Three Years of Natural Disasters
Encyclopedia
The Great Chinese Famine , officially referred to as the Three Years of Natural Disasters by the People's Republic of China, was the period in the People's Republic of China
between 1958 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine. Drought, poor weather conditions, and the policies of the Communist Party of China
contributed to the famine, although the relative weights of the contributions are disputed.
According to government statistics, there were 15 million excess deaths in this period. Unofficial estimates vary, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.
Yang Jisheng
, a former Xinhua News Agency
reporter who spent over ten years gathering information available to no other scholars, estimates excess deaths of 36 million. Historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths from 1958 to 1962.
The phrases "Three Years of Economic Difficulty" and "Three Bitter Years" are also used by Chinese officials to describe this period.
's stance, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters", was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by several planning errors. Researchers outside China, however, generally agree that massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward
were the key factors in the famine. Since the 1980s there has been greater official Chinese recognition of the importance of policy mistakes in causing the disaster, claiming that the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement.
During the Great Leap Forward
, farming was organized into communes
and the cultivation of private plots forbidden. Iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement. Millions of peasants were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron and steel production workforce.
Yang Jisheng
would summarize the effect of the focus on production targets in 2008:
Along with collectivisation, the central Government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques based on the ideas of Ukrainian pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko
. One of these ideas was close planting, whereby the density of seedlings was at first tripled and then doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other. In practice they did, which stunted growth and resulted in lower yields. Another policy was based on the ideas of Lysenko's colleague Teventy Maltsev, who encouraged peasants across China to plow deeply into the soil (up to 1 or 2 meters). They believed the most fertile soil was deep in the earth, allowing extra strong root growth. However in shallow soil, useless rocks, soil, and sand were driven up instead, burying the topsoil.
These radical changes in farming organization coincided with adverse weather patterns including droughts and floods. In July 1959, the Yellow River
flooded in East China
. According to the Disaster Center, it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated 2 million people, while other areas were affected in other ways as well. It could be ranked as one of the deadliest natural disasters of the 20th century.
In 1960, an estimated 60% of agricultural land received no rain at all. The Encyclopædia Britannica
yearbooks from 1958 to 1962 also reported abnormal weather, followed by droughts and floods. This included 30 inches (762 mm) of rain in Hong Kong across five days in June 1959, part of a pattern that hit all of Southern China.
As a result of these factors, year over year grain production in China dropped by 15% in 1959. By 1960, it was at 70% of its 1958 level. There was no recovery until 1962, after the Great Leap Forward ended.
According to the work of Nobel prize
winning economist and expert on famines Amartya Sen
, most famines do not result just from lower food production, but also from an inappropriate or inefficient distribution of the food, often compounded by lack of information and indeed misinformation as to the extent of the problem. In the case of these Chinese famines, the urban population had protected legal rights for certain amounts of grain consumption. Local officials in the countryside competed to over-report the levels of production that their communes had achieved in response to the new economic organisation and thus local peasants were left with a much reduced residue.
The officially reported death rates show much more dramatic increases in a number of provinces and counties. In Sichuan province, the most populous province in China, for example, the government reported 11 million deaths out of the average population of about 70 million during 1958–1961, one death in every seven people. In Huaibin county, Henan province, the government reported 102 thousand deaths out of a population of 378 thousand in 1960. On the national level, the official statistics imply about 15 million so-called "excess deaths" or "abnormal deaths", most of them resulting from starvation.
Yu Dehong, the secretary of a party official in Xinyang
in 1959 and 1960, stated,
It is widely believed that the government seriously under-reported death tolls: Lu Baoguo, a Xinhua reporter in Xinyang, told Yang Jisheng
of why he never reported on his experience:
Some Western analysts, such as Patricia Buckley Ebrey, estimate that about 20-40 million people had died of starvation caused by bad government policy and natural disasters. J. Banister estimates this number is about 23 million. Li Chengrui, a former minister of the National Bureau of Statistics of China
, estimated 22 million (1998). His estimation was based on Ansley J. Coale
and Jiang Zhenghua's estimation of 17 million. Cao Shuji estimated 32.5 million. The aforementioned Yang Jisheng
(2008) estimated the death toll at 36 million. Hong Kong based historian Frank Dikötter (2010) estimates that, at minimum, 45 million people died from starvation, overwork and state violence during the Great Leap, claiming his findings to be based on access to recently opened local and provincial party archives. However, his approach to the documents, as well has his claim to be the first author to use them, have been questioned by other scholars. Dikötter's study also stresses that state violence exacerbated the death toll. Dikötter claims that least 2.5 million of the victims were beaten or tortured to death. He provides a graphic example of what happened to a family after one member was caught stealing some food:
being practiced in various forms, as a result of the famine. Due to the scale of the famine, the resulting cannibalism has been described as "on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century".
