"But less than ten years after Mao took power, Chinese population increased from around 450 million to 600 million. How could an already stretched Chinese agricultural system feed these suddenly increased extra 150 million people, before green revolution and under the US embargo? "
This is really all you need to know, as well as the fact that China's life expectancy immediately after the civil war was in the 30s and China had experienced a famine every 20-30 years.
A US embargo never helps either as evidenced by the 40,000 dead in Venezuela that the US media was quick to blame on "socialism" or whatever gibberish.
This is an interesting account of the 1959-1962 famine and how and why it has been portrayed, most likely, as a great deal more severe than previous famines. One curious aspect, said to be because the Government is hiding them, is the absence of photographic evidence of people dying from the famine in large numbers. Certainly the propaganda from the West was intense an intent on overlooking the great improvements in equality and living, work, education standards etc - and hopes of a much better future for China under Mao and his leading comrades in the making of New China.
Gao says92 the only suicide in the history of his village occurred during the Great Leap.
A woman hanged herself because of family hardship. The Great Leap Forward years were the only time in anybody’s memory that Gao villagers had to pick wild vegetables and grind rice husks into powder to make food. Throughout my twenty years in Gao village, I do not remember any particular time when my family had enough to eat … as a rural resident, life was always a matter of survival. However, the Great Leap Forward made life even more difficult. Our region was hit very hard by natural disasters for two consecutive years… But during the two years of natural disasters, we got relief grain from the Central Government, the provincial Government, Qingdao City, Shanghai City, and many other regions… Whenever and wherever one place had difficulties, people from different places helped. I remember many peasants told me that if it were not for the People’s Government’s help, many people would have starved amid disasters like the one in 1960. By contrast, in Northern Henan Province (where the grain shortage during the Great Leap Forward was supposed to have been severe), five million people starved to death in 1942. The government at that time had done nothing to help the local people.
In the 1990s, on a Guggenheim scholarship, I accompanied Ralph Thaxton, my graduate school advisor, to study the region’s famine. When Ralph told them he had come to study the famine, peasants thought that he was studying the famine of 1942-1943. During that 1942-1943 famine, they said, not only did five million people starve, but many had to sell their land, their houses and children before fleeing their home towns. The local and national governments did nothing to help. But nothing like that took place during the Great Leap Forward.
Mao’s bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, described93 how Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and their cook prepared a family banquet when Mao’s teenage daughter, Li Na, returned from boarding school. She was so hungry and ate so fast that Mao and Jiang put down their bowls and watched her devour every dish on the table until, by the end, the cook and Jiang Qing were sobbing, and Mao was wandering around the courtyard, speechless.
Journalist Sidney Rittenberg said Party members were forbidden to stand in line to buy food. He recalled a woman who broke the rule, “They had this big meeting where she made a self-criticism, weeping, weeping, weeping, saying, ‘I’m not a good communist, I put my children’s health above the health of the masses.’ Can you imagine that today, anything even remotely similar? Today it’s ‘get mine!’”
The harvest failures were widely known, and the US Government tasked the CIA94 with reporting on the effectiveness of its grain embargo:
April 4, 1961: The Chinese Communist regime is now facing the most serious economic difficulties it has confronted since it concentrated its power over mainland China. As a result of economic mismanagement, and especially of two years of unfavorable weather, food production in 1960 was hardly larger than in 1957, at which time there were about 50 million fewer Chinese to feed. Widespread famine does not appear to be at hand. Still, in some provinces, many people are now on a bare subsistence diet, and the bitterest suffering lies immediately ahead, in the period before the July harvests. The dislocations caused by the ‘Leap Forward’ and the removal of Soviet technicians have disrupted China’s industrialization program. These difficulties have sharply reduced the rate of economic growth during 1960 and have created a severe balance of payments problem. Public morale, especially in rural areas, is almost certainly at its lowest point since the Communists assumed power, and there have been some instances of open dissidence.
May 2, 1962: The future course of events in Communist China will be shaped largely by three highly unpredictable variables: the wisdom and realism of the leadership, the level of agricultural output, and the nature and extent of foreign economic relations. During the past few years, all three variables have worked against China. In 1958, the leadership adopted a series of ill-conceived and extremist economic and social programs; in 1959, there occurred the first of three years of bad crop weather; and in 1960, Soviet economic and technical cooperation was largely suspended. The combination of these three factors has brought economic chaos to the country. Malnutrition is widespread, foreign trade is down, and industrial production and development have dropped sharply. No quick recovery from the regime’s economic troubles is in sight.
