Introduction

The Great Leap Forward Famine and Chairman Mao’s Catastrophe

Denied entry into the U.S.-dominated global economy, in the middle of 1958, less than one decade after seizing national state power through a rural-based insurgency, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated a political campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. Aimed at promoting self-reliant economic growth and building a modern competitive state through rapid industrial development and the collectivization of agriculture, this campaign also was driven by Mao’s desire to pilot a great leap from socialism to communism, an ideological goal that had implications for policy implementation and ultimately stoked fanaticism at all levels of governance. In the end, the Great Leap fell short of its economic and political goals and spawned a disaster in the Chinese countryside.

   Mao Zedong and other key members of the Central Party Committee were forewarned of the disaster. Between mid-August and late October 1958, they received written petitions from rural farmers in Henan province. The petitions, some of which were penned by members of the Communist Youth League, pleaded with central party politicians to correct problems created by cadres in charge of the Great Leap locally. An August 11 petition addressed to Tan Zhenlin, who had fought under Mao’s command in Hunan during the late 1920s and on whom Mao relied to push his rural policies in the Great Leap, complained that party cadres were falsely overreporting the harvest output so they could justify appropriating more of the food crop for the party-state and thereby achieve greater glory in the eyes of their superiors.¹ A second anonymous petition, sent to Mao on October 20, 1958, documented another problem: cadres were consistently breaking the law by severely beating farmers who did not obey their orders, targeting especially those who accurately reported the harvest output.²

   For the first time, this second petition revealed to Mao Zedong the severity of some of the social problems engendered by the Great Leap Forward. In responding to it on November 29, 1958, however, Mao did not look for the causes of cadre behavior in government institutions or in his own national policies, but rather fell back on his premise that such events had occurred in no more than 10 percent of China’s villages and were the result of local power falling into the hands of “a few counterrevolutionaries.” Ignoring the petitioner’s request for an independent, centrally directed investigation, he directed his followers in the Henan Provincial Communist Party Committee to look into the problem.³

   The matter did not end there: between October 1958 and March 1959, Mao received internal reports of food shortages from junior party officials in Henan, Shandong, Anhui, Hunan, Jiangsu, and Hebei, and in late April 1959 shocked Politburo leaders informed Mao that a great famine had spread to fifteen of China’s provinces and that 25 million rural people were facing starvation.⁴ Mao did not mobilize state resources to manage this emergency. Instead, he compounded it. On the one hand, while on provincial inspection tours, Mao usually asked the first provincial level Communist Party secretaries about local grain production – not about local grain supply. On the other hand, Mao relied on these same party secretaries, all of whom were under pressure to produce a big surge in agricultural production, to provide information about potentially serious problems in communal food supply, and they invariably evaded specific revelations of the extent of the grain shortage crisis in the countryside.⁵ Thus, while acknowledging that overzealous local party leaders had surrendered rural farm people to hunger, Mao declined invitations to visit besieged villages in remote interior provinces in the months following the late April 1959 famine alert. At the July 1959 Lushan Conference, in which defense minister Peng Dehuai warned Mao of the serious social and political consequences of the famine, the leader of the Communist Party refused to acknowledge he was making a great mistake and insisted on unconditional obedience to his Great Leap policy.⁶ Shortly thereafter, Mao accelerated the Great Leap campaign by initiating an anti-rightist movement aimed at silencing party and nonparty opponents of the rapid transition to large-scale collective agriculture and the commune takeover of private farm household assets.⁷

