Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Read online

  Hungry Ghosts

  Mao’s Secret Famine

  JASPER BECKER

  Copyright © 1996, 2013 by Jasper Becker All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

  Also published by THE FREE PRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

  This eBook version published by eBookPartnership.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Becker, Jasper.

  Hungry ghosts: Mao’s secret famine / Jasper Becker, p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-684-83457-X

  1. Famines—China. 2. Food supply—China. 3. Mao, Tse-Tung, 1893-1976. I. Tide. HC430.F3B33 1997 363.8’0951 ‘09045—dc20

  96-32803 CIP

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-78301-249-7

  Print ISBN: 0-684-83457-X

  For Ru who supplied me with tea and sympathy

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  The Year Zero

  Part One China: Land of Famine

  China: Land of Famine

  Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation

  The Soviet Famine

  The First Collectivization, 1949-1958

  False Science, False Promises

  Mao Ignores the Famine

  Part Two The Great Hunger

  An Overview of the Famine

  Henan: A Catastrophe of Lies

  Anhui: Let’s Talk about Fengyang

  The Other Provinces

  The Panchen Lama’s Letter

  In the Prison Camps

  The Anatomy of Hunger

  Cannibalism

  Life in the Cities

  Part Three The Great Lie

  Liu Shaoqi Saves the Peasants

  Mao’s Failure and His Legacy

  How Many Died?

  How to Record the Annals of a Place?

  The Western Failure

  Afterword

  Appendix: Biographical Sketches

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Victims of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3 which presaged an even greater disaster in China during the Great Leap Forward

  The massive labour-intensive projects into which peasants all over China were marshalled during the Great Leap Forward

  Propaganda boasting of China’s miraculous agricultural yields

  Chen Boda and Li Jingquan, two of those responsible for the worst excesses during the Great Leap Forward

  Two provincial Party Secretaries, Zeng Xisheng and Wu Zhifu, under whose leadership millions starved to death in Anhui and Henan

  Evidence of the alleged scientific successes of the Great Leap Forward

  The backyard furnaces, intended to help triple steel output

  The most hated aspect of the communes – the communal kitchens – which were run as militarized units

  The campaign to exterminate the ‘four pests’ and the drive to mechanize agriculture produced ingenious solutions but were in the end useless

  0. In the Great Leap Forward’s attempt to master nature, nothing was deemed impossible if the masses were mobilized to perform extraordinary feats of manual labour

  Those who opposed Mao’s policies were condemned as rightists; those forced to implement his policies were condemned to hard labour

  Party leaders who benefited from the Great Leap Forward: Hua Guofeng, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang and Kang Sheng

  The Great Leap Forward’s chief victim, Marshal Peng Dehuai, whose letter of criticism to Mao led to his condemnation as a rightist

  Two of those who helped to end the famine and thus earned Mao’s hatred: Liu Shaoqi and Zhang Wentian

  The tenth Panchen Lama and the writer Deng Tuo both dared to speak out during the famine and suffered the consequences of their audacity

  Mao Zedong, architect of the famine

  The author and publisher would like to thank David King for permission to reproduce Plates 1 and 16.

  Foreword

  One of the most remarkable things about the famine which occurred in China between 1958 and 1962 was that for over twenty years, no one was sure whether it had even taken place. Whatever else the Communists in China might have done, it was widely assumed that they had at least fed their vast population and had ended China’s seemingly perennial famines. Then, in the mid-1980s, American demographers were able to examine the population statistics which had been released when China launched her open-door policy in 1979. Their conclusion was startling: at least 30 million people had starved to death, far more than anyone, including the most militant critics of the Chinese Communist Party, had ever imagined.

  Why, and how, did such a cataclysm take place? Who was to blame? How was it kept secret for so long? And what was life like in the countryside? How did people behave and how did they survive?

  This book is an attempt to seek answers to these questions. Inside China, the famine is rarely mentioned or discussed, and much of the story remains shrouded in secrecy. In the official view, there were merely three years of natural disasters: the real disaster took place later, during the Cultural Revolution, when senior Communist leaders were persecuted. Yet in the last few years, a growing number of Chinese living abroad have written memoirs that shed more light on the subject. It has become clear that the greatest trauma suffered by the Chinese people was indeed the famine, not the Cultural Revolution. However, most of these memoirs are by intellectuals who, during the famine, were either in the cities or in prison camps and so knew little about the fate of the vast majority of the Chinese population – the peasants. It was the peasants who were the chief victims of the famine but peasants do not write books, or make films, and rarely have a chance to talk to outsiders. Even those who obtain official permission to carry out research in China’s countryside are rarely, if ever, allowed to speak freely to peasants. Invariably, local officials have coached the peasant beforehand on what to say and insist on being present at the interview. Often, too, they interrupt to talk on behalf of the peasants who, in any case, may well speak a dialect unintelligible to outsiders.

