Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  However, most of those arrested were not intellectuals but rather, as Harry Wu points out, ‘peasants driven to drastic acts or rebellion by hunger and dissatisfaction with living conditions’. The severity of these peasants’ punishments was linked to their class status:

  Suppose someone steals twenty pecks of corn from a commune. If this person is from a landlord family, it is possible his sentence could be as high as ten years, the rationale being ‘his act should be considered a counter-attack by the landlord class, a hostile and destructive counter-revolutionary act against socialist public property’. If this person is from a poor or middle-class peasant background, or from the family of a Party cadre, it is possible that no disciplinary action would be taken.

  Most of the peasants, however, were not transported to distant labour reform camps. During the Great Leap Forward, the Party created another form of imprisonment called ‘re-education through labour’. This was not organized by the Ministry of Public Security but by provincial, municipal and county-level authorities. Wu writes that from 1958, such makeshift re-education-through-labour camps were set up at every level down to that of the local village commune. The inmates were not subject to any judicial procedure and were not imprisoned for a fixed term but conditions were otherwise usually identical to those in the labour camps. Arrests under the ‘re-education through labour’ system began in 1957, when perhaps 550,000 counter-revolutionary rightists and another 400,000 rightist sympathizers were dispatched to the camps. The system became fully effective the following year and, according to Wu, was ‘undoubtedly one of the most important methods the Communist regime employed to weather the storm’. Inevitably, there are no comprehensive records of the fate of these re-education-through-labour prisoners but a Party document from Fengyang, Anhui, gives some idea of their circumstances:

  Peasants were forced to work extra hours at the construction site of the hydro-electric power station. The cadres, including the county Party Secretary and deputy magistrate, treated the peasants harshly. If the peasants did not work, they were not given food. Some sick peasants were sent back home and died on the way... In the construction site of the reservoir, a prison was set up where 70 peasants were imprisoned of whom 28 died. There were many methods of torture, including being forced to stand, being tied up by ropes, or suspended by ropes. One of the worst methods was to thread iron wire through people’s ears.4

  Since there are so few other accounts of ‘re-education through labour’ from the rest of China, one cannot be certain how representative this example is. Much more, though, is known about life in the labour reform camps. Many of these camps were established in remote and uninhabited regions in Heilongjiang, Gansu and Qinghai, and a handful of surviving inmates who later emigrated have written about their horrifying experiences there. The death rate in these camps was staggeringly high, ranging from an average rate of 20 per cent to places in which only one in ten survived. The painter Gao Ertai was arrested as a rightist in 1957 and found himself in such a camp with 3,000 others at the Jiabiangou state farm near Jiuquan in Gansu: ‘More than 90 per cent of us perished. For 15 hours a day, we dug a gully in a futile bid to render the wasteland fertile. We were given two bowls of thin gruel every day in addition to an insubstantial bun... Years later, when local peasants wanted to convert the site into a seed farm, they discovered hundreds upon hundreds of bodies.’5

  The highest death rate was probably experienced by the Tibetans imprisoned after the abortive revolt of 1959. One survivor, Ama Adhe, describes in A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands what happened at the Dartsedo camp bordering Sichuan. By the roadside the authorities opened a mass grave which was filled with corpses and gave off a terrible stench. ‘Every day,’ she recalls, ‘they would deliver nine or ten truck loads of bodies to put there. Some days less, some days more. Usually, eight, nine, ten trucks.’ Of the 300 women arrested with her, only 100 survived. The survivors were then made to walk to another prison, a gigantic lead mine, which was still worse. This camp, called Gothang Gyalpo, was filled with Tibetans and Kuomintang prisoners: ‘So many prisoners were working all over this huge lead mine, they looked like bugs, like ants going in every direction. There were thousands and thousands of them swarming over the mine. And, when I looked round, they were all Tibetan. And their physical condition was the same as at Dartsedo, starvation. Many were leaning on walking sticks, otherwise they would not be able to hold up their heads.’ Only 4 out of the 100 she arrived with survived this second camp. In 1962, a fellow prisoner overheard a new prison warder being told that in the last three years, 12,019 Tibetans had starved to death at the mine.

