Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  Yet, amidst all this, no one was ever allowed to mention publicly or privately that there was a famine or even hint at the fact. Propaganda encouraged people to make a virtue out of eating less while newspapers reported great strides in agricultural production. In Chengdu, the authorities declared that ‘a capable woman can make a meal without food’, reversing an ancient saying that ‘no matter how capable, a woman cannot make a meal without food’. In the north, the Beijing Daily reported what could be achieved by ‘alternating liquid meals with solid meals’. It recounted the example of a man with a family of seven who had managed to save a third of his household’s monthly ration of 217 lbs by allocating each person no more than half a pound of grain a day.

  In most cities, a large proportion of the inhabitants had oedema in 1960. Several interviewees recalled that their teachers’ legs were so swollen that they could no longer stand up in front of their pupils and had to sit down to teach. In Beijing universities many students had swollen limbs, and in the canteens the porridge had so little rice in it that, as one former student put it, ‘you could almost see your own reflection in it’. One interviewee who grew up in Fengtai, a suburb of Beijing, remembered that many neighbours died after their limbs swelled up. His parents told him not to go outside because he might be caught and turned into dumplings. Rumours of cannibalism were rife – people told stories of buying dumplings and finding a fingernail inside.

  The utter failure of the cotton harvest in Shandong and other provinces where peasants were forced to try out vernalization led to further emergency measures. In 1958 China had boasted that its cotton crop was the biggest in the world, even bigger than that of the United States, but in 1959 cotton yields fell drastically. The growers, left with nothing to eat, refused to produce any more cotton, creating an acute shortage of cloth. The authorities began to dream up ways of making what was available go further. Tailors were urged to adopt a new method of cutting cloth using a cardboard pattern. The Worker’s Daily reported that the ‘broad masses of the people deeply love the advanced method of cutting’ which was hailed as a ‘technical revolution’. The newspaper calculated that if each of China’s 650 million people saved one foot of cloth a year, an extra 65 million suits could be made.16 The annual cloth ration was cut by 60 per cent to 4½ square feet per person and people were told how to make old clothes into new. For those outside the ration system, cotton cloth was often impossible to find and peasants sometimes resorted instead to using dried straw and grasses.

  To make room for the huge influx of peasants into the cities, local authorities had earlier appropriated and reallocated all housing. Expecting that, like the peasants, they would soon be forced to join communes and lose all their possessions, many city-dwellers had hurried to sell off their furniture. When fuel supplies in the cities dwindled, those with no furniture left to chop up for firewood froze.

  Transportation also ground to a halt: there was no petrol for cars or trucks and no coal for trains. Flights from Beijing to Guangzhou were cut from six to two a week. By early evening city streets were empty. Building lights were dimmed and light bulbs flickered with the erratic power supply. Hotels and guest houses were empty and visitors few. Without traffic, markets, birds or dogs, the cities were shrouded in an oppressive stillness.

  As the famine deepened, the Party began to empty the cities. From Beijing alone, about 100,000 inhabitants were sent into the countryside in February 1960. One young girl, arriving at the famous Seven Li commune in Henan where in 1958 Mao had approvingly said ‘This name, the People’s Commune, is good’, found peasants and guests subsisting off as little as 17 lbs of grain a month:

  At first I found the food inedible and threw away one of the wotou. People ran to eat it. I was struggled and accused of having ‘bourgeois thinking’. Most of the men had oedema and the women had stopped menstruating. Most trees had been felled. People caught stealing the bark of the remaining trees were punished. People could no longer grow their own vegetables and tried to steal food from others. The leader of our group, Yuan Mu, told us that ‘the spirit makes food’.17

  Part Three The Great Lie

  16

  Liu Shaoqi Saves the Peasants

  ‘Even if there’s a collapse that’ll be all right. The worst that will happen is that the whole world will get a big laugh out of it.’ Mao Zedong in the winter of 19591

