Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  As the conviction grew among the prisoners that they were all doomed to die in the camps, they grew fearless with desperation. Order began to collapse throughout the prison system and guards feared a mutiny. In August 1961, the Minister of Public Security, Luo Ruiqing, authorized all labour reform camps to ‘use strong management to prevent vicious and malignant incidents involving prisoner uprisings’.14

  Punishments became more brutal. In Ningxia, prisoners were tied to a carrying pole and suspended upside down, or bound to a tree to allow clouds of mosquitoes to feast on them. Another punishment was to tie a man’s hands together and let other convicts drag him along the ground.15 In Jiuzhen, Gansu, there were frequent executions. Dr Choedak remembers that ‘with hundreds dead, executions continued to be carried out. The charges were never specified. The names of those to be shot would simply appear on small posters periodically glued to the prison walls with such observations as “stubborn” or “suffers from old brains”.’16

  Yet at the height of the famine in Ningxia, the guards made no effort to stop the prisoners from escaping. The prison walls were only four feet high, but there was little point in escaping when there was even less to eat outside. In Bitter Winds Harry Wu writes that in Hebei’s Qinghe camp one prisoner who did escape found that even in Beijing there was nothing to eat so he walked up to a police kiosk, turned himself in and was sent back to the same prison.

  The brutal nature of the prison system may have encouraged prisoners to beat each other in struggle sessions, but this did not always prevent them from showing humanity towards one another. The Tibetans, in particular, reported how older prisoners would give younger ones their food if they thought that they themselves had no chance of surviving. Ama Adhe stole food and tossed it into the cells of starving lamas, and when a relative brought her food, she divided it up amongst her fellow prisoners. Yet, in general, such gestures were rare. The struggle to survive overrode all normal feelings. Prisoners noticed how the dehumanizing effect of hunger extended even towards their wives and children for whom they lost all concern. Spouses who travelled long distances to bring gifts of food, even though they had deprived themselves of their meagre rations to do so, inspired little gratitude. Some prisoners committed suicide when they became aware of the dehumanized state into which they had fallen.

  The behaviour of the guards in the labour reform camps is rarely described as intentionally cruel. It was merely that they did not care whether the prisoners lived or died. One exception is mentioned by Ama Adhe who remembers the well-fed guards of the Gothang Gyalpo lead mine taking a deliberate delight in mocking their prisoners:

  When prison staff saw the cook carrying the soup to the prisoners, they gathered together and followed along behind the cook to watch the scene for their amusement. When all the soup was served out, the empty pot would be placed in the centre of the prisoners. The prisoners would watch the pot and wait, and the guards and officials would stand around and watch with glee. Then, on a signal, the prisoners would go all out for the pot, desperately trying to get something out of it, sticking their hands in and licking their fingers. As the prisoners were so weak they would fall over and stumble and roll around, and the pot would be pushed and pulled in every direction and the prisoners would be fighting together for a chance to lick this empty pot. The Chinese officers would roar with laughter, it was a very funny show for them, and they would shout and laugh and encourage the prisoners to fight over the empty pot.17

  As long as Mao denied the existence of the famine, the guards had no choice but to continue working the prisoners to death. After all, since there was no famine, prisoners could not be dying of hunger. Once a prisoner failed to fulfil his work quota, he was given less food, or none at all. With less food it was harder to continue working and death almost inevitably followed. Dr Choedak saw guards kicking prisoners who were dying, cursing them for being ‘too lazy to work’. Tenpa Soepa recalls that ‘When a prisoner became ill or exhausted he would just lie under his blanket in the morning. Then the guards would drag him out to the fields, right out to his work place. But these prisoners couldn’t do any work, they couldn’t even stand up. They would just lie there in the field, and there they would die. Many died just like that, lying helpless in the fields.’

  Han Weitian reports that the same thing happened in Delingha: ‘Sometimes when a poor wretch fell dead on the ground, the “leaders” would go over and examine him to determine whether he had really ceased to breathe, but they wouldn’t allow death to provide an excuse for malingering.’