  John Avedon, in his book on the Tibetans, In Exile from the Land of Snows, quotes former prisoners who reported similar death rates in Gansu. One claimed that of the 70,000 Tibetans taken to camps north of the provincial capital, Lanzhou, only half survived. At Jiuzhen prison in the same province, more than half the 76 Tibetan prisoners died of starvation and at least half of the 1,000 Chinese inmates perished. At the Vebou camp complex, ten hours’ drive west of Xining, the capital of Qinghai, 14,000 of the 30,000 inmates died. In another camp at Shen Mu, half the 12,000 inmates died.6

  One interviewee from Shanghai told me that at the Mazong Shan coal-mine in Gansu province where he was sent, only 2,000 of the 5,000 Shanghainese he arrived with survived. Altogether there were 100,000 prisoners, half of them Tibetans, and at least 20 per cent died of hunger. Another interviewee estimated that one in five died at the Qi Ling state farm in Qinghai province where he worked with 4,000 others. Han Weitian, who was arrested in Shanghai as a former Kuomintang member and whose experiences are recorded by the Taiwanese-based writer Pu Ning in Red in Tooth and Claw, was sent to the Delingha labour camp complex in the same province. Han believes one-fifth of the 100,000 inmates died and that in all the camps in Qinghai 200,000 died.

  Such specific figures are not available for those sent either to camps in the far north or, nearer home, to places such as Qinghe in Hebei province. The accounts of former inmates are no less terrible, though. Jean Pasqualini, part French, part Chinese and the author of Prisoner of Mao, relates how since so many prisoners were dying, the guards took the weakest to a special camp known as Section 585 or the Patient Recovery Centre to improve the morale of the rest. Harry Wu was one of the few ever to return from Section 585. In his autobiography Bitter Winds, he remembers that ‘dead bodies went out and live bodies came in almost daily’. Chi Chunghuang, now a professor of English in America, was also there: ‘When people were dying in their hundreds, the bodies were carried from all over the state farm to one camp. They stacked all the corpses in three rooms and piled them up to the ceiling. Then, in the evening, convicts were ordered to take out the corpses and bury them.’7

  Peasants living outside the camps somehow became convinced that those inside had greater access to food. A former journalist from Shaanxi, sent to a state farm in the Qilian mountains on the border of Gansu and Qinghai, remembers how peasants even came to beg to be allowed to work in the camp, settling in caves outside and trying to steal the prisoners’ food.8 Dr Tensing Choedak, the Dalai Lama’s physician, has said that at his camp in Gansu he gave food to a starving village girl. Next day there was ‘a mass assault on the prison walls by scores of men and women from Jiuzhen camp demanding food. A full-scale mêlée ensued, until they were beaten back with rifle butts by the guards and then the townspeople retreated across the fields.’9 By contrast, the Chinese writer Zhang Xianliang, in his autobiographical work Grass Soup, writes that he escaped from his camp in Ningxia province only to discover that the villagers outside had less to wear and eat than the prisoners themselves.

  Before the famine, rations in the labour reform camps were not designed to starve the prisoners. In the autumn of 1958, prisoners in some camps even shared with the peasants the joy of being able to eat as much as they wanted. This happy state lasted for several months. Most Chinese prisoners are fed wotou, buns made of baked and steamed cor
n. When Jean Pasqualini first arrived in the camps, the minimum monthly grain ration was 31 lbs, but top workers could get 43 lbs. He was required to spend his days folding sheets of paper in his prison cell and the more he worked, the more he ate. The prisoners were classified into categories according to their work rate, and every few weeks their status and rations would be reassessed. The amount of food was determined not just by productivity but by a prisoner’s political attitude. Political prisoners almost never received the top rations.

