Mao's Great Famine (32 page)

But even after the heady days of 1958, villagers continued to find ways to have a treat occasionally – sometimes with the connivance of their local leaders. In Luoding, a county bloodied by a thuggish leadership, one brigade still managed to ‘celebrate the birthday of the Communist Party’, an excuse for each family to gulp down four ducks on 1 July 1959.
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At Chinese New Year in 1961 thousands of farm cattle were slaughtered by disgruntled farmers in the Zhanjiang region, a form of protest also observed in other parts of Guangdong province, as no pork was available for the all-important dumplings traditionally used to celebrate the new lunar year.
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Another reason for the occasional feast was that few people saw any reason to save, as expropriation and inflation rapidly eroded any personal reserves. Chen Liugu, a thrifty old lady living in Panyu, had managed to save 300 yuan but now splurged in the early summer of 1959, treating ten people at a restaurant where bowls of fish soup were avidly consumed. ‘There is no use in saving money right now and I only have a hundred yuan left to buy a coffin.’
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In Beijing, foreign residents noticed that some of the usually quiet restaurants did a roaring trade in 1959, as rumours about the advent of urban communes sent residents scrambling to sell their furniture in state-owned shops. The proceeds were spent on a rare meal in the restaurants.
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Sometimes ordinary people could eat copiously because they were lucky enough to be looked after by their cadres, who used every political skill to turn their unit into a bastion of abundance in the midst of starvation. In Xuhui, Shanghai, some canteens had the comparative luxuries of glass doors and fluorescent lamps fitted throughout. Others installed radios, while one canteen in Putuo built a basin with goldfish.
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On the other hand poor supervision of the food-supply chain in some urban units occasionally meant that workers had plenty to eat. In Hebei an investigation showed that workers sometimes moved from one canteen to the next, eating their way through a series of meals. In one dining hall the tables were routinely laden with produce, which spilled over on to the floor. When the leftovers were swept up at the end of each session three to four washbasins, weighing five kilos each, were filled. In a further case of an embarrassment of riches, some workers took food back to their dormitories, although much of this was never eaten. The floor was covered in a layer of yellow mush, as people trod on the discarded buns.
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In Shijingshan, just outside Beijing, the offerings were rich enough for workers to pick out the filling in jujube buns, discarding the dough.
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In the canteens of the mighty Shanghai Machine Tool Factory, rice was given such a cursory wash that several kilos were dug out of the sewers on any one day of the week. This was used to feed the pigs. Slack supervision during the night shift allowed workers to eat their fill, and some even engaged in eating contests: a true champion could manage about two kilos of rice in one sitting.
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23

Wheeling and Dealing

Whatever their position in the social hierarchy, virtually everybody, from top to bottom, subverted the system of distribution, covertly giving full scope to the very profit motive that the party tried to eliminate. As famine developed, the survival of an ordinary person came increasingly to depend on the ability to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, slack, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state.

But no one could navigate the economy on his own. In a nation of gatekeepers, obstacles were everywhere, as anybody could obstruct anybody else, from the cantankerous caretaker in an apartment block to the dour ticket seller behind the window in a railway station. So prolific and complex were the rules and regulations that ran through the system that discretionary and potentially tyrannical power was vested even in the lowliest of bureau functionaries. The simplest of transactions – buying a ticket, exchanging a coupon, entering a building – could become a nightmare when faced with a stickler for rules. Petty power corrupted petty people, who proliferated at the lower levels of the planned economy, making arbitrary and capricious decisions over goods and services in short supply which they happened to control. And higher up the chain of command, the greater the power the more dangerous the abuse.