  The absolute insistence that there was no famine when all around were dying was not merely macabre, it was surreal. Zhang Xianliang recalls that it was a political crime to note how many were dying:

  People in our group began to die one after another. If you got up in the morning and discovered that the person beside you had died, the thing to do was make a report to the Group Leader in the following manner: ‘Group Leader, so-and-so has died.’ Whatever happened, you never wanted to say ‘Oh! Group Leader, another person has died!’ This subtle linguistic difference is something that people who were not in the camps in the 1960s cannot understand... You had to forget all about the man who had died beside you right away. Next time, when ‘another’ died, you had to think of him as the first. It was necessary to get accustomed to this method of accounting, for no matter how many died in the camps, they were all the only one who died.

  The prison authorities made every effort to carry on as if nothing was amiss. In Qinghe the camp loudspeakers continued to blare out waltzes and tunes such as ‘The asters are in bloom’ while the emaciated prisoners staggered across the bleak fields in search of food. Political indoctrination, with lectures, study sessions in the cells, the compilation of lengthy self-criticisms and even the occasional performance of an agitprop play, went on without respite. One interviewee remembers how in his camp throughout the famine the gaunt skeletons had to assemble each day and stand with heads bowed to listen to a speech about ideology: ‘This was the thought reform, the re-education of the camps, which was supposed to turn us into New Men to fit into the New Society.’

  In May 1961 the Chinese government imposed a new policy, establishing fixed sentences for counter-revolutionary rightists undergoing re-education through labour. In study sessions Harry Wu and other rightists were told to make a confession, think again about their crimes, and state the punishment they thought they deserved. At study sessions Dr Choedak had to repeat that ‘the Chinese Communists are the vanguard of all Communists. This is because Mao is the leader of the whole world. Right now he is the only one worthy of even being called a leader!’ In Qinghe in 1960, Jean Pasqualini heard the camp director tell them that ‘The situation at home and abroad is very good. At home the production has never been so high and all efforts are being bent to overcome any economic hardships that linger on. Improvement is assured for 1961. What I have come to tell you is that you have more reason than ever to be grateful to the government. The government realises we have been living through a temporary period of difficulty caused by abnormal factors beyond our control.’

  Prisoners were warned not to tell visitors that there was famine or that inmates were dying from starvation. When the brother of Ama Adhe arrived to meet her in one camp, she was warned that she must ‘show a happy face’. If she said anything about starvation or suffering there would be ‘serious consequences’. Like officials elsewhere in China, the prison authorities dared not speak out or betray what they thought. For a while, the guards were able to insulate themselves from the famine by consuming the prisoners’ rations or what they grew. However, their wives and children, who often remained in the big cities, starved on the same diminishing rations as the rest of the population. Eventually, the food shortage did affect the prison guards. In the Qinghe camp prisoners were invited to tour the kitchens of the guards to see what they were eating – sweet potato flour mixed with ersatz corncob. A Shanghainese sent to work at the Mazong Shan coal-mine in the d
eserts of Gansu recalls how his starving guards repeatedly sent out desperate messages to the provincial government headquarters begging for food. When there was no reply, a party set off to walk to the railway line. From there, they used a hand-operated railway cart to travel hundreds of miles to the provincial capital of Lanzhou. In response to their appeal, the Lanzhou authorities sent a truck which arrived one day containing 5 tonnes of grain. The guards kept half and gave the rest to the prisoners, who each received half a cup of grain.18

  If the Great Leap Forward had not been abandoned, it is likely that in this camp and others many more inmates would have died. Thanks to Liu Shaoqi’s emergency measures, which will be discussed in Chapter 16, conditions began to improve at the end of 1961 and were still better in 1962. And in 1961, when the Party secretaries of Qinghai and Gansu were replaced, some prisoners began to be sent home. Even Tibetan prisoners held in Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai were re-housed in prisons in Tibet. Elsewhere, the change was less marked. In Qinghe near Beijing food rations increased slightly in late 1961 and the amount of food substitutes fell. In 1962, Liu Shaoqi made preparations to rehabilitate the rightists and allow them to return to their old jobs. Although Mao blocked this move, the commandants of many camps were replaced and a more humane regime was introduced. Some prisoners even began to be paid for their labour.

