Mao's Great Famine (52 page)

Tianjin, Zhangjiakou and Shijiazhuang were cities nominally isolated from starvation in the countryside. A very different example comes from Gansu, where the demotion of Zhang Zhongliang in November 1960 was followed by several months of local investigations, bringing to light the extent of the famine. In Longxi county, 16,000 people died in 1959, or 7.5 per cent, followed by 23,000 in 1960, or 11 per cent of the population. So in those two years alone the excess deaths stood at 35,000. But for three years of famine Cao Shuji reaches 24,000 deaths.
²⁴
Party archives give 32,000 deaths for Jingning county, about 7 per cent each year in 1959 and 1960. This contrasts with a figure of 19,000 excess deaths for a period of three years arrived at by Cao Shuji.
²⁵
In Zhangye, out of a population of roughly 280,000, some 5,000 people died in November, followed by 6,000 in December 1960. Even if we double the normal rate of attrition to 2 per cent, that would still represent over 10,000 excess deaths in less than a quarter of a year. Cao Shuji arrives at 17,000 excess deaths – not for one county in two months, but for four counties over a period of three years.
²⁶
In the spring of 1960 some 20,000 people died in Wuwei county alone. Cao Shuji suggests 50,000 premature deaths for a region comprising four counties, over a period of three years.
²⁷

In Guizhou the provincial party committee reckoned by 1961 that some 10 per cent of the workforce was missing when compared with 1957 – meaning half a million workers, not counting children and the elderly.
²⁸
Not all of these had died, of course, as many had migrated out of the province, but the death rates were high throughout Guizhou, in particular in regions such as Chishui and Meitan. In Chishui some 22,000 people died in half a year – or 10 per cent of the population.
²⁹
Cao Shuji, using the official record of the county, proposes 46,000 over a period of three years, which seems reasonable enough. But in the case of Meitan, 45,000 people died in half a year. Cao Shuji suggests 105,000 for four counties over a period of three years, which must be too low.
³⁰
Even more interesting is that in his extremely conscientious compilation of the official data for all counties, some places are missing: Yanhe, part of the Tongren region, is not mentioned, although some 40,000–50,000 people died of hunger in that county alone.
³¹

In Shandong the discrepancies are of a similar magnitude – even if few of the relevant archives can be accessed by historians. In Pingyuan county, to take an example from the north-western part of the province, a high-ranking investigation noted that out of a population of 452,000 in 1957, over 46,000 people had died by 1961. Despite 24,000 births, the total population dropped to 371,000, as tens of thousands took to the roads to escape from famine – many to die elsewhere, their deaths being excluded from these figures. Cao Shuji’s examination of the official annals proposes 19,000 premature deaths for Pingyuan county. Even if we take into account a normal death rate of 1 per cent per year over a period of four years, the total of excess deaths reported at the time would be equivalent to 28,000, or 50 per cent higher.
³²
A similar observation can be made about Qihe, which lost a fifth of its population, or 100,000, between 1957 and 1961. If we deduct a normal death rate of 1 per cent for four years and accept that roughly half of the vanished probably migrated to other areas (the document is not clear on this issue), we are still left with a figure comparable to Pingyuan, or roughly 30,000, although Cao Shuji ventures no more than 19,000, or a third less.
³³
For the entire Laizhou region, consisting of Qingdao and thirteen counties, Cao Shuji’s estimate is 164,000 premature deaths over four years. But the archives show that in Jimo county alone, according to incomplete statistics, some 47,000 people died (excluding 51,000 farmers who took to the roads) over a period of two years. Even if we deduct 15,000 normal deaths for a population of approximately 750,000 people, it still leaves the county with 32,000 premature deaths – far above Cao Shuji’s estimate.
³⁴