  For those who were in the countryside at the time, the horror of the famine is indelibly imprinted on their memories. As the dissident Wei Jingsheng has written, peasants talk of those days as if they had lived through an apocalypse. Even after three decades, memories are still fresh, as became clear when I started to find people who had then been in the countryside but who were now living outside China. Advertisements placed in the overseas Chinese press in 1994 brought hundreds of responses, ranging from a few scribbled lines to accounts twenty or thirty pages long. I visited some of those who replied, at first in Britain and later in the United States, Hong Kong and eventually Dharamsala in India where I met Tibetans who had fled to the Dalai Lama’s place of exile. Then, armed with a clearer picture of what had happened, I travelled around rural areas of Henan, Anhui and Sichuan and talked to older peasants who had survived the famine.

  The background to the famine is drawn from the growing body of academic work on Chinese agriculture. I was also fortunate in being able to find written sources to substantiate the cruelties that eyewitnesses had described. The relative freedom allowed to obscure publishing houses in the provinces in recent years has meant that a surprising amount of material about the famine has become available. In addition, Chinese intellectuals who went into exile after 1989 were able to provide a number of official documents about events in Henan and Anhui which offered detailed facts and figures
.

  Even so, many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are still missing. Knowledge of events at the highest levels of the Communist Party at key moments is often sketchy, making it difficult to understand clearly why things happened as they did. Much data about death totals is also absent and it is hard to be sure of the reliability of what has come to light. Even today Chinese statistics are rarely coherent, and the central government frequently complains about the regularity with which the lower levels of the administration falsify figures. As Walter Mallory wrote in 1926 of a request for the ‘bottom facts’ about an earlier famine in China, ‘There is no bottom in China, and no facts.’ A fuller account of the famine may have to wait until the Party’s own archives are open to researchers but this is unlikely to occur so long as those who share responsibility for the famine remain in power. Lord Acton once spoke of the ‘undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on the wrong’: it is no surprise that the Communist Party believes its control over the past is the key to its future.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following for their help: John Ackerly; Alex and Moira; Robbie Barnett; Dr Alfred Chan, Huron College, Canada; Jung Chang; Madhusudan Chaubey; Chen Yizi, Center for Modern China, Princeton University; Nien Cheng; Chi Chunghuang; Robert Delfs; Ding Shu; Guy Dinmore, Reuters; Professor Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin; Fu Hua; Ge Yang; The Great Britain-China Centre; John Halliday; Dr Jeya Henry, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford; Martha Higgins; Hong Zhen; Peter and Kathleen Hopkirk; Drjayewardene; Stanley Karnow; Dr Benjamin Y. Lee; Lee Yee; Li Yikai; Liu Binyan; Tim and Alison Luard; Clare McDermott, Reuters; Colina McDougall; Jonathan Mirsky, The Times; Robin Munro, Human Rights Watch Asia, Hong Kong; Pu Ning; Andrew Roche; Tsering Shakyu; Shu Cassen; Si Liqun; Daniel Southerland, Washington Post, Mrs M. Sykes; T. C. and Nancy Tang; Sander Tideman; Buchung Tsering and Tsering Tashi, Dharamsala; Jimmy Wang; Mary Wang; Wang Ruowang; Sechun Wangchuk; Dick Wilson; Sophia Woodman; Wu Hongda; Professor Wu Ningkun; Zheng Haiyu; Zheng Yi; and the many people inside and outside China who would prefer not to be named. In particular I would like to thank Gail Pirkis at John Murray both for her initial enthusiasm for the project and for the considerable effort and skill she applied to editing the manuscript.

  Map

  The Year Zero

  The year 1960 was the darkest moment in the long, long history of China. Two thousand years before, a massive peasant uprising brought about the collapse of the Qin empire, the first great dictatorship to unify and control all the disparate peoples of ancient China. Now the nation had been unified once again under one great leader, Mao Zedong; and the fertile fields of Henan, where the first known Chinese dynasty, the Shang, was founded, were littered with the bodies of peasants who had starved to death.

  In a small village in Guangshan county in Henan, Mrs Liu Xiaohua, now aged 65, still vividly remembers the events of thirty-six years ago. One afternoon in 1994, perched on a small footstool, dressed in faded blue cotton trousers and smock, and occasionally smoking a cigarette, she recalled what had happened. On the muddy path leading from her village, dozens of corpses lay unburied. In the barren fields there were others; and amongst the dead, the survivors crawled slowly on their hands and knees searching for wild grass seeds to eat. In the ponds and ditches people squatted in the mud hunting for frogs and trying to gather weeds.

  It was winter, and bitterly cold, but she said that everyone was dressed only in thin and filthy rags tied together with bits of grass and stuffed with straw. Some of the survivors looked healthy, their faces puffed up and their limbs swollen by oedema, but the rest were as thin as skeletons. Sometimes she saw her neighbours and relatives simply fall down as they shuffled through the village and die without a sound. Others were dead on their earthen kang beds when she awoke in the morning. The dead were left where they died because she said that no one had the strength to bury them.

