Mao's Great Famine (49 page)

Far away from the lush valleys along the Yangzi, pitched battles bloodied the grasslands up in the Tibetan plateau to the west. In 1959 in Serthar (Seda), a county in the Ganzi autonomous region, Tibetans were rounded up and forced into collectives, after Lhasa had been rocked by rebellion and the Dalai Lama forced to flee on foot over the Himalayan mountains into India. Dozens of uprisings took place in Ganzi by the end of 1958, leading to thousands of arrests and many executions.
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In Serthar widespread slaughter preceded collectivisation, since herdsmen preferred to kill their sheep rather than hand them over to the state. Tens of thousands of animals were butchered and eaten. The cadres, in control of the grain, refused to feed the nomads, using the militia to extract every possible hint of wealth from those they considered to be their enemies. Corralled into makeshift communes, many people died of disease. Whereas the nomads had had access to clean water all year round, they were now packed into shoddy encampments without adequate facilities, and quickly overrun with excrement and detritus. Out of a population of some 16,000, about 15 per cent died in 1960 alone. About 40 per cent of those who died were beaten or tortured to death.
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Guizhou, unlike its northern neighbour Sichuan, is an impoverished province, historically rocked by rebellions from the minority people who compose at least a third of the population – many of them living in poverty in the hills and highlands that dominate what is known as the ‘kingdom of mountains’. Chishui, once prosperous as a strategically located pass for the transportation of salt, is a forlorn outpost on the border with Sichuan. The river that flows through a red sandstone valley picks up the sediment and gives the place its name, which means ‘Red Water’. In March 1935 the Red Army crossed the river several times, turning the county into a holy ground keenly promoted by local leaders after the revolution. Up in the scarlet mountains, small villages were hidden among giant tree ferns and bright-green bamboo, but most of the people grew paddy and sugarcane along the river and its tributaries. Between October 1959 and April 1960, around 24,000 people died – more than 10 per cent of the population.
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Wang Linchi, a relatively young man at thirty-five, was in charge of the county. He was given a coveted red flag in 1958 and was commended by the central leadership for having transformed a backwater into a ‘Five-Thousand-Kilo County’ thanks to the many innovations heralded by the Great Leap Forward. In Chishui, under Wang Linchi, deep ploughing meant digging to a depth of 1 to 1.5 metres: the deeper the better. Large quantities of seed were used, often 200 to 450 kilos per hectare, but at times as much as a tonne or two, sometimes even three tonnes. Among other great schemes devised by the county leadership was an irrigation project in which water would be conveyed through a network of bamboo pipes to every plot in the county. ‘Water pipes in the skies of Chishui’ was the slogan, but the scheme failed miserably after acres of bamboo forest were chopped down, depriving the villagers of a much-needed resource.

The result of the Great Leap Forward in Chishui was a plummeting grain output and the virtual extermination of the livestock. But Wang was determined to maintain his reputation. As early as September 1958, many months before Zhao Ziyang’s report on the hiding of grain in Guangdong, he decreed that a part of the crop was being withheld by ‘rich peasants’ and ‘bad elements’ in a sustained attack on the socialist system. A merciless counter-attack with armed cadres was required to save the communes and prevent a counter-revolution. People on the ground were terrorised. A year later, in the wake of the Lushan plenum, villagers were divided into ‘poor peasants’ and ‘rich peasants’. Behind the backs of rich peasants stood the landlords, saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries and other elements who were bent on wrecking the revolution: ‘Poor and Rich Peasants, This Struggle is to the Death!’ Several thousand cadres were expelled from the party for having the wrong class background, while mass demonstrations, struggle meetings and anti-hiding campaigns were organised to root out every class enemy. Like Mao, Wang Linchi was a poet, composing verses to celebrate the working class and organising a traditional opera in which he starred as the main actor – before hundreds of invited guests tucking into a lavish banquet. In the meantime, agriculture was neglected: although in January 1960 Wang announced to his superiors in Guiyang a bumper crop of 33,500 tonnes, 80 per cent of this amount existed on paper only.
