Mao's Great Famine (21 page)

A series of biting assessments followed Li Fuchun’s speech. Li Yiqing, a senior party secretary, reported that in 1958 more than 140,000 tonnes of farming tools had been thrown into the backyard furnaces in the model province of Henan. Wu Jingtian, vice-minister of railways, explained how one in five locomotives was out of circulation because of engine damage. Peng De, vice-minister of transportation, announced that fewer than two out of three vehicles under his command actually worked. Vice-minister of metallurgy Xu Chi noted that the steelworks of Angang were forced to stop for weeks on end over the summer because of coal shortages.
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Mao rarely attended the meetings, following them instead through written reports compiled every evening. He was in retreat, strategically withholding judgement and finding out where his colleagues stood. But the Chairman was not pleased. Letting off steam with his doctor Li Zhisui, he said: ‘All the good party members are dead. The only ones left are a bunch of zombies.’
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But he took no action. At last, party leaders started to discuss among themselves the extent of the damage done by three years of forced collectivisation. What they discovered was destruction on a scale few could have imagined.

Part Three

Destruction

17

Agriculture

The term ‘command economy’ comes from the German
Befehlswirtschaft
. It was originally applied to the Nazi economy, but was later used to describe the Soviet Union. Instead of allowing dispersed buyers and sellers to determine their own economic activities according to the laws of supply and demand, a higher authority would issue commands determining the overall direction of the economy following a master plan. The command principle entailed that all economic decisions were centralised for the greater good, as the state determined what should be produced, how much should be produced, who produced what and where, how resources should be allocated and what prices should be charged for materials, goods and services. A central plan replaced the market.

As planners took over the economy in China, farmers lost control over the harvest. In 1953 a monopoly over grain was introduced, decreeing that farmers must sell all surplus grain to the state at prices determined by the state. The aim behind the monopoly was to stabilise the price of grain across the country, eliminate speculation and guarantee the grain needed to feed the urban population and fuel an industrial expansion. But what was ‘surplus grain’ in a country where many farmers barely grew enough to scrape by? It was defined as seed, fodder and a basic grain ration set at roughly 13 to 15 kilos per head each month. However, 23 to 26 kilos of unhusked grain were required to provide 1,700 to 1,900 calories per day, an amount international aid organisations consider to be the bare minimum for subsistence.
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The notion of a surplus, in other words, was a political construct designed to give legitimacy to the extraction of grain from the countryside. By forcing villagers to sell grain before their own subsistence needs were met, the state also made them more dependent on the collective. Extra grain above the basic ration had to be bought back from the state by villagers with work points, which were distributed on the basis of their performance in collective labour. Farmers had lost control not only of their land and their harvest, but also of their own work schedules: local cadres determined who should do what and for how many work points, from collecting manure to looking after the buffaloes in the fields. As the market was eliminated and money lost its purchasing power, grain became the currency of exchange. Most of it was in the hands of the state.

But a more insidious problem lurked behind the notion of a grain surplus, namely the enormous pressure applied to local leaders to pledge ever greater grain sales. The amount sold to the state was determined in a series of meetings which started from the village up, as a team leader passed on a quota to the brigade, where the pledges were adjusted and collated into a bid passed on to the commune, which then negotiated how much it would deliver to the county. By the time a pledge reached the level of the region and the province, the amount had been revised upwards several times as a result of peer pressure. A figure very far removed from reality finally landed on the desk of Li Fuchun, the man responsible for planning the economy and setting national production targets. He, in turn, inflated the target according to the latest policy shifts agreed on by the leadership: that new figure was the party’s command.

The pressure to show sensational gains in grain output reached a climax during the Great Leap Forward. In a frenzy of competitive bidding, party officials from the village all the way up to the province tried to outdo each other, as one record after the other was announced by the propaganda machine, in turn spurring even more cautious cadres to inflate the figures. Even after the party had tried to rein in some of the more extravagant claims in early 1959, failure to project a substantial leap in output was interpreted as ‘rightist conservatism’, in particular during the purges which followed the Lushan plenum. In a climate of fear, village leaders followed orders rather than try to haggle over quotas. More often than not, a party secretary or deputy from the commune would simply drive up to a strip of land, have a look around and casually determine the target yield. A team leader explained the process as follows: ‘In 1960 we were given a quota of 260 tonnes. This was increased by 5.5 tonnes a few days later. Then the commune held a meeting and added a further 25 tonnes. After two days, the commune phoned us to say that the quota had gone up to 315 tonnes: how this all happened we have no idea.’
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The higher the office, the greater the power to increase the quota, which had repercussions for every subordinate unit, and each had to juggle the figures to comply. When Xie Fuzhi, the boss in Yunnan, was told by Beijing that the national target for grain output had been raised to 300 million tonnes, he immediately convened a telephone conference to explain to county leaders that this really meant 350–400 million tonnes. Yunnan, he rapidly calculated, contained about one-thirtieth of the total population, meaning a share of 10 million tonnes. Since Yunnan did not want to trail behind the rest of the country, Xie raised this to a nicely rounded total of 25,000,000,000
jin
, equivalent to 12.5 million tonnes.
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Everybody from the region down to the county, commune, brigade and village had to scramble and adjust the local quotas accordingly.

