Re: China's Great Leap Forward

[Alan G Isaac <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 29 Aug 2002 13:48:09 -0400 "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> People have disagree with me but few have describe me as
> giving "silly" arguments.  Alan [Isaac] shows himself to be
> a small and narrow minded individual who tries to win
> points not by a show of his wealth of information or
> insight, but by innuandos.  Calling people who have
> different views "silly" is more than silly.  Why doesn't
> he post a pieve of substance rather than nitpicking in the
> most perdestrain manner.  Fill the list with intelligence
> and information, not bar room insults.


Actually Henry in the single place where I accuse you of
being silly you do not give an "argument" (your word above)
but rather simply make an unfounded claim.  You say:
>>> There would have been no deaths in the 1961-62 famines if
>>> not for the US embargo.

You may not like the word "silly" but it is a natural
response such an outrageous claim that is not backed by any
objective reading of history (and therefore is not backed
by any of the standard historical works).  If I thought all
of your arguments were silly I would not bother to respond
at all, but I cannot find a way to view this particular
claim as anything else.  The only remote sense I can try to
make of it is that you are playing some game with the dates:
by leaving out the initial years of the famine you are
trying to make the US only responsible for the later years.
At least that suggests an implicit acceptance of China's
own responsibility for the commencement of the great famine,
in alignment with most historians, but I fear you plan to
wiggle out of even that by trying again to blame the weather.
Do you agree that ex-president Liu once said that the famine
was probably 70% man-made and 30% the result of natural
causes?

I beleve my response was substantive and not "nitpicking".
I said in response to that one claim:
>> That is the silliest claim you make in this post.  The
>> reasons are legion, but let's just focus on one you
>> acknowledge to a certain extent.  Because the desire not
>> to hear bad news and an ideologically charged environment
>> that made truthful reporting dangerous---a habit China has
>> not lost, as evidenced by its handling of its AIDS
>> problems---the ongoing famine was not even acknowledged by
>> the leadership until it was well under way.  (At which point
>> they continued grain seizures, which contributed to the
>> famine, in order to ship grain to the USSR.)

>> Even if China could have gotten the grain quickly enough
>> (which it couldn't) and could have gotten enough (which it
>> couldn't), it couldn't have distributed it effectively
>> enough.

Perhaps if you would respond to the substance of my post
rather than attempting to dismiss my points through badly
targetted personal attacks the tenor of the conversation
would improve.

It might be helpful if you discuss some particular facts
that I believe help expose the groundlessness of your claim.
Some are above, but I have offered many others that you also
have never responded to.  For example, do you agree that
while her people starved the state granaries were often
full, and indeed China exported grain during the famine?  Do
you agree that in an attempt to meet centrally imposed
quotas grain was seized from farmers ("peasants") who were
facing famine.  Do you agree that in early 1959, the State
Statistical Bureau was dismantled and replaced by "good news
reporting stations" and that this delayed the needed
response to a growing crisis.  (Just as China's current
attempts to stifle the information flow surrounding the AIDS
problem is contributing to that problem and, it follows,
killing people.)  And do you agree that Mao himself saw the
chaos of the GLF as his responsibility (e.g.,  "The chaos
caused was on a grand scale and I take
responsibility"---note the use of the word "caused").

Alan

PS The following article by Jasper Becker
may be of some interest in this discussion.
(Of course Becker is a reporter, not an historian.)
___________________________________________________
 http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/99/0927/xinyang.html
Sowing the Seeds of Famine
By JASPER BECKER

It was one of the blackest moments in Chinese history. In
villages across the country, millions were dying of hunger
even as the granaries stood full. Communist Party officials
driving through the countryside of provinces like Henan and
Shandong saw corpses littering the roadside. In some cases
starving survivors stoned the cadres' cars, but even then
few in the party dared speak out. Even now China officially
keeps silent about the 30 million or more who died. Today's
youth scarcely know of it.

The Great Leap Forward was Chairman Mao's master plan to
wrench the country into a communist Utopia without money,
without private property, without want. The state would feed
and clothe everyone. Each peasant was to become a soldier,
marching to work behind a red flag. Each worker was to
become a steelmaker. In the giant people's communes,
scientific methods were to replace, overnight, ancient ways
of farming. Mao ordered the 600 million peasants to employ
techniques pioneered in the Soviet Union. The idea was taken
to extremes: furrows were ploughed 3.5 m deep and densely
spaced rice seedlings were planted in fields. The People's
Daily proclaimed output gains of double, triple, even 10
times previous yields.

