Mao's Great Famine (28 page)

But most of the devastation was in the countryside. Destruction came in waves. As we have seen, buildings were torn down to provide nutrients for the soil during the fertiliser campaign in early 1958. To allow a continuous revolution to take hold, buildings were used as a source of fuel: as farmers ploughed deep furrows throughout the night, bonfires flared and sparkled. Then, as the people’s communes were established, private property was turned into offices, meeting halls, canteens, nurseries or kindergartens. Some were stripped for building material, others torn down to make way for a vision of modernity that never quite managed to migrate from paper to the village. With the drive to produce more iron and steel, metal window frames and door knobs were stripped, then the floorboards were taken for fuel. When the Great Leap Forward acquired a second life after the summer of 1959, the militia went from house to house searching for hidden grain as if it were a weapon of insurrection, breaking through walls, prodding the floor for hidden holes, digging up cellars, often taking down part or all of the building as compensation. As famine set in, the villagers themselves started cannibalising their homes, either bartering the bricks for food or burning the wood for fuel. If the thatch on the roofs had not yet been consumed by fire, it was taken down and eaten in desperation. Villagers also ate the plaster from the walls.

At best people were compelled to make a ‘voluntary’ contribution, as happened in a village in Xinhui, Guangdong, where each household was asked for thirty bricks towards a new school. As local cadres ‘borrowed’ more and more building material there was no house left in the end.
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Sometimes villagers were compensated for their contributions. One villager in Sichuan dared to ask for both a tea cup and a towel in exchange for half a straw hut. He was given the tea cup. A neighbour received a small washbasin for four rooms.
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But most of the time coercion was the order of the day in the village. In Guangdong, where Zhao Ziyang pioneered an anti-hiding campaign in early 1959, the militia confiscated everything from a single peanut to entire mansions.
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In Longgui commune, Shaoguan, party secretary Lin Jianhua abolished private property, sending the militia on a rampage through the villages. In a typical team of eighty-five households, some fifty-six rooms and outdoor toilets were sequestered. Farmers were tied up and beaten if they refused to follow orders.
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It is difficult to estimate how much was destroyed. The situation varied tremendously from place to place, but overall the Great Leap Forward constitutes, by far, the greatest demolition of property in human history. As a rough approximation between 30 and 40 per cent of all houses were turned into rubble. Here is what Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, wrote to Chairman Mao on 11 May 1959, after having spent a month investigating the region of his birth: ‘According to comrades from the provincial party committee 40 per cent of all houses in Hunan have been destroyed. Besides this there is also a portion that has been appropriated by state organs, enterprises, communes and brigades.’
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The number of people per room in Hunan doubled during the years of the Great Leap Forward, as entire families crowded into a single room the size of a wardrobe – despite the space created by the loss of several million people to starvation.
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In Sichuan the situation was worse, with families living in toilets or under the eaves of somebody else’s house. In Yanyuan (near Xichang), an area dominated by the Yi, a minority people who lived scattered in mountain areas, the situation was dire after thousands of houses were handed over to the state: ‘According to statistics 1,147 families share one room with another family, 629 families share one room with three or four other families, 100 families share one room with five or more families.’
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In the province as a whole, the rate of destruction varied from 45 to 70 per cent in some of the most affected counties.
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Many never found a new home, surviving as well as they could on the margins of society, seeking temporary accommodation in ragged shacks cobbled together from debris or living in pig sheds. In the Huanggang region of Hubei, where temperatures dropped to freezing, about 100,000 families had no home in the winter of 1960–1. Half of the population there had no firewood for heating, and people had to survive the bitter cold wearing miserable rags.
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A special group of victims were displaced by the irrigation and reservoir schemes launched during the Great Leap Forward. There were several million of them. In Hunan alone well over half a million people were evacuated.
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A third of a million, if not more, were evicted as each of the giant projects were started at the Three Gate Gorge in Henan, Xin’anjiang in Zhejiang and Danjiangkou in Hubei.
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In the Zhanjiang region in Guangdong, some 300,000 houses were needed for evacuee families by the end of 1961.
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Most were moved without much planning and generally without compensation. In Yueyang county, Hunan, some 22,000 people lost their homes during the building of Tieshan Reservoir. The bricks, furniture, tools and cattle of the villages to be inundated by the reservoir were commandeered and used to set up a collective farm in the mountains, to which the displaced people were relegated by the county authorities. Marooned in the mountains, without arable land to survive on and with all ties to their home villages cut off, they found life miserable, and many started flocking back to the plain. Then the reservoir project was abandoned. Most of the evacuees decided to return home, but were left stranded in ghost towns from which every removable asset had been stripped. They sought shelter in makeshift huts, outdoor toilets, pig sheds and even caves, some of which periodically collapsed and buried their occupants. Many had to beg or steal to get by, sharing a few cooking utensils and surviving on a paltry ration of 10 kilos of grain a month. Few had any padded clothes or blankets for the winter.
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Many of the displaced people roamed the countryside, but some eventually returned home, pulled by ties to their native place. About a hundred kilometres north-east of Beijing, set in a picturesque valley with chestnut, pear and crab-apple orchards against the wooded mountains, the residents of some sixty-five villages were uprooted to make way for the Miyun Reservoir, built between September 1958 and June 1959. As many as 57,000 people lost their homes. As if this were not bad enough, local cadres requisitioned all the tools and stole the furniture. Farmers who resisted were locked up. Only a quarter of the villagers were relocated, but the makeshift camps were so confined that their inhabitants referred to them as ‘pig sheds’.

