Starving a Nation With the Politics of Illusion

XIAOGANG, China — Yan Hongchang remembers when there was no food. People in this village were so hungry their chests touched their backs, the peasants would say.

It was 1960, and Yan was 10 years old. China was slowly starving to death in the worst famine of this century--perhaps in all human history.

More than any other event of modern times, the great Chinese famine--a totally unnecessary, entirely man-made holocaust that claimed between 23 million and 30 million lives--exemplifies the political and ideological causes of starvation.

It came at a time of buoyant optimism, when Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung launched the “Great Leap Forward”--an all-out push to “leap” the country into a state of pure communism through collectivization and industrialization. Mao called it “walking on two legs.” But when it was finished, China was so depleted it barely had a leg left to stand on.

The hunger that today stalks North Korea is born of the same political isolation and intimidation. The inefficient, state-owned farms and the philosophy of self-determination crafted under the cultish rule of the late Kim Il Sung are eerily similar to the do-it-alone model of development that predominated during China’s famine.

Concept of Famine Has Changed

Until the second half of the 2Oth century, famine was widely blamed on the wrath of God, symbolized by the pale horse of the Apocalypse, on which rode death, wielding hunger and a sword.

Today, famine is almost always political. It is caused by war, ethnic rivalry, totalitarianism and inept public policies, noted Harvard University economist Amartya Sen in his extensive writings on the subject.

The three deadliest famines of this century--1932-33 in the Soviet Ukraine, 1959-61 in China and 1979-80 in Cambodia--were all essentially political disasters. All took place under isolationist, totalitarian regimes.

“No substantial famine,” Sen wrote, “has ever occurred in a democratic country where the government tolerates opposition, accepts the electoral process and can be publicly criticized.”

At the time of the Great Leap Forward, rumors of famine did surface: Chinese refugees in Hong Kong told of widespread desperation on the mainland, and a few foreign journalists, most notably conservative American columnist Joseph Alsop, documented famine conditions as early as 1960. Some overseas Chinese, hearing of their relatives’ plight, attempted to send canned food through the mail.

But it was not until 1987 that an American demographer and a Shanghai scholar produced the first public estimates of the massive loss of life after careful study of Chinese census data.

And the human details of the famine have been slow to come out. The Chinese government officially denies that the famine took place and only recently loosened restrictions on allowing scholars and journalists to enter the hardest-hit regions to interview survivors.

Tales of Loss, Helplessness

In an attempt to reconstruct the terrible events that took place nearly four decades ago, a Times reporter spent two weeks in remote areas of Anhui province--one of the areas most devastated by the famine--talking to victims as well as some of those who contributed to the catastrophe by falsifying harvest reports to please the Beijing regime.

“I lost my 3-year-old daughter and my younger sister,” said Li Xianjun, 72, a retired schoolteacher from Fengyang. She sold the wood from the sprawling chun tree in her family courtyard to feed an infant son. Now living with that son, a grocery store owner in Fengyang, Li recalled hiking miles to her sister’s home in the rural suburbs only to find that she had died hours before.

“As I turned to come home, I thought for sure that I would die myself on the way,” she said.

Chen Xinghan has known hunger from an early age: As a young boy from a very poor family, he recalls, he traveled from village to village begging for food. And in 1960, he was leader of a collective farm in Houchen Village that could not produce enough to keep its 40 households fed.

“The only thing that saved us was carrots that we grew in the riverbanks,” Chen recalls. “. . . In our commune, we had three old people die from diseases related to starvation. But the carrots saved most of us.

“The collective policy did not work,” says Chen, now 63, who has built a 200-acre rice and wheat farm by diking and reclaiming marshland along the Huai River. Chen is one of the few farmers in the area to own his own harvesting machines, and he also owns a brick factory and a rice processing plant that employ 113 people, making Chen one of the most prosperous farmers in Fengyang County.

Yan--who witnessed the horrors of famine here in the village of Xiaogang--is now a successful 47-year-old farmer. Because of what he did as a young man, at great personal risk, to break down the Maoist collective farming system, Yan is also one of China’s modern heroes of reform, the subject of a tribute in Beijing’s Revolutionary History Museum.

Truth of Calamity Slow to Surface

In an interview with The Times, his first with a foreign reporter, he recalled slowly walking home from school in 1960, weak with hunger, tortured by thoughts of food. The bodies of his neighbors, shriveled by dehydration or grotesquely swollen from edema, lay alongside the dirt path.

