Page 1 of
2 The
Great Leap Forward from myth to
history By Peter Lee
The Great Leap Forward, a calamity that
killed tens of millions, afflicted China with the
misery and morals of a concentration camp and
spawned the Cultural Revolution, was once a
shunned and shameful topic.
But convenient
myths - such as the threadbare explanation of
"Three Years of Natural Disasters", fingerpointing
at the Soviet Union, and exculpatory emphasis on
quixotic but seemingly admirable revolutionary
enthusiasm - are now crumbling as a new generation
feels enough distance to confront the painful
past, and at the same time races to record the
memories of the citizens who suffered through the
period before they pass on.
Through the
efforts of Chinese and foreign researchers, a more
complete history of the
Great Leap Forward is emerging from archives and
personal accounts, as a parade of folly,
viciousness, and cruelty. This history - and the
current regime's incomplete willingness to
confront it - is finding resonance in the campaign
to discredit Chongqing neo-Maoist firebrand Bo
Xilai, and the effort to shape the agenda of the
new leadership cadre that is expected to assume
power in 2013.
In the process, the era of
the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath is
acquiring a new name: The Great Famine.
The Great Leap Forward was born of hubris:
Mao Zedong's bet that his version of socialism
could unleash unprecedented productivity from the
Chinese economy and show the supercilious
commissars of the Soviet Union who was the best
and greatest Communist leader.
In 1958 and
1959, China was convulsed by massive, disruptive
labor projects, collectivization, and a mad rush
to steelmaking. Agriculture was disrupted by
diversion of labor and misapplied programs of deep
planting, marginal land recovery, and
over-irrigation. At the same time, local leaders
made extravagant claims of increased agricultural
output attributed to the new socialist system,
figures that were further padded as they travelled
up the chain of command to Beijing and, fatally,
became the basis for central government grain
requisitions.
Things turned very dark very
quickly as local cadres emptied granaries in order
to meet their requisition targets and demonstrate
their ability, zeal, and loyalty to their
superiors.
One county in Henan claimed
production of 7 billion jin of grain (about 3.5
million tonnes) - but actually produced only 2
billion jin - of which 1.6 billion jin was
requisitioned.
By the late months of 1958,
throughout China communal kitchens - where farmers
in the new collectives went to get fed - were
either handing out thin gruel or were no longer
bothering to light their fires at all. People
began to starve.
Despite concerted efforts
by local and provincial leaders to cover up, it
was soon apparent at the center that something was
seriously amiss. And things got worse.
Mao
Zedong adopted the self-serving explanation that
the shortfall in grain was the result of a
counter-revolutionary resurgence in the Chinese
countryside, with ex-landlords and rich peasants
conniving to conceal their bumper grain harvests
from the state.
Ironically, his
convictions were buttressed by the party secretary
of Guangdong province, who conducted a successful
campaign to root out one million tonnes of grain
hidden by desperate peasants. His name: Zhao
Ziyang.
As the situation deteriorated in
the Chinese countryside, therefore, the afflicted
areas were not regarded as disaster areas needing
outside assistance; they were nests of anti-state
criminals who had to be compelled to give up their
ill-gotten grain.
Then things got even
worse. As news of widespread suffering trickled up
to the party leadership, sub voce
dissatisfaction with Mao's policies was
amplified at the Lushan plenum in the summer of
1959 as open criticism of the Great Leap Forward
as a whole by defense minister Peng Dehuai and
party elder Zhang Wentian.
Mao interpreted
the criticism at Lushan as an attack on himself by
a cabal of candidate Khrushchevs and launched an
all-out political war, loyally abetted by Zhou
Enlai, Lin Biao, and most other senior leaders,
against Peng, Zhang, and any cadre that presumed
to criticize the Great Leap Forward.
The
full human and political dimensions of the Great
Famine - and a damning portrait of Mao as a leader
who was happy to slay the messengers, by the tens
of millions, rather than endure the humiliation of
acknowledging the failure of his policies before
his peers in China and the Soviet Union, or accept
diminution of his authority and political power -
are found in the book Mao's Great Famine by
Dr Frank Dikotter (New York: Walker & Co,
2010). In the words of Dikotter:
Had the leadership reversed course
in the summer of 1959 at Lushan, the number of
victims claimed by famine would have been
counted in the millions. Instead, as the country
plunged into catastrophe, tens of millions of
lives would be extinguished through exhaustion,
illness, torture, and hunger.
As party
ranks were purged of over 3 million officials
whose doubts led them to soft-pedal Great Leap
Forward policies (and swelled by new, more
ruthless but perhaps less-qualified additions),
local cadres, in a convulsion of fear, fury, and
opportunism, beat, tortured, and killed peasants
they considered thieves, malingerers, and
complainers, while trying to obscure the
dimensions of the disaster from their disbelieving
superiors.
Dikotter told Asia Times Online
how he was struck by documents surviving in
mainland archives that showed that as many as 2.5
million people were tortured or beaten to death in
those desperate years.
