Human-Engineered Catastrophes
In reviewing an important book about Mao's policies in China that led to the "Great Famine," George Jochnowitz makes the necessary connection between Marxism and famine. There is a famine currently taking place in North Korea, which the world hardly notices. One of the greatest famines in human history took place in China, and the reasons have everything to do with Chairman Mao's warped ideology, which placed revolution above people. Prof. Jochnowitz writes: "There was no crop failure. The disaster was man-made. It was caused by the Great Leap Forward, a series of policies designed to make China richer and stronger—policies that could not possibly have worked."
Mao’s
Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962,
by Frank Dikötter. 2010, Walker, xxiii + 423 pages.
**********************************
by George Jochnowitz
The world has hardly noticed the connection
between Marxism and famine. Stalin
deliberately caused a famine in Ukraine in order to kill the kulaks—peasants
who were seeking independence. An
estimated 7 million people died as a result.
Pol Pot evacuated the cities of Cambodia and sent residents into labor
camps, where perhaps 3 million people died, some because of starvation, others
because they were executed. Nowadays,
famines still take place in North Korea, where a man killed two of his children
and ate them.[see http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/report-starving-north-korean-father-resorts-cannibalism-article-1.1250773].
Worst of all was the famine that took place
in China because of the policies of Chairman Mao—the most destructive famine in
human history.
I first learned about China’s great famine
shortly after my family and I arrived in Baoding, China, in 1984. We were there to teach at Hebei University as
part of a faculty exchange agreement.
The January 16, 1984, issue of Beijing
Review, an English-language news weekly, had an article entitled “Age Distribution
of China’s Population.” It was a report
on China’s efforts to stem its growing population through its one-child
policy. The various charts and tables
did indeed show that population growth had been stabilized. They showed something else as well: In a
sample of 10% of China’s population, there were 2,737,743 19-year-olds;
1.067,672 21-year-olds; and 1.944,603
24-year-olds. It seemed impossible.
The number of 21-year-olds was less than half the number of 19-year-olds
and almost less than half the number of 24-year-olds.
How could the number of children born have
dropped by half in three years and then zoomed back up two years later? I started asking people questions. Generally, they said they didn’t know about
population figures and couldn’t answer.
One young man told me there had been a famine during which his grandmother
had died. That explained it.
The editors of Beijing Review, one assumes, didn’t need any explanation. Apparently, they thought nobody would
associate the drastic zigzags of population with a disaster, and they were more or less correct. The information was available to all foreign
experts living in China in 1984, and yet nobody paid attention.
A year after I got back to America I came
across an article in the December 1985 issue of Scientific American by Vaclav Smil, who wrote about the years
1959-61 that census figures in China “put the number of excess deaths in that
period at 30 million and the number of postponed births at about 33 million. No other famine has been so devastating.”
30 million plus 33 million equals 63
million. “Postponed births” might mean
more than birth control or even abortion; it could refer to killing newborn
children—a possibility Smil does not raise.
Be that as it may, Smil recognized the famine as unprecedented. He obtained his information from census figures—provided
by the Chinese government. Once again,
nobody paid attention.
I started asking around, just as I had done
in China in 1984. Nobody knew
anything. Nobody seemed interested. It was just like being in China. Finally, in
1996, Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts:
Mao’s Secret Famine appeared. It got
reviewed. The knowledge became
widespread, but it still never became a major subject of discussion or
conversation. Becker reported the number
of victims as at least 30 million but probably more. A few people paid attention; nevertheless,
the famine never became a major issue, and the general public remained
ignorant.
Now that Mao’s Great Famine is available, more details—more horrible
details—are known than before. Dikötter
explains how this happened: “But a new
archive law has recently opened up vast quantities of archival material to
professional historians, fundamentally changing the way one can study the Maoist
era” (pp. ix-x).
There was no crop failure. The disaster was man-made. It was caused by the Great Leap Forward, a
series of policies designed to make China richer and stronger—policies that
could not possibly have worked.
The first of these policies was diverting
water to use for irrigation. “Some 30 million people were recruited in October
1957. By January one in six people was
digging the earth in China. … At its
peak, some 160,000 people had been made to work on the project, and most of
these were villagers diverted away from agricultural work. At least 2,400 died,
some in accidents, but many more as a result of a brutal regime which forced
workers to slave day and night in order to reach ever higher targets” (pp. 27-28).
