FORGOTTEN VOICES OF MAO'S GREAT FAMINE, 1958–1962

AN ORAL HISTORY

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

CHAPTER 1

The Tragedy of Collectivization

People's Communes are big, and they are public: Lotsof people, a vast area of land, large scales of production, [and]all activities are [performed] in a big way. [They] integrategovernment [administration] with commune [management] toestablish collective canteens, eliminating private plots. Chickens,ducks, and young trees in front of, and behind, the houses are stillprivate. This, of course, will not exist in the future.... With asurplus of grain we can implement the supply system....

In ten years time commodities will be abundant, the standardof morale will be high. We can start Communism with food,clothing, and housing. With free food in the collective canteen,that's Communism.

—Mao Zedong at Beidaihe Conference, August 19 & 21,1958

Before the early 1950s, private land ownership formed the basis ofagriculture in China. However, the growing population contributed toan escalating land shortage problem, and the lack of land subsequentlybecame directly linked to poverty. In 1943, Mao Zedong, the newsupreme head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), proclaimedagricultural collectivization as the only way to eliminate rural poverty,and he stipulated that collectivization should be the CCP's long-termgoal. In 1949, at the end of the civil war, which had lasted ten years, theCCP finally defeated the Nationalist Party (KMT) and took control ofthe entire mainland. Despite its initial victory, the new Communistregime was anxious about the risks of descending back into civil war.Although the KMT had been driven off to the island of Taiwan, itcontinued to present a threat to CCP rule. Though victorious, theCCP was also haunted by the fissiparous warlord years and the risk ofinternal insurgencies and breakaway movements. To consolidate theirgrip on power over such a vast country with many divisions and toprevent any backsliding into Nationalist resistance and a furtheroutbreak of civil war, Mao Zedong and the CCP leadership rushed todevelop and implement a new Communist economic and social orthodoxy.To enforce agricultural collectivization in the countryside waspart of the process that Mao saw as integral to building a new socialistconsciousness among China's mass population.

Despite the bloodshed and catastrophic results that had accompaniedthe rapid collectivization initiated in the Soviet Union by JosephStalin in 1927, Mao was not content with the speed of the initialstage of collectivization in China. He wanted a fully socialist agriculturalsystem established throughout the country, and he wanted itfast. In the summer of 1955, he pushed forward the leftist economicpolicies of the "Socialist High Tide" in the Chinese countryside tospeed up the process of incorporating individual peasant familiesinto agricultural cooperatives. Once it was launched, the campaignof agricultural collectivization swept through the country like awhirlwind. A number of provincial and local cadres embraced it withunprecedented enthusiasm. This became known as the "Little LeapForward." The pace of agricultural collectivization was astonishing,and it proceeded even faster than Mao had anticipated. By 1956,virtually all agricultural households in rural China had been organizedinto farming collectives.

The initial success, however, did not satisfy Mao. He wanted aneven greater Leap Forward to ensure the Communist writ ran acrossall aspects of life in the country. He subsequently revived the slogan"More, better, faster, and more economically," and it became therally call in this campaign to modernize China rapidly. His push togo further forward was also a response to the setback of his leftisteconomic policy or the "Socialist High Tide." In the latter half of1956, a number of CCP leaders, including the premier Zhou Enlai,were concerned that collectivization was progressing too fast. Theyopposed a "blind advance" (jizao maojin) and called for a slowdown.This displeased Mao. In June 1957 he launched the Anti-RightistCampaign and put Deng Xiaoping in charge. The campaign'sprimary target was the so-called "bourgeois rightists," non-partymembers who had responded to Mao's call to criticize the Party onall manner of topics but whom he decided had gone too far. Morethan half a million people were labeled "bourgeois rightists" andwere soon disposed of. Thereafter Mao seized the initiative torelaunch the idea of a leap. In January 1958, at a meeting for top Partyleaders, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was pressured by Mao intomaking a public self-criticism for his part in encouraging "right deviationistconservative thinking," for trying to persuade Mao to haltthe earlier version of the Great Leap Forward. Alongside Zhou, a fewother leaders were also criticized for the same reason. Any voiceopposing collectivization was silenced. Until this point, it had seemedthat all the top leaders were working together. A few months later, inspring 1958, the full force of the Great Leap Forward was unleashed,with Mao at its helm.

Another motive behind the Great Leap Forward was the rivalrywith the Soviet Union. Referred to as the "Big Brother" by the CCP,the Soviet Union served as not only a model for the new CommunistChina, but also the target of its envy. Like Communist leaders elsewhereduring the same period, the CCP leaders had always been inpsychological thrall to the events in the Soviet Union. The death ofStalin in 1953 created an opportunity for the CCP but also increaseduncertainty over Soviet economic aid. Mao saw rapid collectivizationas a means to make China self-reliant. On May 17, 1958, two daysafter the Soviet Union had successfully launched the third Earthsatellite Sputnik 3, in a speech at the second session of the EighthCommunist Party Congress, Mao told the Party that China shouldemulate the success of the Soviet Union, and shoot a few "sputniks"into orbit. "Ours must be bigger and heavier [than the one launchedby the Soviet Union]. They must not look like the satellite made inthe United States. It looked like an egg." In the same speech, Maoalso criticized the Stalinist interpretation of orthodox Marxist theoryof economic development and boasted that China would overtakethe Soviet Union and be the first to achieve true Communism.

