The Great Leap Reconsidered. Part Three.

"I lived through the Cultural revolution, then did field work in China in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This is what I saw and heard”. Dongping Han.

Part 1. Part 2.

Dongping Han: In my village in Shandong, people would say anybody who died in 1959,1960 and 1961 died of starvation, does not matter how old they were.  My village had very little land, less than  one sixth acre per capita in 1959.   There were three years of flooding and drought during these three years. We did not have enough harvest to sustain ourselves but we got relief grain from Shandong Provincial government, from Shanghai, Qingdao's city.  

More importantly, we got a lot of relief grain and dried vegetables from Yunnan Province. My grandfathers of both my mom and my father died in 1960. They were both over sixty years old.  [Life expectancy was 58 years. Ed]. But my mom would tell people he died of starvation. He actually died of a disease. The public dining hall was open, and people could get three meals a day there. But it does not provide enough, and barely sustained us. I would argue that most people died of some disease. Poor nutrition weakened people's health, and they became sick and died.  I did not know any of my classmates in primary school who had lost a sibling in my village. 

I also studied several Henan villages.  In one big village with two thousand people, I asked people how many people starved during the great leap forward.  People would say one hundred, fifty, all kinds of numbers. I would gather all the people in the village who were above sixty years of age in 1987 to have a group interview. I would ask them to tell me collectively who were the people who starved to death. The most names they were able to come up with were 15, and those people were all over 60 years old, except one. The exception was a 37 years old man, he had no siblings and no parents, living by himself in the village. Everybody else tried to eat some green crops while working in the field, but he was too honest to do that.  He just ate what he could get from the public dining hall.   Eventually he fell sick and died.  He may be the only person who could be considered starved to death in that village,  but even he died of a disease. 

The Chinese farmers were closest to crops and food in China.   They would cook and eat green corns, sweet potatoes, wheat and soybean while working in the fields.  Everybody did, even village leaders. They were all hungry, and they all wanted to eat.   They would also eat carrots, cabbage, turnips in the fields.   These crops belonged to the farmers, and they would eat as much as they could. They would not starve themselves when there were all kinds of foods around them. After I studied the great leap forward in Shandong, Henan, and Anhui, I would argue that the whole idea of starvation during the Great Leap Forward was fabricated and out of proportion.  The collective ownership of land and crops, and socialist system made it almost impossible for people to starve.  Before 1949, individual landlords owned the land and crops, they would never allow anybody to eat green crops.  But during the great leap forward, everybody owned the land and crops, and they could eat while working in the fields.

More accomplishments

During the second five-year-plan, which included the three years of the Great Leap Forward, China invested 120,090 million yuan and completed 581 big and medium industrial projects. Fixed national industrial assets increased by 861,820 million yuan. Without the hard work of the Great Leap Forward, it would be hard to imagine that China would be able to take off in the automobile, boat, transportation, and national defence industries. That China would develop nuclear bombs and satellites would be questionable. In fact, the DF-5, China’s first strategic ICBM, was developed entirely during the Cultural Revolution.

Grain shortages?

Post-Mao Chinese scholars, together with their foreign counterparts, try to paint a very dark picture of the Great Leap Forward. They claim that the Great Leap Forward created an unprecedented famine in China. They circulate rumours that 36 or more millions of people starved to death. In 1958, 1959 and 1960, the Americans, the Russians, the British, the Jiang Jieshi regime in Taiwan, the Japanese, and South Koreans were all hostile to China, had spies in China, and listening devices around China to monitor what was going on. But they did not have any evidence to show there was a famine in China at that time.

The post-Mao struggle between the representatives of opposing lines in the Communist Party ended in an anti-Mao faction coming to power. This anti-Mao faction began a political campaign to tarnish the Mao era in order to legitimize their political return and to introduce a different political platform, opposed to that of Chairman Maoʼs. They started changing population statistics, and began to focus on the shortcomings of the Great Leap Forward. For many years, they only allowed one sided anti-Mao materials to be published. They used questionable methods to project the population changes in China during the Great Leap Forward, and eventually claimed dozens of millions of Chinese people perished during that period.

A Chinese mathematics professor, Sun Jingxian, and an Indian economist, Utsa Patnaik, have refuted these claims and denounced them as an ideologically motivated attack on socialism. I will not repeat their argument here.

Rather, I shall present some of my own field research, which will provide a case study of experiences of people in the Great Leap Forward and corroborate some of these findings. After all, I grew up during the Great Leap Forward and I have done rural research in China during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

Doing rural research

In 1958, the year when the commune was formed, we had the greatest summer and fall harvests in recorded history. People ate so well. That was true not only in my hometown in Shandong Province, but also in Henan and Anhui Provinces, where I studied.

