Mao's Great Famine (12 page)

In the cities too the campaign was tough on ordinary people. In Nanjing one furnace alone set a record of 8.8 tonnes in a single day, but the fires had to be fed constantly and some teams went so hungry that they fainted by the smelters. Despite huge pressure, still people protested. Wang Manxiao simply refused to work more than eight hours a day. When challenged by a party secretary, Wang was defiant, asking point-blank, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Others openly doubted that backyard furnaces would help to overtake Britain in steel production. Close to half of all the workers in some teams were described as ‘backward’, meaning that they shirked hard work.
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In the end, the leadership got its record, although much of it was slag, unwashed ore or mere statistical invention. Iron ingots from rural communes accumulated everywhere, too small and brittle to be used in modern rolling mills. According to a report from the Ministry of Metallurgy itself, in many provinces not even a third of the iron produced by backyard furnaces was usable. And the price tag was exorbitant. One tonne of iron from a backyard furnace was estimated to cost 300 to 350 yuan, twice the amount needed by a modern furnace, to which had to be added four tonnes of coal, three tonnes of iron ore and thirty to fifty working days.
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The total losses from the iron-and-steel drive in 1958 were later estimated by the Bureau for Statistics at 5 billion yuan – not including damage to buildings, forests, mines and people.
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When Mikhail Klochko, a foreign adviser who had grown up in the Ukraine with its undulating and irregular fields, travelled to southern China in the autumn of 1958 he was taken aback by the bare, yellow patches of earth divided into narrow terraces: these were the fabled rice paddies, but hardly a single human being could be seen.
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Where were the farmers? Many were mobilised by the militia on backyard furnaces, some were deployed on large irrigation schemes, and others had left the village in search of work in the many factories chasing after ever higher targets. In total more than 15 million farmers moved to the city in 1958, lured by the prospect of a better life.
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In Yunnan the number of industrial workers jumped from 124,000 in 1957 to 775,000, meaning that over half a million people were taken out of the countryside.
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One-third of the entire workforce in the province was sent to work on water-conservancy projects at some point or another that year.
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To put it differently, out of the 70,000 working adults in rural Jinning, Yunnan, 20,000 were deployed on irrigation schemes, 10,000 on building a railway, 10,000 in local factories, leaving only 30,000 to produce food.
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But the figures masked another shift in patterns of work: as most of the men left the village, women had to work in the fields. Many had almost no experience in maintaining complex rice paddies, planting the seedlings unevenly and allowing weeds to invade the fields. In Yongren county a fifth of the crop rotted as a consequence.
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Up to a third of the time devoted to agriculture was lost,
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but Mao and his colleagues believed that innovations such as deep ploughing and close cropping amply compensated for this shortfall. On the other hand, in the ‘continuous revolution’ hailed by the leadership, farmers were deployed along military lines, moving from the industrial field in the slack season back to the agricultural front during the harvest. As Xie Fuzhi put it, ‘a continuous revolution means ceaselessly coming up with new tasks’.
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But even as all available sources of manpower were mobilised in the harvesting campaign, from office clerks, students and teachers, factory workers and city dwellers to the armed forces, the situation on the ground was chaotic. Many of the farming tools had been destroyed in the iron and steel campaign, labour was still diverted to building dams, and communal granaries in the people’s communes were poorly managed. In Liantan, the model commune where a slogan praising the Great Leap Forward had been chiselled in the mountains to welcome an inspection team, several thousand farmers were conscripted to deep-plough seven hectares during the autumn harvest; as nobody was available to collect the crop, some 500 tonnes of grain were abandoned in the fields.
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But deliveries of grain to the state had to be made according to yields that local cadres had officially declared. The actual grain output for 1958 was just over 200 million tonnes, but on the basis of all the claims made about bumper crops the leadership estimated that it was close to 410 million tonnes. Punitive extractions based on entirely fictitious figures could only create fear and anger in the villages. The stage was set for a war on the people in which requisitions would plunge the country into the worst famine recorded in human history. Tan Zhenlin was blunt, addressing some of the leaders of South China in October 1958: ‘You need to fight against the peasants . . . There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.’
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Part Two