“Every day, I would see a corpse,” the soft-spoken farmer said, drawing on a cigarette as he described the most terrible year of his life. “Sometimes I recognized them as a neighbor. Often they were strangers.”

Of the 176 people who lived in the village in 1960, more than 70 starved to death, he said. Other communities in surrounding Fengyang County fared worse. Entire villages were wiped out. Cannibalism, the last resort of the desperately hungry, was widespread.

It has taken more than 30 years for the truth about China’s “secret famine” to emerge, mostly in recently published research such as that of University of Chicago scholar Dali L. Yang. A native of China’s Shandong province, Yang derisively described the era as “the Great Leap Famine,” a term he chose “to convey and underscore the political nature of the calamity that befell millions of Chinese.”

Details of China’s other modern political catastrophe, the 1966-76 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, have long been out in the open, partly because some of the country’s top leaders, including the late Deng Xiaoping, were persecuted then. After Deng emerged from political exile in 1976 and took the helm of Chinese power in 1978, so-called wound literature describing the political horrors of the Cultural Revolution began to surface.

Until recently, however, the great famine has been examined only in a “small number of scholarly publications, mostly academic articles scattered here and there,” Yang noted.

“This lack of attention,” he observed, “is partly because the victims of the Great Leap Famine were chiefly farmers, who were likely to remain inarticulate even if they survived. It is also partly because, with rare exceptions, archives on the Great Leap Famine remain tightly guarded. After all, many members of the current elite in China played a part in that inglorious era and have no interest in displaying their own dirty linen.”

N. Korea’s ‘Famine in Slow Motion

China’s experience is relevant to what is going on today inside North Korea, which one international relief worker described as “a famine in slow motion.” China of 1960, before the economic reforms that opened the country up to the outside world, insisted on the same fanatical self-reliance and rural collectivization currently practiced in North Korea.

Shortly before the Chinese famine, Beijing broke politically with its Soviet patron, deepening the country’s political insulation. Similarly, one indirect cause of the North Korean food shortage was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the North had depended on for trade and food aid.

“The main comparison you could make between China and North Korea is this extreme isolation,” said California Institute of Technology demographic historian James Z. Lee, who was in Beijing recently to attend an international conference on population. “The Sino-Soviet split, coming at the time that it did, created a kind of isolation in China much as North Korea is isolated today.”

Like China in 1960, North Korea claims that its food shortages are the result of natural disasters, including two successive years of flooding. But international aid workers in the region contend that most of the problems are institutional.

Even a healthy harvest in North Korea produces only 5 million tons of grain--2.4 million tons short of what the country needs to adequately feed its more than 20 million people, International Red Cross specialist Geoffrey Dennis said recently in Beijing after leading a famine assessment team into North Korea.

Dennis, a Briton who has lived in North Korea, said the country’s recent flooding has only aggravated an economy that has been in decline for the past 20 years.

At the same time people were starving to death in China’s countryside, the government continued to issue reports of bountiful harvests, British journalist Jasper Becker wrote in his recent book, “Hungry Ghosts.” In some areas where the famine was the worst, Becker noted, the granaries were full--a cruel fact that much of the recent scholarship has documented using formerly secret Chinese provincial records.

‘We Were All Afraid’ to Tell Truth

China’s food problems began in 1959, with the launch of the Great Leap Forward.

Under Mao’s instructions, family farms, the heart and soul of China, were formed into giant collectives. Peasants were told to melt their cookware to produce iron and steel. People would not need to own woks and pans because the state forced everyone to take meals in giant communal kitchens.

Meanwhile, the central government in Beijing pressured the local Communist cadres for record-breaking harvests. With no free press and no political opposition, the unrealistic demands led to fantastic exaggeration and widespread falsification as party officials scrambled to meet the new quotas.

Misguided scientists pushed an ecologically disastrous program of killing the “four pests”--sparrows, rats, insects and flies--and of “close planting,” a practice that ended up killing more crops than it produced.

One famous faked photograph, published in the China Pictorial magazine, showed a field planted so densely with sturdy wheat that children were standing on top of the stalks of grain. As it was revealed later, they were standing on a bench. The closely planted wheat, starved for light, shot up tall and spindly, then fell over.

