Great Chinese Famine

Based on Wikipedia: Great Chinese Famine

Between 1959 and 1961, somewhere between fifteen and fifty-five million people starved to death in China. The range itself tells you something important: the death toll was so catastrophic, so difficult to comprehend, that even decades later historians cannot agree on the count to within forty million human lives.

This was not a natural disaster.

The Great Chinese Famine stands as one of the deadliest man-made catastrophes in human history, caused not by drought or flood or pestilence, but by policy decisions made in Beijing and enforced throughout the countryside. It happened during peacetime. It happened in a country that had enough grain to feed everyone. And it happened because a political system made it impossible for the truth to travel upward while death traveled outward.

The Machinery of Starvation

To understand how tens of millions of people can die of hunger in a country growing enough food to feed them, you need to understand how Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward actually worked on the ground.

Before 1958, Chinese farmers cultivated plots of land given to them by the government. They kept what they grew, minus what they owed to the state. It was a harsh system, but it had a basic logic: grow more, eat more.

The Great Leap Forward destroyed that logic.

Farming was reorganized into massive collectives called "people's communes." Individual plots were forbidden. The state would now tell farmers what to plant, how to plant it, and how much to produce. Regional party leaders received production quotas from above. They were expected to meet these quotas and then report their success upward. The food they collected would be redistributed by the central government as it saw fit.

This created a catastrophic information problem. Local officials were rewarded for reporting success and punished for reporting failure. So they reported success. They reported bumper harvests while crops rotted in fields. They reported grain surpluses while people starved outside locked warehouses.

A journalist named Yang Jisheng, who later spent years investigating the famine, described what this meant in practice:

In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, "Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us." If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.

The grain was there. The food existed. But the system could not deliver it to the people who needed it, because the system could not admit they needed it.

The Illusion of Superabundance

Here is a number that captures the madness: in 1960, the government in Beijing believed that state granaries contained fifty billion jin of grain. A jin is about half a kilogram, so this would be roughly twenty-five million metric tons. The actual amount in the granaries was 12.7 billion jin—about a quarter of what the leadership thought they had.

This was not a rounding error. This was a civilization-scale hallucination.

The Communist Party had created a culture where reporting good news advanced your career and reporting bad news ended it. Beginning in 1957, officials across China began reporting exaggerated grain production figures. The actual harvest was shrinking year by year, but the numbers flowing to Beijing kept climbing. In Sichuan Province, collected grain decreased every year from 1958 to 1961, while the reported figures kept increasing.

This "illusion of superabundance," as historians call it, had three devastating consequences.

First, because the government believed it had vast grain reserves, planners shifted agricultural land away from food crops and toward "economic crops" like cotton and sugarcane. They also pulled millions of farm workers out of the fields entirely to work in steel production. After all, if you have more grain than you can eat, you can afford to grow less of it.

Second, the government began exporting grain. Premier Zhou Enlai, believing China had surplus food, accelerated grain exports to earn foreign currency for industrial equipment. China was shipping food out of the country while its people starved.

Third, the Party established communal mess halls throughout the countryside. If grain was abundant, why not let everyone eat together from the collective pot? The mess halls became a mechanism for redistributing food away from where it was produced—and for exhausting reserves that villages might otherwise have saved for lean times.

Pseudoscience and Sparrows

The food that did get planted often grew poorly, thanks to agricultural policies based on junk science.

The Great Leap Forward imported ideas from Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist whose theories had been discredited in the scientific community but remained politically favored in communist states. One of Lysenko's ideas was "close planting"—the notion that plants of the same species would not compete with each other, so you could pack seedlings much more densely than traditional farming allowed. The density was first tripled, then doubled again.

The theory was wrong. Plants of the same species absolutely compete with each other for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. Close planting stunted growth and reduced yields. Fields that should have produced abundant harvests instead produced withered, crowded plants fighting each other to survive.

