13.06.1996

Severe excess deaths

John Craig reviews Hungry Ghosts - China’s Secret Famine by Jasper Becker (John Murray Publishers, London 1996)

This book presents communists with an important problem. It is an account of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, a breakneck attempt under Mao Zedong to turn China into a communist society almost overnight, resulting in a disastrous famine which, Becker argues, ran from 1958 to 1961 and claimed 30 million lives.

The famine was little reported at the time and even China’s post-Mao leaders like Deng Xiaoping have never acknowledged that such a gigantic and lasting wave of hunger gripped their country. This contrasts with their openness about the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution later in the 1960s.

Throughout its very long history, China has been subject to recurring famines. The Chinese Communist Party and Mao Zedong have been credited with ending the cycle of relative prosperity followed by hunger on an enormous scale. Even anti-communists have credited the People’s Republic of China with ending famine. The story Becker tells is different. He says that the agricultural change embodied in the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (notably moving China’s vast rural population into ‘people’s communes’) disrupted traditional agricultural patterns and caused hunger to sweep over the entire country, described in the words of a later Chinese book as “severe excess deaths” (p242).

Not the least of the horrors of the famine was cannibalism. According to Becker, large numbers of people were reduced to eating human flesh, sometimes killing and eating their own families. He even alleges that two families would exchange each other’s children, so that the parents would be able to kill and eat the children of others rather than their own offspring.

The famine finally ended when figures in the Chinese leadership like Liu Shaoqi spoke out successfully for a policy change, but Liu later became a victim of the Cultural Revolution. In hindsight, the capitalist features today’s China shows are the other side of the coin of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and its wild leftism.

Becker says the Soviet Union’s Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s was a precursor of the Chinese one and sees it as stemming from the belief that “politics could change reality” (p305). This shows that Becker is a bourgeois ideologue, and part of the ideological offensive against socialism. Politics, except of the most conservative kind, has to be about changing reality. However, this does not necessarily make his book a lie, unfortunately. Communists have to take account of the mistakes and crimes of our movement, of which Mao and Stalin were a part. We have to know the past, learn from it and do better. Otherwise we might not liberate humanity but merely burden it with further “severe excess deaths.”

John Craig