Mao's Great Famine (37 page)

But nothing could destabilise the regime even in its darkest hour. As in other famines, from Bengal and Ireland to the Ukraine, most villagers, by the time it became clear that starvation was there to stay, were already too weak even to walk down the road to the next village, let alone find weapons and organise an uprising. In any event, even a mild form of opposition was brutally repressed and severely dealt with: leaders of riots or uprisings faced execution, while others were given an indefinite sentence in a labour camp. What also prevented the country from imploding, even as tens of millions perished, was the absence of any viable alternative to the communist party. Whether they were dispersed secret religions or poorly organised underground parties, none except the regime could control this huge expanse of land. And the potential for a coup from within the army had been averted by extensive purges carried out by Lin Biao after the Lushan plenum in 1959.

Yet something more tenacious than mere geopolitics prevented the appearance of a credible threat to the rule of the party. The most common technique of self-help in times of mass starvation was a simple device called hope. And hope dictated that, however bad the situation was in the village, Mao had the best interests of his people at heart. A common conviction in imperial times was that the emperor was benevolent, but his servants could be corrupt. Even more so in the People’s Republic, the population had to reconcile a vision of utopia trumpeted by the media with the everyday reality of catastrophe on the ground. The belief that cadres who were abusive failed to carry out the orders of a beneficent Chairman was widespread. A distant entity called ‘the government’ and a semi-god called ‘Mao’ were on the side of good. If only he knew, everything would be different.

27

Exodus

The most effective strategy of survival in times of famine was to leave the village. Ironically, for millions of farmers the Great Leap Forward meant departure to the city rather than entry into a commune. As targets for industrial output were ceaselessly revised upwards, urban enterprises started recruiting cheap labour from the countryside, creating a migration of tidal dimensions. More than 15 million farmers moved to the city in 1958 alone, lured by the prospect of a better life.
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From Changchun, Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai to Guangzhou, cities exploded as, according to the official census, the total urban population ballooned from 99 million in 1957 to 130 million in 1960.
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The great outflow from the countryside happened despite formal restrictions on the movement of people. The household registration rules described in Chapter 22 were brushed aside in the rush to industrialisation. But few migrants managed officially to change their place of residence from the village to the city. A great underclass was created, relegated to dirty, arduous and sometimes dangerous jobs on the margins of the urban landscape, and facing discriminatory barriers against assimilation in their place of work. Migrant workers were deprived of the same entitlements accorded city dwellers, for instance subsidised housing, food rations and access to health, education and disability benefits. Most of all they had no secure status, dwelling in a twilight zone of legality and risking expulsion back to the countryside at any time.

This happened in early 1959, as food reserves ran out and the country faced its first winter of hunger. In all major cities, as we have seen, grain reserves fell to historic lows, shortages in industrial centres such as Wuhan being so severe that they risked running out of food within a matter of weeks.
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The mounting crisis prompted the leadership to ramp up the household registration system, erecting a great wall between city and countryside. As it could provide food, housing and employment only to urban residents, it left farmers to fend for themselves. In order to ease the burden further, the state capped the growth of the urban population. Tough restrictions on the movement of people were imposed by the State Council on 4 February 1959 and again on 11 March 1959, stipulating that the free market in labour could no longer be tolerated and villagers had to be sent back to the countryside.
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As the police started enforcing the household registration system in Shanghai, it was revealed that in some districts up to a fifth of all families had only temporary residence permits, the majority being farmers from Jiangsu province.
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An estimated 60,000 villagers resided in the city illegally, most working in the freight and construction industries. In the wake of the State Council’s repeated directives, a quarter of a million farmers were rounded up and sent back to the countryside.
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Adrift between two worlds in the midst of starvation, migrants throughout the country were being forcibly returned to their villages. In the countryside, in turn, local authorities did their best to prevent anybody from leaving for the city, locking people into the famine.