Wim F Wertheim, emeritus professor from the University of Amsterdam, has questioned the validity of the large number of famine deaths put forward by various researchers. In the article "Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy", Wertheim says
Mobo Gao, Professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Confucius Institute
at the University of Adelaide
, suggested that the Great Leap Forward did in fact have its own logic and rationality, and that its terrible effects came not from malign intent on the part of the Chinese leadership at the time, but instead relate to the structural nature of its rule, and the vastness of China as a country. Gao says "..the terrible lesson learnt is that China is so huge and when it is uniformly ruled, follies or wrong policies will have grave implications of tremendous magnitude".
Others suggest that Mao's responsibility for disastrous famine has to be evaluated in light of the overall demographic situation. Lucien Bianco
points out that Maoist China dramatically improved life expectancy and that many of the babies who died would, under the old regime, never have been born, and that there was a crisis in agricultural production population in any case. Gao Mobo argues that the Maoist revolution gave an estimated net positive value of 35 billion extra years of life to the Chinese people.
Former Chinese dissident
and political prisoner, Minqi Li
, a Professor of Economics at the University of Utah
, has produced data showing that even the peak death rates during the Great Leap Forward were in fact quite typical in pre-Communist China. Li (2008) argues that based on the average death rate over the three years of the Great Leap Forward, there were several million fewer lives lost during this period than would have been the case under normal mortality conditions before 1949.
Nobel Prize
winner economist Amartya Sen
puts this famine in a global context. His book Development as Freedom
argues that lack of democracy is the major culprit: "Indeed, no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country—no matter how poor." He adds that it is "hard to imagine that anything like this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and that has an independent press. During that terrible calamity the government faced no pressure from newspapers, which were controlled, and none from opposition parties, which were absent."
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
between 1958 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine. Drought, poor weather conditions, and the policies of the Communist Party of China
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
contributed to the famine, although the relative weights of the contributions are disputed.
According to government statistics, there were 15 million excess deaths in this period. Unofficial estimates vary, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.
Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng is a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone , a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until...
, a former Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua News Agency
The Xinhua News Agency is the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China and the biggest center for collecting information and press conferences in the PRC. It is the largest news agency in the PRC, ahead of the China News Service...
reporter who spent over ten years gathering information available to no other scholars, estimates excess deaths of 36 million. Historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths from 1958 to 1962.
The phrases "Three Years of Economic Difficulty" and "Three Bitter Years" are also used by Chinese officials to describe this period.
Causes
Until the early 1980s, the Chinese governmentGovernment of the People's Republic of China
All power within the government of the People's Republic of China is divided among three bodies: the People's Republic of China, State Council, and the People's Liberation Army . This article is concerned with the formal structure of the state, its departments and their responsibilities...
's stance, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters", was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by several planning errors. Researchers outside China, however, generally agree that massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...
were the key factors in the famine. Since the 1980s there has been greater official Chinese recognition of the importance of policy mistakes in causing the disaster, claiming that the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement.
During the Great Leap Forward
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...
, farming was organized into communes
People's commune
The people's commune was the highest of three administrative levels in rural areas of the People's Republic of China during the period of 1958 to 1982-85 until they were replaced by townships. Communes, the largest collective units, were divided in turn into production brigades and production teams...
and the cultivation of private plots forbidden. Iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement. Millions of peasants were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron and steel production workforce.
Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng is a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone , a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until...
would summarize the effect of the focus on production targets in 2008:
In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, "Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us". If the granaries of HenanHenanHenan , is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the central part of the country. Its one-character abbreviation is "豫" , named after Yuzhou , a Han Dynasty state that included parts of Henan...
and HebeiHebei' is a province of the People's Republic of China in the North China region. Its one-character abbreviation is "" , named after Ji Province, a Han Dynasty province that included what is now southern Hebei...
had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.
Along with collectivisation, the central Government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques based on the ideas of Ukrainian pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist of Ukrainian origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful...
