Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  The Tibetans have traditionally lived scattered across an enormous region that spills over the borders of present-day China, farming the valleys between the highest mountains of the world and roaming with their herds across a vast and desolate plateau. After the eleventh century, their conversion to Tantric Buddhism, imported from India, turned a warlike people into the most intensely religious society on earth. The focus of religious and economic life became the large monasteries subject to the rule of reincarnated lamas. This theocracy was little changed by the Mongols or Manchus who occupied China. When the British invaded Tibet in 1905, they found a medieval society cut off from the outside world. The Nationalists failed in their turn to impose their rule over Lhasa and the Tibetans lapsed into a self-imposed isolation that was only shattered by the invasion of the People’s Liberation Army in 1950-1.

  The Chinese Communists created an autonomous region in central Tibet and divided the rest of the Tibetans among different provinces. The majority now lived within the newly drawn borders of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. There they were subject to the same policies, the ‘democratic reforms’, which were applied all over China. The monasteries were dismantled, the land and livestock they controlled were given to the poor peasants, individuals were labelled according to their class and, after the initial stages of mutual-aid teams and co-operatives, communes were set up. Under the terms of a seventeen-point agreement that the Dalai Lama signed with Beijing in 1951, inner Tibet (which in 1965 would formally become the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR) was, temporarily, excused from introducing these democratic reforms. No such concessions were made to the rest of the Tibetans who rose in revolt, some as early as 1952. When collectives and higher collectives were established in the mid-1950s, resistance turned into large-scale bloodshed, especially among the Tibetans in Sichuan who are known as Khampas. Many retreated to Lhasa from where, in 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced to flee amid fierce fighting. The rebellion was put down with great brutality and up to 100,000 Tibetans fled to India where the Dalai Lama had sought sanctuary. For those who remained behind, the effects of the Great Leap Forward brought fresh hardships.

  Although the collectivization which sparked off the rebellion was a nationwide policy, many Tibetans are still convinced that the ensuing famine was a deliberate attempt to punish them further for their revolt. The majority of Tibetans had the misfortune to live in those provinces – Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu – which were devastated by some of the most brutal and fanatical leaders in the whole country. Here, Han Chinese and Tibetans suffered alike from the famine. In the Dalai Lama’s birthplace in Ping An county, as many Chinese as Tibetans died of hunger. Even Chinese who were resettled in Qinghai died. Out of 5,000 Henanese dispatched in 1959 to Tongren county in Qinghai, only 2,000 were left when the group was sent home two years later, the majority having starved to death.2 Yet many Tibetans still feel they were subject to a far harsher fate than the Chinese. First, they were the victims of policies imposed on them by alien conquerors. Second, the wholesale destruction of their monasteries and the arrest of their lamas which took place in the 1950s and not, as is generally believed, during the Cultural Revolution, were viewed as a deliberate attempt to erase the basis of Tibet’s civilization. And finally, the Tibetans were peculiarly vulnerable to the destructive consequences of Maoist agricultural policies.

  Tibetans were either nomadic herdsmen or farmers dependent on barley. In the Great Leap Forward, the Party forcibly settled the nomads and this, as in Kazakhstan under Stalin, led to the death of most of their animals. In some places, Tibetan peasant farmers, who knew only how to eat barley, which they roast over a fire and grind into a paste called tsampa, were now forced to grow unfamiliar and unsuitable grains. Much like the peasants in Ireland, who could not make bread from the wheat imported after the potato crop failed, the Tibetans, especially the nomads, had no idea how to eat wheat or maize. And, while many Chinese peasants knew from experience how to endure famine, this was a hardship virtually unknown among the Tibetans. Many said they would have died had Han Chinese immigrants not taught them to eat leaves or wild grasses.

