Great Chinese Famine

Aside from the "Three Years of Great Famine" (), there are two names for the famine that have been used by the Chinese government. Initially, the usual name was "Three Years of Natural Disasters" (). In June 1981, this was changed to "Three Years of Difficulty" (), thus no longer blaming nature alone for the famine. ==Causes of the famine==

The Great Chinese Famine was caused by a combination of radical agricultural policies, social pressure, economic mismanagement, and natural disasters such as droughts and floods in farming regions. Great Leap Forward The Chinese Communist Party introduced drastic changes in farming policy during the Great Leap Forward. People's communes During the Great Leap Forward, farming was organized into people's communes and the cultivation of individual plots was forbidden. Previously farmers cultivated plots of land given to them by the government. The Great Leap Forward led to the agricultural economy being increasingly centrally planned. Regional Party leaders were given production quotas for the communes under their control. Their output was then appropriated by the state and distributed at its discretion. In 2008, former deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu and author Yang Jisheng would summarize his perspective of the effect of the production targets as an inability for supply to be redirected to where it was most demanded: The degree to which people's communes lessened or worsened the famine is controversial. Each region dealt with the famine differently, and timelines of the famine are not uniform across China. One argument is that excessive eating took place in the mess halls, and that this directly led to a worsening of the famine. If excessive eating had not taken place, one scholar argued, "the worst of the Great Leap Famine could still have been avoided in mid-1959". However, dire hunger did not set in to places like Da Fo village until 1960, and the public dining hall participation rate was found not to be a meaningful cause of famine in Anhui and Jiangxi. In Da Fo village, "food output did not decline in reality, but there was an astonishing loss of food availability associated with Maoist state appropriation". Agricultural techniques Along with collectivization, the central government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques that would be based on the ideas of later-discredited Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko. One of these ideas was close planting, whereby the density of seedlings was at first tripled and then doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other. In natural cycles they did fully compete, which actually stunted growth and resulted in lower yields. Another policy known as "deep plowing" was based on the ideas of Lysenko's colleague Terentiy Maltsev, who encouraged peasants across China to eschew normal plowing depths of 15–20 centimeters and instead plow deeply into the soil (1 to 2 Chinese feet or 33 to 66 cm). The deep plowing theory stated that the most fertile soil was deep in the earth, and plowing unusually deeply would allow extra-strong root growth. While deep plowing can increase yields in some contexts, the policy is generally considered to have hindered yields in China. Eliminate Sparrows campaign was targeted in the Eliminate Sparrows campaign In the Four Pests campaign, citizens were called upon to destroy mosquitoes, rats, flies, and sparrows. The mass eradication of the sparrows as part of the associated Eliminate Sparrows campaign resulted in an increase of the population of crop-eating insects, which had no predators without the sparrows. Illusion of superabundance Beginning in 1957, the Chinese Communist Party began to report excessive production of grain because of pressure from superiors. However, the actual production of grain throughout China was decreasing from 1957 to 1961. For example: • In Sichuan Province, even though the collected grain was decreasing from 1958 to 1961, the numbers reported to the central government kept increasing. • In Gansu, the grain yield declined by 4,273,000 tonnes from 1957 to 1961. The effects of the illusion of superabundance were significant, leaving some historians to argue that it was the major cause of much of the starvation throughout China. Yang Dali argued that there were three main consequences from the illusion of superabundance: Iron and steel production s for producing steel Iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement, and millions of peasants were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron and steel production workforce. Much of the iron produced by the peasant population ended up being too weak to be used commercially, and agricultural laborers and production were lost. More policies from the central government Economists Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared showed that, much as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had earlier claimed, aggregate production was sufficient for avoiding famine and that the famine was caused by over-procurement and poor distribution within the country. They show that unlike most other famines, there were surprisingly more deaths in places that produced more food per capita, explaining that the inflexibility in the centrally planned food procurement system explains at least half of the famine mortality. Economic historians James Kung and Shuo Chen show that there was more over-procurement in places where politicians faced more competition. In