Good God! Take down your kill list for a day and look at the
garbage that crawls out!
(B) I finally found this--I was looking for it maybe a month
ago. It's selections from the "Introduction" to volume
3, _The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-66_ of Roderick MacFarquhar's
_Origins of the Cultural Revolution_ (Oxford). I think it gives
a good picture of what we know, what we guess, and how limited
our information is (and will be) about the GLF famine, and a
good picture of other issues as well...
Fengyang county's claim to fame is as the native place of
the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang. Situated in the
northeast of the central China province of Anhui, the county's
perennial poverty is underlined by an old saying that after Zhu's
birth, nine years in every ten were hit by famine. But even by
Fengyang's grim standards, the famine brought about by the Great
Leap Forward (GLF, 1958-60) was disastrous. In 1959 and 1960,
60,245 people died, 17.7 percent of the county's population of
335,698. In the worst-hit communes, the percentages ranged as
high as 26.9 percent, 26.6 percent, and 24.2 percent. In one
of these communes' component brigades, the percentage was 39.7
percent; 1,627 people died out of a total population of 4,100....
[In the later 1960s] a teacher 'sent down' to learn from the
poor peasants during the Cultural Revolution found herself in
a village where half the population had died in 1960....
Fengyang's plight may have been exceptional, but the whole
province suffered terribly. By the early 1960s, "it was
an open secret that millions... mostly peasants, had died of
starvation" in Anhui. Even in the provincial capital, Hefei,
the grain ration had been cut to as little as 312 catties a year
by the summer of 1959.... According to official statistics, the
provincial output of grain declined precipitously in 1958 (13.9
percent) and 1959 (a further 20.7 percent) and continued to fall
through 1961, causing the provincial population to drop from
34.2 million at the end of 1959 to 29.8 million at the end of
1961.... According to a former senior official, 8 million people
died in the province as a result of the GLF.
The population data for Sichuan, where grain output fell from
a 1958 peak of 22,455,000 tons to 13,395,000 tons in 1960, tell
a similar story. China's most populous province reached a post-revolution
peak of 70,810,000 inhabitans at the end of the 1st FYP in 1957.
Four years later... the figure had dropped by over 6 million....
In Shandong... there were 650,000 extra deaths in the year
following the relaunching of the GLF in September 1959.... With
the average provincial per capita consumption of the staple food,
grain, falling to 0.42 lb. a day, between a quarter and a third
of the province's 54+ million people were reckoned to be going
hungry....
Even in less-devastated provinces like Hebei, the sick, the
elderly, andinfants died.... Brigades issued certificates permitting
peasants to go begging.... In Beijing, presumably a privileged
environment, per capita annual pork consumption dropped from
13.3 catties in 1958 to 5.3 catties in 1960. It would fall to
2.1 catties in 1961.... In Shanghai, retail sales of pork dropped
from 65,800 tons in 1958 to 17,600 tons in 1960, and then again
to a post-GLF low of 7,500 tons in 1961....
In the Chinese gulag, conditions were far worse. In one prison
camp, working hours had to be reduced, and experiments were made
with feeding the prisoneers paper pulp and marsh water plankton.
The former produced dire constipation, while the latter killed
off the weaker prisoners....
...[A]t the start of the 1960s China was in the grip of the
worst man-made famine in history. With the GLF... CCP Chairman
Mao Zedong had hoped with one supreme national effort to life
his nation and people out of poverty. Instead he had brought
about a human catastrophe. The most recent Western demographic
analysis indicates that there were 30 million excess deaths between
1958 and 1961.
As the death toll mounted, China's leaders reportedly rationed
themselves, although they still ate relatively well. Mao denied
himself meat for seven months in 1960. Premier Zhou Enlai, who
used to calculate the population's grain needs on his desk abacus,
reportedly confined himself to about 15 lb. of grain a month,
saving the remainder of his ration for when he had to entertain....
But at least the Chairman called off--forever, as it turned
out--what some colleagues had rightly called 'reckless advance'....
[I]n 1956... after collectivization... Mao first entertained
visions of leaping economic progress. Now, after five years of
pressing, he reluctantly abandoned the delusion that China could
become a superpower overnight.
The failure of the GLF changed the thinking of most CCP leaders
about China's economic development--even those who, like head
of state Liu Shaoqi, had enlisted enthusiastically.... Their
agonizing reappraisals in the early 1960s made Mao inordinately
suspicious of their private perceptions of him as a post-revolutionary
leader. His paranoia blended with a genuine concern about China's
political future in the context of both domestic demoralization
and what he saw as the renunciation of Leninism in the Soviet
Union.... The anti-Stalin 'secret speech' of CPSU 1st secretary
Nikita Khrushchev had embarrassed Mao, who, like the late Soviet
dictator, luxuriated in a hyperbolic 'cult of personality'....
During the early 1960s, as relations worsened, Mao pondered how
to avert a similar betrayal of the revolution in China.
The collapse of his hopes for a collectivist utopia at home
and a fraternity of communist nations abroad had a profound impact
on the Chairman's thinking. This volume chronicles how Mao, having
failed in the material transformation of China, came to focus
all his energies upon the nation's spiritual metamorphosis. It
seeks to explain why, in the course of that endeavour, the Chairman
decided to tear down and rebuild a regime he had done so much
to create...
Professor
of Economics J. Bradford DeLong, 601 Evans Hall, #3880