Peasants in Henan and Anhui told me that they were able to eat very well, better than ever before, in 1958. This indicates that the forming of the peopleʼs communes and the Great Leap Forward only improved peopleʼs livelihoods in 1958. In 1959, my hometown suffered a summer flood without precedent in the last hundred years. I still remember that my mother and my aunt took me to the fields in those days. After several days of rain, the ditches beside the roads were filled with water. All of our fields were water-logged. My mother pulled out some of the sweet potato plants which were planted about a month earlier, and saw no growth. I heard my mother tell my aunts that we were going to have a hard time that year. In the spring of 1960, my hometown had a very bad drought. On top of that, we had another very bad summer flood. The crops failed again. Quite a few people in my village migrated to the Northeast with their families, and quite a few young people left the village to look for opportunities elsewhere. Thus our region was hit very badly by natural disasters for two consecutive years.

The Shandong Provincial Government, as well as the Central Government sent teams of investigators to our county to find out what was happening with the local leadership. The County Party Secretary Xu Hua and the Head of County Government Office Wang Changsheng were both dismissed by the upper government because of the grain shortage in the county. But during the two years of natural disasters, we got relief grains from the Central government, the provincial government, Qingdao City, Shanghai City and many other regions. I still remember the two dried wild vegetables shipped to us from Yunan Province: one with golden hair which we called ginmaogou (golden-haired dog), because it was shaped like a tiny dog, and another which was brown and shaped like a pig liver, called yezhugan (wild pig liver) by the local people. For many years, my parents kept a piece of each of these wild vegetables as souvenirs of the two hardship years, and also to remember the help we got from other people in China.

People in Baoding Prefecture, Hebei Province, published a collection of memoirs titled During the Difficult Days, which describes how, amid the severe grain shortages, people worked together helping each other, and how the local government leaders shared the hardship of the common people. When I read the book, I was reminded that the reason very few people starved amid the natural disasters of the Great Leap Forward was because of the spirit of socialism. Whenever and wherever one place had difficulties, people from other places helped. I remember many peasants told me that if it were not for the help of the Peopleʼs Government, 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 had starved to death in 1942. The Government at that time had done nothing to help the local people. In the 1990s, I accompanied Ralph Thaxton, my advisor in graduate school, to study (on a Guggenheim scholarship) the regionʼs famine. When he said that he had come to study the famine, peasants thought that he was studying the famine of 1942-3. During that 1942-43 famine, not only did five million people starve, but many people had to sell their land, their houses, and their children, before fleeing their hometowns. The local government and national government did nothing to help the people there.

But nothing like that took place during the grain shortage of the Great Leap Forward. Amid the grain shortages, my maternal grandfather died of a disease. My paternal grandfather also died that year at the same age. They were both in their sixties. (Chinese peopleʼs life expectancy was less than 60 years then.) They had been sick for a long time. The grain shortage might have weakened them, and they may have eventually succumbed to disease. But I think there is a significant difference between that and saying that they starved to death. Only people with ulterior motives would blame principally the Great Leap Forward, or the public dining halls, or the peopleʼs communes, for the grain shortage we faced during these three years amid severe natural disasters. The grain shortage was caused first and foremost by natural disasters.

Like my mother, my father never went to school when he was young. He started working as an apprentice when he was 13 years old. When the Communist Party came to power, the Government set up night schools for workers who wanted to learn how to read and write. He learned how to read and write at the night school. Later, the factory sent him to get training from Shandong Industrial College in Jinan. Because of the training he got, he and a few others were put in charge of building a steel factory in my county (Jimo County) during the Great Leap Forward.

The factory was set up in 1958, and in a very short time span, the factory recruited 2000 workers from the rural areas in the county, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties. For three months, my father interviewed and recruited these workers. Two years later, faced with economic difficulties caused by the natural disasters and the souring of relations with the Soviet Union, the Government decided to close down the steel factory.