Li Weiying, 46, a local leader in northwestern Anhui province, remembers when then-Communist Party General Secretary Liu Shaoqi visited her commune in 1959. The commune leadership, nervous because that year’s crop was poor, told the peasants to collect rice from other fields and plant it in the field that Liu would visit, so he could be impressed by their bountiful harvest.

“After he left,” Li said, “all of the rice died.”

“We were all afraid to talk,” added Shi Shenkun, 49, a wheat and poultry farmer in the same area. “Even when I was a little boy, I remember being afraid to tell the truth. Everyone pretended we had big harvests and then went without food.

“I still remember being hungry all of the time,” said Shi, a short, stocky man who now claims proudly that he weighs 95 kilograms, or 209 pounds. “I remember weighing less than 30 kilograms.”

Gao Yunhua, 68, led a factional army of 30,000 peasants known as the “Cannon Fire Group” during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. They marched under the banner of Chairman Mao though Gao says now that they hated Mao for his famine-producing Great Leap Forward.

The grizzled, balding Gao said the deception was intentional. “We were displaying the head of a lamb,” he said, repeating a popular Chinese expression based on a joke about the dishonesty of butchers, “but we were selling dog meat.”

Gao, as a “grass-roots cadre,” participated in the persecution of local landlords and redistribution of their property following the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949.

‘No One in a Cadre’s Family Died’

In 1960, Gao was chief accountant in Lifu People’s Commune, head of a team that reported the annual grain harvest to the central government. Mainly, he said, they lied.

“We would just find out what they were claiming in another commune,” he said, “and add to that number. If they said they were getting 100 kilograms per mu [1/6 acre], we would claim we were getting 150. In reality we might be getting 25. No one dared give the real amount because you would be branded a counterrevolutionary. You could not tell the truth in those days.”

Gao estimated that, in the village of Lifu, home to 20,000 people in 1960, about 1,000 people died in the famine--including four of his brothers and a younger sister.

No one in his immediate household died, he said, because he was an official cadre, although he never joined the Communist Party.

“No one in a cadre’s family died. Even in the commune kitchen, if people had one dumpling, I would have two.” Still, he said, during the famine his weight dropped from 155 pounds to less than 90 pounds.

Now, Gao is owner of a prosperous granary and one of the richest men in his part of the province. He proudly describes himself as a “typical and authentic capitalist” who employs 60 people and has made more than $1 million.

“But I will tell you one thing,” Gao said, “[if] we had not had the Great Leap Forward, I could be much richer today.”

China did not break out of the great famine until Mao, facing a palace coup by other members of the leadership, finally relaxed the rigid collective farming system. Rice and wheat stored in government granaries were released to the peasants and distributed by the army. Most of the rural collective kitchens were dismantled.

The country still suffers from extensive poverty. The World Bank estimates that more than 300 million people live on incomes of less than $1 a day. The United Nations Children’s Fund reported this year that 16% of children younger than 5 in China are “moderately or severely” underweight.

But the dark days of 1959-61 have not been repeated in the world’s most populous country.

Survivor Now a National Hero

Yan Hongchang, who as a little boy in Xiaogang watched his neighbors starve, is not a rich man. But he is a brave man and a national hero.

In 1978, when he was 18 and a leader of the Xiaogang Production Group, Yan led a quiet but perilous revolt against the system. He called a meeting of the 20 village households and showed them a document he had secretly drafted that would allow the peasant farmers to keep and sell some of the grain they produced on their farms. The rest of the grain they would give to the commune or to the state as taxes.

In essence, Yan proposed what was later introduced in China as the “household contract” or “responsibility system” sponsored by the Communist Party itself. But in 1978, such a proposal was still considered counterrevolutionary, and those who signed it were risking prison.

Yan pledged to take the blame and any punishment if the agreement incurred the wrath of the local government or senior officials. In exchange, the other villagers promised to look after his children until they were 18 years old. The document was then “signed” by the householders, who applied their inked thumbprints to the page.

Within two years after tiny, famine-racked Xiaogang secretly instituted its own version of the “responsibility system,” the central government, desperately looking for a way out of the collective morass, used it as a model for a national program. In the way such things sometimes happen in China, Yan the dissenter became Yan the national hero.

The secret village document, thumbprints and all, is now displayed at the Revolutionary History Museum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Interviewed at dusk during the wheat harvest at his modest farm, Yan said he has made a good life for himself and his family. Since 1981, they have had electricity. In 1984, they bought their first television set and the first of two tractors.