Two years later many were still traipsing homeless and adrift in the countryside. In March 1961, a group of 1,500 families returned home, men, women and children shuffling along dirt roads, carrying in ragged bundles and shabby bags whatever clothes and belongings they had managed to salvage. A few went back to their original villages – the reservoir was still without water – and built mud huts or slept in the open.
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Millions of such refugees lived in similar squalor all over the country.

The dead were also evicted. This flew in the face of a deep-rooted concern with the afterlife, expressed through complex mourning practices, funeral rites and ancestor rituals. Burial was the preferred means of dealing with a corpse, as the body was seen as a valued gift to be placed whole under the soil near one’s ancestral village. Mutual obligations were thought to exist between ancestral souls and their descendants. The dead had specific needs that had to be respected. At funerals spirit money was burned, as well as a whole array of goods, from furniture to entire houses, all made of paper and designed to help the deceased to settle in the hereafter. The coffin had to be airtight. Graves had to be swept, and food and gifts regularly offered to ancestors.
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Some of these practices were observed during the Great Leap Forward. As much as the party decried popular religion as superstition, some local cadres indulged in expensive burials. For the burial of his grandmother one official in Hebei summoned a funeral band of thirty musicians. A canteen was commandeered for the occasion, 120 guests being treated to wine and cigarettes – in the midst of the famine. As if this could not quite assuage his grief, Li Jianjian had the remains of his parents, buried some five years earlier, exhumed, transferred to new coffins and reburied. Li Yongfu, the deputy party secretary of a knitting factory in Beijing, not only erected a tent with electric lighting to welcome a funeral band, but also burned a paper car, a paper cow and paper militia to assist the passage of his mother to the next world. Five monks chanted scriptures.
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But many of the burial places were destroyed, for stone, timber or even fertiliser. In Hunan, for instance, gravestones were taken to build a dam, and party activists set the example by destroying the resting places of their own ancestors. In Yueyang, in hundreds of desecrated graves, bones stuck out of the coffins.
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Wei Shu remembered in an interview how he was made to erase graves in the Sichuan countryside: ‘You know, graves for dead people, they usually look like little hills. We had to flatten them, that was one of the things we had to do in 1958. At night, we were ordered to go around to destroy the graveyards and turn them into farming land.’
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In many parts of the country agricultural land occupied by ancestral graves was systematically reclaimed. In Beijing the crematoriums worked full time during the Great Leap Forward. In 1958 over 7,000 bodies were cremated, almost three times more than in 1956, and twenty times more than in 1952. A third of these corpses had been disinterred to make way for agriculture.
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But in the countryside the authorities did not always bother to cremate the bodies that they had unearthed in their frantic search for timber. As a restricted publication edited by the secretarial office of the State Council noted, in Mouping, Shandong, local cadres used corpses to fertilise the land: ‘they have tossed a few not yet fully decomposed bodies on to the crops’. An elderly lady who had been buried only days earlier was stripped of her clothes, her naked body dumped by the roadside.
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This was by no means an exceptional case. In his report to the commissar of the military division in Shaanxi where he worked, party member Hou Shixiang explained that when he returned to his village in Fengxian county, Hunan, he noticed that many of the coffins had been disinterred and had been left strewn about the field in front of his house. The lids were ajar, the remains gone. A few days later, on a rainy afternoon, he noticed a plume of smoke from the chimney of the local deputy secretary. Inside the house were four large cauldrons in which corpses were being simmered into fertiliser, the extract to be evenly distributed over the fields.
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21

Nature

Travelling extensively through the Qing Empire in the 1870s, Baron von Richthofen reported that the entire north of the country was destitute of trees, the barren mountains and hills offering a desolate view.
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Securing fuel for the long, cold winters was always a problem in imperial China. Farmers raised large quantities of maize and sorghum: seeds were used for food, while the stalks served as fuel to heat the
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, a hypocaust bed which the family slept on at night and sat on during the winter when it was heated by flues built inside.
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In a country depleted of forests, lack of fuel was widely felt: the scarcity of wood meant that every chip, twig, root and shaving was eagerly gleaned by children or elderly women, who stripped the ground bare.

Forest destruction – for clearing, fuel and timber – was made worse after 1949 by rash interference in the natural environment. Mao viewed nature as an enemy to be overcome, an adversary to be brought to heel, an entity fundamentally separate from humans which should be reshaped and harnessed through mass mobilisation. War had to be waged against nature by people pitted against the environment in a ceaseless struggle for survival. A voluntarist philosophy held that human will and the boundless energy of the revolutionary masses could radically transform material conditions and overcome whatever difficulties were thrown in the path to a communist future. The physical world itself could be reshaped, hills erased, mountains levelled, rivers raised – bucket by bucket if necessary.
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Launching the Great Leap Forward, Mao declared that ‘there is a new war: we should open fire on nature’.
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The Great Leap Forward decimated the forests. In the drive to increase steel output, the backyard furnaces that mushroomed everywhere had to be fed, farmers fanning out into the mountains to cut down trees for fuel. In Yizhang county, Hunan, the mountains were covered in lush primeval forest. A great cutting followed, some units felling two-thirds of the trees to feed the furnaces. By 1959 nothing but bare mountains remained.
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In Anhua, to the west of Changsha, an entire forest was turned into a vast expanse of mud.
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Being driven through thick ancestral forests along the road from Yunnan to Sichuan, Soviet specialists in forestry and soil preservation noted that trees had been randomly felled, resulting in landslides.
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Forests were brutalised everywhere, sometimes beyond recovery.