Mao's Great Famine (23 page)

In the end farmers did not even have enough seed left to plant the crop. Travelling by train from Beijing to Shanghai in early spring 1962, foreign visitors noted that swathes of farmland along the tracks were sparsely planted at best, field after field lying fallow.
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Across the country, once carefully manicured fields now looked desolate, with clumps of stunted wheat or rice withering for lack of fertiliser. Large plots lay abandoned because the farmers had nothing to plant. Everywhere vast amounts of seed normally put aside for sowing in the following season had been eaten by desperate farmers. Even in Zhejiang, relatively sheltered from the worst effects of the famine, one in five villages lacked the seed necessary to plant the fields.
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In subtropical Guangdong, normally ablaze in every shade of green in spring, 10 per cent of the sprouts routinely rotted, the seed weak and impoverished, the land leached of all nutrients. In some communes in Zhongshan county half the fields wilted, as fledging plants turned yellow and then slowly decomposed into a brown mush.
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As the planners directed an ever larger proportion of the farmland to be cultivated with grain, the output in commercial crops and edible oils plummeted. But unlike grain, there was no notion of a subsistence threshold below which the state should not intervene, and procurements soared as a result.

Cotton is a good example. We have already noted how textile products from China flooded the international market in 1958, as the country declared a trade offensive by exporting goods at prices below economic cost. The strategy backfired, but exports of textiles nonetheless increased in order to settle the trade agreements entered into with foreign partners. China shipped 1 million metres of cotton cloth to the Soviet Union in 1957, then 2 million metres in 1959 and a huge 149 million metres in 1960.
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The cost of importing 10,000 tonnes of raw cotton to feed the textile industries was US$8 million. The mathematics was simple. As finance minister Li Xiannian exclaimed in November 1961, calculating the equivalent import cost of an extra 50,000 tonnes of cotton that had been procured from the countryside that year, ‘40 million US dollars is really wonderful!’
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The lure of the greenback was irresistible. Procurements increased from 1.64 million tonnes in 1957 to 2.1 million tonnes the following year. Although only half of that amount was levied in 1960, as the cotton crop collapsed, it still meant that between 82 and 90 per cent of the total cotton output ended up in the hands of the state.
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Take the example of Hunan (Table 7). As the actual output plunged after a peak in 1959, the percentage taken by the state shot up from 80 per cent to 95 per cent in 1960. In 1961, Hunan officials managed to procure more than the total cotton output by fanning out all over the province and sweeping up every bale of cotton, including reserves set aside by teams and communes from the previous crop. This strategy had been adopted by Hebei in 1959 and was highly commended by the leadership. As the State Council explained in February 1959, Hebei had managed to increase its procurements by a third by commandeering reserves found in collective storage facilities and by ‘taking the cotton still in the hands of the masses’.
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The masses were left without much clothing. Just as grain was distributed according to political priorities which favoured the export market above domestic needs, a large proportion of the cotton was fed to the textile industries and sold on the international market. What remained was rationed and distributed in dribs and drabs following a well-established pecking order which placed party and army at the top followed by the urban population, each of these categories being further fine-tuned into an intricate hierarchy which had one thing in common: the producers of cotton, namely people in the countryside, were generally excluded. Out of the 3.5 million cotton pieces (
jian
) produced in 1961, about half were reserved for party and army uniforms and 1 million were put aside for the export market, leaving 800,000 for a population of 600 million.
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In Guangzhou ration coupons were required for towels, socks, shirts, vests and raincoats. Cotton cloth was rationed to a metre a year, those living in the suburbs getting one-third less than city dwellers. Before the Great Leap Forward, by contrast, anyone could buy more than seven metres of cotton a year.
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By 1960, the situation in the countryside had become so desperate that farmers ate the cotton seeds. In Cixi county, Zhejiang, some 2,000 villagers were poisoned in a single month by eating cakes made of seeds, an indication of the extent of despair reached in one of the most sheltered provinces of China. In Henan they poisoned over 100,000 people in the region around Xinxiang alone, killing more than 150.
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Across the land desperately hungry villagers ate anything they could get their hands on, from leather belts and straw roofs to cotton padding. Spending a month travelling through some of the most devastated regions along the Huai River in September 1961, Hu Yaobang, a party chief and associate of Deng Xiaoping who would soar to pre-eminence decades later by steering the country away from orthodox Marxism, reported seeing women and children stark naked. Many families of five or six shared one blanket. ‘It is hard to imagine if you do not see it with your own eyes. There are several places where we should urgently address this issue, to avoid people freezing to death.’
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Throughout the country those who died of starvation often did so naked, even in the middle of the winter.