A network of personal contacts and social connections was required to get even the simplest things done. Asking a prominent friend to help was always easier than approaching an unknown official who might be devoted to the details of administrative procedure and see no reason to bestow a benefit on a stranger. Any connection was preferable to none, as a former neighbour, an erstwhile colleague, a school friend or even a friend of a friend was more likely to accommodate a request, turn a blind eye, skirt the law or bend a rule. In the higher reaches of power, influential colleagues could help one to secure state funds, avoid paying taxes or gain access to scarce resources. At every level people expanded their social network by trading favours, exchanging gifts and paying bribes. They looked after their own. Mu Xingwu, head of a storage unit in Shanghai, recruited nineteen relatives to work under him. Half the workforce were related: here was a solid basis for wheeling and dealing in the goods he was supposed to safeguard.
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Everywhere people were pressurising those below them to protect and further their own interests. The planned economy, with its dedication to the greater good, spawned a system in which the individual and his personal network prevailed.

But people in the party were in a better position to use the system for their own personal benefit than those outside it. And they showed endless entrepreneurial guile in devising ways to defraud the state. A common practice for enterprises was to bypass the plan and trade directly between themselves. In Wuhan the Provincial Highway Transportation Bureau agreed to move goods for the Jianghan District Number Two Commercial Office in exchange for food. The operation was worth well over a tonne of sugar, a tonne of alcohol and a thousand cartons of cigarettes as well as 350 kilos of canned meat in the first months of 1960. The Wuhan Oil Purchasing Station, on the other hand, traded hundreds of tonnes of oil, gas and coal to provision lavish banquets for its cadres.
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In the north the Qinghe Forestry Bureau bartered hundreds of cubic metres of timber for biscuits and lemonade from a factory in Jiamusi. Others exchanged pigs for cement, or steel for timber.
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These practices permeated the entire country, as a parallel economy was created by travelling representatives sent to circumnavigate the rigid supply system. Purchasing agents built up social contacts, wining and dining local officials, and traded their way through a shopping list provided by the enterprise for which they were working. Bribes were common. The director of the Bureau for Goods and Materials in Shanghai regularly received presents, from deer antlers rich in velvet to white sugar, biscuits and lamb. More than 6 million yuan in goods were ‘damaged’ or ‘lost’ under his auspices in less than a year.
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In Guangzhou, the Bureau for Transportation was accused of ‘wasting’ over 5 million yuan in the three years following the Great Leap Forward.
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In Heilongjiang province alone one investigation estimated that some 2,000 cadres were shopping for timber on behalf of their units in late 1960, offering watches, cigarettes, soap or tinned food in return.
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Dozens of factories in Guangdong sent agents on acquisition tours to Shanghai, cutting out the state from their business deals.
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People’s communes were no exception: the Seagull Farm in Guangdong sold some 27 tonnes of citronella oil to a Shanghai perfume factory rather than deliver it to the state.
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Nobody knew how much trade took place in this shadow economy, but one investigation team put the quantity of goods shipped out of Nanjing to other units without any official approval at 850 tonnes for the month of April 1959 alone. Hundreds of units were involved, some actually counterfeiting shipping permits, using false names, printing fake certificates and even shipping in the name of the army in order to make a profit.
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Barter exchange, sometimes considered a very primitive form of trade, became one of the most efficient ways of distributing goods where they were needed. And it could be a very sophisticated operation, moving along a nationwide network, cannibalising state structures, shadowing the planned economy and yet managing to remain invisible thanks to creative accounting. Goods became currency. In a detailed study of a famed dumpling shop in Shenyang, investigators showed that food was routinely exchanged for goods from more than thirty construction units in the city, ranging from iron pipes to cement and bricks. A steady and cheap supply of ingredients was also secured by exchanging the dumplings directly with state providers. The Municipal Aquatic Products Company, suffering as much as any other distributor from severe shortages in the midst of famine, handed over its entire supply of shrimps, normally earmarked for consumers in the suburbs, to the shop for the promise of dumplings. The cadres went on shopping sprees in the best department stores in Shenyang, paying with dumpling coupons. They took care of their employees, who feasted on the produce. The traffic police and the fire brigade were bought off, while even services such as delivery of coal, water supply, toilet cleaning and hygiene inspections were all carried out against an agreed amount of the shop’s speciality.