Another imported idea was "deep plowing." Traditional Chinese farmers plowed to depths of fifteen to twenty centimeters. Lysenko's colleague Terentiy Maltsev argued that the most fertile soil was deep underground, so peasants were instructed to plow to depths of thirty-three to sixty-six centimeters. In some soils, this might help. In most Chinese farmland, it simply brought up infertile subsoil and buried the nutrient-rich topsoil where seeds couldn't reach it.

Then there were the sparrows.

The Four Pests Campaign called on citizens to eliminate mosquitoes, rats, flies, and sparrows. The first three made obvious sense. Sparrows made the list because they ate grain seeds.

What the campaign planners failed to consider was that sparrows also ate insects—specifically, the insects that ate crops. With sparrow populations decimated, locust populations exploded. The birds that had been protecting harvests were gone, replaced by swarms of crop-eating pests with no natural predators left to control them.

This was ecology as political theater. It felt like doing something. It made things worse.

When Truth Becomes Treason

What made the famine so deadly was not any single policy, but the impossibility of correcting course. The political system had made honesty dangerous.

The Socialist Education Movement, launched in 1957, created an atmosphere of ideological surveillance. Anyone who questioned the Great Leap Forward's methods could be denounced as a "conservative rightist"—a label that meant, essentially, enemy of the revolution. Local landlords, eager to prove their loyalty, began denouncing any opposition.

This wasn't just about political dissent. Saving extra grain to feed your family could be denounced as rightism. Suggesting that commune production targets were unrealistic could be denounced as rightism. Working at anything less than frantic speed could be denounced as rightism. Even appearing insufficiently enthusiastic about the Great Leap Forward was dangerous.

Worse still, the Party developed conspiracy theories about the peasants themselves. Officials began to believe that reports of hunger were fabricated—that peasants were pretending to starve in order to sabotage state grain purchases. Rather than seeing famine as a policy failure requiring correction, the Party saw it as evidence of class enemies at work.

Once exaggerated harvest figures started flowing upward, no one dared "dash cold water" on them by reporting different numbers. To contradict an optimistic report was to imply that someone above you had been wrong—or worse, that they had been lying. The entire system conspired to make accurate information impossible to transmit.

A Tale of Two Provinces

Not every province fared equally. Comparing Anhui and Jiangxi reveals how much local leadership mattered—and how the same national policies could produce vastly different outcomes.

Anhui was led by Zeng Xisheng, a true believer in the Great Leap Forward and a man with strong ties to Mao himself. Zeng was, in the words of historians, "dictatorial." He proposed agricultural projects without consulting colleagues. He prioritized his relationships with higher officials over the welfare of his province's people.

When a deputy governor named Zhang Kaifan heard rumors of famine breaking out in Anhui and began to question Zeng's policies, Zeng reported Zhang directly to Mao. The chairman labeled Zhang "a member of the Peng Dehuai anti-Party military clique"—a devastating accusation that led to Zhang's purge from the local party. With all dissent silenced, Zeng found himself unable to report the famine even when it became a clear emergency. To admit the crisis would be to admit his own policies had failed.

Anhui suffered enormously. Eighteen percent of the provincial population died—nearly one in five people.

Jiangxi's leaders took a different approach. They publicly opposed some Great Leap programs, quietly made themselves unavailable for implementing others, and generally maintained what might be called a passive attitude toward Maoist economics. Rather than competing with each other for Beijing's favor, they worked collaboratively. Rather than crushing local resistance, they worked with the population.

By creating an environment where the Great Leap Forward was never fully implemented, Jiangxi's government "did their best to minimize damage." The famine still hit Jiangxi, but not with the same devastating force as in provinces with more zealous leadership.

The Weather Question

For years, the official Chinese name for this period was the "Three Years of Natural Disasters." This framing placed blame on floods and droughts rather than on policy decisions made by the Communist Party.

There were natural disasters during these years. In 1958, a significant flood of the Yellow River affected parts of Henan and Shandong provinces, inundating over half a million acres of farmland. The government mobilized two million people as a rescue team—pulling them away from their own fields, where crops "are neglected and much of the harvest is left to rot."

