Great Leap Forward famine

Famine

Date: 1959-1962

Place: The People’s Republic of China

Result: Casualties so vast they can only be estimated at between 15 million and 50 million dead

The greatest famine—and perhaps the greatest natural disaster—in the twentieth century occurred virtually unnoticed in the outside world. So tight was the control of information coming out of the People’s Republic of China in the late 1950’s that the Great Leap Forward famine was unpublicized. The starving millions in China knew that something was wrong in their area, but the national press was reporting on the spectacular success of the government’s programs and acknowledging only food shortages due to bad weather in some localities.

It is hard to say how much knowledge even the Chinese leaders had of this tragedy. Surely the government knew that many of its citizens were hungry, but the lack of a free press meant each leader had to rely on limited personal experience or on government reports from village to county to province to the capital that were inflated every step of the way. In many cases, these reported on bountiful harvests, when the villagers had in fact already eaten the seed needed to plant the next year’s crop before the onset of the harsh unproductive winter season. One year the government reported total grain production of 375 million tons when only about 200 million tons had been produced.

In the Great Leap Forward famine, the losses were so great not even the numbers of victims—let alone their names—are known. So far is the world from knowing the exact number of casualties that they can be estimated only by a demographic analysis of the number of “excess deaths.” Scholarly estimates of the number of deaths range from a low of 15 million to a high of 50 million, a measure so imprecise as to give a range of deaths that could be off by a factor of 3 or as much as 300 percent. Thirty-five million people could have died without any record of it.

Geography—both physical and human—contributed to this catastrophe. Since ancient times, China has been home to the world’s largest population and today has well over 1.3 billion people, or about a quarter of the world’s total population. China also has the world’s third-largest land area—trailing only Russia and Canada. This might seem to be adequate, but well over two-thirds of Chinese land is virtually uninhabitable desert and mountains, so China must feed 25 percent of the world’s people with only about 7 percent of the world’s arable (farmable) land.

Even in good times, avoiding hunger in China is difficult. With so large a land area, China has too much water (flooding) in some regions and not enough water (drought) in others in any given year. The key to a good national harvest is to have relatively fewer floods and droughts than normal. In 1959-1961, the odds turned against the Chinese in that a higher number than usual of both floods and droughts occurred. The 1960 weather conditions are considered the worst in twentieth century China.

Yet weather is only part of this story, and perhaps not even the most important part. Some scholars attribute only 30 percent of the catastrophe to the weather, reserving the brunt of the blame for failed government policies. To the outside world, the late 1950’s anti-Western Chinese Communist system seemed monolithic, and China was thought to have only minor differences with its ally the Soviet Union. In truth, there was a massive split between the two countries, with corresponding differences among the Chinese leaders. They were torn between a highly bureaucratized central planning system recommended by the Russians and a chaotic, voluntaristic path recommended by China’s Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong.

While Mao’s plan seemed to prevail, conflicts marred its execution in many areas. Mao’s Great Leap Forward plan was supposed to stimulate Chinese production so dramatically that China would overtake the British in fifteen years by fostering an ongoing revolutionary fervor among the Chinese. Many Chinese did respond enthusiastically, even accepting Mao’s idea that steel production could be stimulated by having villages build backyard iron furnaces. This idea led many to melt down perfectly good iron skillets and dismantle high-quality steel train rails, throw them into backyard furnaces, and turn out third-rate pig iron. While peasants were busy with this unproductive activity, they often failed to plant crops or to harvest ripe yields at the right time, further compounding the catastrophe.

In reality, neither of the paths was suitable for the crisis China faced. While industrial production slipped, grain production plunged disastrously, to about 75 percent of the level before the Great Leap Forward. Worse, much of this grain was siphoned off to pay for “aid” the Chinese were receiving from the Soviets. This meant that the grain available to feed the Chinese people became even less, exposing those most at risk—the sick, elderly, and children—to the horrors of this massive famine. The government’s policies clearly aggravated this unprecedented natural disaster.

Bibliography

Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.

Blecher, Marc. China Against the Tides. London: Pinter, 1997.

Christiansen, Fleming, and Shirin Rai. Chinese Politics and Society: An Introduction. London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996.

MacFarquhar, Roderick. The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-1966. Vol. 3 in The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960. Vol. 2 in The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Yang, Dali L. Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Zhao, Kate Xiao. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.