In his view, the
Great Leap Forward was perhaps unique in scope of
homicidal activity inflicted by the regime and its
agents: more than the Great Terror accompanying
the Chinese Communist Party's consolidation of
power in the early 1950s, and more than the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, whose violence
was on conspicuous national and international
display in China's cities but not inflicted
wholesale on China's hundreds of millions of
peasants.
Beyond overt violence, there was
the dark issue of the use of food by cadres as an
instrument of reward - and execution. Dikotter
noted to Asia Times Online:
Who do you give the food to? You
give to those who are reliable ... food was used
as a weapon distributed according to political
considerations … feed the strong, not the weak,
the aged, the sick ...
The worst
suffering took place in provinces like Sichuan,
Hunan, and Gansu, which counted their leaders as
some of Mao's most committed supporters.
The final toll is unknowable but most
probably amounts to approximately 45 million
excess deaths for the period from 1958 to 1962,
when the central government finally acknowledged
the extent of the catastrophe and retreated from
collectivized agriculture.
Many of the
critics of the Great Leap Forward were
rehabilitated in the 1980s, after the fall of the
"Gang of Four". However, the venom of those years
has yet to be completely expelled from China's
system.
The volatile world of Chinese
microblogs was roiled on April 29, 2012, by a
statement posted by one Lin Zhibo, head of
People's Daily Gansu Bureau and, apparently a
neo-Maoist and supporter of Bo Xilai, the
now-disgraced "Red Mayor" of Chongqing:
"To bash Chairman Mao, some people
even fabricated lies about the death of tens of
millions of people during 1960 to 1962. To
confirm the number, some visited those Henan
villages which experiences the worst famine at
the time. It turned out that the truth didn't
match their lies. Many villagers have heard of
people starving to death but never personally
saw one themselves, which is direct evidence
that very few people died of starvation at the
time." (translations by Offbeat China)
[1]
Lin's statement was indignantly
rebutted in dozens of replies from netizens
posting recollections of their parents of the
horrendous suffering their families had endured,
such as:
"The Great Famine experienced by my
family. My hometown is Jingyan at Leshan. One of
my aunts married a Mr Xiong from the same
village. They had a total of 8 members in their
family, the couple, one son, two grandparents,
and three siblings. They all starved to death
during the Great Famine. None survived! The
tragedy happened right to our parents'
generation. How does Lin Zhibo dare to deny
it?"
An interesting element of this
affair was what Sherlock Holmes termed the dog
that didn't bark or, in this case, the censor who
didn't censor. As Offbeat China put it: "Luckily
no one seemed to report censorship over stories of
the Great Famine on Sine [sic] Weibo."
The
story took an even more interesting twist as some
public figures weighed in on the Communist Party's
greatest failure, a topic that might, under other
circumstances, be considered taboo. Apparently
in response to Lin's microblog post, economist Mao
Yushi (recently awarded the Milton Friedman Prize
for Advancing Liberty by the Cato Institute) on
May 2 posted a moving excerpt on his blog from his
2010 memoir, A Journey Without Regret. He
discusses the reach of famine - including a family
of 12 in the village of whom only one had survived
- and the suffering he personally experienced
while rusticated to Shandong in 1960 as a
rightist:
When people suffering hunger, their
human consciousness yields completely to their
base nature as a stinking skin sack. People lose
any ideals and have only one desire, that is to
"eat." ... While I was in Teng County, I was
unendurably hungry. My entire body swelled up
with edema, I couldn't even put on my shoes and
it was difficult simply to bend at the waist ...
I was able to make it through for only one
reason, and that is that that I ate quite a few
locusts during summer and autumn ... I would
catch one and put it in an envelope. When I had
seven or eight, I would burn the envelope in the
fire ... and cook the locusts ... the locusts'
digestive tract was filled with a green liquid
... it was extremely bitter and difficult to
swallow. But hunger makes people disregard any
other consideration ... If I had had to stay
there for two more months I would, without
question, have died. [2]
Then Southern
People Weekly, a human interest and current
affairs publication of the liberal Southern Media
Group, devoted the cover and four in-depth
articles of its May 21 edition to first-person
testimony concerning the catastrophe of The Great
Famine.
One piece profiles a survivor who
erected a crude memorial stele in his home town in
Henan to the 73 victims (out of a total population
of 128) who failed to make it through the "grain
pass" to survival.
Another presented
survivor stories from Gansu collected by a young
writer that provide further insight into the
misery and degradation of the period: the man who
ate the dead and was shunned by his wife and son;
the 100-plus people suffering from edema [swelling
caused by fluid beneath the skin and body
cavities) who were herded into an abandoned kiln
to hide them from the visiting investigative team
of senior party member Dong Biwu and died when it
caved in; and the young man who staggered out of
his house and collapsed, only to hear someone
inside implore him to "Could you please die a
little further off?", perhaps so that the family
could be spared the insupportable effort needed to
move and bury his corpse.
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