  The Khampas of eastern Tibet, now part of Sichuan province, grew barley and reared livestock, taking their animals in the summer to graze on high mountain pastures.3 Like the Sichuanese peasants, in the 1950s the Khampas were coerced into joining mutual-aid teams, then higher co-operatives and finally communes. Their large monasteries became centres of resistance and when they were bombed, armed Khampas took to the hills to wage a guerrilla war. Those who stayed behind were forced into communes which were relatively small, with little more than a thousand members. Life was as harsh as elsewhere. Members had to hand over their entire possessions, including their spare clothes and quilts. Metal articles, including the large amounts of jewellery which Khampa women traditionally wear, were all melted down to make ‘steel’. Even in these distant mountains, steel furnaces were erected and, for the first time, Khampa women were made to plough the land. The new agricultural policies made no allowances for the high altitude and local conditions. So wheat was grown instead of barley and sometimes two or three crops were planted in a year, quickly exhausting the soil. The entire population was mobilized in winter, which is very severe in this region, to labour outdoors building unnecessary irrigation canals and digging redundant wells. The Khampas were also forced to eat in collective kitchens and these were retained until 1964, far longer than in other parts of China. One interviewee gave this description of her life in the Huo Shi Tang commune at the foot of the 22,000-foot-high Gongga mountains during this period.

  The worst years were from 1961 to 1963. Every day five or six people would be found dead in the morning. The bodies of the children and old people were always swollen with hunger. Since most men had been arrested, about 60 per cent of the adult population were women. We would collect grasses from the fields, boil them and force this mixture down our throats. If you didn’t, then you would die. Although we were dizzy and faint, we still had to keep working and then we would try and pick up grain or grass to eat. But you had to keep an eye out for the guards. If they caught you, then they would grab you by the throat and choke you to make you spit out the grass seeds. They would body-search all of us when we returned from working in the fields. There were also special teams which searched people’s homes for grain, digging up the floors, breaking open walls and looking through the fodder for the horses. The searches went on all through the famine. If they discovered any food, even a few grains, then they would organize a big meeting of 500 or 600 people. The guilty person would have a big wooden sign hung on him and then he would be paraded round, beaten and spat on. Some people were beaten to death in these struggle sessions. Anyone accused of damaging the fields or tools was also beaten. The former landlords were beaten the worst and sent to work more often. Even if they were dying, they still had to work.

  An eyewitness from another commune in the same region described much the same situation: ‘The famine lasted from 1962 until 1965. My brothers went around picking up whatever food they could find. Sometimes they found bones, which might have been human, and ground them into a kind of paste, adding barley husks. We did not have tsampa but we ate this instead. We had to work very hard and were very hungry. Many people died at this time.’

  As elsewhere in China, the authorities began seizing grain from the Khampas in early 1959. Those caught hoarding grain were sentenced to long prison terms as ‘rightists’. In prison, the majority starved to death. The inmates of one prison were fed a ration of just 11 lbs of grain a month.4 Out of 300 inmates, 160 died. In another prison at Barkham, half of the 1,000 inmates perished.5

  Another part of Sichuan, the Aba prefecture, had been detached from Qinghai after 1949. Here, the ‘democratic reforms’ started later and the monasteries were closed only in 1958. The worst year of famine was 1961. One monk recalled in an interview what it was like there:

  Everyone opposed what the Han cadres did, so there was a reb
ellion. Two-thirds of the men were arrested and were sent to labour camps, mostly at Guanxian near Chengdu. About 70 per cent died of hunger because they were fed only three ounces of food a day. A few returned in 1964 and others in 1977. Those who remained at home had to work from early in the morning until night. People were frightened to talk to each other, in case they were called counter-revolutionaries and beaten. Many people were beaten. No one could leave the commune. There was enough food but it was taken away by the Chinese. A few of us fled to the mountains and lived there for years.

  Ironically, this remote region of grasslands is where Mao and the Red Army would have perished on the Long March but for the food provided by the local Tibetans. ‘Some day we must pay the Mantsu [another tribe] and the Tibetans for the provisions we were obliged to take from them,’ Mao later told the American journalist Edgar Snow. According to Rewi Alley and Wilfred Burchett, two Maoists who worked in China after 1949, the formation of the communes in minority areas ‘was one way of repaying the debt’.6

  For all the Tibetans in Sichuan, the famine lasted longer than among the Chinese because the reforms that followed the famine were delayed until 1965 when one yak and a small plot of land were distributed to households of three to five people. The overall death toll among the Khampas is thought to have been very high. One source said that in the Kanding district, out of one million inhabitants which included Han Chinese, 400,000 died. Another source estimated that a fifth of the Tibetans in Sichuan perished, largely from hunger.