  Dr Benjamin Lee, who now works in the United States but was then a prisoner in the Lake Xingkai camps in the far north, says that inmates there had a monthly ration of 83.7 lbs of cereals and over an ounce of soybean oil.10 This diet of 2.7 lbs a day provided over 4,000 calories but, after deducting food stolen or wasted, the ration in fact amounted to only 2.2 lbs, or 3,520 calories a day. This is the barest minimum needed to sustain life in the region’s harsh environment where in winter temperatures fall to minus 20° Centigrade and sometimes even lower. In this cold, prisoners dug canals for twelve to sixteen hours a day. A pair of prisoners would together have to carry loads of 330-440 lbs of muddy earth on shoulder poles, up and down steep and slippery banks, hundreds of times each day. This was devastating for intellectuals unused to the mildest form of physical labour.

  Generally, prisoners in the labour reform camps began to die in large numbers at the end of 1960, when grain rations were cut by half and adulterated with ‘food substitutes’. These daishipin consisted of wild grasses, the otherwise inedible byproducts of crops, such as corncobs, chaff and potato leaves, and the residue of pressed oil seeds, as well as innovations such as algae and seaweed. To make the food go further, the buns were also steamed twice, making them heavy with water. In some places, prison rations were cut a year earlier. Zhang Xianliang, imprisoned in Ningxia, writes that in the winter of 1959-60, the grain ration dropped from 22 lbs a month to 16.5 lbs, amounting to a couple of buns a day. Eventually, prisoners were getting a mere 9.9 lbs a month. Even this was not pure food, butunhusked grain. Injiuzhen camp in Gansu, the ration dropped still lower, first to 16.5 lbs a month and then to 8.5 lbs, or just 1.5 oz per meal.

  As food supplies dwindled in the winter of 1959-60, camp commandants, like commune leaders in the countryside, decreed that only those who worked would be fed. On the Qinghe state farm in Hebei, prisoners considered beyond work – the elderly, the weak and the sick – were brought to the special unit described above by Jean Pasqualini and left to die. The working hours of the rest were shortened so that they could preserve their energy for the vital sowing season in the spring. When spring came, prisoners who were sent out into the fields often died from the extreme demands made of them. Han Weitian recalls how in Qinghai he saw ‘healthy’ prisoners carrying bags of seed weighing 60 lbs and dropping down dead with exhaustion from the effort of running behind the sowing machine. In Hebei province, prisoners died in a similar fashion in the spring of 1962 when hundreds of the healthiest had to answer Mao’s call for an all-out effort on sowing.

  From early 1961, the labour reform camp authorities changed the rules and began to allow inmates’ relatives to send or deliver food parcels. Prisoners were even encouraged to write home and ask for food, and to go out scavenging. Much of what they gathered consisted of wild grasses, bark and tree leaves which ended up as soup. And in their struggle to survive, prisoners began to eat far worse things. They hunted living creatures: field-mice, rats, frogs, toads, snakes, lizards, cockroaches, the eggs of praying mantises and worms of all kinds. These things were caught, taken back to the camp and boiled. Some creatures, such as snakes, they ate raw. Others searched through horse and ox dung for worms and pieces of undigested grain which could be cleaned and eaten. Prisoners also ate the worms from their own stools and, at Delingha, searched through the excrement of other prisoners for undigested grains. This was because those prisoners who were former Party members were given the best jobs which allowed them to pilfer grain from the camp granary; the uncooked grain passed through them undigested. In some camps, prisoners were seen eating their own excrement. Inmates also searched the refuse of the guards for pieces of old cabbage, the rind of fruit, rotten meat and bones. Ama Adhe recalls how the guards would watch, laughing, as prisoners fought over used tea leaves that they had thrown on the ground.

  More appalling than any of this was cannibalism. Eyewitness reports of cannibalism appear in all accounts of prison life during this period. In one camp in Gansu, it was called ‘eating the crops of Jiuzhen’. A Tibetan who was in Jiuzhen, Tenpa Soepa, describes how he tried, but failed, to eat one of his companions: ‘I couldn’t even get a piece off the body. First of all, I was very weak, and the corpse was stiff and frozen. We didn’t have any knives. I tried to pull off an ear but couldn’t. You just had to put your mouth down and try to bite a piece off. But when I was about to bite, in my mind I felt this strong feeling. I felt I could not possibly eat this. I tried twice but in the end I was not able to eat anything.’11

  The most terrible story appears in Red in Tooth and Claw. In the Delingha camp, prisoners sent out to fetch water would dig up fresh corpses buried beneath a thin layer of sandy soil. They would then cut the flesh off the thighs, arms or breast to sell as meat from a horse or camel: the buyer, though suspecting the meat’s true origin, would not inquire too closely.

