Summary

The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese 三年大饑荒

Before June 1981, the Communist Party of China called it the "Three-Year Natural Disaster" (三年自然災害

Since June 1981, the Communist Party of China called it the "Three-Year Difficulty Period" (三年困難時期

Production decline

According to the China Statistical Yearbook, grain production fell from 200 million tons (1958) to 143.5 million tons (1960).

Number of fatalities

According to government statistics, 15 million people died during the famine. Unofficial estimates vary, but researchers put the number of starvation deaths at between 20 and 43 million. Historian Frank Dikötter, who was granted special access to Chinese archival material, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths between the years 1958 and 1962. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng concluded that there were 36 million deaths from starvation, while another 40 million were not born, so that "China's total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million." (German: "China's total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.") The term "Three Bitter Years" is often used by Chinese farmers to describe this period.

The officially reported death rate showed a much more dramatic increase in some provinces and counties. For example, in Sichuan Province, China's most populous province, the government reported 11 million deaths out of an average population of about 70 million between 1958 and 1961, and in Huaibin County, the government reported 102,000 deaths out of a population of 378,000 (1960). At the national level, official statistics include about 15 million so-called "excess deaths" or "abnormal deaths," most due to starvation.

Yu Dehong, secretary of a party official in Xinyang (1959 and 1960), claimed,

Overwhelmingly, the view is that the government greatly understated the death toll: Lu Baoguo, a reporter in Xinyang for the Xinhua newspaper, told Yang Jisheng about why he never reported his experience:

Most researchers estimate the death toll at between 15 and 55 million. Some Western analysts, such as Patricia Buckley Ebrey (University of Washington), estimate that about 20-45 million people died of starvation caused by poor government policies and natural disasters.

Cannibalism

There are extensive oral accounts, as well as some official documentation, of cannibalism occurring in various forms as a result of the famine. Due to the scale of the famine, the resulting cannibalism has been described as unprecedented in the history of the 20th century.

Great leap forward

The Great Chinese Famine was caused by social pressure, economic mismanagement, and a radical restructuring of agriculture. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, introduced drastic changes in agriculture that prohibited private ownership. Violations of this led to persecution. The social pressure imposed on citizens regarding agriculture and commerce, which was controlled by the government, led to state instability. Due to the laws passed during the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962, according to government statistics, approximately 36 million people died during this period.

Iron and steel production was identified as the key industry for economic progress. Millions of peasants were withdrawn from agriculture to staff the workforces of the steel and iron industry plants.

During the Great Leap Forward, agriculture was organized into people's communes and private cultivation was banned.

Yang Jisheng summarized the impact of the focus on production targets in 2008 as follows:

In the course of the "Eradication of the Four Plagues" campaign, sparrows were hunted in large numbers, in addition to rats, flies and mosquitoes. As a result, the number of pests increased and had a negative impact on crop production.

For their part, local party leaders conspired to cover up failures and blame others in order to protect their own lives and positions. In one famous example, it was announced that Mao Zedong was going to visit a local agricultural commune in Shaanxi Province in the midst of the greatest famine to personally assess conditions. In preparation for his visit, local Party officials ordered hundreds of starving farmers to carefully uproot hundreds of thousands of stalks of grain by hand and then transplant them from nearby farms into a "sample field," which was subsequently shown to Mao as proof that the harvest had not failed. Similar to the severe partial anthropogenic famine in the USSR that affected Ukraine the worst (Holodomor), doctors were forbidden to list "starvation" as the cause of death on death certificates. A famous propaganda picture of the famine shows Chinese children from Shandong province apparently standing on a wheat field that had grown so thick that it could support their weight. In fact, they were standing on a bench hidden below the plants, and the "field" consisted entirely of individually transplanted stalks.

Simultaneously with collectivization, the central government decreed several changes in farming techniques based on the ideas of the Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Denisovich Lyssenko. One of these ideas was to plant the fields to be cultivated more closely, first tripling the density of seedlings and then doubling it again, which resulted in the seeds being virtually planted on top of each other.

Lyssenkoism, adhering to the Stalinist political doctrine that linked any social failure (including crop yield) to the socialist class struggle, claimed that plants of the same species (i.e., the same "class") would not fight each other and, on the contrary, would grow harmoniously together and produce high-density fields. In practice, this resulted in seedlings competing for nutrients and space, and all fields that applied Lyssenko's planting theories showed puny yields or complete crop failure. Another policy (known as "deep plowing") was based on the ideas of Lyssenko's colleague, Tewenty Maltsev, who encouraged farmers throughout China to avoid the normal plowing depth of 15 to 20 cm and instead plow the soil at a depth of one to two meters. According to the deep plowing theory, the most fertile soil was deep in the ground, which meant that exceptionally deep plowing would thus allow for particularly strong root growth. However, in shallow soil, useless stones, useless soil, and sand were carried upward, burying the fertile top layer of soil, which in turn led to poor seed growth.

Institutional policy

According to the work of economist and famine expert Amartya Sen, most famines do not simply result from lower food production, but also from inappropriate or inefficient food distribution, often coupled with a lack of information or even disinformation regarding the extent of the problem. In the case of these Chinese famines, the urban population (under the dictates of Maoism) had protected legal rights to a certain amount of grain consumption, while the peasantry had been granted no such rights and were subject to non-negotiable production quotas on whose surplus they had to survive. As local officials in the countryside competed with each other in exaggerating the production levels that their own communities had achieved in implementing the new economic organization, the local peasants were left with less and less surplus if they were to meet the quotas, and eventually there was no surplus at all. When they finally failed to even meet the quotas needed to feed the cities, peasant farmers were falsely accused of hoarding, profiteering, and other counterrevolutionary activities by the Chinese Communist Party, which cited the massively inflated production estimates of local party leaders as evidence.