  By the end of 1960 Mao still refused to believe that death was stalking the countryside but his colleagues realized that the regime was in danger of collapse and that they must act. In early 1961, senior leaders began to dispatch inspection teams to the countryside to gather evidence that they could present to Mao. When Mao continued to insist that the famine was not the result of his policies but of the actions of counterrevolutionaries and landlords, some of the leadership led by Liu Shaoqi took matters into their own hands. Mao believed that their policies amounted to a challenge to his leadership and, by the end of 1961, a power struggle was underway between Mao and his followers on the one hand and Liu, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping on the other. In provinces such as Qinghai and Gansu, Liu and his colleagues managed to install new leaders who were able to modify the communes, but elsewhere the provincial leadership remained firmly on Mao’s side. The evidence for what exactly took place during this period is patchy, but in August 1962 Mao staged a comeback which culminated in 1966 with the start of the Cultural Revolution in which he eliminated his enemies and almost destroyed the Party itself.

  In February 1961, Zhou Enlai returned from three weeks in Hebei province and told Mao that the peasants were simply too weak to work and that villagers were determined to abandon the communes. At about the same time, Deng Xiaoping went to Shunyi county outside Beijing and returned to deliver an identical message – not only were the peasants starving but the village cadres had to steal from the communal granaries to ensure that they and their families could eat. Peng Zhen, the Mayor of Beijing, also went to the countryside together with the writer Deng Tuo and composed a report which bluntly accused Mao of ignoring reality.

  Mao, however, still wielded considerable power over rural Party cadres who did their best to thwart these inspection teams, nowhere more so than in his home province of Hunan. This was sometimes called the cradle of the Party because so many of its leaders, including Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai, had been born there. Parts of the province had been hit by drought in 1959, and a policy of trying to reap two rice harvests a year instead of one had caused a serious food shortage. By 1960 many were struggling to survive on half a pound of grain a day. In the Hengyang district ‘nearly an entire production team had died of hunger, and there was no one left with the strength to bury the bodies. These were still lying scattered about in the fields from which they had been trying to pull enough to stay alive.’2 Yet when Liu Shaoqi and his wife, Wang Guangmei, visited Hunan to see for themselves, local leaders went to extraordinary lengths to try and deceive them. Along the road leading to Liu’s home town of Ningxiang, starving peasants had torn the bark off the trees to eat, so officials plastered the tree trunks with yellow mud and straw to conceal the scars.3 As the People’s Daily reported in an article published in December 1989, ‘the grassroots Party organ interfered in everything to cover up the death toll’. Liu only managed to discover the truth in the village where he had been born, Ku Mu Chong, when some villagers dared to tell him that twenty of their number had starved to death, including a nephew of Liu’s, and that a dozen more had fled. Liu was not the only senior leader to receive this treatment. That year the President of the Supreme Court, Xie Juezai, also returned to his birthplace in the same county where local officials solemnly told him that things were going so well that they were breeding two million pigs. In fact, as he later wrote, there was mass starvation.4

  Just as many local officials lied to visiting senior leaders, so too did some prominent figures when reporting to Mao. The Party Secretary in Mao’s birthplace in Xiangtan, Hunan, was Hua Guofeng, a 38-year-old from Shanxi who was determined
to prove his loyalty to Mao at all costs. Hua had already earned Mao’s gratitude at the Lushan summit by refuting the claims of the provincial Party leader, Zhou Xiaozhou, that there was widespread hunger in Hunan. Afterwards he wrote an article in the provincial Party newspaper headlined ‘Victory belongs to those people who raise high the Red Flag of the Great Leap Forward’. And in the anti-Peng hysteria that followed the Lushan conference, he personally supervised the brutal persecution of Peng’s family who lived in the Xiangtan prefecture.5

