Unburied corpses, starving children and even cannibalism, a great calamity has befallen China. Yet this tragedy was not one orchestrated by the heavens, but by the errors and negligence of men. Between 1959 and 1961, China was under the spell of a terrible famine, claiming the lives of more than 30 million people. Mismanagement, corruption and human error, set in the stage of poor weather, the “Three Years of Difficulty” — as it is equivocally called — is the result of an overzealous attempt to modernize China, founded on unsound advice and poor principles and crippled by the disconnect between the ruling class and its subjects. How did an attempt to bolster China’s economic growth create such a disastrous famine?
Mao Zedong, President of the People’s Republic of China, was determined to rapidly industrialize the nation. Only recently unified, China had been crippled by years of instability and war. The war of resistance against Japan during the Second World War had leveled cities and killed millions, and a civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists would take its place, ending only in 1949.
The task on hand for the victorious Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was to reconstruct the Chinese society along the lines of Maoist thinking, an ideology which incorporated Marxism with Mao’s own thoughts. The CCP would begin work, ushering in a Five-Year Plan from 1952 to 1957 that mirrored and even outperformed the Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union. The overall output of China grew by 7% per year during the first Five-Year Plan, and coal production increased by 14% per year. Grain production, while less impressive, grew at a pace of 2% per year.
However, the Chinese leader would deem this speed as not being fast enough.
At a conference hosted in Moscow in 1957, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party made an ambitious claim — that China would overtake Britain’s industrial output within fifteen years.
Part of this urgency to industrialize had roots in its rocky relationship with the Soviet Union. An ideological rivalry was emerging within the communist bloc between the two superpowers, and Mao wanted to show that China, with its unique brand of Marxism, could take the place of the USSR as the ideological leader of the communist bloc.
In order to fulfill his goals, Mao introduced the “Great Leap Forward”, which espoused the thinking of “walking on two legs”, symbolizing a massive, two-pronged expansion in both agricultural and industrial output, with the former being achieved through collectivization and the introduction of new farming techniques.
Communes and Collectivisation
Rallying the people in a mass movement, peasant households in rural China were organized into communes. By October of 1958, these communes contained 99% of all peasants across China, amounting to more than 260 million people. Within those communes, peasants pooled together their manpower and resources and lived a communal lifestyle, such as staying in communal dormitories and eating in communal kitchens. Communal schools, communal nurseries, and communal kitchens were built to meet the needs of the households. Women, now freed up from household duties from living in the communes, further expanded the rural workforce. A grain production quota would be imposed on each commune, which would then be collected by the state.
Despite the rhetorics of pooling resources together to bolster output, agricultural output suffered for various reasons. In communes, peasants were deprived of the right to farm their own crops and produce their own food, and could no longer have a private life. Strenuous working hours were also imposed on the farmers, all of which hindered productivity.
Furthermore, peasants also became swept in mass campaigns aimed at improving agricultural output, many of these campaigns being ill-advised or based on poor knowledge.
The “Four Pests Campaign” and the ecological crisis
One of the disastrous campaigns introduced during this period was the “Four Pests Campaign”, with one of its primary targets being the abominable sparrows, which supposedly leeched off the peasants’ hard work. Farmers were riled up by the state in an active campaign against the sparrows. Beyond just destroying their nests and eggs, slings and guns were employed to shoot the birds down, and the sounds of clanging pots and gongs filled the countryside, scaring the birds from landing.
It was a major success, annihilating mosquitoes, flies and rats, but it worked too well. An estimated 1.5 billion sparrows perished during this mass campaign, many of which fell from the sky due to sheer fatigue, giving way to an environmental catastrophe. With their natural predators gone, pests such as locusts and grasshoppers experienced a population boom, descending upon the crops and ravaging the fields.
“Revolutionising” Agriculture
The introduction of “revolutionary” agricultural techniques, such as “close-cropping” or “deep-plowing”, would further weaken output. Peasants were directed by the state to grow the seeds closely together to maximize output, justified by Mao’s unscientific belief that plants “with company… grow easily”. “Deep plowing”, on the other hand, saw peasants digging deep into the soil and applying fertilizer to each layer of the soil, based on the impression that the plants would grow powerful roots and taller stalks.