With inflated crops came procurement quotas which were far too high, leading to shortages and outright famine. But if the figures were made up, how do we know what the real crop was and what proportion of the harvest was procured by the state? Kenneth Walker, a specialist in agrarian economics at the University of London, spent a decade painstakingly assembling statistical data from a whole range of local newspapers, published statistics and policy guidelines. He showed that the state imposed the highest levies in 1959–62 at a time when the average output per head was actually at its lowest.
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Just as his study appeared in print in 1984, a statistical yearbook was published by the National Statistical Bureau in China with a set of historical data covering the famine years. Most observers have relied on these official figures. But why should we trust a set of statistics published by a party notoriously protective of its own past? Problems with the official statistics appeared when Yang Jisheng, a retired journalist from the Xinhua agency, published a book on the famine based on party archives. He relied on a set of figures compiled in 1962 by the Bureau for Grain. But this merely transferred the problem from one set of numbers to another. The fact that a document comes from an archive does not automatically make it right. Every archive has a series of competing figures, put together in different ways by different agencies at different times. As a result of political pressure the statistical work of the Bureau for Grain disintegrated from 1958 to 1962, to such an extent that the state itself could no longer calculate a realistic level of grain production. And the distortion was at its greatest at the very top, as false reporting and inflated claims accumulated on their way up the party hierarchy. If the leaders themselves were lost in a morass of statistical invention, it seems unlikely that we can magically extract the numerical truth from a single document in the party archives. Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and other leaders knew all too well that they were looking at the world through layers of distorted filters, and their solution was to spend more time investigating what happened on the ground in field trips to the countryside.

On the other hand, between 1962 and 1965 local statistical bureaus tried to rebuild their credibility and often went back to the years of famine to find out what had happened. The figures they produced indicate a much higher degree of procurement than those provided by the Bureau for Grain. Table 5 compares the figures compiled by the Bureau in 1962 with the local numbers calculated in 1965 by the provincial Office for Statistics in Hunan in an attempt to determine how much farmers had actually contributed to the state. The difference in estimates for the grain output is minimal, but when it comes to the size of the levies the figures provided by the province turn out to be much higher, ranging from 28 to 35 per cent of the total harvest. Why is there a discrepancy of 4 to 10 per cent? One reason can be found in the nature of the statistical evidence. Closer scrutiny indicates that the figures provided by the Bureau for Grain were not carefully reconstructed in the aftermath of the famine, but rather mechanically compiled from the plans the Bureau had handed out in the previous years. Each plan had two sets of numbers, one set indicating the procurements ‘actually realised’ in the current year, the other setting targets for the coming year. The procurement figures given for 1958, for instance, come from the plan for 1959, meaning that they were rough approximations.
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To this we should add the fact that the Bureau for Grain in Beijing was under much pressure in 1962 to show that it had not allowed excessive procurements to drain the countryside of grain, and would thus have adopted a set of low figures. But there is another reason for the mismatch: at every level of society, from the village and the commune up to the province, grain was being hidden. The figures compiled in 1965 by the Office for Statistics in Hunan were based on careful research after the famine. The Office could go back to whole sets of commune and county statistics to find out how much had actually been procured, in contrast to the numbers the province officially handed over to the centre. The discrepancy, in other words, corresponds to the amount of procured grain which escaped the gaze of the state.

Other examples confirm that the rates of procurement were much higher than those suggested by the Bureau for Grain. In Zhejiang, for instance, Zeng Shaowen, a top provincial official, admitted in 1961 that some 2.9 million tonnes, or 40.9 per cent of the harvest, was procured in 1958, followed by an even larger 43.2 per cent in the following year. The Bureau for Grain gives much lower percentages, namely 30.4 per cent for 1958 followed by 34.4 per cent.
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A similar story comes from Guizhou. In the provincial archives, which Yang Jisheng was unable to access, a document from the provincial party committee shows that an average of 1.8 million tonnes was procured each year from 1958 to 1960, meaning 44.4 per cent, with a peak of 2.34 million tonnes in 1959 – equivalent to an enormous 56.5 per cent of the crop. The figures given by the Bureau for Grain are on average 1.4 million tonnes for the same three years, or about a quarter less.
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Some of these calculations may seem rather abstract, but they matter a great deal. Grain is not only the currency of exchange in a command economy; it becomes the source of survival in times of famine. When either Hunan or Zhejiang increased their procurements by 8 to 10 per cent, taking an extra 750,000 tonnes of grain from the countryside in the middle of the famine, the number of people forced into starvation grew proportionally. We have seen how one kilo of grain provided a sufficient number of calories for one person each day, meaning that a family of three could live on a tonne per year. But the real point is that many farmers could have survived famine if their rations had been only marginally increased by some 400 or 500 calories a day, equivalent to a large bowl in the evening. In short, in order to understand how people perished on such a scale, it is vital to see the role played by increased procurements in times of declining harvests.