. One of these ideas was close planting, whereby the density of seedlings was at first tripled and then doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other. In practice they did, which stunted growth and resulted in lower yields. Another policy was based on the ideas of Lysenko's colleague Teventy Maltsev, who encouraged peasants across China to plow deeply into the soil (up to 1 or 2 meters). They believed the most fertile soil was deep in the earth, allowing extra strong root growth. However in shallow soil, useless rocks, soil, and sand were driven up instead, burying the topsoil.
These radical changes in farming organization coincided with adverse weather patterns including droughts and floods. In July 1959, the Yellow River
Yellow River
The Yellow River or Huang He, formerly known as the Hwang Ho, is the second-longest river in China and the sixth-longest in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai Province in western China, it flows through nine provinces of China and empties into...
flooded in East China
East China
East China is a geographical and a loosely-defined cultural region that covers the eastern coastal area of China.Although an intangible and loosely defined concept, for administrative and governmental purposes, the region is defined by the government of the People's Republic of China to include...
. According to the Disaster Center, it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated 2 million people, while other areas were affected in other ways as well. It could be ranked as one of the deadliest natural disasters of the 20th century.
In 1960, an estimated 60% of agricultural land received no rain at all. The Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
yearbooks from 1958 to 1962 also reported abnormal weather, followed by droughts and floods. This included 30 inches (762 mm) of rain in Hong Kong across five days in June 1959, part of a pattern that hit all of Southern China.
As a result of these factors, year over year grain production in China dropped by 15% in 1959. By 1960, it was at 70% of its 1958 level. There was no recovery until 1962, after the Great Leap Forward ended.
According to the work of Nobel prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winning economist and expert on famines Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...
, most famines do not result just from lower food production, but also from an inappropriate or inefficient distribution of the food, often compounded by lack of information and indeed misinformation as to the extent of the problem. In the case of these Chinese famines, the urban population had protected legal rights for certain amounts of grain consumption. Local officials in the countryside competed to over-report the levels of production that their communes had achieved in response to the new economic organisation and thus local peasants were left with a much reduced residue.
Outcome
According to China Statistical Yearbook (1984), crop production decreased from 200 million tons (1958) to 143.5 million tons (1960). Due to lack of food and incentive to marry at that point in time, the population was about 658,590,000 in 1961, about 13,480,000 less than the population of 1959. Birth rate decreased from 2.922% (1958) to 2.086% (1960) and death rate increased from 1.198% (1958) to 2.543% (1960), while the average numbers for 1962–1965 are about 4% and 1%, respectively.The officially reported death rates show much more dramatic increases in a number of provinces and counties. In Sichuan province, the most populous province in China, for example, the government reported 11 million deaths out of the average population of about 70 million during 1958–1961, one death in every seven people. In Huaibin county, Henan province, the government reported 102 thousand deaths out of a population of 378 thousand in 1960. On the national level, the official statistics imply about 15 million so-called "excess deaths" or "abnormal deaths", most of them resulting from starvation.
Yu Dehong, the secretary of a party official in Xinyang
Xinyang
Xinyang is a prefecture-level city in southeastern Henan province, People's Republic of China, the southernmost such administrative division in the province.-Recent history:...
in 1959 and 1960, stated,
I went to one village and saw 100 corpses, then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people.
It is widely believed that the government seriously under-reported death tolls: Lu Baoguo, a Xinhua reporter in Xinyang, told Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng is a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone , a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until...
of why he never reported on his experience:
In the second half of 1959, I took a long-distance bus from Xinyang to Luoshan and GushiGushiGushi may refer to:*Gushi County, in Henan, China*Güshi Khan , Khoshut-Oirat prince and leader of the Khoshut Mongol tribe*Gushi culture, ancient culture in Xinjiang region of China*Gushi Chinese verse form...
. Out of the window, I saw one corpse after another in the ditches. On the bus, no one dared to mention the dead. In one county, Guangshan, one-third of the people had died. Although there were dead people everywhere, the local leaders enjoyed good meals and fine liquor. ... I had seen people who had told the truth being destroyed. Did I dare to write it?
Some Western analysts, such as Patricia Buckley Ebrey, estimate that about 20-40 million people had died of starvation caused by bad government policy and natural disasters. J. Banister estimates this number is about 23 million. Li Chengrui, a former minister of the National Bureau of Statistics of China
National Bureau of Statistics of China
The National Bureau of Statistics is an agency within the State Council of the People's Republic of China charged with the collection and publication of statistics related to the economy, population and society of the People's Republic of China at national and local levels.-List of Directors:*Xue...