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Wang Linchi was hardly a unique case in Guizhou, a radical province led by Zhou Lin, a close follower of Mao. Everywhere Zhou Lin tacitly encouraged a radical approach to the Great Leap Forward, resulting in one of the highest death rates in the country. In Meitan, famous for its tea, 45,000 people died in six months. Wang Qingchen, the first party secretary, deployed a labour force of 50,000 at will, building giant tea gardens, orchards, irrigation systems and communal buildings that would turn Meitan into a national model. Forty thousand pigs were requisitioned for a ‘Ten-Thousand-Hog City’. Anybody critical of these schemes was accused of ‘stirring an evil revisionist trend’ and given the label of ‘rightist opportunist’. In 1960 an ‘Arrest Many and Detain Many’ campaign was organised by the police and the militia, sweeping across the region and locking up close to 3,000 people in a month. A simple slogan seemed to capture the Meitan spirit: ‘Those Who are Unable to Produce Grain will Not be Given Any Grain’.
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The figure of 45,000 deaths is very high, but even so it may be an underestimate. According to an investigation by the provincial party committee, in one commune alone 12,000 people ‘died of starvation’, representing 22 per cent of the population.
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Focusing on one village, a more detailed inquest showed how over a third of the farmers died. Nongcha was once a relatively prosperous village, in which each family owned a few ducks and chickens, but by 1961 the crop had decreased to a third of what had been produced in 1957. Vegetables were hard to come by. Sugarcane production, indispensable for local farmers to trade against food and goods, was virtually wiped out. Many of the fields lay destroyed after experiments in deep ploughing and land reclamation. Some were called ‘moon plots’ because the pockmarked terrain would no longer retain any water. No work points were ever kept, and villages were fed according to the whims of local cadres in chaotic canteens. Personal property was seized, private plots were abolished. State procurements were sky high despite falling grain production: in 1959 three-quarters of the crop was dragged away by state agents, leaving the villagers to starve. By 1961 one pig was left in the entire village.
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When an inspection team was scheduled to visit Meitan in April 1960, the local leaders scurried about day and night to bury corpses in mass graves by the side of the road. Sick villagers and neglected children were locked up and guarded by the militia, while telltale trees without bark were torn out, roots and all.
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Travelling through the region in March 1960, Nie Rongzhen was ecstatic about Guizhou in a letter to Mao: ‘In fact Guizhou is not poor at all, it is very rich – in future it should be our industrial base in the south-west!’
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As the Yellow River nears the end of its long journey across the loess plateau, it intersects with the Grand Canal, an ancient man-made river completed in the seventh century to haul the grain tribute from the south to the imperial capital in the north. It is said that more than 47,000 labourers were needed to maintain the canal system, which was used, at its height in the mid-fifteenth century, by some 11,000 grain barges. Qihe is the main river port in Shandong, lying just north-west of Jinan, and it should have fared well thanks to its strategic location on the Yellow River. Before the Great Leap Forward it was known as a ‘grain store’ with an abundant crop that managed to reach 200,000 tonnes in a good year for a population of roughly half a million. Cotton, tobacco and fruit were also widely cultivated. By 1961 Qihe county had lost well over 100,000 people, or a fifth of its population compared to 1957. Half of the workers who had survived or stayed behind were sick. The economy lay in tatters. The 200,000 tonnes of grain harvested in 1956 had dwindled to a mere 16,000 a few years later. The collapse in peanut production was even more dramatic: whereas 7,780 tonnes had been taken from the fields in 1956, a pitiful 10 tonnes was all that could be gathered by 1961. Everything, it seemed, was reduced to about one-tenth of what could have been expected before 1958. Even the land under cultivation had shrunk, as a fifth was taken away for waterworks and roads, most of which were never finished. As everywhere in the north, the amount of alkaline soil doubled, reaching almost a third of the surface under cultivation. Despite – or rather as a consequence of – massive investment in water-conservancy projects, the overall irrigated surface shrank by 70 per cent. Off the fields the devastation was just as visible. Livestock was more than halved, the number of carts dwindled, while tens of thousands of simple tools such as rakes and hoes had vanished. Over half of all trees had been felled. Of all the housing in the county 38 per cent had been destroyed. Of what was left standing, a quarter was heavily damaged and needed urgent attention. Some 13,000 families did not even have a single room left to themselves.