addition, policies from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the central government, particularly the Three Red Banners and the Socialist Education Movement (SEM), proved to be ideologically detrimental to the worsening famine. The Three Red Banners of the CCP "sparked the fanaticism of 1958". The implementation of the Mass line, one of the three banners which told people to "go all out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, better, and more economical results", is cited in connection to the pressures officials felt to report a superabundance of grain. The SEM, established in 1957, also led to the severity of the famine in various ways, including causing the "illusion of superabundance" (浮夸风). Once the exaggerations of crop yields from the Mass Line were reported, "no one dared to 'dash cold water on further reports. The SEM also led to the establishment of conspiracy theories in which the peasants were believed to be pretending to be hungry in order to sabotage the state grain purchase. Power relations in local governments Local governments had just as much, if not more, influence on the famine as did higher rings of government. As the Great Leap Forward progressed, many provincial leaders began aligning themselves with Mao and higher Party leaders. Local leaders were forced to choose between doing what was best for their community and guarding their reputation politically. Landlords began "denouncing any opposition as 'conservative rightism, which is defined broadly as anything anti-communist. In an environment of conspiracy theories directed against peasants, saving extra grain for a family to eat, espousing the belief that the Great Leap Forward should not be implemented, or merely not working hard enough were all seen as forms of "conservative rightism". Peasants became unable to speak openly on collectivization and state grain purchase. With a culture of fear and recrimination at both a local and official level, speaking and acting against the famine became a seemingly impossible task. Zeng firmly believed in the Great Leap Forward and tried to build relationships with higher officials rather than maintain local ties. Zeng proposed agricultural projects without consulting colleagues, which caused Anhui's agriculture to fail terribly. Zhang Kaifan, a party secretary and deputy-governor of the province, heard rumours of a famine breaking out in Anhui and disagreed with many of Zeng's policies. Zeng reported Zhang to Mao for such speculations. As a result, Mao labeled Zhang "a member of the 'Peng Dehuai anti-Party military clique and he was purged from the local party. Zeng was unable to report on the famine when it became an emergency situation, as this would prove his hypocrisy. For this he was described as a "blatant political radical who almost single-handedly damaged Anhui". Jiangxi encountered a situation almost opposite to that of Anhui. The leaders of Jiangxi publicly opposed some of the Great Leap programs, quietly made themselves unavailable, and even appeared to take a passive attitude towards the Maoist economy. As the leaders worked collaboratively among themselves, they also worked with the local population. By creating an environment in which the Great Leap Forward did not become fully implemented, the Jiangxi government "did their best to minimize damage". From these findings, scholars Manning and Wemheuer concluded that much of the severity of the famine was due to provincial leaders and their responsibility for their regions. Natural disasters (center front) visited Luokou Yellow River Bridge during the 1958 Yellow River flood. In July 1958, the Yellow River flood affected 741,000 people in 1708 villages and inundated over 3.04 million mu (over half a million acres) of cultivated fields. The spokesperson of the Flood Prevention Center of Chinese government stated on 27 July 1958, that: But the government was encouraged to report success and hide failures. In contrast, historian Frank Dikötter has argued that most floods during the famine were not due to unusual weather, but to massive, poorly planned and poorly executed irrigation works which were part of the Great Leap Forward. Some of the works, such as the Red Flag Canal, made positive contributions to irrigation, but researchers have pointed out that the massive hydraulic construction project led to many deaths due to starvation, epidemics, and drowning, which contributed to the famine. However, there have been disagreements on the significance of the drought and floods in causing the Great Famine. Moreover, Yang Jisheng, a senior journalist from Xinhua News Agency, reports that Xue Muqiao, then head of the National Statistics Bureau of China, said in 1958, "We give whatever figures the upper-level wants" to overstate natural disasters and relieve official responsibility for deaths due to starvation. According to economist Daniel Houser and others, 69% of the Famine was due to government policies while the rest (31%) was due to natural disasters. ==Extent of the famine==