  13

  The Anatomy of Hunger

  ‘In those years, starvation became a sort of mental manacle, depriving us of our freedom to think.’ Han Weitian

  Starvation can be one of the most prolonged and humiliating forms of death. Its immediate effect is rapid weight loss as the body consumes reserves of fat and then muscle tissue. On a diet of 1,600 calories a day, equivalent to a pound of cereals, the body will lose a quarter of its weight in two to three months.1 This, the first stage of starvation, is familiar from news pictures. Adults often have emaciated bodies and concave stomachs while the bellies of children are distended by the gases created by bacteria growing in the stomach and intestine. In tropical countries and especially among refugees living in camps, famine victims in this state are often carried away by disease before they reach the stage of terminal starvation.

  However, in China the famine was different. The vast majority of people remained in their own homes. Standards of public health continued to be vigorously enforced. Even in the depths of the famine, people in villages or labour camps were inspected to see if they were obeying the sanitation regulations zealously laid down during the Great Leap Forward.

  As the famine intensified, a large part of the population reached the second stage of starvation. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it thus: ‘Activity will be reduced and general lethargy will occur. If there is a further reduction in food intake, further weight loss will occur and the death rate will rise. Psychologically the mind is dominated by a desire for food. Other emotions are dulled. Moral standards are lowered and in extreme conditions murder and cannibalism may occur.’

  In this second stage, the body stops shrinking and begins to swell. In medieval Europe, this was called the ‘dropsy’. It is now known as oedema (or edema), defined in the Encyclopaedia as ‘a swelling due to the effusion of watery fluid into the intercellular spaces of connective tissues’. A lack of protein means that fluid escapes from the blood into the tissues which, when punctured, ‘secrete a thin incoagulable fluid’.

  During the height of the famine, various sources suggest that around 10 per cent of the urban population and 10 to 30 per cent of the rural population suffered from oedema. In Fengyang, a report claimed that 37.8 per cent of the population was sick, largely from oedema.2 It is a condition easily detected. It is present if, when a finger is pressed against the skin, the skin preserves the indentation rather than reverting to its unmarked state. In Changsha, Hunan province, one writer recalls that ‘Many of the old people and almost all the children I knew had the “water swelling disease”, dropsy. Our bodies puffed up and wouldn’t recede... When acquaintances met, they squeezed each other’s legs to see how swollen they were, and examined each other’s skin to see if they were yellow. It was a game for me to poke Nai Nai’s cheek and leave a hole that would fill up only very slowly like dough.’3 Even in Beijing, which as the capital received the highest priority in the supply of food, oedema was present. One doctor who worked there reckoned that it affected 10 per cent of the population. A health survey conducted in 1961 estimated that the same proportion of Heilongjiang’s population likewise had oedema.4

  Since officially there was no famine in China, only bumper harvests, doctors were forbidden to tell patients that they were starving. The usual Chinese terms for malnutrition and lack of food are yinyang bu Hang and quefa yinyang. Instead, the government resorted to euphemisms. Doctors were told to talk about fictitious diseases such as fuzhong bing or shuizhong bing, that is swollen sickness or water illness. Oedema is, however, a symptom not a disease. At the same time, it was forbidden to record a death as due to starvation. Even in the prison camps this could not be done, and in some places all medical terms were dispensed with and oedema was simply referred to as ‘Number Two Disease’.

