Mao's Great Famine (44 page)

Collectivisation was chequered with accidents, as we have seen in the last chapter. People were not only given contaminated products or tainted food, they also fell victim to poisoning accidents. In less than a month in 1960 some 134 fatal cases were reported to the Ministry of Hygiene, although this was a pale reflection of the reality on the ground. Pesticides were sometimes stored in canteens and granaries, while the tools used to prepare food or handle chemicals were not always kept apart. In Baodi county, Hebei, a roller contaminated with pesticides was used to mill the grain, and over a hundred villagers were poisoned. Nothing was done, the flour was sold a few days later, and another 150 people fell ill. In Wenshui, Shanxi, a pot used for poison found its way into the kitchen of a kindergarten, where more than thirty children ended up with severe intestinal pains. In Hubei fertiliser balls were mistaken for bean cakes. A thousand people fell ill, and thirty-eight died.
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As food ran out, the government started promoting new food technologies and substitute foods. Most of these were quite harmless. The ‘double-steam method’, heralded as a ‘great revolution in cooking technology’, enjoined cooks to steam the rice twice, adding water each time to bulk up the food.
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Some of the substitute foods consisted merely of ground corncobs, corn stalks or the chaff from soybeans and other grains. But the government also introduced new ersatz foods. Chlorella was heralded in the early 1950s by food experts around the world as a miracle form of algae that could convert twenty times more solar energy into protein than other plants. But the plankton soup that promised to pull millions out of hunger turned out to be impossible to produce and so vile to the palate that the craze eventually subsided. In China the watery slime was elevated to the status of miracle food during the famine. It could be cultivated and skimmed from swampy ponds, but more often than not it was grown in vats of human urine, the green stuff being scooped out, washed and cooked with rice.
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It probably contributed very little in terms of nutrition. Scientists discovered in the 1960s that the nutrients were encased in tough cell walls that were impossible for human digestion to break down.
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Prisoners were used as guinea pigs. Besides the green plankton, which sickened the inmates, they were also fed sawdust and wood pulp. Bao Ruowang – also known as Jean Pasqualini, the author of a memoir about life in a Chinese labour camp – remembered how brown sheets of the stuff were ground into paper pulp and mixed with flour. Mass constipation followed, killing the weaker prisoners.
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But even in the cities the spread of substitute foods caused obstruction of the bowels or rupture of the sphincter. Workers at the Liangma factory in Beijing had to prise out their faeces by hand.
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Villagers scoured the forest for plants, berries and nuts. They combed the hills for edible roots and wild grasses. In desperation, they scavenged for carrion, rummaged through rubbish, scraped the bark off trees and in the end turned to mud to fill their stomachs. Even in Beijing foreigners witnessed people knocking off the leaves of acacia trees with sticks, which were then collected in bags and turned into soup.
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Yan Shifu, a wiry man with a broad grin, was a young boy aged ten when the Great Leap Forward unfolded in Sichuan. He now works as a chef, and has a good memory for food. He recalls how ramie leaves were finely chopped and turned into pancakes, rape stalks were cooked into a thick stew, while mustard leaves were boiled. Pea stalks were milled, sieved and turned into small pancakes. Banana stalks were peeled and eaten raw, as if they were sugarcane. Radish was pickled and rare enough to be seen as a treat. Insects were popped live into the mouth, but worms and toads were grilled. Despite his family’s ingenuity, his father and his younger sister died of starvation.
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Some of the grasses, mushrooms and roots foraged by villagers were toxic. Few people actually knew what they were eating, as children were often the ones in charge of slipping out at night and foraging for wild herbs. ‘In those days,’ one survivor reminisced, ‘it was not possible to go out to look for known herbal remedies. We ate everything. We ate any plant that was green. We did not care, as long as we knew that the plant was not poisonous. We ate almost anything.’
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But accidents were common. In Hebei about a hundred deaths caused by contaminated food, diseased animals and toxic roots and herbs were reported each month.
