Mao's Great Famine (22 page)

How much grain was procured overall? Table 6 has three sets of statistics. The first two show the overall figures reached by Kenneth Walker in 1983 following his research into published statistics as well as the numbers provided by Yang Jisheng from the Bureau for Grain. But, as we have seen, the Bureau for Grain should not be taken at its word, as it had neither the expertise nor the political inclination to collect the actual figures. The third set of statistics comes from the notes taken by the Yunnan Office for Statistics in 1962 as its members attended one of the national conferences periodically convened by the Bureau for Statistics in Beijing. No one set of true numbers will ever be discovered in the archives, since every figure was a statement bound by politics and expediency rather than by expertise. But it seems that the Bureau for Grain compiled figures which were far below both what foreign observers managed to calculate on the basis of published regional statistics and what the Bureau for Statistics compiled in 1962. In short, evidence from different sources shows that the level of procurement varied from 30 to 37 per cent nationally, far above the more usual 20 to 25 per cent extracted up to 1958. As Mao had indicated on 25 March 1959 at a secret gathering of party leaders, ‘If you don’t go above a third, people won’t rebel.’ He himself encouraged much greater procurements than usual, at a time when it was well known that the crop figures had been inflated.
⁸
In other words, the idea that the state mistakenly took too much grain from the countryside because it assumed that the harvest was much bigger than it was is largely a myth – at most partially true for the autumn of 1958 only.

A proportion of the procured grain was sold back to the farmers – at a premium – but they were at the end of a long waiting list. As we have seen in Chapters 10 and 15, the party had evolved a set of political priorities which ignored the needs of the countryside. The leadership decided to increase grain exports to honour its foreign contracts and maintain its international reputation, to such an extent that a policy of ‘export above all else’ was adopted in 1960. It chose to increase its foreign aid to its allies, shipping grain for free to countries like Albania. Priority was also given to the growing populations of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and the province of Liaoning – the heartland of heavy industry – followed by the requirements of city people in general. The consequence of these political decisions was not only an increase in the proportion of procurements, but also an increase in the overall amount of grain handed over to the state out of these procurements. In the case of Zhejiang, for instance, an annual average of 1.68 million tonnes left the province from 1958 to 1961, in contrast to 1.2 million tonnes in each of the preceding three years. In 1958 alone that meant that more than half of the procured grain was handed over to Beijing even before the province started to feed its urban residents.
⁹
Overall, the amount of grain taken out of the procurements by the state to feed Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Liaoning province and maintain its export market went up every single quarter, from 1.6 million tonnes in the third quarter of 1956 to 1.8 million tonnes in the same period in 1957, to 2.3 million tonnes in 1958, to 2.5 million tonnes a year later and to a high of 3 million tonnes in three months in 1960.
¹⁰

The net effect of these policy priorities was that the lives of many villagers were destroyed. As Wang Renzhong put it in a meeting of the leaders of all southern provinces in August 1961, ‘extraordinarily difficult conditions demand extraordinary measures’, explaining that grain could be provided only to the cities, so that villages in the grip of famine would have to fend for themselves. As he saw it, some of the parts had to be sacrificed in order to keep the whole.
¹¹

He was not alone. Zhou Enlai, for one, was relentless in pushing for greater requisitions. He was the man in charge of making sure that enough grain was taken from the countryside to feed the cities and earn foreign currency. He badgered provincial bosses in person, over the phone, through his deputies and in a ceaseless string of telegrams marked ‘urgent’. He too had a keen sense of hierarchy in which the needs of the countryside had to give way to the interests of the state – which he represented. He knew full well that the vast amounts of grain he was given by Li Jingquan, a radical follower of Mao, could lead only to a situation of mass famine in Sichuan. But others, too, clung rigidly to the view that the starvation of the people mattered less than the demands of the state. Deng Xiaoping thought that in the command economy requisitions had to be enforced ruthlessly ‘as if in a war’: no matter how much a provincial leader tried to defend his turf the party line had to be held, or the state would perish. Speaking at the end of 1961, when the extent of the famine was well known among the leadership, this is what Deng Xiaoping had to say about Sichuan, where huge requisitions caused the deaths of many millions of people: ‘In the past, procurements have been too heavy in some regions, for instance in Sichuan, where they have been heavy for quite a few years, including this year, but there was no alternative. I approve of the Sichuan style, they never moan about hardship, we should all learn from Sichuan. And I am not saying this because I myself am from Sichuan.’
¹²
As we have seen, Mao phrased it differently: ‘When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’
¹³

