China's Great Leap Forward Famine

When examining the history of the 20th Century, it seems important to cover significant events that are not often mention in the history books. One such is the great famine which accompanied China's "Great Leap Forward", around 1960. The typical estimate given for the number of people who died is generally placed around 30 million people. There is some similarity between this and other Communist collectivization campaigns, such as the famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930's (about 6 million dead).

To compare this with other major human death tolls, consider that WWII may have killed 80 million people in total. The Japanese probably killed about 10 million Chinese in the war, and the Germans about 20 million Russians (Slavs?). The Nazis killed about 12 million in the Holocaust (6 million Jews). The Americans killed about 1 mil Chinese in the Korean War, a million or so in the bombing of Japanese cities in WWII, and about 1 mil Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. The Japanese starved the Vietnamese during WWII - killing about 2 million. Stalin's collectivization in the 1930's killed about 6 million in the Ukraine famine. The Khmer Rouge killed a million or two in Cambodia in the late 1970's. Pakistan killed a million or more in Bangladesh before it became independent (1970).

In such famines, tales of cannibalism, eating dirt and bark, and a general breakdown of society are common. It does seem clear that this famine, like that in the Ukraine, is accompanied by a totalitarian regime's effort to rapidly industrialize. Weather does not seem to be a major factor in these man-made famines. The death toll is reflective of the regime's philosophy of the ends justifying the means, and a lack of humanitarian ethic. Or maybe just a bureaucratic mechanism gone haywire.

Not much was known of the famine to the outside world for several decades after the fact, and information on it is still difficult to find.

Check out these census graphs of world population change, which show the effect of the famine quite clearly (thanks to Steve Demers for this one).
World Population Change
World Population Percentage Change

Famine Links

  • Great Famines in History
  • Democide

    References

    Original Link
    (extract)
    Hungry Ghosts By Jasper Becker
    Free Press; 352 pp. $25

    The greatest human calamity of our century-- greater than the Holocaust, greater than World War Two itself-- was the famine that swept China in the "three bad years" 1959-61. At least thirty million died.

    For a long time the Chinese authorities and their shills in the West denied that there had been a famine at all. As evidence of the catastrophe began to accumulate they fell back to grudging admissions of "severe shortages" caused by "natural disasters" and "adverse climatic conditions".

    Beginning in the early 1980s, researchers in the West (and a few brave Chinese) began probing into Chinese population statistics. The results of those inquiries are now in, the conclusions incontrovertible. There were no natural disasters. The climate in those years was mild. The famine was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist government, under the inspiration of Mao Tse-tung. The facts have now been set out for a general readership by the British sinologist Jasper Becker (Hungry Ghosts, Free Press, 1997.)

    The physical details of the famine-- even just the bare statistics-- make harrowing reading. Children seem to have suffered especially, not only in the famine itself but in later years, dying from the after-effects of severe malnutrition. In 1957 half of all Chinese who died were under 18; in 1963 half were under 10. These were not the most unfortunate. In the extremity of mass starvation, when rats and insects had long gone and the very bark from the trees had been consumed, peasants resorted to the ghastly custom of yi zi er shi-- swap children, then eat. Since no-one could bear to eat his own children, you exchanged yours with a neighbor. Then you ate his, he ate yours.



    Original Link
    (extract)

    Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China
    The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward
    by Bachman, David

    In this book David Bachman examines the origins of the Great Leap
    Forward (GLF), a program of economic reform that must be considered
    one of the great tragedies of Communist China, estimated to have
    caused the death of between 14 and 28 million Chinese. While standard
    accounts interpret the GLF as chiefly the brainchild of Mao Zedong and
    as a radical rejection of a set of more moderate reform proposals put
    forward in the period 1956 to 1957, Bachman proposes a provocative
    reinterpretation of the origins of the GLF that stresses the role of
    the bureaucracy. Using a neo-institutionalist approach to analyze
    economic policy-making leading up to the GLF, he argues that the GLF
    must be seen as the product of an institutional process of
    policy-making.

