Let’s have an insights on The Great Famine in China which remains a subject of intense debate and controversy, particularly around the accuracy of its reported death toll. During the late 1950s, leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were disconnected from the harsh realities faced by local farmers, relied on inflated harvest figures provided by officials.
These exaggerations not only misled policy decisions but also led to harsh measures that exacerbated the famine’s impact. This blog post delves into the discrepancies and myths surrounding the famine, exploring how official distortions and external influences shaped perceptions and policies, and questioning the widely cited death toll figures. Through personal anecdotes and historical analysis, we aim to shed light on the complexities behind the statistics and the real consequences for those who lived through this dark period.
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, from upper class urban families took local officials’ harvest figures at face value and encouraged them. Liu Shaoqi’s own Communist Experimental Commune in Hebei Province first exaggerated harvest figures like a 250 kg cabbage, 6000 kilo/mu of wheat, etc. Liu also encouraged peasants to speed the upgrade from collective co-ops to communes, to public canteens, to setting up local steel furnaces. Li Jinquan, Governor of Sichuan Province and Deng’s inner circle loyalist, boasted the rice havest in Chengdu suburb was 1200 kilo/mu when, in fact, it was 400.
The actual output of rice in 1959 in Sichuan was 15.82 million tons, but Li exaggerated the figure to 35 million tons, 49% of which then should go to the central government. When he couldn’t fulfill his quota, he used cruel methods to extort/expropriate the rice from the peasants and local cadres. That’s why Sichuan was one of the worst hit areas during GLF. People from Sichuan hated his guts, they beat him almost to death during Cultural Revolution because of his cruelty. However, after Deng became boss again, Liu got promoted.
Mao, who grew up working in the fields, was sufficiently alarmed to write to every official, down to village cadre level: “Last year the harvest was 300 jin per mu, and it would be very good to increase it by 100 or even 200 jin. But talking bout 800, 1000 and more is simply exaggerating. What’s the point?”
A Chinese Mom’s Discovery
As a Chinese who was born around that time and followed this debate in Chinese forums and social media since the very beginning, I totally agree with your analysis.
I believe the death toll of the famine from 1959 to 1962 has been greatly exaggerated by pro-Western and anti-Mao intellectuals in China. The 30 million death toll number (the lower estimation number by those who tried to discredit and demonize Mao) has been controversial in Chinese social media and BBS since the very first day it was made up and circulated in Chinese language forums. The estimation was first made by a Chinese journalist who doesn’t have any formal math training beyond high school level. Many people don’t agree with this number not only because the all of the estimation methods used are questionable, but also the number doesn’t conform to people’s life experience of that time.
For example, 30 million would count as about 5% of total population of that time, together with normal death rate of the period（between 1-1.2% annually), there should be about 8% death of population in three years, which means one death in every 13 people. But most people in Chinese forums debating this number couldn’t tell anybody they personally know of died during that period, not to mention starve to death, even most of those who ardently argue for this number couldn’t tell.
I have over hundred relatives across China, none of them died during those years. My father was a mid-level official at time (building and managing a new factory) in Beijing with relative high salary, the food ration was so little for him that he had edema; still he voluntarily reduced his own salary to help country go through this period, like many communist cadres did at the time. My mother was a student at an elite college. She told me her period stop due to malnutrition, so did many of her female school mates. Even with so little food for them, my mother and her female classmates shared their food ration with their male classmates. This is widely happened and what we heard the most from people who went through that time, not the death.
In past ten year, and special since Wechat got popular in China, I asked many people how many relatives or people they personally know of died during those year. In my college Wechat group (about 120 people), only one person from poorest province said several of his closed relatives dead, another from one of hardest hit province said his old grandma dead. In my high school classmate group, only one person said his grandmother died, another said that there were death in his home village including two of his relatives, but he didn’t give total number of his relatives in the village so I couldn’t tell if that exceed 5%（in rural China, people usually have large extended family).
Over the years, I also asked the same question to several maids of my aging relatives in Beijing. Those maids are all from poor rural countryside in China, only one from a poorest province said her grandparents dead during those three years.
My aunt was sent from Beijing to rural countryside in Henan province (one of the hardest hit province by the famine) to help, she told me that she only heard of people starved to death, didn’t witness any.
For me, the most obvious and main reason for the famine to happen is due to Mao and the Communist’s success, not their failure or crimes: they greatly reduced poverty, improved public health system so that they dramatically reduced infant mortality and increased people’s life expend icy, which resulted explosion of Chinese population in a very short time.
For several hundred years, China had been having difficulties to feed its people. Like what Mr. Unz said in his How Social Darwinism Made Modern China, “enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation”.
Before Deng’s reform, even most relatively well-off Chinese (like my family, before and after Mao took power in 1949) couldn’t afford to eat as well as Black slaves in the US (meat, fish and food with protein were rare and expensive). But less than ten years after Mao took power, Chinese population increased from around 450 million to 600 million. How could an already stretched Chinese agricultural system feed these suddenly increased extra 150 million people, before green revolution and under the US embargo? Disaster bound to happen with or without those mistakes made by the Communists during the Great Leap Forward. Chinese agricultural system and the young and inexperienced Chinese government were not equipped to handle this kind of situation.
Again, my own family is a good example to prove this. Both of my parents are from relatively well to do families in big cities in China before Mao took power in 1949. My father had nine siblings, two of them died of disease before age 30, another before age 40, all before 1949. None of his siblings who were alive at 1949 died before age 70, many passed age 90. My mother experienced two plagues at very young age, she witnessed the deaths of her three closest relatives who lived with my grandparents. After 1949, none of her family members was dead of premature deaths.
I grew up in the US and read several English language news publications cover-to-cover during the 1960s. The MSM was totally dominated by anti-Mao propaganda. One thing I remember clearly was the contradiction between extreme hardship in China, and the longevity statistics. The per capita GDP was rated at at $400, but the longevity was nearly 60. This was much higher than in other poor countries at the time and comparable to the expectancy in developed nations. For $400 you couldn´t pay the property taxes for a roof over your head in the US. So I concluded that there was something horribly wrong with the statistics.
Looking back it seems that much of the anti-Chinese atmosphere at the time was driven by the British. They wanted to keep their colony in Hong-Kong, and to expand the dismemberment and plundering of China. They had a huge influence on the American press and our political elites: especially the circle around President Eisenhower. This led to emergency World War II taxes and the military draft continuing into the Vietnam War era.