In some cases the archival data and the published material are in line. In Xinxing county, Guangdong, 1.5 per cent of the population died in 1959, followed by 2.88 per cent in 1960. This would have amounted to roughly 5,000 deaths, while Cao Shuji arrives at a total of 8,000 deaths for three years.
³⁵
For the much larger region of Jiangmen, also in Guangdong, encompassing several counties, the death rate given to the provincial party committee was 2 per cent in 1960 (or 120,000 deaths, half of which would count as ‘premature’). This is difficult to compare with Cao’s reconstruction of the official data, as the administrative borders of the region were extensively redrawn after 1961, but they do seem roughly to fit his estimate of 112,000 excess deaths for three years.
³⁶
In the case of Sichuan, as noted above, political pressure under Li Jingquan meant that few if any counties reported high death rates, and none match those found in the official documentation published decades later and consulted by Cao Shuji.

None of this is intended as a criticism of Cao Shuji’s work: on the contrary, his painstaking reconstruction of what happened at the county level, on the basis of well over a thousand local gazetteers, has established a baseline which is very much in accord with figures derived by demographers from more abstract sets of population statistics. A systematic comparison of these figures with archival data compiled at the time or in the immediate aftermath of the famine would not be possible without his work. And when we confront the official data with archival evidence we find a pattern of underestimation, sometimes by 30 to 50 per cent, sometimes by as much as a factor of three or four.

Perhaps some of the reports exaggerated the death rates, but it is very difficult to see why. There was no political advantage to be gained from declaring extra deaths. The death toll was not a major consideration in the purge of party members after October 1960. The manner of death mattered, as local cadres were classified according to different levels of abuse. In fact there was every advantage in inflating the overall population. When a team went to investigate the statistics in Hunan in 1964 it found that the overall population was systematically inflated by more than 1 per cent, in some counties by up to 2 or 3 per cent. The difference for 1963 was half a million people in Hunan who existed on paper alone: ‘through thorough testing we found that in the past the population figures were routinely and severely inflated’.
³⁷
When the Ministry of Public Security undertook a more widespread check on population statistics in 1963, it discovered a similar pattern of inflation across the country, sometimes as high as 2.2 per cent in the case of Gansu, for instance. ‘Of a population of 681 million today, we estimate that about 1 to 1.5 per cent of those counted are fake. Many local cadres, in order to obtain greater cloth rations and other goods, intentionally increase the population figures.’
³⁸
A year later, during the official 1964 census, the Central Census Office confirmed that ‘the problem of population inflation is far worse than we thought’, as at least a million was added for Hebei and Henan each, and no fewer than 700,000 for Shandong, three of the provinces that had been closely investigated: there was very little that could be done about the issue.
³⁹

Even if we ignore some of the most glaring disparities between archival data and official figures, the gap is in the order of 50 to 100 per cent. It is very difficult to venture an alternative death toll, all the more since so many of the key sets of archival statistics remain prudently under lock and key, far removed from the eyes of prying historians. But there is enough archival evidence, from a sufficiently large diversity of party units, to confirm that the figure of 43 to 46 million premature deaths proposed by Chen Yizi, who was a senior member of a large working group that sifted through internal party documents around 1980, is in all likelihood a reliable estimate. The death toll thus stands at a minimum of 45 million excess deaths.

It could be even worse than that. Some historians speculate that the true figure stands as high as 50 to 60 million people. It is unlikely that we will know the full extent of the disaster until the archives are completely opened. But these are the figures informally discussed by a number of party historians. And these are also, according to Chen Yizi, the figures cited at internal meetings of senior party members under Zhao Ziyang.
⁴⁰
Yu Xiguang, an independent researcher with a great deal of experience, puts the figure at 55 million excess deaths.
⁴¹

