The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. When, in , Mao was challenged about these events at a party conference, he purged his enemies. Tens of millions died. No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate.
The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work.
His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events.
Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions. Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million.
Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died.
Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities. Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods.
Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine. He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power. In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different.
The Cultural Revolution—the ten-year period — of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
For this, the Chinese modeled their approach on the Five Year Plans employed by the Soviet Union since —a tragic irony given that forced collectivization under the Soviets had resulted in the starvation of between six to eight million people. Although the regime had recently confiscated land from landlords and redistributed it to farmers, collectivization now pooled land and resources for efficiency. Vast communal fields were far more conducive to mechanized farming than millions of small, family-sized plots.
The end goal of collectivization was abolishment of private ownership, or Communism, with its anticipated shared prosperity. Collectivization proceeded in stages, first with perhaps ten families voluntarily cooperating in mutual aid teams MAT.
In this early stage of socialism, each family agreed to share their labor, tools, and draft animals with other team members while retaining ownership—a relationship that had historically existed within farming communities but was now formalized by contract. Five teams or fifty households comprised an APC, and each contributed their resources, including land, to the cooperative.
Families retained title to their parcel of land and were compensated based on their contributions of land and labor. As these moderate steps toward collectivization proved effective, by late Mao moved to the next—and more controversial—phase by combining approximately five low-level cooperatives into higher-level cooperatives, encompassing some households each. Private property was abolished as land; animals, tools, or other resources became property of the cooperative; and labor became the sole criterion for compensation.
The first Five Year Plan yielded impressive results. More important, life expectancy was twenty years longer in than when the Communists took power in Impressive industrial output statistics notwithstanding, quantity took precedence over quality, and quota requirements often resulted in shoddy final products. Also, rural people resisted private property confiscation.
In early , as the first Five Year Plan reached high tide, the party, flush with success, invited comments from Chinese intellectuals and the public in a directive known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, a metaphor equating contending ideas with blooming flowers. Initially hesitant to speak out, first scientists and then literary figures, students, and common people voiced criticisms of party policies.
Then, inspired by the criticisms of Stalin, Hungarians revolted against the Soviet Union in October Moscow brutally suppressed the rebellion, and when his compatriots began public attacks against him, Mao reverted to Soviet tactics. In response, local cadres felt compelled to identify which 5 percent within their ranks were rightists.
In addition to removing the most educated from society, the Anti-Rightist Campaign discouraged the Chinese people from voicing any doubts or criticisms and left them amenable to even the most irrational and misguided policies, including the absurd notion that economic development required only ideological correctness, not scientific or technical expertise.
In this final stage of collectivization, communes formed—each with some 5, house- holds, more than twenty times larger than previous cooperatives. He said the archives were already illuminating the extent of the atrocities of the period; one piece of evidence revealed that 13, opponents of the new regime were killed in one region alone, in just three weeks. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. More about China Dictators malnutrition Nutrition. Why would you force people to strip in winter? And this happened from the North all the way down to the South, even in Guangdong Province it happened. In one case people had to strip bare and work in the middle of the winter on an irrigation site.
There's nothing but the stick to force people to do work. Some people have their ears chopped off, their noses lopped off. The slightest infraction is punished by drastic measures. One man called Juan Se Eow phonetic for stealing a potato, has his legs tied up with iron wire, a 10 kilo stone dropped on his back; somebody chops off one of his ears and then he's branded with a sizzling tor. In Sichuan some people are poured in petrol and sent alight. A small boy for having stolen a grain is punished; his father has to actually bury him alive and the man dies of grief himself.
The whole thing It's a massive one-party state that like all one-party states meticulously compiles its own crimes; there's extremely detailed records that give you the name, the place, who did what to whom when and where.
An extraordinary amount of documentation that shows levels of violence and coercion are widespread throughout the country.
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