The Great Chinese Famine, with bad history.

So, as everyone knows, the Great Leap Forward was more like a Great Stumble Forward (Into a Wall). From idealistic and utterly unrealistic production quotas to utterly useless steel and pig iron to arrogant officials to falsified data regarding crop yields to an ineffectual bureaucracy who tried to cover up starvation deaths, it was *bad*.

Known as the “three years of natural disaster” in mainland China for decades after the event, the Chinese government has refused to discuss this event. It’s getting better now, of course, but it’s still not there yet.

Anyways, I’m going to focus on an event that occurred from October 1959 to October 1960 in Xinyang Prefecture in Henan Provence, China: the Xinyang Incident.

Xinyang Prefecture was, as Yang Jisheng describes in his book *Tombstone*, “the economic engine of the province” (Yang, p. 23). Rooster Mountain, the scenic getaway for Communist Party members, is located there, and it was the main producer of grain and cotton as well as a supplier of “tea leaves, timber, bamboo, tung oil, and medicinal herbs”. Even so, between the years of 1959 to 1960, at least one million people (or 13.5% of the population at the time) perished to death from starvation.

It all started with counterrevolutionaries taking control of the Party leadership in the Prefecture. After the Communist Party came into power, the counterrevolutionaries were rather angry that they had lost power. As such, they began to infiltrate the party’s ranks in the area. Eventually, numerous counterrevolutionaries were in positions of power and authority throughout the entire system in Xinyang, ready to sabotage the Party’s efforts to bring about socialism.

In 1958, the Great Leap Forward was launched. Counterrevolutionaries were quick to strike then; while they declared their loyalty to Chairman Mao and the Party publically, they secretly had a plan to weaken the Party base. With the “Pan, Yang, Wang” incident as justification, they launched an anti-rightest campaign, subduing honest comrades with violent beatings that often turned deadly. One such incident is described as follows:

> Following the provincial-level campaign against the “Pan, Yang, Wang” clique and the campaign against right deviation, Xinyang’s Guangshan County on November 11, 1959, conducted a criticism, or “struggle,” session against the secretary of the CCP country secretariat, Zhang Fuhong, who was labeled a “right deviationist” and a “degenerate element.” During the struggle session, county party secretary Ma Longshan took the lead by kicking Zhang, after which others set upon him with fists and feet. Other struggle sessions were conducted by country-level cadres on November 13 and 14, during which Zhang was beaten bloody, his hair ripped out in patches, and his uniform torn to shreds, leaving him barely able to walk.

> On November 15, Zhang was handed over to commune cadres, by which time he could only lie on the floor while he was kicked and punched and had what remained of his hair torn out. Another struggle session by commune cadres on November 16 left Zhang near death; by the time he was dragged home that day, he had lost control of his bodily functions and could no longer eat or drink. On November 17 he was accused of malingering and attacked again. On November 18 he was accused of pining for the return of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and was dragged from his bed for more struggle. When he asked for water, he was refused. Around noon on November 19, Zhang Fuhong died.

> (Yang, pp. 24-25)

Struggle sessions like this one were not out of place. Counterrevolutionary leaders such as Ma Longshan used Zhang as a scapegoat in order to rile up more impressionable and fearful cadres into never questioning what they were doing. In the meanwhile, they ramped up the estimates for production quotas, initially giving a projection of 15 billion kilos of crop, then lowering it to 7.5 billion and finally 3.6 billion kilos when called out on it by Zhang Shufan and others. Zhang Shufang, however, believed that the actual projection would be 1.5 to 2 billion kilos, and reported such at the Henan provisional party committee meeting. The provisional party leaders were dissatisfied and subjected the area with more struggle; Zhang lost his official position due to trying to tell the truth.

Thanks to counterrevolutionary meddling, these overinflated figures were reported and later used to procure absurdly large amounts of grain. To meet these inflated procurement quotas, every single grain was taken away, leaving almost nothing for the peasants to eat. When these quotas were not met, these counterrevolutionary saboteurs would accuse the production teams of concealing grain and subject them to struggle. One could not win; trying to tell the truth would subject you to struggle, communications were monitored and censored to keep word of the famine from getting out, peasants were kept from running away and escaping the famine struck area. The only thing a peasant could do was sit there to await their death from starvation. Communal halls shut down from lack of food. Households were wiped out from unnatural deaths. Corpses were left unburied, as people were too weak. People would begin to eat human flesh in desperation for food. Trees were stripped of bark, young shoots eaten before they grew seed, and wild herbs sought. And still, the government would do nothing, thanks to the infiltration from counterrevolutionary elements. In fact, they would cover up the deaths, underreporting the number of people dead by using a “seven ‘don’t includes’ and one ‘doesn’t count’” (Yang, p. 53) and subjecting those trying to tell the truth to struggle. Everyone at every level of government would be complicit in these cover-ups, out of fear that speaking out would subject them to struggle.

But word did eventually get out. During the Rooster Mountain Conference in July 1960, Wang Guohua spoke up to defend Zhang Shufan and Li Ruiying (Zhang’s wife, who, while on a mission to report on a pilot project at Rooster Mountain Commune, tried to relay the truth to Li Xuefeng, an official at the Party’s North China bureau and was subsequently labeled a right deviationist and silenced). At that point, there was no way you could cover up these deaths. Ma Longshan was subsequently arrested and sentenced to a suspended death sentence. The Central Committee was called in to investigate, and subsequently targeted grassroot cadres to take the blame for the counterrevolutionaries’ wrongs. Some of the counterrevolutionaries were arrested, jailed, made to attend special training classes, and later sent to the countryside to work for 50 yuan a month. Others were sent to group training classes.

The counterrevolutionaries were setback this time. But many of them were still in power, and many more people would die of starvation by 1962, when the Great Leap Forward ended. They lay in wait for the next opportunity to strike—and they would try again during the Cultural Revolution.