  The first Tibetans to rebel were the nomads in the region known by the Tibetans as Amdo. Most of Amdo lies in Qinghai province but a part, Gannan, is in Gansu and another, Aba, is in Sichuan. Among the nomads of Qinghai, the fiercest and most independent are known as the Goloks, or ‘heads turned backwards’, because they ignore even the authority of Lhasa. They began fighting as early as 1952 but their rebellion was eventually put down by the People’s Liberation Army who used planes to hunt them down. In many cases neither the pilots nor the troops on the ground could distinguish between a group of nomads on the move and a band of guerrilla fighters. They were also ignorant of Tibetan customs and mistook anyone carrying a knife or a sword, as Tibetans customarily do, for a dangerous rebel. And the women who carried infants inside their voluminous sheepskin coats were sometimes killed because soldiers suspected them of concealing weapons. In 1956, there were 140,000 Goloks, but by the 1964 census, their numbers had dropped to 70,000.7 The Golok warriors escaped on horseback to the mountains or to India but the women and children remained and were forcibly settled into communes. In 1958, the tribe was brought together to live in a city of tents in Qinghai laid out in straight rows and traversed by streets named ‘Liberation Road’ or ‘Beijing Road’. Instead of roaming in small groups over the thin pasture, which grows on a bleak plateau 12,000 feet above sea level, the herds of each family, usually numbering around a hundred yaks, were concentrated in one spot. There was no forage prepared and what pasture there was was soon eaten bare. Before long the animals were starving. Normally, nomads slaughter animals in the autumn when they are fat to provide food for the winter. Now no animals could be killed without the express permission of the provincial authorities, hundreds of miles away, who made no allowance for the customs of the herdsmen. By early 1959, the animals had either died of starvation or were so thin that their emaciated bodies could provide little sustenance.

  For the first time, the nomads also had to learn how to till the region’s stony soil. All over Amdo, efforts to plough the thin soil of the plateau failed, leaving a legacy of long-term environmental degradation. Overgrazing and deep ploughing destroyed the thin layer of top soil and exposed the barren black rock beneath. The ground was often so hard that the Tibetans had to use picks to break up the soil. Even so, they had to ‘deep plough’ to a depth of three feet and to ‘close plant’. The harvest of the autumn of 1959 failed, even in the arable regions where wheat and other crops unsuited to the short growing season were sown. On good farming land, yields fell by half. Without draught animals, women often had to pull the ploughs themselves. In the winter, when temperatures fall to minus 30° Centigrade or lower, they were turned out to dig irrigation canals. The poor harvests were reported as enormous successes. One interviewee, from a place called Xiahe, recalled how it happened:

  Grain production per mu was 250 gyama [330 lbs] but the Chinese officials reported that it was 1,000 gyama [1,320 lbs]. According to the Chinese, if in the past you could travel a few miles a day, now you could travel 300 miles a day. So likewise with the harvest: if you worked hard, it could be increased. If the leader of a particular hamlet gave a true figure, then, in another, they would give one 60 times or 600 times higher and the Chinese would say ‘Why can’t you produce this much?’ And then he would be struggled. So everybody told lies. At first an individual got eighteen ounces of food a day, but later, there was so little grain in the store that they reduced it to nine ounces. With this you cannot make steam buns, so they made a soup, a kind of gruel. Later, when they closed the collective kitchens, it was better. When people cooked their own food, they could supplement their diet with mushrooms, sweet potatoes and things gathered from the mountains and forests.

  Interviewees from Amdo also reported the endless house searches for grain, the seizure of all personal property and the smelting of all metal objects to make ‘steel’. Some also recalled eating food substitutes, known as daishipin. In winter people ate stalks, husks and cobs, and even boiled their boots and other articles made of leather. Several interviewees recalled incidents of cannibalism but these were generally among the Han Chinese. The death rate was extremely high in Amdo. One interviewee said that out of 906 inhabitants of his village in Tongren county, 20 fled and 267 died of hunger. A further 67 men were sent to the Delingha labour camp in Qinghai province, and only 24 ever returned. In all, one in three villagers died. The interviewee said that out of eight members in his house, four starved to death and two fled to India. Three uncles were also beaten to death in struggle sessions. Another interviewee from the same county said that in 1958 his village consisted of 35 households with 210 people. By 1964, only 127 people were left. Most of the men had been arrested and never returned.