    Contents: Historical Background and Conceptual Approach / The
    Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward

    Subject: near, middle and far east
    1991 6 X 9 242 pp.
    Hardback 0-521-40275-1 $54.95


    Original Link
    (extract)
    The choir was soon dissolved, Wei wrote, as "organizations supporting
    Jiang Qing began to take action against members of our group." In 1968
    as Mao turned against the Red Guards for creating "chaos" and ordered
    many of the leaders arrested, Wei became increasingly disillusioned.
    Believing he too might be detained, Wei fled to his family's ancestral
    village in Anhui Province in central China. He spent a year living
    there, hearing shocking stories of the devastation caused by the
    famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s which followed Mao Zedong's
    disastrous Great Leap Forward. He saw whole villages of abandoned
    houses, their roofs caved in and their walls buckling, which belonged
    to inhabitants who had all starved to death. He heard of villagers
    driven to eating the flesh of children. He also began to study Marx
    and Engels more closely.

    Original Link
    (extract)
    Although I was aware that the Chinese were sensitive to the notion
    that they might need to import large amounts of grain, I had not
    realized just how politically charged the issue is. All the leaders of
    China today are survivors of the massive famine that occurred from
    1959 to 1961 in the aftermath of the "Great Leap Forward." This
    misguided effort under Mao Tse-tung to employ millions of farmers in
    large construction projects-including roads, huge earthen dams, and
    backyard steel furnaces-sharply reduced food production, claiming a
    staggering 30 million lives and driving perhaps a few hundred million
    more to the edge of starvation. The national psyche of China has been
    so deeply affected by this devastating event that the prospect of
    depending on the outside world for a substantial share of the
    country's food supply is both psychologically difficult to accept and
    politically anathema.

    Original Link
    (extract)
    Many people today don't know anything about this period. Discussion of
    the persecutions of the anti-Rightest campaign that followed the
    'hundred flowers' policy is still taboo for writers, artists and film
    makers. The mistakes, hardships and persecution of other mass
    movements - the Great Leap Forward followed by economic chaos and
    famine in which millions starved, the Cultural Revolution with its
    witch hunt of class enemies - were all part of a single historical
    flow. They tore into ordinary people, broke up families like a distant
    hurricane. The Blue Kite pays homage to my parents' generation.


    Original Link
    (extract)
    He had been suffering from gastric ulcer before his visit to Hong Kong
    and Macau in May and underwent an operation three days after returning
    to Beijing.

    Mr Lu said he was feeling healthy, despite having more than half of
    his stomach removed in the operation. He said his stomach ailment
    stemmed from the 1959-1962 famine, which followed the failed ``Great
    Leap Forward''.


    Original Link
    (extract)
    Comparison with the prison camp writing from the former Soviet Union
    is inevitable yet unfair because such memoirs are personal attempts to
    recall in detail what happened to individuals in the Chinese labour
    camps and their unique responses to the deprivations they faced in
    common with all prisoners. In Wu's case these ranged from near
    starvation during the famine engendered by the Great Leap Forward, to
    the pain of having his family "drawing a line" to separate themselves
    from his predicament, and the continuous pressure to demonstrate
    "reform" through willingly "drawing close to the government, actively
    informing against evils, and reporting them to the authorities".


    Original Link
    (extract)
    Perhaps the public had become numb to the protracted violence of the
    Middle East and Central America, so that one more outbreak of killing
    was simply taken for granted. But then why was the public shocked by
    the brutality in China? Compared with other episodes of violence,
    upheaval, and oppression in the history of the People's Republic of
    China, the June 4 massacre was relatively mild. The numbers of dead
    were modest in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of landlords
    (by conservative estimates) killed during the land reform of the early
    1950s, the 20 million (by conservative estimates) who died during the
    1959-1961 famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, and the
    hundreds of thousands who lost their lives during the Cultural
    Revolution of the late 1960s. And although something on the order of
    ten thousand people were imprisoned for their political activities in
    the wake of the June 4 crackdown, this hardly compares with the
    hundreds of thousands of intellectuals ! sentenced to labor camps
    during the antirightist campaign directed by Deng Xiaoping during the
    late 1950s. Why did the Beijing crackdown inspire such anguish and
    soul searching outside of China? Why was it not simply discussed
    calmly, though bitterly, as another sad, reprehensible, but basically
    predictable calamity for an unfortunate people?