Propaganda photos, clearly falsified, showed wheat stems
growing so densely together that children could sit atop
them. They depicted pumpkins the size of cars and miracle
rice plants that produced three ears where one had grown.
The country was gripped in a frenzy of euphoric adulation as
party officials outbid each other in what was later called a
"wind of exaggeration." Those who dared question found
themselves, at best, in detention like Marshal Peng Dehuai
or, at worst, beaten to death in a "struggle session."

"The bloody lessons of that fateful period still haunt
me," Zhang Shufan writes in a posthumous memoir released
this year. He had been the deputy party secretary of Xinyang
prefecture in Henan province, where 12,000 people were
"struggled against" for questioning--or being suspected of
doubting--these miracle harvests.

The first people's commune was set up in Xinyang's Chayashan
county, and local leaders felt a special duty to demonstrate
success. Xinyang's party boss reported that the 1959 harvest
had more than tripled, to 3.6 million tons. In fact it
totaled only 1 million tons. In China the state has
traditionally taxed peasants by collecting a share of their
harvest; the communists established a grain monopoly in the
1950s and raised the tax to extreme levels. In Xinyang,
authorities confiscated 800,000 tons and launched a massive
"anti- hoarding campaign" to forcibly extract an additional
share based on the fictional harvest.

Peasants still recall how party cadres tortured peasants to
make them reveal their secret caches and went from house to
house poking iron rods into roofs and floors. They seized
families' last possessions and animals, leaving nothing to
eat when winter came. Peasants could eat only in the
communal kitchens set up in each village, and gradually
there was nothing but "grass soup," served once a day. Dizzy
with hunger, people fought each other to be first in line.
"So many died of hunger while there was food in the
granaries" from the government seizures, Zhang recalls. "All
the big and small granaries were full." People had
maintained an edifice of lies to protect Mao's reputation.

In Xinyang, the party secretary ordered the militia to man
roadblocks so no one could flee. Those who wrote letters
appealing to the provincial party secretary, Wu Zhifu, were
handed over to the secret police; their families and friends
were arrested. In Hunan, meanwhile, officials were so
fanatically loyal to Mao they even deceived China's
President Liu Shaoqi when he came to inspect his home
village. They plastered mud over the trunks of trees and
painted it all so he wouldn't notice that the bark had been
stripped by hungry villagers.

Resistance was hopeless. By the time the peasants realized
the state was not going to open the granaries and supply
them food, many were already weak from hunger. Besides, they
had few possessions left, not even knives or pitchforks.
Metal implements had been taken and melted down to make
steel in backyard furnaces in the 1958 drive to quadruple
China's steel output.

In his memoirs, Zhang claims the peasants preferred to die
rather than rob from the state, and he blames them for their
childlike innocence. "It proves how obedient our people are,
how much ... trust they gave to the party," he writes. Those
left behind ate tree bark and wild grasses and caught frogs
and insects. In villages in Henan and elsewhere, every
single person died. In others, according to party documents,
cannibalism became common. People ate the flesh of corpses
and, in insane rages, sometimes killed and boiled their
offspring.

The famine continued through 1960; so many died that party
officials banned daytime funerals. Children left to fend for
themselves were put in orphanages. They were usually boys;
the girls were often sacrificed first. By 1961, the dead
were being left unburied. In Xinyang alone, the death toll
totaled around 1 million people, or one in eight.

The state blamed the hardship on "three years of natural
disasters," but the heaviest death tolls were recorded in
provinces with ultra-leftist leaders who exaggerated
harvests and forcibly seized large amounts of grain.
Fatalities exceeded 7 million in each of several provinces:
Henan, Anhui, Shandong, Sichuan. Demographic data indicate
the national death toll was 30 million, and some claim it
was much higher. No one can be sure until the party's
archives are opened up.

In Henan, Zhang claims he finally managed to get word to
Beijing, which sent an inspection team to investigate the
excesses. After 1961, rural policies were adjusted, the
grain tax was lowered and China began to import food. Using
a motto that Deng Xiaoping would adopt years later as
justification for pushing capitalist reforms--"It doesn't
matter if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches
mice"--peasants were allowed to subsist on what they grew on
private plots. In Xinyang, even after an investigation, no
one was punished. Mao protected his allies and then, in the
Cultural Revolution, turned his full fury against those he
believed had betrayed his vision, leaders like Liu Shaoqi
and Deng.

Jasper Becker, Beijing bureau chief of the South China
Morning Post, is the author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret
Famine