  There was also a lively trade in tobacco, clothes and food pilfered from the kitchens or caught in the fields. While some prisoners arrived in camps without winter clothing, or even bowls and eating implements, others, especially the city-dwellers, came with watches that were exchanged for food. A few traders had wads of money tied around their waists when they died. For the majority, the obsession with food was so all-encompassing that some hesitated to eat all their food at once. Psychologically, it was better to keep some food in reserve rather than endure the torture of watching others eat or live with the knowledge that there was nothing more left to eat. Professor Chi Chunghuang saw the most poignant example in Qinghe. He was lying in the infirmary next to a young college student from Sichuan who had oedema and was plainly close to death. His mother had sent him a box with cake inside but he would not eat it. Instead, he just opened the box and looked at it while his neighbours watched with envy. He died a few days later with the cake still uneaten. Professor Chi states: ‘One has to understand the psychology of hunger. Every evening we would sit on the kang for supper. No one would eat first because then they would finish first and have to watch the others eat. This was a great suffering. When hungry you hate to eat so fast because afterwards there is nothing left.’

  In some camps, prisoners sewed themselves little bags in which to keep food. They would then hang these around their necks just to keep this fear at bay. Perpetual hunger led to another obsession over the division of rations. This was difficult to do fairly. Prisoners did not have receptacles of equal size. Some got the watery food from the top of the pail, others the thicker gruel from the bottom. Certain types of food, such as a pile of cucumbers of different sizes, simply could not be divided into identical portions. In Dr Choedak’s camp, some prisoners had no bowls but only pieces of wood in which crude indentations had been carved. Others had tin cans or metal ashtrays which the guards had handed out.12 Zhang Xianliang in Grass Soup records:

  Among the 18 men there were eighteen different standards of measurement. Splitting up a pile of food was infinitely more difficult than writing a poem... Whether or not a man kept on living, or whether he was able to live one more day or two, appeared to depend on whether he was given two extra or two fewer grains of rice. One’s survival did not depend on the vitamins or protein in one or two grains of rice – but it did depend on the spiritual sustenance, the encouragement those grains gave a man. After every convict had received his portion, he would stir it around his basin for a long time, glancing at everybody else’s basins and comparing their amounts to his own.

  Suspicion and envy led to fights and thieving on all sides. Prisoners
stole from each other to find things to trade for food. The strong bullied the weak to get the best food. As the rations were cut, the prison camps became less and less controllable. Groups of prisoners began to attack the food being carted to other cells, or to grab the food of another before it was eaten. Harry Wu describes how he organized his squad to protect their supplies:

  I told my squad we would walk back from the kitchen together to protect each other’s food. Even then, our rations were at risk. Three men came after one of my squad members the next afternoon and two of them grabbed him while the other stole his wotou. They had organised to work together. Then other squads including mine began organising against the band of three. I went out with four of my squad members the following day. We found the three and gave them a beating.13

  In Delingha, Qinghai, conditions were still worse, as Han Weitian records in Red in Tooth and Claw.

  On our farm, many stronger fellows gathered there to rob the food senders. It is hard to believe that men on the brink of death could still be so energetic, but they struggled out of their beds, staggered up to the kitchen door, and lay in ambush waiting for the moment when the bamboo hampers of loaves were carried out of the kitchen. They were all prepared to steal. One day these starving plunderers snatched the loaves away, and afterwards many suspects were imprisoned in special cells, and kept constantly in close custody until they died. Strife was inevitable among these men. Three to five people died every day fighting one another for food at the kitchen door, or in the yard. They did not fight with clubs or fists, but merely pushed each other with their remaining strength. That push was often enough to knock down one’s opponent and deprive him of his life.