People's Communes were officially inaugurated in August 1958 asan essential component of the Great Leap Forward. Mao believedthat a socialist system of agriculture, or the People's Commune,would bolster agricultural productivity, stimulate rural markets forindustrial products, and divert sufficient workers and funds towardthe acceleration of China's industrialization. The policy of "walkingon two legs" was launched. In Mao's view revolutionary zeal andcooperative effort would transform the Chinese landscape into aproductive paradise. His goal was to overtake the United Kingdomin steel output within fifteen years and turn China into an industrialpowerhouse. By then Mao would figure as not only the supremeleader of the CCP, but also the leader of the world Communistmovement. By the end of 1958, according to an official estimate,nearly 99 percent of the peasant population had joined a commune.Approximately 26,000 communes had been set up, with an averageof 5,000 households within each one.

The general image projected of 1958 is of the entire country unitedin rapturous enthusiasm for the Great Leap Forward and that by theend of the year steel, coal, and industrial output had seen a hugeboost, even as the production of grain and cotton had also increasedconsiderably. It looked as if the Communist dream was on the vergeof becoming a reality in the Chinese countryside. The original goalof fifteen years was cut to five. The reality was very different. For themajority of China's rural population, this was a terrible time. Privatepossessions were collectivized; household furniture became the propertyof the communes; pots and pans were smelted to make moresteel; individual houses were burned down to make fertilizer. In someareas family graveyards were destroyed to make way for communalfarmland, and the bricks from private graveyards were removed tobuild collective canteens or nurseries. In a frenzy of collectivization,even mothers' sewing needles and children's diapers were confiscatedand turned over to the communes.

The radical collectivization in China turned out to be as bloodyand violent as it had been in the Soviet Union. Unlike in the SovietUnion, however, where collectivization led to a civil war between thestate and the peasants, in China Mao pitted all individuals againstone another. He called this "mass struggle," or a "bottom-up"approach, in contrast to the "top-down" approach of the SovietUnion. During the Land Reform and the Campaign to SuppressCounterrevolutionaries in the early 1950s, the CCP leadership urgedlocal cadres to "not fear executing people" and to punish those whowere too lenient and practiced peaceful land reform. From the latterhalf of 1950 the mass class struggle against "feudal" landlords andcounterrevolutionaries was rapidly implemented throughout China.The Korean War (1950–53) and the imagined threat presented by"counterrevolutionaries," such as landlords, was incorporated intothe official nationalist discourse. Its deceptive power inspired millionsin China to turn extremely violent against these real or imaginedfoes. As Hannah Arendt famously argued, "The sad truth is thatmost evil is done by people who never make up their minds to begood or evil." In Communist China during the Land Reform,encouraged by the state, countless individuals became engaged inviolence against their next-door neighbors or strangers on the street.

For some, the practice of violence became a habit and they neededno intellectual rationale for their behavior. In Yunnan province'sZhanyi county, seventy people were tortured to death within twentydays during the Land Reform in 1951. One landlord was beaten todeath simply because a villager wanted his trousers. In China's southwest,13,590 people committed suicide by July 1952 in fear of thetorture, humiliation, and executions. In Zhejiang province'sZhuangqiao township, one percent of the total population wastortured to death during the Land Reform. In northwest Guizhouprovince's Wuchuan county, with a predominantly Miao and Gelaopopulation, a seventy-year-old local landlord, Zhang Baoshan, wastortured to death during the Land Reform in 1951. His son ZhangRen'an was later hanged after his unsuccessful attempt to seek revengefor his father's death. Afterward, some villagers chopped off ZhangRen'an's tongue and penis, and burned his body. The rest of thefamily was also arrested and brutally tortured by local cadres andvillagers. An estimated 1 to 4 million people were killed during thefirst years of the regime, and an additional 4 to 6 million were sent toforced labor camps where a huge number eventually died.