  Emmanuel John Hevi, an African student studying medicine in Beijing during the famine, records how his teachers claimed that the Chinese are physiologically different from the rest of humanity. His American-trained biology professor gave a lecture on the metabolism and explained that ‘because proteins, fats and carbohydrates are inter-convertible during human metabolic processes, the people of China do not suffer any nutritional loss in consequence of their diet’s deficiency in fats and proteins’. As Hevi comments, ‘She was not telling us what she knew to be a fact but rather what she had been ordered to tell us as a political necessity... Faced with a shortage of protein and fats, the Party declares that these things are no longer necessary but are luxuries which the Chinese people can well do without.’5

  Fortunately, one authoritative medical description of the reality behind such nonsense has been written by Dr Benjamin Lee who now works in the Department of Pediatrics at the Louisiana State University Medical Center.6 In 1958 he was sentenced as a rightist and spent the next four years on the Sino-Russian border in Heilongjiang province at the Lake Xingkai state farm. There he took notes of the effects of the famine on over 5,000 prisoners. Although Dr Lee only recorded what happened to camp inmates, his description applies equally well to millions of others outside the camps:

  An inmate would become malnourished within a few weeks of arrival. Usually, the first sign of severe malnutrition in a prisoner was incontinence. However little water he had drunk, the victim would find himself having to urinate one or even two pints of colourless fluid a night. Prisoners had to get up at one-to three-hour intervals and, even more humiliating in crowded cells, they would often pee in their pants before they made it to a pot or the latrines. Some gripped their penis to try and stop themselves.

  Equally degrading was the way in which the starving lost control over their bowels, developing acute diarrhoea. Their stools would become milky and jelly-like, and often bloody. Terminal cases excreted reddish brown watery faeces in large quantities. Food would pass through the intestine within an hour, often without undergoing any change. Victims would also suffer from severe flatulence and at night they would sweat so severely that their bedclothes would become drenched.

  The outside of the body would also change. In a third of the inmates, big patches of brown skin appeared, especially at the elbows, the spine, the feet and thighs. Some long-term prisoners found the skin inside their cheeks drying up and turning green. The skin would also fissure, creating crevasses in the hands and feet which became infected. The skin became particularly painful at the fingertips and the sides of the nails. Often the first sign of malnutrition was the appearance of fine parallel yellowish lines which appeared on the fingernails. The upper nail would flatten out and become thin and brittle, while the lower part turned thick and soft like dirty rubber. Sometimes the nails bled, causing intolerable
pain. As they weakened, prisoners found that they could no longer make fine movements with their fingers and the tendons around the wrists became inflamed.

  Starvation also changed the body in other ways. Large joints, like the shoulder, moved with a dull clanging noise. Joints thickened and became enlarged. Even the cartilage at the end of the nose thickened so that the bridge of the nose widened into a crest. Much the same thing happened to the sternum. Other parts also swelled in strange ways. In some prisoners, the parotid glands under the neck and in front of the ears grew to the size of a hamburger. Others complained of swellings behind the knees, or at lymph nodes in the groin or under the arms. Veins in the eyeballs hardened and became inflamed. Fissures in the teeth appeared. In some cases, the chest collapsed and became compressed like a child’s rib-cage to half or even a third of its normal extent.

  Most inmates suffered from a terrible hacking cough. One former inmate said that this condition became worse at night when he would cough continuously, unable to catch his breath: ‘My chest cavity seemed to have been packed with dynamite – explosion after explosion would erupt from within me.’ Many famine victims also fell into a high fever with severe headaches and cramps. High blood pressure, hypertension and bradycardia, when the heart beats very slowly, became common, while broken bones did not heal but swelled up dangerously.

  Dr Lee could always tell when a prisoner was going to die. He would lose his appetite, the skin around his swollen body would turn translucent and his face would become corpse-like. However, the actual manner of death varied. Some would suddenly drop dead of heart failure while out walking or after dinner. Others died in a general convulsion. A few would begin to spit massive amounts of blood from their lungs as if they had severe pneumonia; or they would show signs of suffering from severe jaundice because their liver had failed. Often, death was heralded by violent diarrhoea after which the patient would collapse in a coma. When the authorities began to replace real food with food substitutes, many prisoners also died from perforation of the intestine.