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Cassava, a starchy tuber that could be milled into tapioca, is an excellent source of carbohydrates, but the leaves are highly toxic and cannot be eaten raw. In Guangxi province some 174 people died in a single month after eating it without proper soaking and cooking. A similar number in Fujian province succumbed to a paralytic neurological disease caused by cassava – among thousands of cases of food poisoning.
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Cocklebur, a weedy plant, was another hazard. The seeds were highly toxic, killing unsupervised pigs rooting for food. In humans it led to nausea and vomiting as well as twisting of the neck muscles, followed by a rapid pulse, breathing difficulties and eventually death. In ten days the toxic weed claimed 160 victims in Beijing.
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In a strange reversal of fortune, sometimes the most politically marginalised people were in a better position to survive, as they had developed coping mechanisms against starvation for many years before the Great Leap Forward. As the offspring of an ‘evil landlord’, Meng Xiaoli and his brother were chased from their ancestral house in Qianjiang, Hubei, immediately after the communist takeover in 1949. He was not given the time to gather any belongings. Though he was only a young boy, his jumper was torn from his back. They wandered about the village with their mother, ostracised by all, and ended up by the lakeside digging for wild vegetables. They slept on dried straw with the village dogs on their first night, and were later allocated a shabby mud hut. At first they tried to beg but nobody dared to give them any food. ‘So we tried to catch fish from the lake but couldn’t catch enough to eat because we didn’t have the right tools. But we still managed to survive because we could dig up lotus roots and pick up seeds. After a few months, my brother and I learned how to catch fish from the lake. Although we didn’t have any rice, in fact we could eat quite well.’ When the famine engulfed the village years later, the family was the only one to be prepared for survival.
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Straw and stalks were eaten from roofs. Zhao Xiaobai, the orphan girl aged eleven who had to work like an adult to look after her little sister, remembered how one day, tortured by hunger, she climbed up a ladder on to the roof. ‘I was still quite young then. I was very hungry, so I broke a piece of maize stalk [used to cover the roof] and began to chew it. It tasted delicious! I chewed one piece after another. I was so hungry that even maize stalks tasted good.’
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Leather was softened and eaten. Explained Zhu Erge, who witnessed half his village die of hunger in Sichuan but managed to survive because his mother was a cook in the canteen: ‘We soaked the leather chairs people used to sit on. After they were soaked, we cooked the leather and cut it into small pieces to eat.’
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Infected animals were eaten by the famished, even in the outskirts of the capital. In Huairou county, lambs contaminated with anthrax were regularly devoured by starved villagers.
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Hundreds were poisoned after eating bits of smelly fat mixed with clumps of hair, scraped off animal hides by a Chengdu leather factory, which were bartered for vegetables with a people’s canteen. Even the contaminated carcasses of diseased livestock, culled by a slaughterhouse in Guanxian county, were quietly sold to a local commune.
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When people were not eaten by rats, rats were eaten by people, dead ones sometimes being fished out of cesspits.
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When nothing else was left, people turned to a soft mud called Guanyin soil – named after the Goddess of Mercy. A work team sent by Li Jingquan was taken aback by what they saw in Liangxian county, Sichuan. It was a vision of hell, as serried ranks of ghostly villagers queued up in front of deep pits, their shrivelled bodies pouring with sweat under the glare of the sun, waiting for their turn to scramble down the hole and carve out a few handfuls of the porcelain-white mud. Children, their ribs starting through the skin, fainted from exhaustion, their grimy bodies looking like mud sculptures shadowing the earth. Old women in ragged clothes burned paper charms and bowed, hands folded, mumbling strange incantations. A quarter of a million tonnes were dug out by more than 10,000 people. In one village alone 214 families out of a total of 262 had eaten mud, several kilos per person. Some of the villagers filled their mouths with mud as they were digging in the pit. But most of them added water and kneaded the soil after mixing it with chaff, flowers and weeds, baking mud cakes that were filling, even if they provided little sustenance. Once eaten the soil acted like cement, drying out the stomach and absorbing all the moisture inside the intestinal tract. Defecation became impossible. In every village several people died a painful death, their colons blocked up with soil.
