Mao's Great Famine (24 page)

And those were the tools that had not been devoured in the backyard furnaces during the frenzied iron and steel movement in 1958. At the Lushan plenum held in the summer of 1961, Li Yiqing, secretary of the south-central region, told the party leaders that 140,000 tonnes of farming tools had been thrown into the fires in the model province of Henan.
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When these losses were tallied with what was destroyed through neglect, the total varied from about a third to half of all equipment. In Shandong a third of all tools were useless within a year of the Great Leap Forward.
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In the Shaoguan region, Guangdong, 40 per cent of all necessary equipment was gone by 1961, meaning a loss of some 34 million tools. A third of what was left was broken.
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The number of waterwheels in Hebei was halved, while carts were also reduced by 50 per cent.
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In Zhejiang province half of all water pumps, over half of all planting machines and more than a third of all threshing machines were damaged beyond recovery.
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Besides the fact that there were few incentives to repair tools that belonged to everybody in general and nobody in particular, other reasons stood in the way of recovery. Widespread shortages of natural resources, especially timber, meant galloping inflation – despite the fixed prices of the planned economy. In Zhejiang, for instance, bamboo was 40 per cent more expensive than before the Great Leap Forward, and the iron allocated to the countryside for tool production was of inferior quality.
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Their homes already stripped of cooking utensils and agricultural implements to feed the backyard furnaces, the villagers were then handed back useless ingots of brittle iron. Half the metal allocated to villages in Guangdong in 1961 was defective.
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Tool production in state enterprises, as we shall see, did not fare any better.

18

Industry

Ever greater output targets were assigned to factories, foundries, workshops, mines and power plants all over China. How a production unit was rewarded was determined by the percentage of the quota it managed to fulfil. The output total was the magic number that determined the rise and fall of any one factory. And just as cadres in the people’s communes pledged ever increasing amounts of grain, all over the country factories tried to outperform each other in fulfilling the plan. Lists of output figures were broadcast on a daily basis by the propaganda machine, reproduced on chalkboard messages and wall newspapers for everybody to see. Charts and diagrams with growth projections were displayed in factory shops. Photos of model workers were enshrined under glass on a ‘board of honour’, while posters, stars, ribbons and slogans adorned the walls of every workshop. Underachievers were identified at factory meetings, while workers who overfulfilled the targets were commended, some of them attending mass meetings in Beijing reviewed by the Chairman himself. Above the hissing molten metal, the clang of crucibles and the whistling steam an incessant racket would come from loudspeakers, spewing out propaganda and radio programmes to encourage workers to increase production.
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As the supreme goal of the red factory was output, the cost of input was often neglected. In the sprawling bureaucracy in charge of industry, from the central economic ministries to the different administrative departments within the factories, nobody quite managed to keep track of the staggering amount of equipment ordered from abroad. Even Zhou Enlai, who so ruthlessly pressed for the extraction of foodstuffs from the countryside to meet export targets, seemed unable to curb the import of machinery effectively. Enterprises also borrowed money to fund constant expansion, build prestige buildings and purchase more equipment. In the case of the Luoyang Mining Machinery Factory, the monthly interest owed to the bank was equal to the factory’s entire wage package.
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But, once installed, the new equipment was subjected to poor maintenance and relentless maltreatment. On a visit to a wharf in Shanghai in 1961, the otherwise sympathetic delegation from East Germany were taken aback by the state in which they found imported machinery. New materials like sheet metal, tubes and profile iron rusted in the open.
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The Iron and Steel Plant in Wuhan, inaugurated with much fanfare by Mao at the height of the Great Leap Forward in September 1958, gave a similar impression of extreme neglect, a mere two out of six Siemens-Martin furnaces operating at full capacity by 1962.
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More detailed reports by investigation teams confirmed that materials, tools and machinery were neglected or even deliberately damaged. In the Shijiazhuang Iron and Steel Company, for instance, half of all engines broke down frequently.
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A culture of waste developed. In Luoyang, three factories alone had accumulated more than 2,500 tonnes of scrap metal that went nowhere.
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In Shenyang, sloppy streamlets of molten copper and nickel solutions ran between heaps of scrap metal.
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Waste developed not only because raw resources and supplies were poorly allocated, but because factory bosses deliberately bent the rules to increase output. The brand-new iron and steel plant in Jinan, according to a team of auditors, wasted a fifth of total state investment, or 12.4 million yuan, in its first two years by adding sand to hundreds of tonnes of manganese ore, resulting in a useless mixture which had to be discarded.
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As everyone worked feverishly towards higher production levels, mountains of substandard goods accumulated. Many a factory spewed out inferior goods as corners were cut in the relentless pursuit of higher output. The very fabric of material culture was shot through with shoddy goods, from ramshackle housing, rickety buses, wobbly furniture and faulty electric wiring to flimsy windows. The State Planning Commission found that a mere fifth of all the steel produced in Beijing was first rate. Most was second or third rate, and over 20 per cent was classified as defective. In Henan more than half of all the steel produced in factories was third rate or worse. Inferior material churned out by the steel-producing giants had a knock-on effect for a whole range of related industries. At Angang, the sprawling steel and iron complex in Anshan, the rails produced in 1957 were generally of first-rate quality, but by 1960 a mere third corresponded to the requisite standards. As the quality of the rails suffered, several sections of the railway network became too dangerous for heavy traffic and had to be closed down; a few collapsed altogether.
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Not only did the quantity of inferior goods increase, but larger proportions of them found their way into society. In Henan only 0.25 per cent of the cement which did not fulfil production criteria actually left the premises in 1957. This ballooned to over 5 per cent in 1960, as large quantities of substandard material were used on building sites. A survey of a whole series of industries in Kaifeng, Henan, reached an even more astounding conclusion: more than 70 per cent of all the output consisted of reject products.
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And just as faulty rails, warped beams and fake cement perilously weakened the material structure of everyday life, inferior consumer goods became part and parcel of socialist culture. In Shanghai clocks sounded the alarm at random, enamel basins were sold with splits and bubbles on the surface, while half of all knitwear and cotton goods were defective.
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In Wuhan zips jammed, knives bent and blades broke off the handles of agricultural tools.
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Sometimes factories cut costs by churning out products without any identifying label. This was the case with a fifth of the tinned meat sold in Beijing. Sometimes the labels were wrong, for instance when fruit was substituted for pork, leading to large amounts of rotten goods.
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Even more worrying were problems caused by the addition of chemicals to processed food. In one year a Beijing dye factory sold 120 tonnes of harmful pigments specifically designed as food additives. Many of these were banned, for instance Sudan yellow, a dye used in inks. Lax procedures over quality control also meant that contaminated food and medicine were allowed to leave the factory floor, one example being a batch of 78 million bottles of penicillin gone bad. A third was sent out from a Shanghai factory before the problem was even spotted.
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Mao scoffed at the very notion of a defective product: ‘there is no such thing as a reject product, one man’s reject is another man’s grain’.
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Mao may have dismissed concerns about quality, but a reject culture damaged the country’s reputation on the international market. As we have seen, the cost of making good on the leaky batteries, contaminated eggs, infected meat, fake coal and other tainted merchandise delivered in 1959 alone amounted to 200 or 300 million yuan. But reject culture also corrupted the inner workings of military industry. As a report by Marshal He Long showed, it was not only assault rifles that failed to fire, but also nineteen jet fighters produced in Shenyang that were substandard. In Factory 908 well over 100,000 gas masks were unusable. Nie Rongzhen, who ran the nuclear weapons programme, in turn complained about the poor quality of wireless devices and measuring gauges, which were often unreliable because of dust particles trapped inside. Even in top-secret factories rubbish was found everywhere, and the slightest breeze blew the dirt resting on propaganda banners hanging on the wall on to sensitive equipment: ‘The Americans doubt that we can make guided missiles because the Chinese are too dirty.’
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Living conditions for workers were appalling. Stupendous imports of foreign machinery were meant to catapult the country forward, as gleaming new plants, from steel mills and cement kilns to oil refineries, were purchased from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But very little was invested in the housing and feeding of ordinary workers and their families – despite the fact that the workforce exploded with the arrival of millions from the countryside.