    Original Link
    (extract)
    The People's Republic. Under the Communists, high inflation was
    brought under control, a land reform program introduced, industry
    nationalized and expanded with Soviet aid, and agriculture collectivized.
    The Chinese People's Volunteers entered the KOREAN WAR against
    UN forces in 1950, participating on a large scale until the armistice of
    1953. A liberal "hundred flowers" period (1957) was followed by a
    crackdown on intellectuals and the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), a
    massive industrial and agricultural development program that was
    intended to transform China's economy overnight but that ended in the
    largest famine in world history, with an estimated 20-40 million deaths.
    At about the same time a growing ideological rift between China and the
    USSR led to withdrawal of Soviet aid and technical assistance. Evidence
    of internal tension began to surface in the 1960s, culminating in the
    CULTURAL REVOLUTION of 1966-69, a massive upheaval launched
    by Mao to purge the revolution of liberal elements. Tension increased in
    the early 1970s with the revelation that Lin Piao, China's defense
    minister and Mao's designated heir, had died (1971) in a plane crash
    after an attempt to assassinate Mao. In international affairs, China's
    progress toward recognition as a world power was aided by its explosion
    of an atomic bomb (1964) and the launching of its first satellite (1970).
    An easing of relations with the West led to the admission of China to the
    UN in 1971 and to a visit to China by Pres. Richard Nixon in 1972. Chou
    En-lai and Mao Tse-tung died in 1976.


    Original Link
    (extract)
    China is one of the world's largest net importers of grain, and in
    some years the largest importer of wheat, despite being largely
    self-sufficient. Imports (of wheat) began in the famine following the
    Great Leap Forward. Net imports have tended to increase in the reform
    period, although this tendency was held at bay for a while by
    extraordinary growth in grain output up to 1984.


    Original Link
    (extract)
    China has a historic predilection for maintaining unworkable
    situations long after other countries would have thrown up their hands
    in despair. The Qing Dynasty was considered corrupt, rotten and
    tottering since the beginning of the 19th Century, yet it lasted for
    more than another century. Various rebellions and breakaway efforts
    sprouted up during that time, most of them as successful as Tiananmen.
    Throughout the 1920s and 1930s China was effectively broken up into
    tiny fiefdoms ruled by local warlords, yet the country never stopped
    considering itself China. China has already experienced the world's
    greatest famine: 30 million people dying of hunger between 1958 and
    1960 as a result of Mao's Great Leap Forward, yet the result was not
    worldwide chaos and war. China has already had a breakaway
    republic--called Taiwan--yet its existence has not torn China asunder
    and Taiwan has flourished to become China's biggest investor.

    Original Link
    (extract)
    Major demographic fluctuations over large populations are historically
    rare. Changes that are locally drastic disappear in global aggregates.
    Even the greatest demographic catastrophe in modern history - the
    1959-61 famine in China associated with the Great Leap Forward policy,
    which resulted in 30 million excess deaths and a 35 million deficit in
    births - had a barely perceptible impact on the curve of world
    population growth. Simulations of India's population trajectory show
    that introducing sharp mortality peaks at regular intervals has only a
    slight effect on the course of India's population growth. Thus it
    makes sense for demographers to work generally with "surprise-free"
    projections - making assumptions of smooth trends in mortality and
    fertility.

    Original Link
    (extract)
    Here are some aspects of recent world material progress that we expect
    to continue.

    1. Larger quantity and variety of available food. In recent years
    famines have only occurred as a result of wars. The last major non-war
    famine was the Chinese Great Leap Forward famine of 1958-60.

    2. Better health. Almost all countries are experiencing an increase in
    lifespan and a reduction in the fraction of their time people spend ill.

    3. The elimination of child labor. It is hard for us to imagine the
    evil of putting children to work in the coal mines at age six.
    (more follow)


    Original Link
    (extract)
    This is a tragedy. Those with higher stature (not necessarily older)
    studied in foreign countries or participated in the Sino-Japanese war,
    and have a wider variety of opinions. Those in the leadership with
    less stature (not necessarily younger) are deeply influenced by the
    reforms and better understand world trends. Only the children of the
    "Nine Criticisms" view the years initial years after the establishment
    of the People's Republic as a golden era.

    Yet how can that be a golden era! Leaving aside the communization and
    anti-rights campaigns, the appearance of the "Nine Criticisms"
    coincided with raging famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. At the
    time, Mao did not attempt any systemic reforms or production
    increases, but sent his energy trying to cover-up the disastrous
    failures of the GLF. In this way, "Soviet Revisionism" became a
    scapegoat, and the function of the "Nine Criticisms" was to elevate
    the disputes between the Soviet Union and China into a sacred battle
    on the theoretical truths of Marxism.

    Cris A Fitch cfitch@alum.mit.edu