The Great Leap Reconsidered. Part Four.

What the CIA found.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Mao’s successor, Liu Shaoqi, attributed seventy percent of the Great Leap’s problems to human error and thirty percent to weather and canceled Mao’s Five-Year Plan. Thenceforth, he said, policies would rely on material incentives and never on idealistic, unplanned mass mobilizations (a resolve he would break a decade later).

The drought deepens

As the drought deepened, the Party drew on decades of experience feeding millions of men on the march, mounting the most comprehensive food relief program in history. Thanks to ration books and efficient distribution, everyone had something to eat every day. At a time when life expectancy was fifty-eight years, the constant hunger weakened people who had grown up malnourished amidst cholera, tuberculosis, and war. Grandparents gave their meager rations to grandchildren and, as harvests fell, death rates rose relentlessly, from twelve per thousand in 1958 to fifteen in 1959 and twenty-five in 1960, not falling back to fourteen until 1961. Mobo Gao says 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, described 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 as Mao wandered 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 CIA reported on the effectiveness of Washington’s 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 Snow 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.

Writer Felix Greene also 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 Marshal 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 drastically which, combined with the flood of rural women entering the urban workforce and young villagers migrating to cities further suppressed the birth rate. Yet the US National Institutes of Health 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.

Historian Han Dongping, who lost two grandparents during the Great Leap, later visited the sites of the worst shortages, Shandong, and Henan Provinces. Yes, farmers told him, the abundance of 1958 had led to carelessness in harvesting, consuming, and storing food, for they had assumed that the communes relieved them of responsibility for their food security. “I interviewed numerous workers and farmers in Shandong and Henan and never met one who said that Mao was bad. I talked to a scholar in Anhui who grew up in rural areas and had done research there. He never met one farmer that said Mao was bad nor a farmer who said Deng [Mao’s successor] was good”. As historian Gwydion Williams dryly observed, “The peasants, heavily armed for the only time in history, took no action. Had their faith in Mao been shaken, would the survivors have shown the enthusiasm for his Cultural Revolution that they demonstrated from 1966 onwards?”

For all its chaos and disappointment, we must consider China’s fate had there been no Great Leap, for it was the foundation of the country’s current success. Without its forty-six thousand communally constructed reservoirs the effects of later droughts would have been truly disastrous.

Says agronomist William Hinton, “When I spent three weeks in China in 1983 visiting several communes—which still existed then—I was told every time, ‘We built our water conservation system during the Great Leap.’”