The 2,000 young workers my father recruited and trained were all asked to go back to their original villages. Mr. Sun Jingxian (who, as mentioned earlier, wrote a refutation of the inflated estimates of deaths during 1959-61) argues in his article that the alleged population loss (on paper) during the Great Leap Forward was partly caused by the fact that a large number of people moved in this period. First they moved as a result of industrialization at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward; and later they moved because the closing down of these factories led to workers being sent back. What happened in my fatherʼs factory could support Mr. Sunʼs argument. An important point I want to make here is that these rural youth received important training during the two years working in my fatherʼs factory. Later, when the economic

My method

Let me tell you how I found out if people starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. I went to the places where the famine was supposed to have been very bad. I talked with all the old people in the village and asked them how many people starved to death in their village. In one village, where there were 2,000 people during the Great Leap Forward, some people said that about 100 people died and some people said that 50 people died. I then asked these same people to tell me the names of these people who died and how old these people were when they died. It turned out that in this village of 2,000 people, these old people could only name 15 people collectively, and those who died were all over 60 years old (when life expectancy then was less than 60 years), except one man who was in his forties. But this man was a mentally handicapped orphan, who lived alone, could not care for himself and had nobody else to help him. And sadly, he died prematurely. In the last 30- odd years, one heard many stories about starvation and famine during the Great Leap Forward. But most of the stories could not stand close scrutiny and examination.

Frank Dikötter also claimed that he had documents to prove that Chairman Mao was willing to starve half of the Chinese people to death so that the other half could have more than enough to eat. My friend challenged him to produce the document. Dikötter said that he had an agreement with the source of the document not to show the document to anybody. But under pressure, he agreed to let my friend in Hong Kong to see the document. It turned out that the document was a speech by Chairman Mao at a meeting discussing the investment planned in industrial projects. China had planned to launch over one thousand industrial projects in 1960. Chairman Mao said in the speech that he would rather cut the number of investment projects by half so the Government would have enough money to quickly complete the remaining half of the projects. But Dikötter interpreted Chairman Maoʼs words to mean that he was willing to starve half the Chinese population in order that the other half have more than enough to eat. Dikötter claimed that he was a China specialist. I wonder if he was able to read and understand Chinese text, or he was in fact a linguistic genius who could read into the Chinese language something that was not there in the first place.

I had a debate with one of my professors when he said in class that 40 million Chinese peasants starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. I asked him why the Chinese peasants, allegedly facing certain starvation, did not rebel during the Great Leap Forward. Chinese peasants had rebelled so many times in history when there was a famine. He said that Chinese people were too starved to rebel then. I said that apparently the Chinese peasants were not too starved to build thousands of reservoirs during the Great Leap Forward. He then said that the Chinese peasants did not have weapons during the Great Leap Forward with which to rebel. I said that throughout Chinese history, the Chinese ruling classes never allowed Chinese peasants to have weapons. But that did not prevent Chinese peasants from rebellion with sticks and shovels, again and again. In our Chinese language, we have a proverb, “jie gan erqi” (pick up a bamboo stick and rebel), to describe one of the earliest rebellions in the Qin Dynasty. I also told my professor that the Mao era was an exception in Chinese history: under Chairman Mao, the Chinese State did allow the Chinese people, both peasants and workers, to have weapons. During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government called upon the Chinese people to organize several hundred divisions of militia.

Peasants worked in the fields with rifles stacked beside them. This summer I interviewed the former village party secretary of Yakoucun Village in Guangzhou. He told me that during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution years, his villageʼs militia had more than 200 rifles, machines guns, and even anti-air artilleries. The village militia was trained regularly. The weapons were taken away from the village when Deng Xiaoping started the rural reforms in 1982. It would be much easier for peasants to rebel, if they wanted to, with such easy access to weapons. But there was not even a protest, let alone a rebellion, during the Great Leap Forward.

The three line projects

The three line projects were launched when the Sino-Russian relations were ruptured after 1960. The Great Leap Forward built up the agricultural infrastructure, constructing 84,000 big reservoirs related irrigation channels, like the red flag irrigation projects in Henan, which continued to 1976 when Mao died. The great Leap Forward also laid the foundation for China's industrialization, some big tractor factories, truck, car, locomotives, steel plants and so on. More importantly, many provinces, cities and counties began to invest huge amounts in industry. My county had no industry before the great leap forward. During the great leap forward, it built up the first steel factory, first farming machinery factory, the first chemical fertilizer factory. By 1976, when Chairman Mao passed away, we had 35 major factories, each employing more than one thousand workers. All were state owned.

During the third line projects, several of my middle school classmates were hired by the government to work on some of the projects. They were mostly 16 years old, and just left the school to work on some secret projects. They did not have mailing addresses, only a mail box. Many years later, when they came back to visit, we learned that they were working in the remote mountain areas to build up the third line defense projects. They had to pass strict political scrutiny before they were chosen. They had to be politically reliable. Now these people are retirees, back to my hometown again.

Chairman Mao had a long vision for China. Most of the third line projects were military oriented, but they were converted to civilian projects after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1979. It greatly expanded China's distribution of industry over a large expanse of the territory. Dongping Han.

Reading

Remembering Socialist China, 1949-1976. Dongping Han, Hao Qi, Mobo Gao,