Through the Valley of Death

9

Warning Signs

People died of hunger even before the people’s communes were introduced. As early as March 1958, at a party conference on grain, a number of delegates voiced their concern about food shortages as the farmers were taken from the fields to work on irrigation projects. Telltale signs of famine were gangs of people shuffling along dusty roads begging for food, leaving behind empty villages. Li Xiannian, minister of finance, swept these reservations aside and pressed ahead with grain targets.
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By the end of April hunger and want had spread across the country. In Guangxi one person in six was without food or money, and villagers died of hunger in parts of the province. In Shandong some 670,000 were starving, while 1.3 million were destitute in Anhui. In Hunan one in every ten farmers was out of grain for more than a month. Even in subtropical Guangdong close to a million people were hungry, the situation being particularly bad in Huiyang and Zhanjiang, where children were sold by starving villagers. In Hebei grain shortages were such that tens of thousands roamed the countryside in search of food; children were sold in Cangxian, Baoding and Handan. From the devastated villages 14,000 beggars made it to Tianjin, where they were put up in temporary shelters. In Gansu many villagers were reduced to eating tree bark; hundreds died of hunger.
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This was spring famine, and it could be explained as a temporary aberration, but in parts of the country hunger got worse over the summer. Such was the case in Luliang, Yunnan. We saw in an earlier chapter how as early as February 1958 forced labour on irrigation campaigns resulted in cases of starvation. But famine was not restricted to villagers conscripted to work on dams and reservoirs. In the township of Chahua, to take but one example, one in six villagers died between January and August 1958, amounting to a total of 1,610 people. Some were beaten to death, although most died of hunger and disease.
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The county boss Chen Shengnian had been brought in to replace a party official purged for having been soft on grain requisitions in 1957. Chen encouraged the use of violence to impose strict discipline. Two out of three cadres in Chahua routinely resorted to corporal punishment, depriving villagers who were too weak to work of the right to eat.
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The problem was not confined to Luliang alone. Throughout the Qujing region in Yunnan people died of hunger. In Luliang some 13,000 were reported to have perished: thousands were also starving in Lunan, Luoping, Fuyuan, Shizong and other counties.
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In Luxi county the local party committee inflated the crop as early as 1957, proclaiming that each farmer had some 300 kilos of grain a year when only half of that amount was available. After May 1958, starvation claimed some 12,000 lives, equivalent to one in every fourteen people. In some hamlets a fifth of all villagers were buried.
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How many died in the Qujing region is difficult to assess, but hidden in the archives is a set of population statistics which throw some light on the issue. They show that 82,000 people died in 1958, or 3.1 per cent of the population. The number of births declined dramatically, from 106,000 in 1957 to 59,000 in 1958. In the province as a whole, the death rate stood at 2.2 per cent, more than double the national average of 1 per cent for 1957.
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Xie Fuzhi, the party boss in Yunnan, thought long and hard about Luliang and finally decided to report the losses to Mao in November 1958. The Chairman liked the report. Here, it seemed, was somebody he could rely on to tell him the truth. A year later Xie was promoted to head the Ministry of Security in Beijing. As to the deaths, Mao considered them to be a ‘valuable lesson’.
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Another ‘lesson’ came from Xushui, a shrine of the Great Leap Forward where Mao had enjoined farmers to have five meals a day to get rid of the grain surplus. Behind the splendid façade of Xushui, Zhang Guozhong ran an elaborate labour camp which held 1.5 per cent of the local population, from recalcitrant farmers to party secretaries who failed to toe the line. Punishment inside the camp was brutal, ranging from flogging to naked exposure to the cold in the midst of winter. One hundred and twenty-four people died as a result; others were maimed or crippled for life. Outside the camp some 7,000 people were tied up, beaten, spat upon, paraded, forced to kneel or deprived of food, resulting in another 212 deaths.
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Li Jiangsheng, the apparently affable head of the Dasigezhuang Brigade who had welcomed Mao and many other visitors to his showcase village, regularly beat farmers, some being hung up to freeze to death during the winter.
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Despite all the violence, the crop yield was nowhere near what Zhang had promised. When Zhou Enlai passed through Hebei in December 1958, he was approached by a humbled Zhang, who confided that Xushui had produced only 3,750 kilos per hectare, a far cry from the fifteen tonnes he had boasted over the summer. Xushui, in effect, was starving. Zhou promised to help.
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Much, but not all, of this came to light in a report written in October 1958 by the Office of Confidential Affairs at Mao’s behest. Mao circulated the document to others in the central committee, writing at the bottom that ‘these kinds of problems may not be restricted to one commune alone’.
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But as Zhang Guozhong fell from grace, the Chairman embraced the county of Anguo, eighty kilometres south of Xushui, as a model instead. After listening to reports about farmers producing 2,300 kilos of grain a year each, he contemplated the output of Hebei province soaring from a mere 10 million tonnes in 1957 to 50 million by 1959.
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When Hebei boss Liu Zihou warned Mao that some of these figures might be inflated, the Chairman brushed off these concerns and airily stated that errors were inevitable.
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Mao received numerous reports about hunger, disease and abuse from every corner of the country, whether personal letters mailed by courageous individuals, unsolicited complaints from local cadres or investigations undertaken on his behalf by security personnel or private secretaries. Xushui and Luliang are two telling examples; others will be invoked elsewhere in this book, while many more remain buried in the Central Archives in Beijing, closed to all but a few researchers hand-picked by the party.

