one commune, a 15-year-old girl who survived by boiling her younger brother’s corpse and eating it was caught. The Public Security Bureau charged her with ‘destroying a corpse’ and put her in prison where she subsequently starved to death. In Gushi county, in 1960, the authorities listed 200 cases of corpses being eaten and charged those arrested with the crime of ‘destroying corpses’.13
Among the peasants little blame or stigma was apparently attached to breaking such taboos. Bai Hua, one of China’s most famous contemporary writers, recalls that while living in another part of China, he heard the following story from a workmate who returned from a visit to Xinyang.14 There, the man had discovered that all his relatives bar one had starved to death. This was his aunt who had managed to survive through chance because a pig had run into her hut one night. She quickly closed the door, killed it and buried it under the ground. She did not dare share the pork with anyone, not even her 5-year-old son, for she was convinced that if she did so, her son would blurt out the news to the other villagers. Then she feared that the authorities would seize the meat, beat her to death and leave her son to die anyway. So she let him starve to death. Neither Bai Hua nor his workmate condemned the aunt for her actions.
Deaths were kept secret for as long as possible. What food there was was distributed by the collective kitchen and generally one family member would be sent to collect the rations on behalf of the whole household. As long as the death of a family member was kept secret, the rest of the household could benefit from an extra ration. So the corpse would be kept in the hut. In Guangshan county, one woman with three children was caught after she had hidden the corpse of one of them behind the door and then finally, in desperation, had begun to eat it.15
The Xinyang prefectural leadership did everything it could to hide what was going on from the world outside. The Party ensured that all mail and telephone calls were monitored and censored. No one could leave the region without written permission from the Party leaders who even posted cadres at the railway station in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital. They were accompanied by guards who searched and usually arrested anyone getting off a train from Xinyang. While in other parts of China the authorities issued starving peasants with ‘begging certificates’ which allowed them to try their luck elsewhere, this was strictly forbidden in Xinyang.16
The provincial authorities in Zhengzhou did send inspection teams to Xinyang but they were prevented from gathering information. In one instance, the inspection team was simply not allowed to get off the train. Even when, in the autumn of 1959, the provincial authorities offered to send grain to relieve the shortages caused by the drought, it was refused. Some grain was delivered but it was returned by the Xinyang leadership who continued to insist that they were enjoying a bumper harvest. In the atmosphere of terror, no cadre at any level dared admit the truth: Liang Dezhen, the First Secretary of Huang Chuan county, turned back relief grain because he suspected that it was a ruse to trap him into making a political mistake, and one production brigade in the county that did take the grain
sent it back as the fruits of its ‘anti-hiding-grain production’ work.17
Much of the blame for what happened in Xinyang must rest with Wu Zhifu, the head of the Henan Party organization. A short, tubby man, the son of local peasants, Wu had joined the Party early on and became a student of Mao’s at the Peasant Movement Training Institute in the mid-1920s. After the Communists had driven the Nationalists south of the Yangtze in 1948, he rose to be a senior member of the Party in Henan. As such, he was responsible for carrying out land reform in the province, which was marked by exceptional violence. Not only were landlords stripped of all their possessions, but so were rich peasants and large numbers of so-called middle peasants. According to one account, the peasants ‘carried off and divided everything that could be moved. Beatings and killings were widespread and not all victims were landlords.’18 Indeed, the violence was so great that the Party was obliged to halt the process. Partly as a result, the post of First Secretary went not to Wu but to a more moderate figure called Pan Fusheng. Over the next few years, the Henan leadership was split between radical leftists loyal to Mao, who wanted to press ahead with collectivization as fast as possible, and moderates under Pan. The Maoists began to drive the peasants harder and harder, forcing them into ever larger co-operatives and pressurizing them to promise to deliver ever larger quotas of grain to the state. Such men were singled out for praise by Mao in July 1955 when he compiled his book The High Tide of Socialism in the Chinese Countryside. Henan suffered from famine in 1956 and Pan responded by splitting the co-operatives into smaller units and allowing peasants to leave if they wished. He criticized the collectivization, saying, ‘The peasants are the same as beasts of burden, yellow oxen are tied up in the stall and human beings are harnessed in the fields. Girls and women pull ploughs and harrows with their wombs hanging down. Co-operation is transformed into the exploitation of human strength.’19 In the 1957 Anti-Rightist purge, Pan was accused of following in the footsteps of Bukharin – the Soviet leader shot for opposing Stalin’s rush into collectivization – and dismissed.20 In his place Mao appointed Wu Zhifu, who turned Henan into the pace-setter for Maoist agriculture. As a result, many provinces adopted the slogan: ‘Learn from Henan, catch up with Henan, press ahead consistently and win first position.’