The regions of China that suffered most
from Mao’s policies were those where people were evicted from their farms and
homes in order to make room for reservoirs—reservoirs that were never
completed. “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.
A third of a million, if not more, were evicted in each of the giant
projects that were started at the Three Gate Gorge in Henan, Xin’anjiang in
Zhejiang and Danjiangkou in Hubei” (p. 170).
These areas are all in central China.
The second policy was forcing farmers to
follow a policy of deep plowing. Mao somehow believed that this would increase
productivity. “Villagers, of course, knew better. They had tilled the land for generations, and
knew how to care for a precious resource on which their livelihoods
depended.. Many were incredulous, trying
to reason with the cadres. … But advice was ignored. … Most villagers, having
witnessed a series of anti-rightist campaigns since 1957, were too wily to
object in public” (p. 40).
The third policy, and by far the most
destructive, was ordering farmers to build backyard furnaces and to melt their
tools and produce steel to make China a powerful industrial nation. They also were told to cut wood to use to
melt the metal. “Villagers dispersed
into the forests in search of fuel …
Trees were randomly felled, keeling over on villagers” (p. 58).
The cost of losing tools and spending time
hunting for wood to make steel was enormous.
Famine followed as the night the day. The steel turned out to be
useless: “Iron ingots from rural
communes accumulated everywhere, too small and brittle to be used in modern
rolling mills” (p. 61).
Farmers were the victims who suffered
most. China’s major cities—Beijing,
Shanghai and Tianjin—suffered as well, but less than villages. “All three cities, as well as Liaoning, were
placed under special protection” (p. 71).
Mao, more than anybody else in China, was deceived
by the system of thought control he had
instituted. The official who accompanied
Mao on his visits, Li Zhisui, was told that farmers had been ordered to
transplant rice plants along the Chairman’s route to give the impression of a
bumper harvest. … Mao was delighted. As
reports came in from all over the country about new records in cotton, rice,
wheat, or peanut production, he started wondering what to do with the surplus
food” (p. 41).
Li Zhisui, alas, did not say a word to Mao
about this. Mao didn’t learn that his deep-plowing policy was nonsense. He didn’t find out that the steel was
useless. The countless party officials kept their mouths shut. “At every level party officials badgered
their subordinates for the truth but were deceitful to their own superiors,
contributing to a maze of self-deception” (p. 327).
There was one hero who tried to tell Mao
the truth. His name was Peng Dehuai, and
he was China’s Secretary of Defense.
There was a meeting of party leaders that took place in the city of
Lushan and began in July, 1959. He tried
to tell Mao and other party members what was really happening in China. “Mao delivered an ultimatum: leaders would
have to choose between Peng and himself, and the choice would bring about
enormous political consequences for the party” (p. 97). Not a soul at the Lushan meeting dared to
confirm the information Peng had produced.
Peng lost his position and was placed under house arrest for the next 16
years.
The silence of Zhou Enlai and the consistent dishonesty of the party officials followed from the nature of a society built according to Marx’s dream, a time when the state will wither away because there will be no more disagreement since there will be no economic differences. Believing that this situation is one’s goal is necessarily destructive, since it involves believing a lie. In order to protect this lie, the state must be designed to eliminate freedom of thought. Thought reform, sixiang gaizao in Chinese, was an explicit goal of all Marxist societies, not only China’s.
Stalin engineered a famine as part of his war against the kulaks. Pol Pot’s regime led to about 2 million deaths in Cambodia, out of a population of 7 million. Most of those deaths were by starvation. In North Korea starvation still continues. Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, wrote in his book Development as Freedom (1999), “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”
China, unlike the USSR, did not have a
moment of relative improvement after the takeover by the Communist Party. Mao’s victory took place in 1949. A year later, China entered the Korean
War. John King Fairbank, in his major
book China: A New History, writes,
“Altogether the PRC sent into Korea more than 2.3 million troops, including
about two thirds of its of its filed army, artillery, and airforce and all its
tanks” (p. 348). During the period of
the Korean War, China began its policy of purges. “In 1951-52 the Three-Antis Campaign (against
corruption, waste, and bureaucratism) was targeted on officials in government,
in industry, and in the party. The
concurrent Five-Antis Campaign attacked the capitalist class, who at first had
been left in place. Under charges of bribery, tax evasion, theft of state assets,
cheating in labor or materials, and stealing of state economic intelligence,
nearly every employer could be brought to trial” (p. 349).