A few years later, between 1955 and 1956, during the initial stage ofcollectivization, poor peasants were once again urged to struggleagainst "middle" and "rich" peasants, as well as "counterrevolutionaries"who opposed collectivization. Although this phase of collectivizationseemingly was relatively easy, it did encounter a huge amountof opposition. Violence was used to whip those unwilling individualsinto joining collectives. Many also became victims merely becausethey happened to be born into the "wrong class." From 1958, duringthe period of radical collectivization, terror and repression wereextended to a much wider population, and the level of violenceintensified. Mao conceived of the People's Commune as an environmentwithout legal safeguards, which operated strictly as a militaryorganization. His view was that "We should be a bit rough—it showswe are being truthful." In some parts of the country, this meant thatviolence could be practiced with little or no restraint. Endless"struggle" meetings also provided opportunities for venting personalrevenge and for other selfish pursuits. Local cadres used their positionsof power to extract as much benefit for themselves as theycould, while punishing anyone they disliked or with whom theydisagreed. To survive, peasants fought against peasants under thePeople's Commune, and in some cases even family members foughtone another.

In the pursuit of Mao's utopia, unleashed by totalitarianism, familiesand homes were destroyed and many lives were sacrificed. Thosewho survived these tragic years still remember the period with horror,great pain, and a "bitter taste in their mouths."

Marching into Radical Collectivization

Qiu Wenhua lives in a small village in southern Henan'sPingdingshan region, central China. On the eve of radical collectivizationQiu was only nine years old. Henan province, today home tothe highest number of serial killers in China, is often said to havebeen the cradle of Chinese civilization. It had had a predominantlyagrarian economy and it found itself at the forefront of radical collectivizationin 1958. Qiu recalls:

In 1959 I was still at school. Every day we had to listento things like mass production of iron and steel, the GreatLeap Forward, and to uphold the "Three Red Flags" [theParty's general line, the Great Leap Forward, and People'sCommunes]. I had no idea what they meant. Men andwomen, all the agricultural laborers, were told to go into theriver to dig sand because someone said the sand in the riverhad a high iron content. Only old people and children didnot go. There was no one at home to harvest the crops thatyear. They were left to rot in the field....

At the time we were told that we had entered intoCommunism, and there would be no more private housing.The day before that happened we were still living in our ownhouse, but the day afterward our house was turned into agranary for the collective. After that we had to move fromone place to another on a regular basis. There was no peacein those days.

In our village, there were no other activities except fordenunciation meetings.... All "rich" and "middle" peasantswere denounced.... We ate in the collective canteen at thetime. Every day before sunset we had to attend denunciationmeetings. Only after the meeting were we allowed tohave something to eat. People were regularly beaten at thosemeetings. Sometimes they were forced to kneel on a stool oron coal dregs. No one dared to disobey. In those days evenif you did nothing wrong, the cadres would still find somethingto trouble you with. Many people were denounced fornothing.

Life was very bitter for us and for most of the villagers.Only cadres had a better life. They had good food to eat.Ordinary villagers were desperate for something to eat. Eventree leaves were hard to find....

No one dared to oppose it when we were merged into thePeople's Commune. I remember someone said somethinglike: "The People's Commune is good but the fields are fullof weeds." That person was denounced as a "bad element."Afterward no one dared to say anything anymore. We had tofollow everyone else and join the commune.

In China's far southwest, Mao Xiansheng lives in a hilly village inRenshou county, south-central Sichuan. Sichuan is another one ofChina's biggest agrarian economies. During the Great Leap Forward,Sichuan was one of the last places in China to become fully collectivized,but once collectivization took hold, there was no turning back."Renshou" means "benevolence and longevity," and today the countyis known as Sichuan's granary and the home of the sought-afterloquat fruits. Yet while interviewing for this book, I visited Renshouseveral times to speak with survivors, and I found it a rather backwardplace. Halfway to Mao Xiansheng's village, I had to step out ofthe bus and walk because there was no bridge over the river. I set outearly in the morning, but by the time I reached Mao's village it wasafter midday, and Mao was having his lunch. When he heard that Ihad arrived, he put down his bowl of noodles and came out to greetme. His house was rather shabby and dark, but he told me thingswere a lot worse fifty years ago:

It was on October 1, 1958, when our area merged into onePeople's Commune. We were forced to move out from ourhome and to live communally. Our house was burned downbecause the commune needed more land to grow crops.Suddenly we had nowhere to live. In the end we moved inwith other families, several families crowded into one room.... Furthermore, our pans and pots were taken away since wewere not allowed to cook at home. At the People's Communewe could only eat at the collective canteen. Everything wascollectivized and we had nothing left in the end....

Most collective canteens had over one hundred people.We had food to eat in the very beginning, but soon thereafterthe food ran out.... In our canteen there were morethan three hundred people and there was never enough foodto feed all of us.... As the food ran out many people weresent away to help develop industry. Only a few less capablepersons or those who obeyed the cadres were allowed tostay to do agricultural work. All the rest were sent awaybecause the cadres found them difficult to manage. So ini958 most crops died. We watched the rice plants die in thefield when they were still young, but there was nothing wecould do.
(Continues...)Excerpted from FORGOTTEN VOICES OF MAO'S GREAT FAMINE, 1958–1962 by Zhou Xun. Copyright © 2013 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.