   Whether Mao single-mindedly pursued his Great Leap agenda without regard to its cost to rural dwellers and, unlike Stalin, attempted to draw tillers to his vision without inflicting massive human suffering is a much debated issue. Initially, Mao proclaimed that his Great Leap was aimed at rescuing the rural poor from a marginal existence,⁸ and it seems that the Maoist system of procurement was designed to mitigate the social cost of squeezing primitive capital from the farm population.⁹ Yet this system, which in theory was aimed at returning food back to the villages by reselling a part of the state-appropriated harvest at a “reasonable price,” had a deleterious impact on per capita consumption in rural China.¹⁰ Whereas the miscarriage of this system has been attributed to misinformation based on seriously flawed communication between central government leaders and rural cadres, Mao Zedong himself was substantially responsible for the misinformation crisis of the Great Leap. According to local knowledge, in the first decade of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao and his local party base systematically dealt with voiced popular complaints over grain extraction by instituting public criticism of county- and village-level dissenters – a process that devastated the ageless practice of addressing the misrule of high and mighty officials through deferential petitions. As this study indicates, the suppression of such complaints correlated strongly with Maoist government attempts to gain control over the grain harvest.¹¹

   To be sure, Mao Zedong argued for an agricultural collectivization that would restore prosperity to rural people and make them equal with urban workers and urban cadres. However, Mao’s industrial policy not only maintained the unequal economic disparities between rural and urban China, it also reinforced social and political discrimination against country people.¹² Throughout most of the collective era, and especially during the Great Leap Forward, Chinese farm households were trapped in an apartheid system. This system, which was called the people’s communes, was aimed at maximizing production for provisioning the cities and constructing offices, factories, schools, and social insurance systems for urban-dwelling workers, cadres, and officials. Rural people who criticized it were labeled dangerous. Those who attempted to escape it were denied exit by party-orchestrated public struggle, which, in the end, further jeopardized survival.

   Although leading scholars have shown that Mao did act to curb some excesses of the Great Leap from time to time, it is important to place the Great Leap and the horror it produced in the villages of China in the context of the Mao-led revolutionary takeover of state power beginning in 1945. From the perspective of this historical process, it seems that Mao was consistently pushing for radical transformation on all fronts, and that any retreats to moderate policy on Mao’s part were the product of his penchant for quick change and imperious trickery: he gave in momentarily to ultimately get his way, and his retreats were ebbs within a systematic pattern of resolute advance.¹³ When, for example, Mao launched the 1946–47 land reform, he had to pull back because he could not afford to alienate conservative smallholders while the Civil War raged. When Mao attempted to nationalize the grain market through unified purchase and sale in 1953, he was forced to retreat by reports of rural cadre skepticism and popular discontent over this veiled form of procurement. In mid-1955, when Mao launched the agricultural production cooperatives, he again was compelled to retreat from this move against the proprietary rights of tillers, in part because the smallholding “middle peasants,” whom Mao labeled “malcontents,” refused to sell their surpluses to the state and wanted to back out of the big production cooperatives to farm their own land.¹⁴ Then, in 1957–58, after starting the anti-rightist movement in the countryside and then pushing ahead with the Great Leap Forward in poor interior provinces, Mao himself acknowledged that his own aspirations and the zealous acts of his cadre base had combined to produce chaos and food supply problems.¹⁵ Yet when implored to pull back by Marshal Peng Dehuai, Mao Zedong reacted by crushing Peng and reinventing the repressive anti-rightist policies of the past. As Thomas P. Bernstein has shown, this development created a political climate that allowed the Great Leap to quickly generate a disaster in much of the countryside.¹⁶ Seen in this context, the calamity of the Great Leap seems to resonate with Mao’s long-standing belief in the necessity of the radical transformation of rural society.¹⁷ Thus, even though Mao expressed compassion for rural people, he had been hardened by Kuomintang state violence, and he had come to understand both pre- and post-1949 China as a huge country with pockets of famine and flood disaster, so he was accustomed to massive human suffering. After seizing national power, Mao convinced himself that he could extract huge amounts of grain from rural China, and, after all was said and done, Mao allowed his cadre base to compel farm households to endure a life of semi-starvation so that he could promote internal economic colonization and enable China to catch up with the global powers quickly.¹⁸

   Championed by Mao himself, the supreme leader of the newly established PRC, and impressed on the countryside by means of Mao’s autocratic style of policy making and his revival of wartime structures and strategies to force the advancement of collective agriculture, the Great Leap Forward engendered the worst famine in modern world history.¹⁹ This famine took the lives of 40 to 55 million rural people;²⁰ at least 32.6 million people died as a result of food deprivation alone.²¹