The attempt to impose a cordon sanitaire around cities was defeated by a myriad of factors. The great outflow in 1958 had created patterns of migration and networks of contacts which were used by villagers to return to the city. In Hebei in early 1959 one in every twenty-five agricultural workers was roaming the countryside in search of employment. Those who returned to the village over the Chinese New Year encouraged others to follow, heading back as a group to enterprises where good connections had been established and few questions were asked. Letters were sent from the city, including money and detailed instructions on how to join the exodus. In Xinyang, one of the most devastated regions in Henan, letters came ‘incessantly’ from Qinghai, Gansu and Beijing, according to local officials – who opened the mail. Li Mingyi sent three letters, including 130 yuan, to his brother, urging him and four other relatives to join him in working for the railway bureau in Xining.
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In the village tales were told about life in the city, seen as a haven where rice was plentiful and jobs abounded. Some communes actually supported a form of chain migration by agreeing to take care of children and the elderly, as remittances from workers in the city contributed to the survival of the entire village. From Zhangjiakou, a major hub along the railway to the west of Beijing, a third of a million people vanished during the 1958–9 winter, representing some 7 per cent of the entire workforce.
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Even in relatively sheltered provinces such as Zhejiang villagers took to the road in the winter of 1958–9. Some 145,000 people were known to be on the move, although many more must have escaped the attention of the local authorities tasked with arresting them. As elsewhere, most were headed for a city in search of employment. They were ambitious, the majority intending to travel as far as Qinghai, Xinjiang and Ningxia, where the famine was less intense. But proximity to a city remained a key factor in prompting villagers to flee. In Longquan, for instance, one in ten of all able-bodied villagers crossed into Fujian province, a mere forty kilometres away, while others trekked to the cities of Xiaoshan, Fenghua and Jinhua. Most were young, male workers; the women were left behind to look after the family and the village. In Buxia Village, forty kilometres south of Xiaoshan, 230 workers left in several large groups, including local cadres and members of the Youth League. A significant proportion of these had already experienced the city as factories eagerly recruited from the surrounding villages during the Great Leap Forward. Many absconded in the middle of the night, while others walked away in broad daylight, claiming to visit a sick relative in town. In a few cases cadres themselves wrote letters of reference and provided travel permits, encouraging villagers to pull up stakes and take their chances in the city. Some made a profit by selling blank permits bearing an official stamp.
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Elsewhere, for instance further south in Guangdong, local cadres adopted a lenient attitude, sensing that more movement of people could alleviate the famine. In Lantang commune a mere one in seven of all workers in a brigade participated in collective labour. The others performed private work or traded with neighbouring counties, some going as far as Haifeng, over 100 kilometres down the coastline.
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Many left in groups, boarding freight trains headed for the city. On one day in March 1959, a group of about a hundred farmers managed to board a train at Kongjiazhuang, Hebei, without buying a single ticket. A few days later, a similar number boarded from Zhoujiahe station, a tiny village in Huai’an.
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In Hubei, on the stretch from Xiaogan to Shekou, hundreds of farmers would congregate at the station each day and board en masse. Some intended to flee the village, but many simply went to the city to sell wood or visit friends. When asking for a ticket, collectors faced verbal abuse and physical assault. In the chaos of boarding, accidents happened, as weaker fare dodgers fell off the train, including a five-year-old child who had a leg severed in the process.
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All these groups amounted to a large number of people on the move. In the first four months of 1960, for instance, over 170,000 farmers escaping from the countryside were found ticketless on trains in Beijing alone, most of them hailing from Shandong, Hebei and Henan. Once on board, every available bit of property was used in the struggle for survival. As one official noted in disgust, they ‘wantonly spoil and damage goods, some urinating and defecating on them, a few using high-quality stockings as toilet paper’.
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After they had arrived at their destination, many migrants would be met at the station by a friend or by a tout recruiting labour.
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Others found a job on the black market. Called ‘human markets’ (
renshi
) in Beijing, they opened early in the morning as a mob of unemployed men pushed, shoved and jostled for attention as soon as a prospective employer turned up. Most lived in temporary shelters, a few stayed with friends and family. They would work for as little as 1.3 yuan a day, although carpenters could fetch up to 2.5 yuan, the highest salary for skilled labour being 4 yuan. Some were recruited underground by state companies, others were hired by private individuals for menial jobs or domestic service.
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The cumulative effect of this outflow could overwhelm the city, despite the cordon sanitaire designed to keep the urban population insulated from the rural famine. Thousands found their way into Nanjing every month, and by the spring of 1959 some 60,000–70,000 refugees had either arrived or transited through the city, overrunning the temporary shelters hastily erected by the municipality. On a single day in February 1959 around 1,500 refugees disembarked. Two-thirds were young men, and most came from the surrounding counties, although a number also hailed from Anhui, Henan and Shandong, the three provinces most affected by famine. A few wanted to visit friends and family, most had no money, and all were in search of a job. Factories and mines secretly recruited them, paying them by piece rate, less than workers with residence permits. Some enterprises actually faked the necessary papers to register them locally, but the vast majority – some 90 per cent of all factories – simply inflated the official number of workers in order to secure sufficient food to feed illegal workers.
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Not every migrant found a job on the black market, and some were forced to live a marginal existence in the shadows of the city, stealing, begging, scavenging or selling themselves in order to survive. Kong Fanshun, a twenty-eight-year-old male, was described as a vagrant who would climb walls at night to steal clothes and money. Su Yuyou was caught after he entered a shop, grabbed a large flatbread and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth while making a run for it. Young women could be found soliciting customers in the centre of the city. For a ration coupon worth ten or twenty cents or for a pound of rice they would perform a sexual favour in a quiet corner of a public park. Those who failed faced starvation: some twenty bodies were collected each month during the harsh winter.
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All were described as a threat to social order by the local authorities, reinforcing the negative imagery associated with country folk. When they were caught they were sent back to their villages, only to return to the city again after a few weeks.
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Some of the refugees, when questioned by officials, told their stories. Yu Yiming, interviewed in May 1959, had been surviving on two bowls of gruel a day in her village in Anxian county. After the cadres turned over all the grain to the state, nothing but cabbage remained. Then all the bark on elm trees and the chestnut tubers vanished, leaving the village depleted. Wang Xiulan, a fellow villager, broke down in tears, crying that ‘we are not lying, we have not had any food for several months, everything has been eaten – what can we do?’ Other escapees explained how they had managed to abscond under the cover of night. Tao Mintang, from Lishui county, recounted how eleven of them fled as a group one evening, lured by rumours that in Heilongjiang young workers could make up to seventy yuan a month.
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Not all migrants lived in the city’s dark underbelly, eking out a miserable existence at the mercy of rapacious factory bosses. In the rush towards industrialisation during the Great Leap Forward, some of the most able men recruited from the countryside were given good salaries as incentives to stay.
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In Pukou, Nanjing’s busy port, a team of loaders working on the docks had no right to food rations, reserved for city residents, but they earned about 100 yuan a month, enough to eat in some of the top restaurants. Some made two salaries, making a better living for themselves than most of the registered workers in local factories.
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A few even specialised in trading ration coupons on the black market. One woman was caught with coupons worth 180 kilos of rice, which she bought in Shanghai to double her money in Nanjing, exploiting one of the countless loopholes in the planned economy by which the same basic commodity was sold at vastly different prices across the country. Most migrants in factories and construction sites were men, but the majority of villagers who left the rural areas to trade were women.
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