  Mao himself did not go to Hunan but instead sent another senior Party official, Hu Yaobang, who had been born in the same district and who now headed the Party’s Youth League. Hu soon realized that most of the province’s population was starving to death and returned to Beijing to deliver his report to Mao. In 1980 Hu, by then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and responsible for the break up of the communes after Mao’s death, told an audience of Party officials how, on the eve of his audience, he paced up and down smoking, unable to sleep. Should he tell Mao the truth? Hu’s courage failed him. As he later explained, ‘I did not dare tell the Chairman the truth. If I had done so this would have spelt the end of me. I would have ended up like Peng Dehuai.’6

  Liu Shaoqi sent inspection teams to Gansu and Qinghai which were more successful and quickly managed to bring down their Party leaders and introduce reforms which helped to end the famine. As in Xinyang in Henan, the support of the local army commanders was crucial, or it would not have been possible to arrest such fanatics.

  In Anhui, Zeng Xisheng tried to hold on to power by switching sides early on. As one of the most aggressive promoters of the communes, he was a pivotal figure and his reforms, the ze ren tian or contract field farming system, became central to the struggles within the Party during 1961 and 1962. Zeng had begun cautiously, by ordering cadres to try small-scale experiments on land outside the provincial capital, Hefei. By the spring of 1961, cadres all over the province were ready to issue every peasant household with two or three mu of communal land for the spring sowing. At the same time Zeng allowed the communes to abandon the collective kitchens, rehabilitated officials dismissed as rightists, and punished those who had committed the worst crimes. Yet to do all this Zeng had to have Mao’s approval. In March 1961, Zeng attended a top Party meeting in Guangzhou and reported what he was doing to a working group of the East China Bureau. China was then divided into a number of such regional bureaux and East China was controlled by the radical leftist and Shanghai Party boss, Ke Qingshi. Ke wanted to block Zeng’s ze ren tian system, so Zeng appealed directly to Mao. Mao himself was toying with various measures that might raise agricultural production but without openly retreating from socialism. Trusting that Zeng would not betray him, Mao gave him his blessing, saying ‘if we do it right, we can increase national grain output by 491,000 tonnes [1 billion jin] and that will be a great thing’.7 Mao’s verdict was immediately relayed to Anhui together with instructions to promote the ze ren tian. A few days later, Mao changed his mind and said that only small-scale experiments were permitted. Zeng then wrote Mao a letter, again expounding the benefits of the system.

  Much of what happened at this crucial juncture is obscure but Mao, although unrepentant, was under pressure from Liu Shaoqi and others who were horrified by what they had discovered in the countryside. Even hitherto loyal supporters such as Deng Xiaoping, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, believed that whatever Mao thought, there had to be a retreat. At the March meeting in Guangzhou, Deng had uttered his famous maxim: ‘It does not matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.’ In other words, ignore the principles of socialism: what matters is whether people have enough to eat or not. This sentiment would come back to haunt him five years later during the Cultural Revolution. At the time, Mao seems to have been torn between heeding the advice of his followers and sticking to his convictions. He took an immense pride in his obduracy and his doctor, Li Zhisui, in his memoirs quotes him as boasting that ‘Some people don’t give up their convictions until they see the Yellow River and have nowhere to retreat to. I will not give up my convictions even when I see the Yellow River.’8 Confronted with such obduracy, senior leaders attempted to find a way to disguise a retreat to private farming so as to preserve the face of the Great Leader.

  When senior officials met again in May, however, the attacks against Mao were blunt. Chen Yun baldly asserted that the Party should disband the communes altogether and immediately return all the land to the peasants, adding: ‘The peasants do nothing now but complain. They say that under Chiang Kai-shek, they “suffered” but had plenty to eat. Under Mao everything is “great” but they eat only porridge. All we have to do is give the peasants their own land, then everyone will have plenty to eat.’9 Chen Yun insisted that China import emergency grain and chemical fertilizers, and drew up plans for the construction of fourteen large and modern plants to ensure long-term supplies of the latter. At the same time millions of tonnes of grain were ordered from Australia, Canada and other countries.

  It was also at around this time that Premier Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi and Chen Yun, who had dominated much economic policy-making until 1958, introduced a series of policies on the communes aimed at reviving the peasant economy. These were accompanied by other new regulations relating to industry, science, handicrafts and trade, finance, literature and art, education, higher education and commercial work.