Chen Boda, who spent much time in Henan, made Wu his protégé and asked him to write articles about his successes in Red Flag, the ideological journal which Chen edited. Henan was rewarded for its loyalty by being chosen as the site for both the country’s first tractor factory and a giant hydro-electric scheme on the Yellow River.
Mao toured the new model communes in Henan several times in 1958, admiring their agricultural miracles and the speed with which some communes had apparently reached the final stage of Communism. In his wake, thousands of officials from around the country came to study the Henan model. Among the innovations launched in Chayashan was a technique called ‘launching a sputnik’. Unlike the Soviet Union’s satellite, this sputnik required no technology or science, just peasants pushed into working for twenty-four hours at a stretch to achieve extraordinary feats of industry. The American journalist Anna Louise Strong claimed that in one such twenty-four-hour sputnik, peasants produced a staggering 1.2 million tonnes of iron, more than the United States poured in a whole month. By launching sputniks, Wu promised to make Henan the first province to achieve full literacy, complete irrigation and full Communization. He also claimed that the Chayashan commune’s sputniks were lifting grain yields to astronomical levels. Yields allegedly shot from an average of around 330 lbs per 0.17 acres to 3,300 lbs and sometimes even 11,000 lbs. After Mao visited these fields, he told a top-level meeting in Zhengzhou that such yields could now be reached by everyone. It was of course all lies, for everything Mao saw was a staged pantomime. Before each visit, local officials prepared fields for Mao to inspect by digging out shoots of wheat and replanting them all in one experimental field. When Mao arrived they put three children on top of the grain to show that the wheat was growing so closely together that it could support their weight. When he left, they put the grain back in the original fields. The same trick was used to demonstrate how successfully agriculture was being mechanized. At each commune Mao visited, he was delighted to see electric irrigation pumps watering the fields, but they were always the same pumps, which had been taken from the last commune and which were then installed in the next while he slept.21
Trapped by their own lies, local officials then had to order the peasants to try to reach exceptional grain yield targets using methods such as deep ploughing and close planting. Some peasants genuinely believed that close planting would work if it was done with great accuracy. They cut up endless copies of the People’s Daily and on the pages spread out over the fields they marked out exactly where individual seeds should be placed. Experience dictated a limit of 12 lbs of seed per mu (0.17 acres), but now they tried to plant 88-132 lbs per mu. In some places, layer upon layer of seeds were forcibly pressed into the ground. Naturally, the seeds suffocated each other and the fields remained barren. No one dared openly admit that Mao’s ideas did not work, so they literally covered up the emperor’s nakedness with their coats. They went to their huts and took out their cotton coats and bedding, and added seeds and water. In this way the seeds quickly sprouted. When the new seedlings were high enough, the mattresses and coats were buried under soil.22
In Henan, everything was taken to extremes. When the nation was ordered to exterminate the four pests and clean up their villages and latrines, the peasants in Xinyang set a new standard in this orgy of cleanliness by brushing the teeth of their oxen and sheep. Henan’s irrigation projects were the grandest and most ambitious in China and work on them went on around the clock. In the fields, too, peasants worked at night by electric light; when that was not available, they used oil lamps and candles.