  Adult males died in the greatest numbers. Many were arrested simply because they were lamas. Generally a quarter of the male population were reckoned to be monks, although this includes those who were labourers attached to the monasteries which controlled much of the land and livestock. Amdo is famous as a religious centre of the dominant Gelugpa, or Yellow Hat, sect because its founder, Tsongkapa, as well as the current Dalai Lama and the tenth Panchen Lama, were all born there. The demolition of nearly all the region’s monasteries provoked widespread unrest. In several incidents, the People’s Liberation Army machine-gunned crowds of Tibetans attempting to free lamas under arrest. In 1958, 2,000 rioting Tibetans were gunned down in such circumstances in Wendu county.8 Almost every family contained one member who, as either a lama or a rebel, was classified as a ‘black element’. This had terrible consequences for the rest of the population. Virtually everyone could be labelled as a ‘rightist’ because they had someone in their immediate family who had been killed as a rebel, arrested as a lama, or classified as a landlord for belonging to the local aristocracy. Some sources claim that during this period, one in seven Tibetans were penalized as ‘rightists’, compared to a national average of one in twenty.9 Worse still, those arrested were sent to labour camps in Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan which had the lowest survival rates in the country. Few ever returned. For example, out of 400 monks arrested from a monastery in Gannan county, Gansu, only 100 survived.10 Many eyewitnesses testified that the death rate for Tibetan prisoners ranged from 40 to 90 per cent.11

  It was against this background that the tenth Panchen Lama drafted a 90,000-word report for Mao. Apart from Peng Dehuai, he is the only prominent leader known to have dared to do so during the famine.

  In 1961, the Panchen Lama toure
d many counties in Amdo and was shocked by what he discovered. He went to his birthplace, Xunhua, as well as to Gonghe (also known as Hainan, where in 1958 the rebellion in Amdo began), Tongren, Guide, Haibei, Haixi and the labour camps at Gangca, to the north of Lake Koko Nor. At each place he asked how many had been shot, starved or beaten to death. According to another source, who refers to the report, the Panchen Lama concluded that up to 15 per cent of the population had been imprisoned, 800 to 1,000 from each town or village, and that in prison nearly half of these had died.12

  At the Spring Festival in 1962, he returned to Qinghai, to a place near the Gangca labour camps. There he flew into a rage, angrily rounding on officials who had prepared a field for feasting, dancing and other New Year festivities. Had they no feelings, he asked, to dance on a spot beneath which the bodies of thousands of men, who had been starved or beaten to death, had recently been buried?

  Chinese propaganda insists that after 1949 the Panchen Lama co-operated and supported the Chinese Communists, while the Dalai Lama turned traitor by fleeing the country in 1959. It is true that the Panchen Lama gave credence to Chinese propaganda reports that in Tibet a ‘new socialist paradise on the roof of the world’ had been created. In a report to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in December 1960, he declared that ‘a wonderful situation prevails in Tibet today. Prosperous scenes of labour and production are to be found in every corner of the vast countryside and the towns. This is the main trend of our work today.’ Yet what he saw on his journeys shook him deeply and he determined to write a hard-hitting report to Mao. Many of the various Tibetan advisers who surrounded him tried to dissuade him, but without success. They included Rinpoche Enju, his teacher and Abbot of the Tashilhunpo monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lamas. The latter had consulted oracles which predicted disaster but he also tried to put forward rational arguments to sway his pupil: ‘If they [the Party leadership] had wanted to solve the problem, they would have done so earlier. If they do not want to solve the problem, then it will do no good just to send letters of opinion, because they will pay no attention. I worry that handing in this letter will not only not help the Tibetans, but will bring trouble to you. Now that the Dalai Lama has gone, everyone depends on you. ‘13 Another of his advisers, the Abbot of Sera monastery and a Deputy Governor of Qinghai, Geshe Sherab Gyatso, urged the Panchen Lama to tone down the report and to ‘make his words smoother’.