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Hanzhuang was one of the many hamlets in Qihe county. It had 240 villagers in 1957, but by 1961 only 141 remained. A quarter of the village had died of hunger, one in six families having been entirely extinguished – a fact which always carried a great deal of weight in a culture which continued to emphasise descent, despite all the official rhetoric of class war. Between 1958 and 1961 only four children had been born in the village, one of whom had died in infancy. Many villagers were single, most were weak or sick, and few women from other villages were willing to marry local men. The village had lost some 40 per cent of its land, and well over half of what remained was almost barren through heavy salinisation. According to a local saying, ‘on leaving the house one beholds a white expanse’, as the salt whitened the earth for as far as the eye could see. In the midst of this thin, exhausted land stood derelict mud huts.

The village had boasted a total of 240 rooms, but a mere eighty remained standing, most of them with leaky roofs or walls that had caved in. There was nothing inside these miserable dwellings, as an inspection team revealed: ‘All the families have gone bankrupt through the famine. Those least affected have sold all their clothes and furniture, while the most damaged ones have had to sell their pots, bowls and basins, as well as the wood stripped from their houses. In the village twenty-seven families have sold everything they had.’ Yang Jimao, for instance, left the village in 1960. His wife and child could survive only by selling every possession. They had no bed, no pots and no tools to cultivate the land. They shared a ragged blanket and a threadbare coat. Others were worse off. Among the few people who had stayed in Hanzhuang was Liu Zailin, aged thirty-three, who soon died of hunger. His wife hanged herself from a rafter, leaving behind two children who were adopted by local villagers.

In Shandong the teams sent to investigate what had happened during the famine were coy about pointing the finger at abusive cadres, unlike their peers in Gansu or Guangdong. But the political dimensions of the famine were clear. The head of the village had changed fifteen times since the Great Leap Forward. Few could do anything to resist punitive procurements imposed from above, and in 1959 the villagers were left with an average of twenty-five kilos of grain per person – for the entire year. Widespread conscription of labour on irrigation projects did not help. In the winter of 1959–60 forty-six of the best labourers were recruited from Hanzhuang. They worked for forty days and nights on end, in the snow, but were not given any grain, which had to be supplied by the village, already depleted by state requisitions. Some died while digging earth outside in the cold, others dropped dead by the roadside on the way home.
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Across the Shandong countryside there were countless villages in a similar predicament, broken by four years of mass abuse. Early warning signs had appeared in April 1959. Tan Qilong, a senior leader in Shandong, personally witnessed how in several counties in the Jining region the trees had been stripped bare, children were abandoned and farmers died along the roadside, their faces sallow from hunger. In Juye people ate the straw from their pillows; thousands died of hunger. Tan Qilong reported this situation to provincial boss Shu Tong, but also took the exceptional step of sending a copy to Mao Zedong.
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A few weeks later, a contrite Shu Tong had to explain the ‘Jining incident’ to the Chairman, who was passing through the region in his special train.
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But Shu Tong did nothing to alleviate the famine. By his own admission, he detested bad news and refused even to talk about ‘one finger’ of shortcomings in Shandong, threatening those who were critical of the Great Leap Forward with the label of ‘rightist conservatism’.
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According to others who had to work alongside Shu Tong, the regional tsar exploded in a violent rage when anybody prevented him from enforcing a utopian vision that had cost the lives of countless people. ‘He who strikes first prevails, he who strikes last fails’: Shu Tong religiously followed Mao’s advice about seizing the grain before the farmers could eat it, enforcing vast procurements to satisfy the demands from Beijing.
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Gansu, Sichuan, Guizhou, Shandong – all these provinces contained counties where the death rate was above 10 per cent in 1960. But nothing was as bad as Anhui, run by Zeng Xisheng, one of Mao’s most devoted followers. Like other provinces, Anhui was divided into regions, having over a dozen. One of these regions was Fuyang. Fuyang had a population of 8 million in 1958. Three years later more than 2.4 million people had died.
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