In reality, the excessive digging done by farmers — who often resorted to using their own hands in the absence of proper tools — resulted in the destruction of the fertile topsoil. The employment of state terror came hand-in-hand in ensuring the obedience of the masses, who often questioned, but could not dare to voice it out, the effectiveness of these techniques. With a series of purges still fresh in their minds, the farmers, fearing the label of a “rightist” and the persecution which would ensue, stayed in line, dissuaded from going against state authority. The result was a sharp drop in agricultural output, with the average amount of grain per capita dropping from 205kg in 1957 to 154kg in 1961.
While unsound agricultural practices caused output to whither, the quota set by the state for each commune was accelerating in the other direction.
Requisitioning more and more
Moved by a revolutionary zeal to beat other communes — or perhaps by fear of punishment for underperforming — local officials and party cadres often exaggerated the grain output in these communes, sending impressive but falsified figures of agricultural output to Beijing. These reports gave the impression of a booming agricultural sector and in turn, were used as justifications by the central government to collect even more grain from the peasants.
As a result, a vicious cycle began.
Exaggerating the output meant that more was to be collected, an expectation which local officials did not dare to disappoint. This further imposed a heavier strain on the already diminishing foodstuffs in the communes. When farmers could not meet the inflated quotas, the local officials resorted to violence. Rather than seeing the inability to collect sufficient grain as the product of exaggeration and falsification, the state and its apparatus saw it as the outcome of greedy peasants hoarding grain. Beatings, torture and even death — those were the fates of the peasants who “underperformed”. This fate was shared by the whistleblowers, who dared to point out that there was simply not enough food.
Requisition of grain and other agricultural products ballooned, blind to the eventual starvation of the peasants producing them.
“Mao’s” Great Famine: Pride, Ideology, and Repression
In the face of the growing crisis, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, out of his pride and ideological fervor, failed to alleviate the plights of the peasants. Despite reports of famine and peasant abuse being known by the central government as early as 1958, Mao failed to take any action.
The Lushan Conference of 1959, instead, saw Mao doubling down on his policies. A clash between the Chairman and the Defence Minister Peng Dehuai, who had criticized the Great Leap Forward and the human suffering he had witnessed in his home in Hunan, convinced Mao to radicalize rather than reform. In the wake of the conference, the policies of the Great Leap Forward were promoted with renewed vigor, and those who dared to stand against Mao and his policies, like Peng, were branded as “rightists” and purged. In the face of criticism and the harsh reality that the Great Leap Forward had failed, Mao’s solution was to ramp up persecution, launching an intensive purge between 1959 and 1960 to silence dissenters. State terror at all levels, targetting the peasants all the way to the central government, ensured that the peasants would not be relieved of their suffering.
Even at the height of the food crisis, the stockpiled grain was not made available to the peasants, and was instead increasingly being moved to urban areas, justified by Mao as being “better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill”. It was even being exported overseas, to the developing communist nations of Cuba and in Africa, and even to the nearby Soviet Union, where the Chinese attempted to meet debt payment ahead of schedule.
Blinded by pride and a sense of ideological righteousness, both within his party and as a leader in the communist bloc, Mao rejected humanitarian aid in the time of crisis — from the Red Cross, from Japan, from East Germany — and failed to reconcile with the disastrous campaign he had unleashed upon China.
The result? An unimaginably terrifying manmade famine, involving harrowing stories of spouses and children being sold for food, cruel forms of torture and abuse of peasants by state officials, and the accounts of people murdering their own family members before eating them out of sheer hunger.
At last, the manic campaign of the Great Leap Forward would wind down. In January 1962, Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, did the unthinkable, boldly pinning the blame of peasant “difficulties” on the central leadership. Facing the support that Liu garnered against the Great Leap Forward, Mao would approve a policy of “economic adjustment” months later, which would reverse much of the reforms introduced during the period. With communes dismantled and many of Mao’s ideas discredited, Mao, too, would retreat into the background of the party leadership, overshadowed by new leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi as they reconstructed China’s economy after the calamity.
But he would have the last laugh. Fearing the desecration of his legacy — as Nikita Khrushchev had done to Stalin after his death — Mao Zedong would stage a magnificent comeback. For the time being, Mao would choose to bide his time, but when he struck again, the Chairman would take revenge on those who had criticized him and his policies, unleashing in his wake a massive political and social upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution.
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