The procurement prices paid by the state for grain varied from province to province. In the case of maize, for instance, it ranged from 124 yuan per tonne in Guangxi to 152 yuan just across the border in Guangdong in early 1961. The difference for rice could be up to 50 per cent, for instance 124 yuan per tonne in Guangxi versus 180 yuan for the same quantity in Shanghai.
¹⁴
The state made a substantial profit by exporting rice for 400 yuan per tonne.
¹⁵
These prices were periodically adjusted, but the procurement prices remained so low that more often than not farmers produced grain at a loss. As late as 1976 it was unprofitable simply for that reason to cultivate wheat, barley, maize and sorghum. The income on rice was marginal.
¹⁶
But in a command economy farmers no longer decided for themselves which crop they could grow, as they had to follow the orders of local cadres instead – who in turn had to apply the commands of the party. And the planners were transfixed by grain output, deciding to force an ever greater proportion of farmers to concentrate on grain – to the detriment of the overall economy. This vision was translated in 1959 into a policy of encouraging grain production above all else, leading many provinces to extend the surface cultivated with grain by some 10 per cent.
¹⁷
Farmers who were asked to abandon more remunerative crops for maize, rice or wheat lost out. For instance, after some villages in Zhejiang were told to grow grain instead of the melons, sugarcane and tobacco they had habitually cultivated, they saw their income plunge.
¹⁸

Another problem with the command economy was that officials on the ground did not always know what they were doing, and they imposed decisions which turned out to be disastrous. We have already seen how close cropping and deep ploughing were insisted on by the regime at the height of the Great Leap Forward. This was compounded by capricious interventions by local cadres with little knowledge of agriculture. In 1959 in Luokang commune a local leader decided to replace the existing crop with sweet potatoes on half of the available acreage, only to change his mind later and substitute the potatoes with peanuts. These were then torn out to make room for rice instead. The previous year the commune had tried deep ploughing, using vast concentrations of manpower on small strips of land to dig deep furrows, much of it by hand. Huge amounts of fertiliser were applied, in some cases up to 30 tonnes a hectare. It all came to nothing.
¹⁹
In Kaiping county, Guangdong, thousands of villagers were repeatedly forced to plant a crop in the early spring of 1959 despite bitterly cold weather: the seeds froze on three occasions, and in the end fields yielded a paltry 450 kilos per hectare.
²⁰

But even more disastrous was the command to plant less. Mao was so convinced that the countryside was heaving under the weight of grain that he suggested that a third of the land be allowed to lie fallow. ‘People in China on average cultivate three
mu
, but I think that two
mu
is enough.’
²¹
Combined with an exodus of farmers towards the cities, the overall acreage under cultivation plummeted. In Hunan in 1958 some 5.78 million hectares were cultivated with grain, but by 1962 this was down by 15 per cent to 4.92 million hectares.
²²
In Zhejiang province some 65,000 hectares of cultivated land vanished every year, leading to a loss of about a tenth of the total acreage by 1961.
²³
These provincial averages masked deep regional differences. In the Wuhan region, for instance, just over half of the available 37,000 hectares were tilled.
²⁴
Tan Zhenlin, the man in charge of agriculture, noted in 1959 that some 7.3 million hectares were allowed to lie fallow.
²⁵
Speaking in early 1961 Peng Zhen estimated that the total sown area stood at 107 million hectares: if true this would have meant a waste of 23 million hectares since 1958.
²⁶