Ridiculing the Great Leap Forward as ‘The Great Leap Backward,’ Edgar Snow95 confirmed the CIA’s findings:
Were the 1960 calamities as severe as reported in Peking, ‘the worst series of disasters since the nineteenth century,’ as Chou En-lai told me? The weather was not the only cause of the disappointing harvest, but it was undoubtedly a major cause. With good weather, the crops would have been ample; without it, other adverse factors I have cited–some discontent in the communes, bureaucracy, transportation bottlenecks – weighed heavily. Merely from personal observations in 1960, I know that there was no rain in large areas of northern China for 200-300 days. I have mentioned unprecedented floods in central Manchuria where I was marooned in Shenyang for a week …while eleven typhoons struck northeast China–the largest number in fifty years, and I saw the Yellow River reduced to a small stream. Throughout 1959-1962, many Western press editorials continued referring to ‘mass starvation’ in China and continued citing no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-Communist visitor to China provides an authentic instance of starvation during this period. Here I am not speaking of food shortages, or lack of surfeit, to which I have made frequent reference, but of people dying of hunger, which is what ‘famine’ connotes to most of us, and what I saw in the past.
Felix Greene96 aso traveled across China in 1960:
With the establishment of the new Government in Peking in 1949, two things happened. First, starvation–death by hunger–ceased in China. There have been food shortages–and severe ones, but no starvation–a fact fully documented by Western observers. The truth is that the sufferings of the ordinary Chinese peasant from war, disorder, and famine have been immeasurably less in the last decade than in any other decade in the century.
During a visit to Yan’an in 1961, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, an expert on physical conditioning, even inspected public bathhouses. “Before coming here, some people told me China is having a famine, hundreds of thousands have starved to death, but here people’s musculature is very good. I did not see signs of famine”. Reginald Maudling, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, summarized intelligence reports, “There was little evidence that Chinese refugees attempting to enter Hong Kong were suffering from malnutrition. Except for occasional signs of vitamin deficiency, those refugees seen by Mr. Hughes indicated that food rationing–to cope with three years of failing agricultural production and bungled corrective methods–has obviously served to ward off mass starvation”.
Like all famines, this one cut fertility by fifty percent and, combined with the ongoing entry of women into the workforce, migration of young villagers to cities further suppressed the birth rate. Yet the US National Institutes of Health97 found that life expectancy under Mao “Ranks among the most rapid, sustained increases in documented global history. These survival gains appear to have been largest during the 1950s, with a sharp reversal during the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine, followed by substantial progress again during the early 1960s”. Note that survival gains suffered the reversal, not the population.
"But less than ten years after Mao took power, Chinese population increased from around 450 million to 600 million. How could an already stretched Chinese agricultural system feed these suddenly increased extra 150 million people, before green revolution and under the US embargo? "
This is really all you need to know, as well as the fact that China's life expectancy immediately after the civil war was in the 30s and China had experienced a famine every 20-30 years.
A US embargo never helps either as evidenced by the 40,000 dead in Venezuela that the US media was quick to blame on "socialism" or whatever gibberish.
This is an interesting account of the 1959-1962 famine and how and why it has been portrayed, most likely, as a great deal more severe than previous famines. One curious aspect, said to be because the Government is hiding them, is the absence of photographic evidence of people dying from the famine in large numbers. Certainly the propaganda from the West was intense an intent on overlooking the great improvements in equality and living, work, education standards etc - and hopes of a much better future for China under Mao and his leading comrades in the making of New China.
How could a government hide photographs? There were journalists traveling all over China at the time.
Thank you, that's an interesting angle. Can you name some of those journalists / photographers, please, so I can follow up any leads?
Gao says92 the only suicide in the history of his village occurred during the Great Leap.
A woman hanged herself because of family hardship. The Great Leap Forward years were the only time in anybody’s memory that Gao villagers had to pick wild vegetables and grind rice husks into powder to make food. Throughout my twenty years in Gao village, I do not remember any particular time when my family had enough to eat … as a rural resident, life was always a matter of survival. However, the Great Leap Forward made life even more difficult. Our region was hit very hard by natural disasters for two consecutive years… But during the two years of natural disasters, we got relief grain from the Central Government, the provincial Government, Qingdao City, Shanghai City, and many other regions… Whenever and wherever one place had difficulties, people from different places helped. I remember many peasants told me that if it were not for the People’s Government’s help, many people would have starved amid disasters like the one in 1960. By contrast, in Northern Henan Province (where the grain shortage during the Great Leap Forward was supposed to have been severe), five million people starved to death in 1942. The government at that time had done nothing to help the local people.
In the 1990s, on a Guggenheim scholarship, I accompanied Ralph Thaxton, my graduate school advisor, to study the region’s famine. When Ralph told them he had come to study the famine, peasants thought that he was studying the famine of 1942-1943. During that 1942-1943 famine, they said, not only did five million people starve, but many had to sell their land, their houses and children before fleeing their home towns. The local and national governments did nothing to help. But nothing like that took place during the Great Leap Forward.