As the famine worsened, these accusations caused widespread atrocities on the part of Maoist party officials (including extensive grain confiscations that left millions of peasants to starve) who sought to deflect blame for damaging changes in agricultural policy and massive overestimates of grain yields. At this point, the famine was blamed almost entirely on the conspiracy of "class enemies" and "unreformed kulak elements" among peasant farmers, three times more of whom were starving than the urban Chinese population. The increase in food exports to other brother Socialist countries exacerbated the famine.

Natural disasters

These fundamentally damaging changes in farm organization coincided with adverse weather patterns including droughts and floods. In 1958, there was a flood in the Yellow River. This flood was the only major flood during the Great Chinese Famine. It flooded half a million acres of crops (3.04 million mu (亩)) and destroyed over 300,000 houses. However, in Henan Province and Shandong Province, 2 million people were called to protect the dams and riverbanks, and the floods were successfully directed to Bohai Gulf. On the other hand, historian Frank Dikötter has argued that most of the flooding during the famine was not due to unusual weather, but to massive, poorly planned irrigation works that were part of the Great Leap Forward. Some of the projects, such as the Red Flag Canal, contributed positively to irrigation, but researchers have pointed out that the massive hydraulic engineering project led to many deaths from starvation, pestilence, and drowning, which contributed to the famine.

However, there was disagreement about the significance of the drought and floods in triggering the Great Famine. According to published data from the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences (中国气象科学研究院), the drought in 1960 was not unusual and its severity was only classified as "mild" compared to other years - it was less severe than those in 1955. 1963, 1965-1967 and so on. Moreover, Xue Muqiao (薛暮桥), then head of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, is reported to have said in 1958 that "we give whatever figures the superior wants" in order to exaggerate natural disasters and exonerate official responsibility for deaths due to starvation. Yang Jishen claimed he had examined other sources, including a nongovernmental archive of meteorological data from 350 weather stations across China, and the droughts, floods, and temperatures between 1958 and 1961 were within typical patterns for China. Some scientists also pointed out that the negative effects of the 1959-1961 climate were local at best and definitely not the main cause of the three-year famine that spread throughout the country. Under conditions of abundant food supply, even in the event of a major disaster, farmers have the energy and enthusiasm to keep disaster losses to a minimum.

Cultural Revolution

The failure of the Great Leap Forward, as well as the famine, led Mao Zedong to withdraw from active decision-making within the Communist Party and the government and to hand over various future tasks to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. However, disagreements between Mao and Liu (and Deng) gradually increased, and in 1963 Mao launched the "Socialist Education Campaign" and in 1966 he launched the "Cultural Revolution," in which Liu was accused of having attributed only 30 percent to natural disasters and accused of being a "traitor." Liu was prosecuted to death in 1969. Deng was also purged (twice) during the Cultural Revolution.

Reforms and opening

After the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping became the new Supreme Leader of China in 1978. In the late 1970s, Deng launched the "Boluan Fanzheng" program to correct the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, and launched the "Reform and Opening Up" program. China's agricultural and industrial systems have changed systematically since then. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world's second largest economy.

Until the early 1980s, the Chinese government's attitude, reflected in the name "Three-Year Natural Disaster," was that the famine was predominantly the result of a series of natural events exacerbated by several planning errors. In June 1981, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially changed the name to the "Three-Year Period of Difficulty" and declared the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Anti-Right Campaign," in addition to several natural disasters and the "Sino-Soviet Discord."

Scholars outside China argued that massive institutional and policy changes that accompanied the Great Leap Forward were key factors in the famine, or at least exacerbated the disasters caused by nature.

Some claim that famines in the Republican era caused a mortality rate of about five million

Famine researcher Cormac Ó Gráda noted that even before the Great Chinese Famine, famines were "recurrent features of Chinese history during the preceding century." He noted the "apocalyptic" nature of such famines, which, including the 'Great North China Famine' (1876-1879), were estimated to have resulted in between 9.5 and 13 million deaths. Quoting Yang Jisheng, Ó Gráda also notes that between 1920 and 1936, 18.36 million people died due to famines caused by crop failures, while the Henan Famine (1943

Former Chinese dissident and political prisoner Minqi Li, an economics professor at the University of Utah and supporter of Maoist policies, has collected data showing that even the peak mortality rates during the Great Leap Forward were actually fairly typical in pre-communist China. Li argues that based on average mortality rates across the three years of the 'Great Leap Forward,' several million fewer lives died during this period than under normal mortality conditions prior to 1949.

Amartya Sen places this famine in a global context. His book Development as Freedom claims that the main culprit is the lack of democracy. He adds that it is "hard to imagine that anything like this could happen in a country where people go to the polls and where there is an independent press. During this terrible disaster, the government was not subject to any pressure from news papers, which were controlled, or from opposition parties, which did not exist." Nonetheless, Sen notes in his Hunger and Public Action that "despite the gigantic scale of excessive mortality in the Chinese famine, the extraordinary mortality in India from regular shortages was already at normal times those considerably This view is also reflected in Noam Chomsky in Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs.

Sources

1. Great Chinese Famine
2. Große Chinesische Hungersnot