Take the iron and steel plant in Jinan, the capital of Shandong. Established at the height of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 with the most technologically advanced equipment, it should have been a haven for its new recruits. But conditions deteriorated rapidly. There were inadequate toilet facilities, so workers urinated and defecated directly on the factory floor. Filth and stench permeated the premises, lice and scabies were common. Chaos reigned on the ground. Scuffles were a frequent occurrence, windows were broken and doors smashed in. A pecking order emerged in which the strongest workers grabbed the best beds in the dormitories. Fear was pervasive, in particular among women, who were commonly teased, humiliated and abused by local cadres in their offices, in their dormitories or sometimes on the factory floor in full view of other workers. None of them dared to sleep or go out on their own.
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A similar scene could be found in Nanjing. When the Federation of Trade Unions looked into the lives of iron, steel and coal workers in 1960, they found filthy canteens infected with insects and rodents. Queues were interminable, up to a thousand workers lining up in front of a single canteen window at the Lingshan Coal Mine. As the canteen was open for only an hour, workers would tussle and wrangle for space, sometimes coming to blows. In the Guantang Coal Mine, miners who were late were deprived of their meal, and had to go down the shafts for a ten-hour shift on an empty stomach. Dormitories were cramped. On average each worker had a space of 1 to 1.5 square metres, although some slept on boards jammed between beds or against the pillars. Many rested in shifts, having to share a bed. Straw roofs would leak, forcing some of the workers to move their bunk beds around the dripping pools. Others slept under an umbrella. Protective equipment was either lacking or wholly inadequate. Many miners had no shoes and had no alternative but to go down the shafts barefoot. Those made to hew coal in open pits were drenched when it rained, their jackets soaked with water. In the dormitories there were no blankets, and the humidity was so high that clothes would never quite dry. Some of the steel workers who had to work in front of blast furnaces burned their feet because they had no shoes.
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Further south, in subtropical Guangzhou, the dormitories were so crowded that a bunk bed provided no more than half a square metre per worker. Shoddy construction work meant that the premises were hot and damp during the rainy season, causing mould to spread like a rash, infecting clothes and bedding. The humidity was such that some of the facilities were described as mere ‘ponds’, with water dripping from the walls to form puddles on the floor.
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In the Quren coal mine, located near Shaoguan, workers cannibalised the pit props and mine timber to build furniture or provide heating. One in seven workers suffered from silicosis, also known as potter’s rot, caused by inhalation of dust particles, as no protective masks were provided.
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The situation was no better in the north. In the capital itself, a detailed study of four factories by the Federation of Trade Unions showed that there were four times as many workers as before the Great Leap Forward, although dormitory space had failed to keep pace with the increase. In Changxindian, in the Fengtai district, a railway factory allocated just over half a square metre to each of its workers. Throughout Beijing, workers slept in storage rooms, libraries and even in air shelters, often on bunk beds arranged in three layers. They were packed like sardines, so tightly that there was no room to turn at night. In order to get through a door, workers had to queue up. The toilets were permanently engaged and more often than not blocked. Many would wrap their faeces in a sheet of newspaper and chuck the package through a window.