But he has never forgotten the famine of 1960. The only reason he survived, he said, was that his father knew how to make steel tools, which he traded to the local railroad for dried sweet potatoes.

Not all his family fared as well. An uncle and his entire family starved to death. “Since that time, I have never been able to eat sweet potato again,” Yan said.

‘Unlikely We Will See Famine Again

“Life is not bad now. If we continue like this, it is unlikely we will ever see famine again,” he said.

Still, Yan said, pointing to a low building on the side of his courtyard, he is taking no chances. He said he keeps a two-year supply of grain--20,000 kilograms, or 44,000 pounds--in the building.

“Even if we had a flood and the whole crop was destroyed,” he said, “we would survive.”

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THE POLITICS OF HUNGER

The lack of food can be caused by bad harvests or brutal weather. But millions in this century have died from famines that were the result of government policies.

U.S.S.R., 1932-33

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the Communist government under Josef Stalin took over privately owned farms in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and combined them into larger, state-run farms. “Collectivization” brought great hardship, particularly in the Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of farmers resisted the seizure of their land and were sent to prison or killed. In 1932 and ‘33, the Soviet regime seized grain and food from people’s homes. The famine caused by these policies killed between 5 million and 7.5 million people.

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CHINA, 1959-61

After a program of collectivizing China’s farms, Mao Tse-tung launched “The Great Leap Forward,” an effort to convert a rural labor surplus into a huge production force through the reorganization of production. What Mao called “walking on two legs”--the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture--backfired when the communes proved too large to be effective and Chinese technology proved too limited. The allocation of foodstuffs from rural to urban regions caused widespread starvation, but the regime persisted with its unrealistic ideology until the economy collapsed. Between 23 million and 30 million people died in what has been dubbed “The Great Leap Famine.”

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CAMBODIA, 1979-80

In the wake of the Vietnam War, Khmer Rouge Communists, led by Pol Pot, took control of Cambodia and began to closely supervise the lives of the people. They forced urban residents to move to rural areas to work as farmers. They required that everyone dress alike, and they discouraged the practice of religion. The government took control of all businesses and farms and killed at least 1 million Cambodians, including former officials and educated people. The policies triggered disruption of the nation’s economic structure, a sharp decline in agricultural production and severe food shortages. Starvation claimed up to 1 million lives.

Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica; World Book Encyclopedia; “U.S.S.R.: A Country Study”

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THE CHINA SYNDROME

Collective farming began in China under Mao Tse-tung in 1955, and by 1959 virtually all farm workers were members of state-controlled communes. Collectivization radically changed rural China until Mao’s death in the late ‘70s, when Deng Xiaoping reversed many of Mao’s policies.

CHANGES IN RURAL CHINA (Before collectivization)

Production unit: Family farm

Relation to land: Proprietor

Production purpose: Family consumption

Inheritance of land: Yes

Ownership of resources: Family

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CHANGES IN RURAL CHINA (Under collectivization)

Production unit: Commune

Relation to land: Member of commune

Production purpose: Sale to state

Inheritance of land: No

Ownership of resources: State

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Aquaculture

Chinese have farmed fish--a major source of animal protein--for 3,000 years. China produces 9 million tons of farmed fish annually.

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Healthy trend

UNICEF’s 1991 Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative has transformed infant care globally by training mothers in the health benefits of breastfeeding and by providing counseling and support. In China, where 20 million babies are born each year, 6,300 baby-friendly hospitals have helped raise breastfeeding rates sharply.

Breastfeeding rates in China

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1992 1994 Rural 29% 68% Urban 10% 48%

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About This Series

At a time when humankind has the resources to conquer hunger, 800 million are chronically undernourished.

* Monday: International agencies are seeking innovative strategies to combat the problem at its core.

* Today: Nearly 40 years after Maoist idealogy led to cataclysmic famine in China, the lessons can be applied to another isolationist, hunger-racked state: North Korea.

* Wednesday: No place in the world suffers more from conflict-born starvation than Africa, where civil war, ethnic bloodletting, coups d’etat and revolution take a tremendous toll.

* Thursday: Class divisions perpetuate hunger and turn India into a nation of contradictions: Stretches of bountiful land coexist with pockets of utter desperation.

* Friday: Scientists hope dramatic discoveries in plant genetics and biotechnology will produce a second “Green Revolution” that will help feed a swelling world population.