To this loss had to be added a change in the proportion of grains grown. The urban population much preferred fine grains – rice, wheat, soybeans – although in the north considerable amounts of coarse grain – sorghum, maize and millet – were also consumed. But sweet potatoes were regarded as peasant fare and were not generally eaten in significant amounts.
²⁷
Sweet potatoes, moreover, were a perishable commodity, meaning that the state had a limited interest in them: most of the procurements were in fine grains. But the proportion of sweet potatoes grew during the years of famine, as cadres responded to pressure to increase the yield by switching to the tuber, which was easy to cultivate. More often than not farmers were left with potatoes only.

By imposing a monopoly on the sale of grain the state undertook a task of mammoth proportions. State employees had to buy the grain, store it, transport it to different destinations across the country, store it again and distribute it against ration coupons – all according to a master plan rather than the incentives created by the market. Even a wealthy country might have baulked at the immensity of the task, but China was a poor nation, and a very large one at that. State storage – as opposed to small inventories distributed across a wide range of private and public producers, retailers and consumers – contributed in no small measure to the destruction of grain. Insects were common, rats abounded. A detailed investigation by the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress showed that in Nanxiong county an astonishing 2,533 of all 2,832 local granaries had rats. Insects infested a third of all 123 state granaries and an even larger proportion of the 728 commune granaries in Chao’an county.
²⁸
In Yunnan in the first half of 1961 some 240,000 tonnes were contaminated by vermin.
²⁹
In Zhucheng county, Shandong, each kilo of grain was crawling with hundreds of insects.
³⁰

And then there was rot. Poor storage conditions contributed to it, as well as the practice, not always successfully detected by grain inspectors, of bulking up grain with water. In Guangdong close to a third of 1.5 million tonnes of state grain contained too much water, so that one granary after another succumbed to rot.
³¹
In Hunan one-fifth of all grain in state granaries was either infested with insects or corrupted by a high water content. In Changsha, the provincial capital, over half of all stored grain was contaminated.
³²
Temperatures in the state granaries were often too high, accelerating the blight, and in turn benefiting the insects, which took advantage of the heat and moisture. In Yunnan the temperature in some of the granaries reached 39–43 degrees Celsius.
³³
Even far away from the humidity of subtropical China, in the cold winter of the northern plain, rot was common. Just outside the capital, in the middle of the worst year of famine, well over 50 tonnes of sweet potatoes decayed in a dozen villages in Yanqing county. A further 6 tonnes putrefied in storage facilities across the Haidian district in Beijing.
³⁴

Significant losses were also caused by fire, through arson or accident. In Yunnan alone 70 tonnes of food went up in smoke each month in 1961; more than 300 tonnes were completely written off each and every month in 1960 and in 1961 due to blight, insects and fire. The Bureau for Security calculated that the grain lost to fire in 1960 alone in that province would have been sufficient to feed 1.5 million people adequately for a whole month.
³⁵
Yunnan was not the worst offender. In the Anshan region, Liaoning province, 400 tonnes were destroyed each month in 1960, although this figure included only losses that could be attributed to theft and corruption – a topic we will address later.
³⁶

The transportation system was disastrously affected by the programmes of the Great Leap Forward. The railway system was paralysed by early 1959, overwhelmed by the amount of goods the plan directed from one end of the country to the other. Lorries rapidly ran out of fuel. All over the country grain was going to waste on railway sidings. In the small provincial capital of Kunming, some 15 tonnes were lost on trains and lorries each month.
³⁷
But this was nothing compared to what happened in the countryside after the harvest. In Hunan, the entire system seized up in the summer of 1959 because of a shortage of hundreds of freight wagons which were needed every day. Lorries were lacking too, so that only half the grain could be transported from the countryside to the main railway stations. Some 200,000 tonnes of grain accumulated by the roadside, although only 60,000 tonnes could be loaded every month.
³⁸