Henan’s enthusiasm for the Great Leap Forward made Zhengzhou a favourite venue for a number of key top-level meetings in 1958. That year Wu reported that the Henan grain harvest was 35 million tonnes of grain, triple the real total of 12.5 million tonnes.23 To Mao this was a vindication of his policies and substantiated what he thought he had himself seen in Henan. In internal Party circulars, he described those who doubted him as ‘tide-watchers’, ‘bean-counters’ and ‘right opportunists’. After the Lushan summit, Mao was equally pleased when at a meeting in November 1959, again in Zhengzhou, Wu Zhifu told him that Henan’s agriculture was doing even better. Wu had returned from Lushan and had immediately organized a huge conference with cadres from the village level upwards. They were ordered to spare no effort to hunt down ‘right opportunists’. Wu made a list of those who should be attacked. He said rightists included those who talked about the limitations of nature and predicted disaster, and divided them into five categories – among them the ‘push-pull faction’, the ‘wait-and-see faction’, the ‘shaking-heads-in-front-of-the-furnace faction’ and the ‘stretching-out-hands faction’.24 These categories were so vague and so open to interpretation that anyone could be persecuted depending on the whim of their superiors. Fear and panic swept the province.
Wu Zhifu set a new and equally unrealistic grain target of 22 million tonnes for 1959. Though lower than the 1958 target of 35 million tonnes, because parts of Henan were stricken by drought, it was more than double what was actually harvested in 1959, estimated at 10.3 million tonnes of grain.25 At the same time, Wu reduced the acreage sown to grain by 14 per cent in line with Williams’ theories. In early 1960, he raised production targets still higher and commissioned more irrigation projects, reporting to Beijing that Henan’s grain output that year was again very high and joining in the chorus of Maoist loyalists who were urging another ‘Great Leap Forward’.
The blame for these acts of criminal folly cannot entirely be laid on Wu’s shoulders, or on those of Xinyang’s Lu Xianwen. The fanaticism with which they pursued these goals derived in part from Henan’s past which had created a fertile ground for Utopian fantasies.
In a region notorious for its famines, the peasants were psychologically receptive to millenarian movements. Dynasties had come and gone, but their way of life had changed little. Most lived in the same kind of crude huts made of mud and straw as had their forefathers 2,000 years before, and across the same fields the patient ox pulled a wooden plough just as its ancestors had done. By the twentieth century, Henan was a backward and impoverished region known as the ‘land of beggars’. The exhausted soil could not feed the growing population and many periodically fled elsewhere. Among those who stayed, many turned to secret societies and religious sects – it is no coincidence that in the first half of the twentieth century American missionaries built hospitals and churches in great numbers in the province. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, disaster after disaster struck Henan. In April 1938, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek breached the dykes of the Yellow River to halt the Japanese army’s southward advance. Some claim that as a result between 1 and 3.9 million peasants drowned or starved and another 11 million were left homeless. Nonetheless, war continued to rack the region. In the plains the Nationalists and Japanese armies fought. In the Dabie mountains in the south of Henan, the Communist Red Army established a base and each army fought viciously for control of the peasantry. In 1943 Henan was the epicentre of what was then considered the worst famine in Chinese history when between 3 and 5 million died. This was the famine which the American journalist Theodore White witnessed and which he appealed, successfully, to Chiang Kai-shek to stop. It convinced him that the peasants were right to go over to the Communists after the Japanese defeat: ‘I know how cruel the Chinese Communists can be: but no cruelty was greater than the Henan famine, and if the Communist idea promised government of any kind, then the ideas of mercy and liberty with which I had grown up were irrelevant.’ In the light of what subsequently occurred in Henan under Mao, his comment has a terrible irony. The famines did not end with Japan’s defeat in 1945. The following year another famine, witnessed by the Daily Telegraph correspondent John Ridley, carried off a further 5 million people in Henan.
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Page 14