, estimated 22 million (1998). His estimation was based on Ansley J. Coale
Ansley J. Coale
Ansley Johnson Coale , was one of America's foremost demographers. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he earned his B.A. in 1939, his M.A. in 1941, and his Ph.D. in 1947, all at Princeton University...
and Jiang Zhenghua's estimation of 17 million. Cao Shuji estimated 32.5 million. The aforementioned Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng is a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone , a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until...
(2008) estimated the death toll at 36 million. Hong Kong based historian Frank Dikötter (2010) estimates that, at minimum, 45 million people died from starvation, overwork and state violence during the Great Leap, claiming his findings to be based on access to recently opened local and provincial party archives. However, his approach to the documents, as well has his claim to be the first author to use them, have been questioned by other scholars. Dikötter's study also stresses that state violence exacerbated the death toll. Dikötter claims that least 2.5 million of the victims were beaten or tortured to death. He provides a graphic example of what happened to a family after one member was caught stealing some food:
Liu Desheng, guilty of poaching a sweet potato, was covered in urine . . . He, his wife, and his son were also forced into a heap of excrement. Then tongs were used to prise his mouth open after he refused to swallow excrement. He died three weeks later.
Cannibalism
There are widespread oral reports, and some official documentation, of cannibalismCannibalism
Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...
being practiced in various forms, as a result of the famine. Due to the scale of the famine, the resulting cannibalism has been described as "on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century".
Further perspectives
The discussion includes other scholars who caution against taking a one-sided approach or see the issue in a wider context.Wim F Wertheim, emeritus professor from the University of Amsterdam, has questioned the validity of the large number of famine deaths put forward by various researchers. In the article "Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy", Wertheim says
Often it is argued that at the censuses of the 1960s "between 17 and 29 millions of Chinese" appeared to be missing, in comparison with the official census figures from the 1950s. But these calculations are lacking any semblance of reliability...it is hard to believe that suddenly, within a rather short period (1953-1960), the total population of China had risen from 450 [million] to 600 million.
Mobo Gao, Professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Confucius Institute
Confucius Institute
Confucius Institutes are non-profit public institutions that aim to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching internationally, as well as facilitating cultural exchanges. They are sometimes compared to language and culture promotion organizations such as France's...
at the University of Adelaide
University of Adelaide
The University of Adelaide is a public university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third oldest university in Australia...
, suggested that the Great Leap Forward did in fact have its own logic and rationality, and that its terrible effects came not from malign intent on the part of the Chinese leadership at the time, but instead relate to the structural nature of its rule, and the vastness of China as a country. Gao says "..the terrible lesson learnt is that China is so huge and when it is uniformly ruled, follies or wrong policies will have grave implications of tremendous magnitude".
Others suggest that Mao's responsibility for disastrous famine has to be evaluated in light of the overall demographic situation. Lucien Bianco
Lucien Bianco
Lucien Bianco is a French historian and sinologist specializing in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the twentieth century. He is the author of a reference book on the origins of the Chinese revolution and has co-edited the book China in the twentieth century...
points out that Maoist China dramatically improved life expectancy and that many of the babies who died would, under the old regime, never have been born, and that there was a crisis in agricultural production population in any case. Gao Mobo argues that the Maoist revolution gave an estimated net positive value of 35 billion extra years of life to the Chinese people.
Former Chinese dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
and political prisoner, Minqi Li
Minqi Li
Minqi Li is a Chinese Political Economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently an associate professor of Economics at the University of Utah. Li is known as an advocate of the Chinese New Left and a Marxist economist....
, a Professor of Economics at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
, has produced data showing that even the peak death rates during the Great Leap Forward were in fact quite typical in pre-Communist China. Li (2008) argues that based on the average death rate over the three years of the Great Leap Forward, there were several million fewer lives lost during this period than would have been the case under normal mortality conditions before 1949.
Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winner economist Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...
puts this famine in a global context. His book Development as Freedom
Development as Freedom
Development as Freedom is a book focused on international development written by economist Amartya Sen.-Background:Amartya Sen posits that all individuals are endowed with a certain set of capabilities while it is simply a matter of realising these capabilities that will allow a person to escape...
argues that lack of democracy is the major culprit: "Indeed, no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country—no matter how poor." He adds that it is "hard to imagine that anything like this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and that has an independent press. During that terrible calamity the government faced no pressure from newspapers, which were controlled, and none from opposition parties, which were absent."
See also
- Great Leap ForwardGreat Leap ForwardThe Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...
(1958–1961) - Four Pests Campaign
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62