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In Henan, as He Guanghua recollected, so many people took to eating a local stone called
yanglishi
, which was ground and turned into cakes, that adults would help each other prise out their faeces with twigs.
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All over China, from Sichuan, Gansu and Anhui to Henan, people tormented by ravening hunger turned to mud.

People really did die of starvation – in contrast to many other famines where disease loomed large on the horizon of death. Starvation, in a strict clinical sense, means that the attrition of protein and fatty deposits in the body causes the muscles to waste away and eventually stop functioning, including the heart. Adults can survive for weeks without food, as long as they can drink water. The fat stored in the body provides the main source of energy and is broken down first. A small amount of calories are also stashed away in the liver as glycogen, which is generally converted within a day. But as soon as the fatty deposits have been exhausted, proteins are stripped from muscles and other tissues and used by the liver to produce sugars needed by the brain – the body’s first priority. The brain quite literally starts cannibalising the body, taking bits of this or that tissue to come up with the glucose it needs to survive. Blood pressure lowers, which means that the heart has to work harder. The body weakens and progressively becomes emaciated. As proteins are depleted, fluids start leaking out of the blood vessels and from disintegrating tissues, accumulating beneath the skin and in cavities around the body, producing oedema. The swelling first appears in the face, the feet and the legs, but fluids can also gravitate around the stomach and chest. Swollen knees make walking painful. Taking extra salt or watering down a meal to make it last longer only worsens the condition. But some of the starving do not suffer from oedema and dehydrate instead, their skin turning to parchment, shrivelled and scaly, sometimes covered with brown spots. As the throat muscles weaken and the larynx dries up, the voice grows hoarse before falling silent. People tend to curl up to save energy. The lungs weaken. The face caves in, cheekbones stand out and bulging eyeballs are a gruesome white, staring vacantly and seemingly without emotion. The ribs poke through the skin, which hangs in folds. Arms and legs look like twigs. Black hair loses its colour and falls out. The heart has to work harder still, as the volume of blood actually increases relative to a declining body weight. In the end the organs are so damaged that they fail.
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Starvation may have been a taboo topic, but the archives are replete with reports about oedema (
shuizhongbing
) and death by starvation (
esi
). Wu Ningkun, a professor of English literature, described what happened as he went through hunger: ‘I was the first to come down with a serious case of oedema. I became emaciated, my ankles swelled, and my legs got so weak that I often fell while walking to the fields for forced labor. I did not know what I looked like, as there were no mirrors around, but I could tell from the ghastly looks of the other inmates that I must have been quite a sight.’
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Few victims were as eloquent, but the symptoms were observed everywhere. In a commune in Qingyuan – once considered Guangdong’s granary – 40 per cent of the villagers suffered from oedema in 1960.
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Even in cities it was common. We have already seen how half the workforce suffered from oedema in Beijing. Among high school students in Shanghai oedema spread in 1960–1.
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In Nankai University, Tianjin’s top institution of higher learning, one in five suffered from oedema.
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So common was the disease that when the famished did not develop it, an explanation was warranted. Hu Kaiming, an outspoken official appointed as the first secretary of Zhangjiakou in 1959, observed how in the winter of 1960–1 starving villagers would suddenly drop dead as a consequence of low blood sugar, without the usual signs of oedema.
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Why did villagers not succumb to epidemics in much greater numbers before terminal starvation set in? One reason, suggested above, is that the party closely monitored infectious diseases. But collectivisation also brought about organisational chaos and the collapse of rural health care, which was rudimentary in the best of cases. A more plausible explanation is that people in the countryside starved to death much more quickly than elsewhere, reducing the window of opportunity during which germs could prey on a lowered immunity. The only available food was in the collective canteens, and access to these was controlled by local cadres. Under immense pressure to come up with tangible results, many local officials used food as a weapon. As we shall see in the chapter on violence, villagers who did not work were not given any food. And those who could no longer work were often exhausted. Death followed promptly.