GREAT FAMINE

Although the Central Committee under Maos leadership made various adjustments to extreme leftist policies, it failed to adopt measures on major issues. It ignored the obvious distress of starving peasants while maintaining elevated procurement targets and food exports, and it persisted with the Great Leap Forward and delayed adjustment of economic targets.

The State Council secretariat on April 6, 1959, reported on food shortages in Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei, and Anhui, and on April 9 sent up a statistical table showing 25.17 million people were going without food in fifteen provinces. Mao wrote a memo requesting that the secretaries of each of the fifteen provinces promptly address the issue. Mao believed that this was a “temporary (two month) urgent crisis,” and he made no effort to relax food supply policies.

Lower level officials continued to send up reports meant to deceive Mao. In April 1959, as the famine deepened, a report claimed that Henan and Hebei has arrested the spread of the spring famine, that the outward migration of Shandong peasants had been largely brought to a halt, and that the overall evidence of edema had begun to decline. On April 26, Mao wrote in a memo, “Plant more melons and vegetables and pay attention to both eating and economizing in food, eating less during quiet times and more during busy times.”

On October 26, 1960, Mao read a report stating that hundreds of thousands of people had starved to death in Xinyang Prefecture, He responded with a bland memo of a dozen words: “Lu (Shaoqui) and Zhou (Enlai) please read today and discuss ways to deal with this.” He treated the Xinyang Incident as an isolated incident to be handled as routine work, and made no move to relax policies on supplying or procuring grain.

In respect to grain procurement and the sale of grain back to rural households, procurement for the 1958/1959 grain year increased by 22.32 percent. In 1959, when the Great Famine had become pervasive, procurement levels continued to rise, while sale of grain back to the countryside increased only marginally This is to say, during the height of the Great Famine in 1959-1960, the state provided no relief aid to the countryside, but rather extracted an additional 3.378 billion kilos of grain. Snatching grain from the mouths of starving peasants was no easy matter, and resulted in the horrendous violence and tragedy described elsewhere in this book.

Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, The Great Chinese Famine 1858-1962
New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008 (457-458)