Although slaughtered in significant quantities during the Great Leap Forward in 1958, over the years poultry, pigs and cattle mainly succumbed to neglect, hunger, cold and disease. Numbers give a sense of the extent of the devastation. Whereas some 12.7 million pigs were rooting about in 1958, a mere 3.4 million scrawny animals were alive in 1961 in Hunan province (Table 8). Hebei had 3.8 million pigs in 1961, half of what the province boasted five years earlier. A million cattle had also vanished.
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Shandong lost 50 per cent of its cattle during the famine.
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Neglect was widespread, as incentives to look after livestock were removed once all the animals had been turned over to the people’s communes. In Huaxian, just outside Guangzhou, pigs stood in a foot of excrement. In some villages the pig sheds were destroyed for fertiliser, leaving the animals exposed to the elements.
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Routine quarantine measures broke down, as veterinary services lay in disarray. Rinderpest and swine fever spread; chicken flu was common.
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The winter exacted the highest toll. Tens of thousands of pigs died of hunger in Cixi county, Zhejiang, in a single winter month.
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In December 1960 alone 600,000 pigs died in Hunan province.
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Even more revealing are the disease rates, which rocketed sharply. In Dongguan, Guangdong, the death rate for pigs was just over 9 per cent in 1956. Three years later a quarter of all pigs died, and by 1960 well over half of all pigs perished. The county was left with a million pigs where more than 4.2 million had existed a few years earlier.
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In Zhejiang, the death rate in some counties was 600 per cent, meaning that for every birth six pigs died; the entire herd was soon eliminated.
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In all of Henan the situation with livestock was better in 1940, in the middle of the war against Japan, than it was in 1961 – according to Zhou Enlai himself.
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Before the pigs died of hunger they turned on each other. More often than not livestock was not segregated by weight, meaning that they were all locked up in a common space where the smaller ones were pushed aside, trampled on, mauled to death and devoured. In parts of Jiangyin county, for instance, many of the pigs froze to death, but quite a few were cannibalised by larger hogs.
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When large numbers of pigs are thrown together in a harsh environment, apparently no pecking order develops, and each animal regards all others as its enemy. In Beijing’s Red Star commune, where the death rate for livestock was 45 per cent, villagers noticed that hogs ate piglets, as all were confined together indiscriminately.
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A small proportion of the deaths were caused by innovations in animal husbandry. Like close cropping and deep ploughing, these were supposed to propel the country past its rivals. All sorts of experiments were carried out to increase the weight of pigs, some of them inspired by the fraudulent theories of Trofim Lysenko. A protégé of Stalin, Lysenko rejected genetics and believed that inheritance was shaped by the environment (Lysenko, it might be added, openly expressed his contempt for the Great Leap Forward in 1958, to the great irritation of the leadership in Beijing).
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Just as seeds of hybrid varieties were developed for greater resistance, hybrid breeding of livestock was envisaged by senior leaders. Jiang Hua, party secretary of Zhejiang, thus asked the county leaders to take steps to ‘actively shape nature’: he suggested cross-breeding sows with bulls to produce heavier piglets.
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Local cadres, eager to fulfil impossible quotas for meat delivery, also artificially inseminated animals that had not even reached maturity, including ones weighing a mere 15 kilos (a healthy adult pig should weigh between 100 and 120 kilos). Many of the animals were crippled as a result.
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Despite a precipitous decline in livestock, state procurements were relentless. In Hebei and Shandong a ban on the slaughter of animals was imposed in the countryside for a period of three months in early 1959. As we have seen, Mao applauded the ban, going so far as to suggest that a resolution be passed that nobody should eat meat: all of it should be exported to honour foreign commitments.
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Mao did not quite get his way, although the rations for the urban population were slashed several times. Even in Shanghai, a city where on average each person consumed some twenty kilos of meat annually in 1953, a mere 4.5 kilos in ration tickets were allocated by the plan in 1960, although in reality much less was available.
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But party members continued to receive a regular supply of meat. Guangdong was thus ordered in 1961 to deliver 2,500 pigs to the capital, all earmarked for state banquets and foreign guests: this was in addition to the more regular state procurement quotas.
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The fishing industry was also badly damaged by collectivisation, as the equipment was either confiscated or poorly maintained. In Wuxing, a district of the prosperous silk city of Huzhou situated on the south of Lake Tai, one in five boats was no longer seaworthy because of insufficient tong oil to repair sprung seams. The number of leaks steadily increased, since the marine nails were no longer being made of forged iron.
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The overall catch tumbled. On Chaohu Lake, Anhui, a single team of fishermen routinely caught some 215 tonnes of fish in 1958. Two years later no more than 9 tonnes were hauled aboard, as boats and nets rotted away without any care being taken. Many fishermen abandoned the trade because of a lack of incentives.
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Ploughs, rakes, sickles, hoes, shovels, buckets, baskets, mats, carts and tools of every kind were collectivised, but which collectivity actually owned them? A tug of war began between teams, brigades and communes, with mutual recriminations and random repossessions, the result of which was that in the end nobody really cared. Some villagers would simply throw their ploughs and rakes aside in the field at the end of the day. Whereas in the past a good tool could last up to ten years – some ploughs managing to survive for sixty years with careful repairs – they no longer lasted for much more than a year or two. A mat used to dry millet, when carefully maintained, might only have to be repaired after ten years, but with the advent of the people’s communes most were worn out after one season. Some rakes, it was reported by a team of investigators from Shanghai, had to be repaired after a day.
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