But was the weather actually unusual? The Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences later published data showing that the 1960 drought was "mild" compared to droughts in 1955, 1963, and 1965 through 1967. Yang Jisheng, investigating the famine decades later, found that droughts, floods, and temperatures during 1958 through 1961 were within typical patterns for China.

Some historians have argued that many of the floods during the famine were not natural at all, but the result of poorly planned irrigation projects that were themselves part of the Great Leap Forward. Mao had encouraged massive dam construction and thousands of kilometers of new irrigation canals, attempting to move water from wet regions to dry ones. Some projects, like the Red Flag Canal, eventually proved useful. Many others were disasters—poorly designed, poorly executed, contributing to drownings, epidemics, and flooding that destroyed crops.

The head of the National Statistics Bureau at the time reportedly admitted: "We give whatever figures the upper-level wants." Natural disasters were overstated to relieve officials of responsibility. The weather was not the cause of the famine. It was the excuse.

Enough Food, Wrong Places

Economists have since analyzed the famine using modern methods, and their findings are damning. Aggregate food production during the famine years was sufficient to avoid mass starvation. China grew enough grain to feed its people.

The problem was distribution. The centrally planned food procurement system was inflexible—it took grain from where it was produced without regard to local needs, and it could not redirect supplies to where people were hungry. Researchers have found that, counterintuitively, there were often more deaths in places that produced more food per capita. The grain-producing regions were stripped of their harvests and shipped elsewhere, while the producers starved.

This inflexibility in procurement explains at least half of the famine deaths. The system was designed to extract resources from the countryside and send them to cities and to export markets. It was not designed to respond to local food emergencies. It could not course-correct when officials on the ground saw people dying.

Political competition made things worse. Economic historians have found that there was more over-procurement in places where local politicians faced more competition with each other. When officials competed to demonstrate their loyalty by exceeding quotas, they took more grain from their regions—leaving less for the people who had grown it.

Acknowledgment and Naming

In early 1962, at a gathering called the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, President Liu Shaoqi offered a startling admission. He attributed thirty percent of the famine to natural disasters and seventy percent to human error.

Seventy percent. This was the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party acknowledging, internally, that they had caused the deaths of tens of millions of their own citizens through policy failures.

It would take nearly two more decades for anything approaching public accountability. In June 1981, after Mao's death and the beginning of economic reforms, the Party officially stated that the famine was "mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward." The official name was changed from "Three Years of Natural Disasters" to "Three Years of Difficulty"—a subtle but significant shift that no longer blamed nature alone.

The full story remained suppressed for much longer. Yang Jisheng, the journalist who investigated the famine in detail, did not publish his comprehensive account until 2008. His book, "Tombstone," documented the catastrophe using government archives, interviews, and provincial records. It remains banned in mainland China.

What Systems Cannot Say

The Great Chinese Famine offers a brutal lesson about information and power. A government that punishes bad news will eventually receive only good news—even as reality deteriorates. Officials who fear for their careers will report what their superiors want to hear. And when enough false reports accumulate, the leadership loses the ability to understand what is actually happening in the country they govern.

The grain was there. The food existed. But between the warehouses full of grain and the people starving outside their doors stood a system that could not admit error, could not redirect resources, could not tell the truth to itself.

Mao Zedong did not order tens of millions of people to starve. He ordered policies that he believed would accelerate China's development. But the system he built—with its ideological rigidity, its punishment of dissent, its rewarding of optimistic lies—made catastrophe inevitable once those policies began to fail. There was no feedback mechanism, no way for the truth to travel upward fast enough to matter.

The famine ended when the Great Leap Forward ended, when the most extreme collectivization policies were relaxed, when farmers were gradually allowed to tend their own plots again. The Chinese agricultural system would eventually transform completely, becoming one of the most productive in the world. But between 1959 and 1961, in the gap between ideology and reality, tens of millions of people died waiting for a truth that could not be spoken.