Mao’s bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, described93 how Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and their cook prepared a family banquet when Mao’s teenage daughter, Li Na, returned from boarding school. She was so hungry and ate so fast that Mao and Jiang put down their bowls and watched her devour every dish on the table until, by the end, the cook and Jiang Qing were sobbing, and Mao was wandering around the courtyard, speechless.
Journalist Sidney Rittenberg said Party members were forbidden to stand in line to buy food. He recalled a woman who broke the rule, “They had this big meeting where she made a self-criticism, weeping, weeping, weeping, saying, ‘I’m not a good communist, I put my children’s health above the health of the masses.’ Can you imagine that today, anything even remotely similar? Today it’s ‘get mine!’”
The harvest failures were widely known, and the US Government tasked the CIA94 with reporting on the effectiveness of its grain embargo:
April 4, 1961: The Chinese Communist regime is now facing the most serious economic difficulties it has confronted since it concentrated its power over mainland China. As a result of economic mismanagement, and especially of two years of unfavorable weather, food production in 1960 was hardly larger than in 1957, at which time there were about 50 million fewer Chinese to feed. Widespread famine does not appear to be at hand. Still, in some provinces, many people are now on a bare subsistence diet, and the bitterest suffering lies immediately ahead, in the period before the July harvests. The dislocations caused by the ‘Leap Forward’ and the removal of Soviet technicians have disrupted China’s industrialization program. These difficulties have sharply reduced the rate of economic growth during 1960 and have created a severe balance of payments problem. Public morale, especially in rural areas, is almost certainly at its lowest point since the Communists assumed power, and there have been some instances of open dissidence.
May 2, 1962: The future course of events in Communist China will be shaped largely by three highly unpredictable variables: the wisdom and realism of the leadership, the level of agricultural output, and the nature and extent of foreign economic relations. During the past few years, all three variables have worked against China. In 1958, the leadership adopted a series of ill-conceived and extremist economic and social programs; in 1959, there occurred the first of three years of bad crop weather; and in 1960, Soviet economic and technical cooperation was largely suspended. The combination of these three factors has brought economic chaos to the country. Malnutrition is widespread, foreign trade is down, and industrial production and development have dropped sharply. No quick recovery from the regime’s economic troubles is in sight.
Ridiculing the Great Leap Forward as ‘The Great Leap Backward,’ Edgar Snow95 confirmed the CIA’s findings:
Were the 1960 calamities as severe as reported in Peking, ‘the worst series of disasters since the nineteenth century,’ as Chou En-lai told me? The weather was not the only cause of the disappointing harvest, but it was undoubtedly a major cause. With good weather, the crops would have been ample; without it, other adverse factors I have cited–some discontent in the communes, bureaucracy, transportation bottlenecks – weighed heavily. Merely from personal observations in 1960, I know that there was no rain in large areas of northern China for 200-300 days. I have mentioned unprecedented floods in central Manchuria where I was marooned in Shenyang for a week …while eleven typhoons struck northeast China–the largest number in fifty years, and I saw the Yellow River reduced to a small stream. Throughout 1959-1962, many Western press editorials continued referring to ‘mass starvation’ in China and continued citing no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-Communist visitor to China provides an authentic instance of starvation during this period. Here I am not speaking of food shortages, or lack of surfeit, to which I have made frequent reference, but of people dying of hunger, which is what ‘famine’ connotes to most of us, and what I saw in the past.
Felix Greene96 aso traveled across China in 1960:
With the establishment of the new Government in Peking in 1949, two things happened. First, starvation–death by hunger–ceased in China. There have been food shortages–and severe ones, but no starvation–a fact fully documented by Western observers. The truth is that the sufferings of the ordinary Chinese peasant from war, disorder, and famine have been immeasurably less in the last decade than in any other decade in the century.
During a visit to Yan’an in 1961, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, an expert on physical conditioning, even inspected public bathhouses. “Before coming here, some people told me China is having a famine, hundreds of thousands have starved to death, but here people’s musculature is very good. I did not see signs of famine”. Reginald Maudling, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, summarized intelligence reports, “There was little evidence that Chinese refugees attempting to enter Hong Kong were suffering from malnutrition. Except for occasional signs of vitamin deficiency, those refugees seen by Mr. Hughes indicated that food rationing–to cope with three years of failing agricultural production and bungled corrective methods–has obviously served to ward off mass starvation”.
Like all famines, this one cut fertility by fifty percent and, combined with the ongoing entry of women into the workforce, migration of young villagers to cities further suppressed the birth rate. Yet the US National Institutes of Health97 found that life expectancy under Mao “Ranks among the most rapid, sustained increases in documented global history. These survival gains appear to have been largest during the 1950s, with a sharp reversal during the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine, followed by substantial progress again during the early 1960s”. Note that survival gains suffered the reversal, not the population.