WHO CHINA LOST

The largest human calamity of our century — larger than the Holocaust, larger than the Stalinist Great Terror — was the famine that swept China in the “three bad years” from 1959 to 1961. At least 30 million died. For a long time the Chinese authorities and their Western sympathizers denied that there had been a famine at all. As evidence of the catastrophe accumulated, they fell back on grudging admissions of “severe shortages” caused by “natural disasters” and “adverse climatic conditions.”

In the early 1980s, researchers in the West (and a few brave Chinese) began probing Chinese population statistics. The results of those inquiries are now in, the conclusions incontrovertible. There were no natural disasters in the relevant years, and the dimate was mild. The famine was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist government, under the inspiration of Mao Tse-tung. In Hungry Ghosts, the British sinologist Jasper Becker has finally set out these facts for a general readership.

Even the bare statistics of the famine make harrowing reading. Children suffered especially, not only in the famine itself but in later years, dying from the after-effects of severe malnutrition. In 1957 half of all Chinese who died were under 18; in 1963 half were under 10. These were not the most unfortunate. In the extremity of mass starvation, when rats and insects had long gone and the very bark from the trees had been consumed, peasants resorted to the ghastly custom of yi zi er shi — “swap children, then eat.” Since no one could bear to eat his own children, you exchanged with a neighbor. Then you ate his, he ate yours.

The immediate cause of the famine was the policy of stripping peasants of their property and herding them into communes. Mao, by this time sunk deep in megalomania, “knew” that this was the way to agricultural success. His subordinates flattered him with reports — entirely fictitious — of bumper harvests. Local officials, fearful of being denounced as “rightists,” vied with each other to supply Beijing with dazzling — but equally fictitious — statistics for grain production.

Reasonably enough, Beijing asked for its portion, to feed the cities and export to “fraternal socialist” countries. (Grain exports continued throughout the famine.) Since that portion was often larger than the entire crop, everything was taken, and the peasants starved. When even the state portion could not be found, peasants were accused of concealing grain, and thousands were killed, often after grisly tortures, in an effort to make them reveal their hiding places. Thus, one casualty of Becker’s book is the notion that China’s was a “peasant revolution,” different in kind from Russia’s. In fact the pattern of the disaster — communization, forced requisition, mass starvation — runs strikingly parallel to that of Stalin’s famine in the Ukraine thirty years earlier.

Mao’s affection for the peasants was entirely theoretical. Like practically all the Chinese Communist leaders, Mao was a middle-class radical. There is no evidence he ever did so much as an hour of field work. (Similarly, Lenin never set foot inside a factory.) When the behavior of the peasants — in particular, their devotion to private property — failed to agree with Mao’s theories, he turned against them with terrible ferocity.

The only senior Communist openly to protest Mao’s policies was Marshal Peng Dehuai, who was also the only senior leader of a genuinely peasant background. Peng was swiftly purged from the armed forces. Later he was jailed and tortured to death. With opposition thus silenced, the disastrous policies might have continued indefinitely.

The army, however, was getting restless. Most soldiers came from the countryside. When they began to get news that their families had starved to death there were discipline problems. The leadership split, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping heading up a reformist faction bent on weakening the commune system and reintroducing private farming. Of course, this diluted Mao’s authority. He was even obliged to make a selfcriticism of sorts — in which he nonetheless managed to imply that the “mistakes” were everyone’s fault but his own.

Mao never forgave this humiliation. Five years later he launched the Cultural Revolution. Becker asserts that this upheaval, which plunged China into eleven years of chaos, was nothing more than a purge of those who had been responsible for ending the famine. Most historians of the period would, I think, agree that there was more to the Cultural Revolution than just factional revenge — but certainly the reformers were early victims. Liu Shaoqi was murdered, and Deng Xiaoping exiled to the countryside. Those who had been cruelest in persecuting the peasants were promoted, or honorably retired.

Becker tells of a reporter in China in the 1920s responding to a request from his editor for “the bottom facts.” His reply: “There is no bottom in China, and no facts.” Now we have a new generation of China gulls, reporting back breathlessly to us about China’s “opening” and “commercialization.” Meanwhile, a correspondent of mine in North China, in a letter smuggled out by an emigre (no Chinese person would be such a fool as to trust the postal service) writes of coal miners unpaid for six months, enterprises looted by the sons and daughters of Party officials as soon as they become profitable, and scholars jailed for “embezzlement” and “counter-revolutionary activity.”

There are lessons we can learn from the appalling tragedy of China’s famine, the most depressing of which, for those of us who set ourselves up as knowledgeable about China, is that nobody ever understands the true current state of affairs in that vast, autistic world-in-a-world.

Thirty million dead — and nobody knew!

John Derbyshire is the author of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream (St. Martin’s Press).