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Creative accounting could hide misappropriation of funds. Accountants would invent expenditures which were never incurred, in some cases claiming funds of up to a million yuan. Another trick consisted of moving state investments away from industry towards fixed capital, as state units treated themselves to new buildings, dance halls, private toilets and elevators. This happened in the Zunyi region, where a raid revealed that 5 million yuan had been embezzled since the Great Leap Forward.
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In Heilongjiang, one quarry entered all the capital expenditure on offices, canteens and even kindergartens into the production costs, thus passing on the bill to the state. In many other enterprises administrative and operating expenses were added on to the production costs. In Beijing alone some 700 administrative units, complete with salaries and expenses, thus vanished into a black hole called ‘production’.
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Other costs could be disguised and passed on to the state. In Luoyang, Henan province, a ball-bearing factory built a 1,250-cubic-metre swimming pool, sending the bill up as a ‘heat lowering device’.
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Endless borrowing from state banks was also a common ploy. As Li Fuchun pointed out when he noted a deficit of 3 billion yuan in the summer of 1961, many units borrowed from the bank to feast.
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And when a city or a county was in the red, it simply stopped paying taxes. This started in 1960, as a number of provinces passed regulations stipulating that all profits be kept. The Finance Department and the Trade Department of Liaoning province thus dictated that profits from enterprises under their control should be removed from the budget and distributed locally instead. In Shandong, Gaoyang county unilaterally determined that profits should fall outside the budget and be retained locally. Losses, on the other hand, were entered into the budget and billed to the state. Not only did collective enterprises and urban communes routinely fail to raise taxes, but entire cities decided to forgo tax collection.
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And then there were those who simply stole from the state, dispensing with clever accounting tricks altogether. Local factories along the Shanghai–Nanjing railway line pilfered, embezzled or smuggled well over 300 tonnes of steel, 600 tonnes of cement and 200 square metres of timber in less than a year. The New China Lock Factory from Xuzhou, for instance, hired a lorry systematically to steal all the material it needed from railway depots. Most of these activities were directed by top cadres. A large assembly hall in Nanjing East Station, entirely built from stolen material under the direction of station manager Du Chengliang, was a monument to organised theft.
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Another way to defraud the state was to inflate the ration roster. A macabre trade in dead souls flourished in the countryside. Just as families tried to hide a death in order to get an extra ration of food, cadres routinely inflated the number of farmers and appropriated the surplus. This was common too in cities, where the state was committed to feeding urban residents. When a team of investigators pored over the accounts of one county in Hebei, they discovered that the state handed out an average of nine kilos of grain a month in excess of the prescribed rations for each of the 26,000 workers. Everybody massaged the figures, one small brickyard being bold enough to declare more than 600 workers where only 306 could be found on the ground. Some factories classified all their workers as involved in heavy duties because that entitled them to a larger ration, even if most of the employees were engaged in light work.
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In the construction industry in Beijing, up to 5,000 workers who had died or had returned to the countryside were kept on the books. Even in the more rarefied atmosphere of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, well over a third of the 459 workers who claimed their daily allowance in the Institute of Geophysics were not regular members entitled to food rations.
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The obverse of this practice was to hire people outside the approved plan. A black market in labour appeared in which supply and demand determined the salary. Top workers and promising apprentices were lured away with fringe benefits or monetary incentives. Thousands, according to a report in the summer of 1960, had been hired away in Nanjing in the first half of the year.
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Such was the competition that, when factory bosses refused to let good workers pursue better opportunities elsewhere, they would complain about lack of ‘employment freedom’ and try to get dismissed. A few exploded in a violent rage, directing their ire at the cadres who stood in their way. Of the 500 apprentices in the commercial sector of Baixia District, 180 had absconded. Part and parcel of the black market in labour were ‘underground factories’, which popped up in every city, including Nanjing. Some people took on night shifts on top of their regular jobs, others worked two shifts to make ends meet. This was the case for two-thirds of all workers in one construction unit near the centre. Students, doctors and even cadres abandoned their posts to make money on the black market, working on docks or moving goods on flatbed tricycles.
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