By the end of 1958 Mao did make a few gestures to appease concern about widespread abuse on the ground. In the comments he circulated about the Luliang report, he accepted that the living conditions of villagers had been neglected at the expense of increased output. But to him Luliang was merely a ‘lesson’ that somehow magically ‘immunised’ the rest of the country against similar mistakes. In the case of Xushui, Mao simply switched his allegiance to the next county down the road willing to outdo others in extravagant production claims. As we will see in Chapter 11, Mao did slow down the pace of the Great Leap Forward between November 1958 and June 1959, but he was unwavering in his pursuit of utopia. The Great Leap Forward was a military campaign fought for a communist paradise in which future plenty for all would largely compensate for the present suffering of a few. Every war had its casualties, some battles would inevitably be lost, and a few ferocious clashes might exact a tragic toll that could have been avoided with the benefit of hindsight, but the campaign had to press on. As foreign minister Chen Yi put it in November 1958, addressing some of the human tragedies on the ground, ‘casualties have indeed appeared among workers, but it is not enough to stop us in our tracks. This is a price we have to pay, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Who knows how many people have been sacrificed on the battlefields and in the prisons [for the revolutionary cause]? Now we have a few cases of illness and death: it’s nothing!’
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Other leaders ignored the famine altogether. In Sichuan, in the grip of a terrible hunger in the winter of 1958–9, radical leader Li Jingquan enthused about the communes, noting that some villagers in Sichuan ate more meat than Mao Zedong, gaining several kilos in weight: ‘Now what do you think of the communes? Is it a bad thing that people get fat?’
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For a party attuned to decades of guerrilla warfare, having survived the Long March after five campaigns of annihilation by the Guomindang in 1935, constant harassment from the Japanese army in the Second World War and a vicious civil war with massive casualties, a few losses were to be expected. Communism would not be achieved overnight. The year 1958 had been a blitzkrieg, an unremitting assault on several fronts at once. The generals in command recognised that the footsoldiers needed some rest: 1959 was to be spent conducting more conventional guerrilla warfare. This meant, in a nutshell, that none of the key decisions about the Great Leap Forward was reversed.