The History of a Single Rural Village

As Gregory Ruf observes, the trauma of the Great Leap Forward “had a profound influence on the shaping of popular consciousness,” particularly on how China’s village people viewed – and still view – the Communist Party.²² Yet official party historiography in the PRC has presented the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward with little reference to the trauma it inflicted on individuals, families, and communities or to the damage it did to the Communist Party’s legitimacy in the countryside.²³ This book takes us inside the disaster of the Great Leap Forward through examination of a single rural village in which Maoists achieved supremacy. It is the first of two linked volumes about how China’s rural people remember the politics that imposed the famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, about how some resisted and eventually escaped its grip, and about how their memory of this traumatic injustice has shaped the politics of everyday resistance ever since. Relying substantially on oral political history, it provides the first in-depth history of how one village’s people experienced the ultimate catastrophe of Maoist rule. I have drawn on individual memories of encounters with the ground-level agents of Mao’s Great Leap Forward to show how rural people attempted to survive and resist this formative episode of socialist state building and then, in its aftermath, strove to recover the liberties, entitlements, and enterprises they lost to its brutality.

   The fundamental premise of this study is that during the Great Leap Forward Famine, the Chinese Communist Party lost its mandate to rule in the same interior rural places where it had earlier based its insurgency against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. My central hypothesis is that the individual and collective recollections of the style of Communist rule that crystallized in this formative phase of state making – autocratic, brutal, corrupt, and distrustful – when combined with the plunder, forced labor, and starvation of the famine itself, turned Chinese villagers against the Communist Party, in which they had earlier placed their trust, and motivated them to seek basic social rights and local self-governance through protracted resistance to Communist rule. The persistence of this resistance and the memories of state-delivered pain that made it necessary have complicated the efforts of post-Mao reformers to regain political legitimacy with village dwellers in the agricultural interior. As I will explore in the second volume of this study, the memory of loss and suffering in the Great Leap famine has conditioned Chinese villagers to think about their relationship with the Communist Party in ways that do not bode well for the continuity of socialist rule, though the degree to which popular memories of the famine have been attenuated, or transformed, over time for post–Great Leap generations remains an open question.

   Trained in agrarian studies and Chinese politics, I had long aspired to undertake a research project on how Chinese villagers experienced the waves of state intrusion of the twentieth century. When I first began my field work in rural China in the 1980s, my interest was in how Mao and the Communist Party won control over the Chinese mainland from the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) following World War Ⅱ and how village people saw Kuomintang state interventions in their lives. Two experiences shifted my focus and led to my interest in the Great Leap campaign as a famine-inducing state failure. First, while interviewing in remote villages during the late 1980s, I found that villagers would respond to questions about the 1942 Henan Famine with stories of their personal suffering in the radical scarcity of 1958–61. I began to understand that they had been impoverished by two different famines, the first during the era of Nationalist governance and the latter after the Communist party-state had supposedly resolved the food insecurity of the past. Later, as I interacted with scholars who were studying the impact of war, famine, and repression on popular memory in other societies, I began to realize that I was positioned to play a role in uncovering the story of how Chinese villagers experienced the greatest trauma of Maoist politics: the Great Leap and its famine. This led to my interest in presenting an oral history of how the people of one village remember their experiences with socialist rule under Mao.

   This volume is based on interactive interviews and intimate discussions with both ordinary villagers who suffered from the Great Leap famine and village-level Communist Party leaders who participated in and sometimes imposed the politics engendering the famine. Between 1989 and 2007, I conducted and/or supervised approximately four hundred in-depth interviews with villagers aged twenty-one to eighty-five in Da Fo, or “Great Buddha,” village, a rural market village situated on the North China Plain in Dongle County, Henan province. I chose to conduct research on the long-term history of this village on the advice of farmers in another village in Dongle County where I was interviewing during the late 1980s. They told me that if I wanted to discover how the Communist Party succeeded in the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance of 1937–45 and to learn more about the fate of the party in the post-1949 period, then I should go to Da Fo. When my official Dongle County hosts learned of the farmers’ suggestion, they turned pale and protested that they could find a more appropriate village for me to study. I soon learned that Da Fo was nicknamed “the old headache” by both Kuomintang and Communist Party cadres. On sensing the official reluctance to allow me to go to Da Fo, I played a hunch and dug in my heels. Fortunately, the local Dongle County historian whom I had befriended and worked with in studying the rise of the Communist Party in the pre-1949 countryside supported my choice.