China, of course, has no history of
democracy, although Sun Yat-Sen, who died in 1925, attempted to bring democracy
to China. There have been famines in
China throughout history, with one recorded as early as 875 C.E. But there was never anything anywhere in the
world equal to the Mao-made famine.
According to Dikötter, “The death toll thus stands at a minimum of 45
million excess deaths. It could be even
worse than that. Some historians
speculate that the figure stands as high as 50 to 60 million people. It is unlikely that we will know the full
extent of the disaster until the archives are completely opened. … Yu Xiguang, an independent researcher with
a great deal of experience, puts the figure at 55 million excess deaths” (pp.
333-334).
China’s principle philosophy, Confucianism,
is relatively open to freedom of thought but at the same time demands respect
and obedience to one’s elders. The
Daoist (Taoist) and Buddhist religions have no history of religious persecution
in any way comparable to what went on in Europe. However, the first emperor of a unified
China, Qin Shi Huang, who ruled from 221 to 210 B.C.E., burned most existing
books and ordered 460 scholars to be buried alive for owning forbidden
books. Perhaps he was the ruler who most
resembled Chairman Mao.
China’s history is long and complicated, but compared to Europe in the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the religious wars in response to the Protestant Reformation, it was a stable and functioning society.
During the Mao era, however, society broke down. “As famine set in, the villagers started cannibalising their homes, either bartering the bricks for food or burning the wood for fuel. If the thatch on the roofs had not been consumed by fire, it was taken down and eaten in desperation. … 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” (p. 169).
The loss of property should in no way be
interpreted as the beginning of an egalitarian society. “A wall was created between cities and the
countryside, but an equally important fault line ran between ordinary people
and party members. … Even the quality of cigarettes varied according to
rank. At the apex of the party stood the
leadership, who had special residences ensconced between high walls, security
guards around the clock and chauffeured cars. … Above them all was Mao, living
in opulence near the Forbidden City where emperors had once dwelled, his
bedroom the size of a ballroom” (p. 192).
People were so desperate that they sold
their children. “Before they died they
sold their offspring, more often than
not to couples who could not have children of their own. … Wu Jingxi got five yuan for his
nine-year-old son from a stranger, a sum which covered the cost of a bowl of
rice and two kilos of peanuts. His
heartbroken wife, an inquiry discovered, cried so much that her swollen eyes
were losing their vision” (pp. 207-208).
Cannibalism occurred, not
surprisingly. “A few people ate human
flesh. … Soon the practice appeared in every region decimated by starvation,
even in a relatively prosperous province such as Guangdong.” (p. 320). Furthermore, cannibalism led to an increase
in practices that were decidedly not socialist.
“Human flesh, like everything else, was traded on the black market” (p.
321). And cannibalism was not restricted
to humans. “Before the pigs died of hunger they turned on each other. … In
parts of Jiangyin county, for instance, many of the pigs froze to death, but
quite a few were cannibalized by larger hogs” (p. 142).
Throughout the famine, China continued to
export food. “President John Kennedy,
apparently, noted coolly that Beijing was still exporting food to Africa and
Cuba even in time of famine, adding that ‘we’ve had no indication from the
Chinese Communists that they would welcome any offer of food’”(p.114).
The source of this information is very surprising indeed. It comes from Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), China’s national daily newspaper. It was reported in the paper way back in 1958, in two separate stories, on October 6th and 13th. There is no mention of the numbers of people living on the streets. As for the reason for this destructiveness, it reflects a slogan used by some of the people who tore down homes: “Destroy Straw Huts in an Evening, Erect Residential Areas in Three Days, Build Communism in a Hundred Days” (p. 53). In other words, it was sheer idiocy for the sake of a cause.
***********************************
George Jochnowitz was born in New York City, in 1937. He became aware of different regional pronunciations when he was six, and he could consciously switch accents as a child. He got his Ph.D. in linguistics from Columbia University and taught linguistics at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His area of specialization was Jewish languages, in particular, Judeo-Italian dialects. As part of a faculty-exchange agreement with Hebei University in Baoding, China, he was in China during the Tiananmen Massacre. He can be reached at george@jochnowitz.net.
***********************************
Copyright ©2013. George Jochnowitz. All Rights Reserved. This essay appeared in Jewish Currents Summer and Autumn, 2011. This post can be found on George Jochnowitz. It is republished here with the permission of the author.