Mao’s China · 1960
How far was the Great Famine caused by deliberate choices?
The seminar question: “To what extent was the Great Famine the result of deliberate choices by China’s leaders?”
The famine of 1959–61, the largest in recorded history, was caused by policy. The Great Leap had diverted labour from the fields and replaced family kitchens with mess halls, and the state took grain on the basis of inflated harvest claims; after the Lushan purge of 1959, warnings were silenced.
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Hunger followed a chain of decisions made during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s 1958 drive to transform China through mass labour, and each link is visible in the records of the Communist Party, which ran every level of government. The harvest of 1959 fell to about 170 million tonnes, and that of 1960 to about 144 million, against 195 million in 1957, because labour had been taken for furnaces and dams. Yet the state’s procurement, its compulsory purchase of grain at a fixed price, in effect a tax in grain, was the decade’s highest in 1959, close to two-fifths of the real crop, since quotas rested on the Leap’s false figures. When officials in Guangdong reported in early 1959 that peasants were hiding grain, drives to seize “concealed” grain spread. Cadres, the local Party officials who acted as a village’s employer, police and tax office, searched houses and beat those who resisted. The communal mess halls, which had replaced family kitchens in 1958, ran short in the winter of 1959–60, and families who had surrendered their pots and stores had nothing left. The deaths that peaked in late 1959 and 1960 followed from a decision to keep collecting grain after the evidence of hunger was in.
The short answer
- Procurement based on false harvests. Grain quotas for 1959 were set on the claims of 1958, when the official harvest was announced as 375 million tonnes against a real figure of about 200 million. Officials who had invented the harvests could not admit it, so they met the quotas by taking seed grain and the food that villages needed to survive. The state therefore took its largest share of the decade in 1959, from villages in the very year they had least.
- Households with nothing of their own. The communes had abolished private plots and family livestock, closed rural markets and collected pots and stoves for the furnaces, so food came only from the mess hall. When the halls ran out of grain, families had no reserves, no land of their own to dig and nothing to sell. A system designed to free people from household cares left them with no defence against hunger. Families who had once hidden a little grain for hard years had surrendered their reserves to the collective.
- The Lushan purge silenced the alarm. The purge at Lushan made reporting hunger dangerous. After Peng Dehuai was dismissed in August 1959, the campaign against right opportunists punished officials who questioned targets, and millions of cadres were criticised or demoted. Reporting deaths became dangerous, because hunger implied that the Leap had failed. Provincial leaders raised procurement again in the autumn of 1959, exactly when a retreat was most needed, and the worst deaths followed in the next winter and spring.
- Cities and exports came first. Household registration and ration cards guaranteed urban residents a minimum supply, so shortages were pushed onto the countryside. China also kept exporting grain, 4.2 million tonnes in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union, to pay for machinery and repay debts, and it refused foreign food aid. Drought and floods in some regions in 1959–60 made matters worse, but the decisions about who would bear the shortage were political, and they were made in the capital by people who would not go hungry.
THE TURNING POINT
Xinyang, winter 1959–60. Xinyang is the hinge because it was where the leadership could no longer pretend not to know. Henan’s leaders had led the Leap, and in Xinyang prefecture they pressed the campaign against concealment through the winter of 1959–60, searching homes, beating peasants and blocking escape, while about one million people died. When an investigation sent by the centre reported in 1960, the Party had written proof from its own officials. Mao endorsed the purge of the local leaders and, in November 1960, the retreat of the Twelve Articles. The famine did not end at once, but the policy that caused it began to be reversed only after Xinyang.
What it changed
The great retreat. The Party saved the countryside by undoing the Leap. From late 1960 it restored private plots, rural markets and smaller farming units, closed the mess halls and imported grain. Led by Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, the recovery of 1961–65 brought food production back to its 1957 level by about 1965. The managers of the recovery, whose reforms saved lives, would become Mao’s targets in 1966.
A wound in Mao’s authority. Mao withdrew further from day-to-day government and made a limited self-criticism in 1962, while privately blaming lower officials. Leaders who had seen the evidence now doubted his judgement, and Mao came to suspect that they would one day repudiate him as Khrushchev had repudiated Stalin. That fear shaped his decision to attack the Party in 1966. The Cultural Revolution was, among other things, Mao’s answer to the famine’s verdict on him.
Missing births and a lasting scar. Births collapsed during the famine, and demographers estimate around 30 million births lost or postponed in addition to the deaths. The cohort shows as a deep notch in China’s population pyramid even today, and studies of people conceived in 1959–61 have found lasting effects on health and height. The famine marked the bodies of children too young to remember it.
Memory without a monument. Remembering the famine remains a political act in China, because the Party has never published a death toll. Its 1981 Resolution acknowledged “serious losses” and blamed errors, natural calamities and Soviet perfidy together. No national memorial exists, archives have been closed again since the 2010s, and works such as Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone are banned in China. Families have often kept the memory privately, and much of what historians know comes from people who chose to record it at their own risk.
The full answer, argued
The famine was certainly the result of choices: to set quotas on inflated harvests, to abolish private food, to purge Peng Dehuai and revive the Leap after Lushan, to protect the cities and keep exporting grain, and to refuse foreign aid. Each was taken by people with power, and the provincial variation shown on the map strongly suggests that choices by local leaders mattered far more than the weather. Whether these choices amount to deliberate killing is where historians divide. Dikötter argues that Mao knew of mass deaths and continued, which makes the famine a mass killing; Wemheuer, Ó Gráda and others see leaders who accepted rural deaths as the price of their priorities without seeking them, a famine of ideology and wilful blindness. The evidence of Mao’s private knowledge in 1959–60 is incomplete and disputed, so certainty is impossible. The strongest answer separates the two questions: the deaths were caused by deliberate policies, while the intention to kill is not proven. The general lesson concerns systems that punish bad news, since such systems can kill on a vast scale without any leader needing to want it.
An interesting fact
The most detailed history of the famine was written by a member of the Party who had lost his own father to it. Yang Jisheng, a journalist for the state news agency Xinhua for more than three decades, was a student in 1959 when he went home to his village in Hubei and found his father dying of hunger; he says that at the time he believed the official explanation. He spent more than a decade gathering provincial records and interviews, and published Tombstone in Hong Kong in 2008. He explained the title as a tombstone for his father, for the millions who died, and for the system that caused their deaths.
This is the study layer of Great Chinese Famine, chapter 7 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976; the full index of the atlas is here.
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