Epilogue

The turning point came in January 1962, as 7,000 cadres arrived from all parts of the country to attend the largest work conference ever held in the vast, modernistic Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, issued the official report to a packed audience, speaking for three hours without a break – but not without interruption. He did not confront Mao directly, which would have been unthinkable, but he openly repeated everything he had said behind closed doors to a small gathering of senior leaders half a year earlier. In Hunan, he explained, the farmers believed that the ‘difficulties’ were due 30 per cent to natural calamities and 70 per cent to a man-made disaster. The very use of the term ‘man-made disaster’ (
renhuo
) was a bombshell, drawing gasps from the audience. As Liu proceeded to dismiss the expression ‘nine fingers to one’, Mao’s favourite phrase to emphasise achievements over setbacks, the tension became palpable. ‘In general our successes have been primary, shortcomings and errors are secondary, they occupy a second position. I wonder if we can say that, generally speaking, the ratio of achievements to setbacks is seven to three, although each region is different. One finger versus nine fingers does not apply to every place. There are only a small number of regions where mistakes are equal to one finger and successes equal to nine fingers.’ Mao interrupted Liu, visibly annoyed: ‘It’s not a small number of regions at all, for instance in Hebei only 20 per cent of regions decreased production and in Jiangsu 30 per cent of all regions increased production year after year!’ But Liu refused to be intimidated, and carried on: ‘In general, we cannot say it is merely one finger, but rather three, and in some places it is even more, for instance in the Xinyang region [in Henan] or in the Tianshui region [in Gansu].’ And who was responsible for this disaster? Liu squarely placed the blame on the central leadership.
¹

Liu did try to appease the Chairman by defending the general party line, postponing the verdict over the communes to five or maybe even ten years later. But Mao was furious nonetheless. ‘He talks about natural disasters versus man-made disasters. This kind of talk is a disaster in itself,’ he confided to his doctor.
²

Lin Biao, the general who had rallied to the defence of the Chairman at the Lushan plenum in 1959, again lauded the Great Leap Forward, hailed as an unprecedented accomplishment when compared to any other period of the country’s history. He rhapsodised: ‘The thoughts of Chairman Mao are always correct . . . Chairman Mao’s superiority has many aspects, not just one, and I know from experience that Chairman Mao’s most outstanding quality is realism. What he says is much more realistic than what others say. He is always pretty close to the mark. He is never out of touch with reality . . . I feel very deeply that when in the past our work was done well, it was precisely when we thoroughly implemented and did not interfere with Chairman Mao’s thought. Every time Chairman Mao’s ideas were not sufficiently respected or suffered interference, there have been problems. That is essentially what the history of our party over the last few decades shows.’
³

Zhou Enlai did what he always managed best. He tried to absolve Mao by assuming much of the blame for what had gone wrong, taking personal responsibility for excessive grain procurements, inflated production figures, the draining of grain away from the provinces and growing exports of food. ‘This is my mistake,’ he declared, going on to claim that the ‘shortcomings and errors of the last few years have occurred precisely when we contravened the general line and Chairman Mao’s precious instructions’.
⁴
He was trying to build a bridge across the gap that had opened between Mao and Liu, but it was to no avail.

We will never know when Mao decided to get rid of Liu, setting in motion a Cultural Revolution that would destroy the lives of all those who had opposed him during the Great Leap Forward. But a good guess is that he started plotting the elimination of his ever more threatening nemesis as soon as he realised that his entire legacy as well as his standing in history was at stake.

The defining moment may have been a summer afternoon in July 1962, when Mao was floating in his swimming pool. He had been urgently called back to Beijing by Liu, and the Chairman was in a foul mood. Liu’s son recalls that his father hurriedly approached the Chairman, having been summoned to explain what the rush was all about. Liu started by reporting that Chen Yun and Tian Jiaying, two of the most outspoken critics of the Great Leap Forward, wanted formally to present their views about land distribution. Mao soon exploded into a torrent of invective. But Liu would not desist. He spoke in haste: ‘So many people have died of hunger!’ Then he blurted out, ‘History will judge you and me, even cannibalism will go into the books!’

Mao went into a towering rage. ‘The Three Red Banners have been shot down, now land is being divided up again,’ he shouted. ‘What have you done to resist this? What’s going to happen after I’m dead?’