  She remembered, too, the unnatural silence. The village oxen had died, the dogs had been eaten and the chickens and ducks had long ago been confiscated by the Communist Party in lieu of grain taxes. There were no birds left in the trees, and the trees themselves had been stripped of their leaves and bark. At night there was no longer even the scratching of rats and mice, for they too had been eaten or had starved to death. Lucky villagers would sometimes find their corpses curled up in a hole but it was better still to find an old burrow from another season which might contain a winter store of grain or berries. Most of all she missed the cries of young babies, for no one had been able to give birth for some time. The youngest children had all perished, the girls first. Mrs Liu had lost a daughter. The milk in her breasts had dried up and she had been forced to watch her child die. Her aunt, her mother and two brothers had also died.

  The village is now a collection of mud huts surrounded by bamboo and trees, and the most prosperous villagers are building fine brick houses with tiled roofs and walled courtyards. Thirty-six years ago, all the villagers lived in houses made of mud bricks with thatched straw roofs, each divided into two or three rooms. In February 1960, Mrs Liu remembered, most of the huts were deserted. The straw roofs had fallen in and weeds grew in the courtyards. The wood from the doors and windows had been taken away and often the lintels too, all to be burnt in furnaces to make steel. At night the family slept together on the kang which could be heated from underneath. That winter, however, without even a cotton eiderdown to keep them warm, they froze. The best eiderdowns had been given to the commune and in many households the last shreds of cotton had been eaten. There was no fire in the clay hearth under the kang because the cadres, the officials of the Communist Party, had forbidden the peasants to cook food at home and all fires had been outlawed. Their iron griddles and nearly all the woks and pans had been taken away to be melted down into steel. Sometimes the peasants used an earthenware pot to try and boil some soup or bake a kind of pancake of leaves but they were usually caught and a savage beating would follow. There was only one place in the village from which smoke was allowed to rise. This was the collective kitchen, set up when the commune was founded two years earlier. It was established in the house of the Wang family. They had once been the richest peasants in the village but they had been dispossessed of their land and killed before the commune was created. On the wall outside, the cadres had painted a slogan: ‘Long live the people’s communes.’

  The collective kitchen was, said Mrs Liu, the most terrible aspect of the commune. The grain from the autumn harvest had been taken from the villagers and delivered up to the state. Now the only source of food was the kitchen. Twice a day, at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., the cook would bang a piece of metal hanging from a rope and the villagers would queue up with their bowls to receive their ration of soup. The soup was a thin gruel into which the cooks had thrown the leaves of sweet potatoes and turnips, ground corn stalks, wild grasses and anything else the peasants could gather. In queuing for the soup the villagers fought with each other, the younger and stronger ones pushing the elderly aside. The first to be served risked getting nothing but water, and those who came late might find it had all gone. She remembered one incident when a cadre tried to restore discipline and punched a woman so hard that she fell down and never got up. Those who worked in the kitchen survived the longest but the best off were the family of the village Party secretary. At night he was able to steal food to feed his family, and although this was only dried pea powder, it kept Mrs Liu, his sister-in-law, alive.

  The first to die, she said, were the families of those who had been labelled rich peasants, for they were given the lowest rations. The next group were those who became too weak to work, for they were given nothing. Families tried to pool their rations and often the husband would rule that any female children should be allowed to die first since if they lived they would later be given in marriage to another family. Their food was given to the elderly. Then these too began to die. Often the villagers hid the corpses in their huts so that they could claim an extra ration. A few village
rs had tried to hide some food by burying it underground. She remembered in particular the constant searches for hidden grain. Teams of cadres looking for secret cavities would go round the huts with iron rods, poking at the roofs and walls and prodding the ground. They searched through the courtyards and the piles of dung and straw, determined to find the grain that they said the peasants were hiding. By that time the peasants had nothing, but a few months earlier they had collected some grain which they had gathered from the fields at night before the harvest was taken in. During the harvest season, the cadres had searched the peasants as they left the fields and had beaten anyone they caught trying to eat the wheat kernels. Mrs Liu had been forced to spit out some kernels when she was spotted chewing while labouring in a field. She was not severely punished but others were. One man was tied with his hands behind his back and suspended from a tree. Another, the widow of a rich peasant, was buried alive with her children. Still others were dragged by their hair through the village while the rest were ordered to beat and kick them.

  She knew, too, that at night some of her neighbours went into the fields to cut the flesh from the corpses and eat it. She pointed to a neighbouring village, another collection of huts across the fields, where a woman had killed her own baby. She and her husband had eaten it. Afterwards she went mad and the secret came out. That winter, said Mrs Liu, human beings turned into wolves. There were stories that some of the villagers who fled were killed and eaten. Too weak to walk far, they often collapsed and died where they had fallen on the road. Some of those who fled were caught by the militia, villagers wearing red armbands and armed with sticks and knives, who were ordered to patrol the main roads. She thought they were put in prison and died there. In other places, she heard that the villagers, led by the Party secretary, had tried to storm the granary at the commune headquarters but had been shot by members of the militia armed with guns.