   Da Fo’s location in the interior of Henan province, where present-day rural village living standards are on par with those in rural Albania and the Philippines,²⁴ offered distinct advantages for my research. First, the province had been assailed by radical Maoist initiatives during the Great Leap Forward, as Wu Zhipu, the first party secretary of Henan, sought to please Mao by imposing the Chairman’s Great Leap transcript on the countryside to the extent that the famine’s death rate soared. In addition, through my previous research in this remote area of rural Henan province, I had won the trust of many rural people in the region. I could talk with them frankly, and I had learned the agrarian history of the triprovincial North China border area where they and their ancestors lived.²⁵

   Although it would be difficult to establish the “representativeness” of Da Fo for all of China – and although it is clear that “the old headache” and the rest of Henan were subject to comparatively radical repression due to Wu Zhipu’s enthusiasm for implementing Mao’s Great Leap Forward – the village certainly shared a number of features with thousands of other twentieth-century villages in the larger area where it is located: Its soil grew acutely saline over the course of the twentieth century, causing grain crop yields to decline. In consequence, villagers became increasingly reliant on off-farm market income for subsistence and developed well-honed family strategies for surviving famine. The village suffered violence serially at the hands of bandits, warlords, Kuomintang agents, Japanese occupiers, and Communist Party cadres. It produced its fair share of locally raised party leaders who under normal circumstances should have been more benevolent toward villagers than imported cadres. Its inhabitants suffered a great disappointment with Maoist-style politics, and, since the founding of the PRC, they have resorted to ageless modalities of resistance to misrule and deprivation.²⁶

   Da Fo was attractive for another reason: Unlike Wugong village, a model socialist village studied by Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden for their seminal work Chinese Village, Socialist State, Da Fo village never became a model socialist pacesetter, nor did it become the headquarters of the people’s commune to which its people were forced to belong. Choosing it for study thus gave me a unique opportunity to clarify the unofficial relationship of one rural community to the people’s commune, the lower tip of the party-state. By choosing Da Fo, I could begin to penetrate the inner layer of what James C. Scott has called “everyday resistance” to the death grip of the Great Leap in one village, a task that eluded Friedman and his associates because, as they point out, Wugong village benefited from its position in the communal state hierarchy, and hence Mao’s Great Leap did not force its residents into the forms of desperate resistance taken up in villages in which the famine was far worse.²⁷ In recording this inner history, I revisit Dali Yang’s pathbreaking work, Calamity and Reform in China, and I show how the resistance unfolded on the ground, why it became entwined with contention, and how it provided a way out of the Maoist disaster. Following in Yang’s footsteps, Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China better positions us to explicate the relationship between popular resistance to socialist dictatorship in the Great Leap era and the coming of reform in the short- and long-term aftermath of this calamity.²⁸

   The two linked volumes that are the result of my long-term study of Da Fo together form a political history of one rural community’s evolving relationship with pre-Maoist, Maoist, and post-Maoist rulers. I have explored this relationship through interdisciplinary research occurring at the intersection of political sociology, cultural anthropology, and political psychology. Hence, this first volume focuses substantially on how villagers remember their encounters with Communist Party agents of the Maoist state during the Great Leap episode, but in order to do so its narrative necessarily reaches back to the periods of Nationalist rule, Japanese occupation, and civil war, during which the local Communist leadership style took shape, and forward to the 1980s and 1990s, when hidden resentments against Da Fo’s Great Leap–era Communist Party leaders finally began to be more openly expressed. The story thus sheds new light on the nature of the legitimacy crises that developed under three different regimes – those of the Kuomintang, the Japanese (administered through their Puppet Army), and the Communists. During the Japanese occupation of the Second World War and in the subsequent years of civil war, Da Fo village became a bastion of Communist Party power. By studying it, I began to grasp how and why the party was able to sink deep roots in one rural community. I then looked at how Mao’s grand design affected those roots in the decades following the Communist victory of October 1, 1949.

