Chapter 42 The Great Famine

The Great Famine

The highest death toll was recorded during China's Great Famine shortly after the Great Leap Forward. [12] The article "Great Famine" in the book Historical Records of the People's Republic of China states, "The number of unnatural deaths and reduced births from 1959 to 1961 is estimated at about 40 million�China's depopulation by 40 million is likely to be the world's greatest famine in this century." [13]

The Great Famine was falsely labeled a "Three-Year Natural Disaster" by the CCP. In fact, those three years had favorable weather conditions without any massive natural disasters like flooding, drought, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, frost, freeze, hail or plague of locusts. The "disaster" was entirely caused by man. The Great Leap Forward campaign required everyone in China to become involved in steel-making, forcing farmers to leave their crops to rot in the field. Despite this, officials in every region escalated their claims on production yields. He Yiran, the First Secretary of the Party Committee of Liuzhou Prefecture, fabricated all by himself the shocking yield of "65,000 kilograms of paddy rice per mu [14]" in Huanjiang County. This was right after the Lushan Plenum when the CCP's anti-rightist movement spread out to the entire country. In order to demonstrate that the CCP was correct all the time, the crops were expropriated by the government as a form of taxation according to these exaggerated yields. Consequently, the grain rations, seeds and staple foods of the peasants were all confiscated. When the demand still could not be met, the peasants were accused of hiding their crops.

He Yiran once said that they must strive to get first place in the competition for highest yield no matter how many people in Liuzhou would die. Some peasants were deprived of everything, with only some handfuls of rice left hidden in the urine basin. The Party Committee of Xunle District, Huanjiang County even issued an order to forbid cooking, preventing the peasants from eating the crops. Patrols were conducted by militiamen at night. If they saw light from a fire, they would proceed with a search and raid. Many peasants did not even dare to cook edible wild herbs or bark, and died of starvation.

Historically, in times of famine, the government would provide rice porridge, distribute the crops and allow victims to flee from the famine. The CCP, however, regarded fleeing from the famine as a disgrace to the Party's prestige, and ordered militiamen to block roadways to prevent victims from escaping the famine. When the peasants were so hungry as to snatch cereals from the grain depots, the CCP ordered shooting at the crowd to suppress the looting and labeled those killed as counter-revolutionary elements. A great number of peasants were starved to death in many provinces including Gansu, Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Guangxi provinces. Still, the hungry peasants were forced to take part in irrigation work, dam construction, and steel-making. Many dropped to the ground while working and never got up again. At the end, those who survived had no strength to bury the dead. Many villages died out completely as families starved to death one after another.

In the most serious famines in China's history prior to the CCP, there were cases in which families exchanged one another's children to eat, but nobody ever ate his own children. Under the CCP's reign, however, people were driven to eat those who died, cannibalize those who fled from other regions, and even kill and eat their own children. The writer Sha Qing depicted this scene in his book Yi Xi Da Di Wan ( An Obscure Land of Bayou ): In a peasant's family, a father was left with only his son and daughter during the Great Famine. One day, the daughter was driven out of the house by her father. When she came back, she could not find her younger brother, but saw white oil floating in the cauldron and a pile of bones next to the stove. Several days later, the father added more water to the pot, and called his daughter to come closer. The girl was frightened, and pleaded with her father from outside the door, "Daddy, please don't eat me. I can collect firewood and cook food for you. If you eat me, nobody else will do this for you."

The final extent and number of tragedies like this is unknown. Yet the CCP misrepresented them as a noble honor, claimed that the CCP was leading people bravely to fight the "natural disasters" and continued to tout itself as "great, glorious and correct."

After the Lushan Plenum was held in 1959, General Peng Dehuai [15] was stripped of his power for speaking out for the people. A group of government officials and cadres who dared to speak the truth were dismissed from their posts, detained or investigated. After that, no one dared to speak out the truth. At the time of the Great Famine, instead of reporting the truth, people concealed the facts about the deaths from starvation in order to protect their official positions. Gansu province even refused food aid from Shaanxi Province, claiming Gansu had too great a food surplus.

This Great Famine was also a qualifying test for the CCP's cadres. According to the CCP's criteria, these cadres who had resisted telling the truth in the face of tens of millions starving to death were certainly "qualified." With this test, the CCP would then believe that nothing such as human emotions or heavenly principles could become a psychological burden that would prevent these cadres from following the Party line. After the Great Famine, the responsible provincial officials merely participated in the formality of self-criticism. Li Jingquan, the CCP Secretary for Sichuan Province where millions of people died from starvation, was promoted to be the First Secretary of the Southwestern District Bureau of the CCP.