Production drop Policy changes affecting how farming was organized coincided with droughts and floods. Weather had been relatively mild for much of the 1950s, but became particularly bad by 1959, driving down crop yields. As a result, year-over-year grain production fell dramatically. The harvest was down by 15% in 1959 compared to 1958, and by 1960, it was at 70% of its 1958 level. Specifically, according to China's governmental data, crop production decreased from 200 million tons (or 400 billion jin) in 1958 to 170 million tons (or 340 billion jin) in 1959, and to 143.5 million tons (or 287 billion jin) in 1960. Death toll The excess mortality associated with the famine is intensely debated. The death toll has been estimated by former CCP officials and international experts, with most giving a number in the range of 15–55 million deaths. According to a declassified CIA report, Mao Zedong himself suggested, in a discussion with Field Marshal Montgomery in Autumn 1961, that "unnatural deaths" exceeded 5 million in 1960–1961. Jasper Becker, a British journalist and author of ''Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine'', wrote that most estimates of the famine death toll range from 30 to 60 million, and also mentioned in the book that several sources said "50 and 60 million deaths were cited at internal meetings of senior Party officials". Maoist author Gao Mobo writes that anti-communist writers prefer to stretch the death toll number as high as possible while those sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Revolution prefer to see the number as low as possible, with both sides thus bending their estimates beyond what is most plausible. Due to the lack of food and incentive to marry at that time, according to China's official statistics, China's population in 1961 was about 658,590,000, some 14,580,000 lower than in 1959. The birth rate decreased from 2.922% (1958) to 2.086% (1960) and the death rate increased from 1.198% (1958) to 2.543% (1960), while the average numbers for 1962–1965 are about 4% and 1%, respectively. Table of estimates Primary accounts Lu Baoguo, a Xinhua reporter based in Xinyang, explained to Yang Jisheng why he never reported on his experience: Yu Dehong, the secretary of a party official in Xinyang in 1959 and 1960, stated: Cannibalism There are widespread oral reports, though little official documentation, of human cannibalism being practiced in various forms as a result of the famine. To survive, people had to resort to every possible means, from eating soil and poisons to stealing and killing and even to eating human flesh. Yang Jisheng, a retired Chinese reporter, said "Parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents. And we couldn't have imagined there was still grain in the warehouses. At the worst time, the government was still exporting grain." Due to the scale of the famine, some have speculated that the resulting cannibalism could be described as "on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century". == Aftermath ==

Initial reactions and cover-ups '' (1961). Provincial and local party leaders, for their part, conspired to cover up shortfalls and reassign blame in order to protect their own lives and positions. Mao was kept unaware of some of the starvation of villagers in the rural areas who were suffering, as the birth rate began to plummet and deaths increased in 1958 and 1959. In visits to Henan province in 1958, Mao observed what local officials claimed was increases in crop yield of one thousand to three thousand percent achieved, supposedly, in massive 24-hour pushes organized by the officials which they called "sputnik launches". But the numbers were faked, and so were the fields that Mao observed, which had been carefully prepared in advance of Mao's visit by local officials, who removed shoots of grain from various fields and carefully transplanted them into a field prepared especially for Mao, to appear to be a bumper crop. The local officials became trapped by these sham demonstrations to Mao, and exhorted the peasants to reach unattainable goals, by "deep ploughing and close planting", among other techniques. This ended up making things much worse; the crop failed completely, leaving barren fields. No one was in a position to challenge Mao's ideas as incorrect, so peasants went to extreme lengths to keep up the charade; some grew seedlings in their bedding and coats and, after the seedlings quickly sprouted, "planted" them in fields—the bedding made the plants look high and healthy. The post office in Xinyang confiscated 1,200 outgoing letters begging for help. This kind of deception was far from uncommon; a famous propaganda picture from the famine shows Chinese children from Shandong province ostensibly standing atop a field of wheat, so densely grown that it could apparently support their weight. In reality, they were standing on a bench concealed beneath the plants, and the "field" was again entirely composed of individually transplanted stalks. Relief measures and recovery In January 1961, the 9th Plenary Session of the 8th Central Committee initiated a policy of readjustment summarized as "adjustment, consolidation, filling out, and improvement", marking a shift away from some of the Great Leap Forward's most extreme measures. China also increased grain purchases and imports beginning in 1961. Between 1961 and 1963, China imported grain from countries including Australia and Canada; these imports were used to supply cities and, in turn, made it possible to reduce grain collections demanded from rural producers. Response from Taiwan In response to the famine on Mainland China, the Government of the Republic of China and the Free China Relief Agency launched a large scale donation campaign throughout Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora community to collect and to deliver aid to the victims of the famine. Initially, the plan was to collect the aid and funds via the Free China Relief Agency and then pass it onto the Red Cross