   Although the documented memories of the Great Leap survivors expose the politics of Maoist delusion and deception, this book does not present an open-and-shut case against the unprecedented violence of socialist rule. Though some of its voices support such an interpretation, others, particularly those of village power wielders, do not. In the final analysis, this book shows that village history both before and after 1949 has been enveloped in violence and that, tragically, the acknowledged horrors experienced by rural villagers in the pre-1949 era in some ways prepared the ground for the unbelievable horrors of the Maoist disaster.

   Even if my findings on Da Fo are correct, a single case study cannot prove a thesis. Da Fo might be an exception to the general pattern of why and how rural contention has developed in China. The value of any case study is that it can help us generate new theories, disprove overly deterministic ones, and shed light on previously unknown causal processes. Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China does not seek to disprove any deterministic theory of rural contention. Instead, it develops a new approach – an approach that is grounded in historical memory – that might be used and refined by others to understand why contemporary rural China is such an incendiary place. It also shows in depth the relationship between memory, resistance, and protest during and long after an episode of massive state cruelty, thereby inviting further reflection on how important memory is to contention and where memory works specifically to inform the discursive framework through which rural dwellers press rulers to repair the past by righting wrongs and admitting their imperfections. In this respect, this book is also about the learning process that can open up a public conversation over inherited state violence, which Roger I. Simon reminds us is essential to the successful invention of elementary forms of democratic life.²⁹

   Although this book is focused largely on one village, I value comparison. Thus, I have drawn on data from several villages and counties in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area in which Da Fo is located and from several other Chinese provinces in order to make a few comparisons that highlight both the typical and the atypical features of Da Fo’s experience with socialist rule. There are more than a million villages in rural China. Surely not all of them were affected by the Great Leap Forward Famine in the same way, and popular responses to the famine as well as memories of the famine and its damage most likely vary from place to place. Surely too, however, the narrative of this one village’s political history, woven together largely from individual memories of the most traumatic episode of the Mao era, contains threads of a historical relationship with agents of the Maoist party-state that were shared with scores of other rural villages. I hope that this work will challenge future scholars to further explore the distinctions and similarities between the political experiences of rural communities more or less transformed by the Great Leap and its famine.

Memory, Politics, and Oral History Methodology

Despite the fact that Da Fo village was savaged by three different regimes and experienced three different famines – the North China Famine of 1920–21, the Henan Famine of 1942, and the Great Leap famine of 1958–61 – it had an unusually high number of survivors who were in the fifty-five to eighty-five age group at the time of my study. Most of them had clear and keen memories of the past, and they gave me reliable oral testimony that reflected the changing history of the village over most of the span of the twentieth century. Following Paul Thompson, I especially needed these aged “voices of the past” to get beyond “haphazard reminiscence” and construct a coherent historical narrative of village life before Mao’s Great Leap.³⁰

   I treat these individual trauma survivors as members of complex family and community relationships, probing several dimensions of popular memory. My research seeks to extend the work of many Western scholars of contemporary rural China who have relied on personal histories to understand villagers as individuals.³¹ The Maoists attempted to suppress and erase popular memory of the famine, but, as Daniel L. Schacter has pointed out, memories of war, famine, repression, and other traumas often persist in popular consciousness long after the actual traumatic event itself. “The intrusive memories that result from such experiences,” Schacter informs us, “usually take the form of vivid perceptual images, sometimes preserving in minute detail the very features of a trauma which survivors would most like to forget.”³² The interviews I conducted for this book confirm that many villagers still live with the traumatic Maoist past.