  Liu Shaoqi’s reforms came to be known as the san zi yi bao or ‘three freedoms, one guarantee’. They did not extend to the abandonment of collective farming and the division of the communal fields but the peasants were now free to raise their own livestock and grow food on small plots of wasteland, and to open markets and trade in everything except grain which they had to continue to guarantee to deliver to the state. These reforms amounted to the sort of collective farming which existed in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. A variation of Liu’s policy, known as bao chan dao hu or the ‘household contract responsibility system’, permitted the peasants to grow a certain amount of grain for the state on communal land but also to sell the remainder. In Hunan the peasants had a simpler term for these measures, calling them ‘save yourself production’.10

  In the universities, the Lysenkoists were replaced with real scientists and serious work began again on agricultural sciences.11 By the summer of 1961, teachers, professors, statisticians, musicians, playwrights and other intellectuals were reinstalled in their original jobs and were being encouraged to help the return to sanity. The Party Central Committee called for scientists to be given sufficient time for their research and numerous academic forums were convened where experts were encouraged to engage in free debate. Yet even in Beijing all talk of famine continued to be forbidden as experts and other citizens obeyed instructions to grow vegetables in the wasteland allotted to each work unit and to raise chickens on their balconies. Professor Wu Ningkun recalls how in Anhui’s capital, Hefei, government workers instructed to grow food were told to show the ‘Yanan spirit’ of self-reliance and arduous struggle. At the university there, professors cultivated small plots of land on the campus, Wu himself planting soybeans.12 Even in Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound next to the Forbidden City in Beijing, everyone except Mao tried to set an example by growing their own food. Liu Shaoqi planted kidney beans with his guards. Zhu De was noted for his pumpkins. Zhou Enlai’s wife, Deng Yingchao, served guests hot water and fallen tree leaves instead of tea.

  In 1961, too, the reformers were for the first time in three years able to seize control of parts of the press and turn them against Mao. Thinly disguised attacks on the Great Leader began to appear. A year earlier, the People’s Daily had claimed that Mao had ‘solved problems which Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin could not, or did not have the time to solve in their lifetimes’. Now it began to publish sarcastic articles, one of which suggested that some people had ‘substituted illusion for reality’. Another implied that Mao suffered from a form of mental disorde
r which led to irrational behaviour and decisions, and warned that this affliction ‘will not only bring forgetfulness, but gradually lead to insanity’. It even went so far as to suggest that such a person should take ‘a complete rest’. Another essay ridiculed the story of an ordinary athlete who was so overtaken by delusions of grandeur that he boasted of breaking the Olympic record for ‘the long jump’. And one attack bitingly referred to the split with Moscow: ‘If a man with a swollen head thinks he can learn a subject easily and then kicks out his teacher, he will never learn anything’.13

  Other articles in the national press talked directly of agriculture. One pointed out that in ancient times wise governments had guarded against shortages by storing grain; another urged officials to listen to the wisdom of ‘sage old peasants’, saying that ‘traditions which have come down to us from our ancestors all contain some truth... what crops to plant, when to sow, how to cultivate, when to harvest – these cannot be changed by man’s will’.

  In June the People’s Daily published a translation into modern Chinese of a memorial to the Ming Emperor Jiajing by that upright official, Hai Rui. This was soon followed by the publication of a new play about Hai Rui, which pointedly focused on the plight of peasants whose land has been confiscated and who have been oppressed by local officials. The play was written by the Deputy Mayor of Beijing, Wu Han, an expert on Ming history. In it, Hai Rui orders that the land be given back to the peasants and executes an official for abusing his power by murdering an elderly peasant. Hai Rui praises the Emperor for past deeds, but dares to criticize him for wasting resources on pointless public works while the peasants starve: ‘Your mind is deluded and you are dogmatic and biased. You think you are always right and reject criticism,’ Hai Rui tells the Emperor.