in order to deliver it to mainland. The Red Cross complied with the request from the Free China Relief Agency and contacted the PRC government for permission to deliver the aid. But, the PRC government refused the aid, claiming that "Although our rural areas suffered serious natural calamities in the past two years, there has never been a famine" and asserting that "the nation was fully capable of overcoming temporary difficulties caused by natural calamities". Upon receiving the negative reply, the Free China Relief Agency contacted the Republic of China Air Force to airdrop the aid onto the mainland. In the ensuing airdrop campaign, the ROC Air Force was able to deliver tons of humanitarian aid to famine-stricken civilians on the mainland through airdrops during the night. Cultural Revolution (1963). In April and May 1961, Liu Shaoqi, then President of the People's Republic of China, concluded after 44 days of field research in villages of Hunan that the causes of the famine were 30% natural disaster and 70% human error (三分天灾, 七分人祸). The policies of Mao Zedong were criticized. A series of economic reforms were carried out by Liu and Deng and others, including policies such as sanzi yibao (三自一包) which allowed free market and household responsibility for agricultural production. However, the disagreement between Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping over economic and social policy grew larger. In 1963, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement and in 1966, he launched the Cultural Revolution, during which Liu was accused of being a traitor and enemy agent for attributing only 30% to natural calamities. Liu was beaten and denied medicine for diabetes and pneumonia; he died in 1969. Reforms and reflections In December 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new Paramount Leader of China and launched the historic Reform and opening up program which fundamentally changed the agricultural and industrial system in China. Until the early 1980s, the Chinese government's stance was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by several planning errors, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters". During the "Boluan Fanzheng" period in June 1981, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially changed the name to "Three Years of Difficulty", and stated that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Right Deviation Struggle, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split. A number of high-ranking Chinese officials had expressed their views on the famine: • Zhao Ziyang, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, once said that "our Party never admitted mistakes. If things got really bad, we just found some scapegoats and blamed them, like Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. If scapegoats were hard to find, we simply blamed natural disasters, such as for the great famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s when tens of millions of people died, which was simply due to political errors of the Party." • Bo Yibo, one of the Eight Elders and former Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China, once said, "During the three difficult years, people across the country went into malnutrition due to lack of food, and edema was prevalent, resulting in an increasing number of deaths due to starvation among many rural areas. It is estimated that in 1960 alone, more than 10 million people died. With such thing happening during a time of peace, we as members of the Communist Party feel truly guilty in front of the people, and we must never forget this heavy lesson! " • Wan Li, former President of the National People's Congress of China, stated that "during the three difficult years after the People's Commune movement, people everywhere had edema and even starved to death. In Anhui alone, according to reports, there were 3-4 million people died 'abnormally' ...... We had been ' left ' for too long, and farmers were no longer motivated to work." • Tian Jiyun, former Vice Premier of China and former Vice President of the National People's Congress of China, stated that "looking back at the Three Years of Difficulty, people everywhere had edema and died of starvation, and tens of millions of people died abnormally, more than the total death toll during the entire Democratic Revolution. What was the reason for that? Liu Shaoqi said it was '30% natural disasters and 70% human error.' But it is now clear that the famine was mainly due to human error, which was the erroneous command, the 'Utopian Socialism', and the 'Left opportunism'." Researchers outside China have argued that the massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward were the key factors in the famine, or at least worsened nature-induced disasters. In particular, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen puts this famine in a global context, arguing that lack of democracy is the major culprit: "Indeed, no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country—no matter how poor." He adds that it is "hard to imagine that anything like this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and that has an independent press. During that terrible calamity the government faced no pressure from newspapers, which were controlled, and none from opposition parties, which were absent." Sen though also argues: "Despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. [...] India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame." ==See also==