The Great Famine

In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, issues with supply and demand, variables of weather and labor and a series of poor decisions resulted in a devastating famine. For three years, China struggled, far removed from the utopia Mao had envisioned. Read the show notes here.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com below, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. David have
the second installment in this mini series that we are
currently in the middle of about China under the Chairman

(00:25):
Mao years Uh. This part is on the Great Famine.
So we're in the middle of the mini series and
basically when the Chinese Communist Party or CCP came to
power in the People's Republic of China. In that's actually
when the People's Republic was founded. Chairman Mao, who was
the chair of the party said quote, not even one

(00:48):
person shall die of hunger. And at this point China
was really already no stranger to famine. Tens of millions
of people had died in famines that had swept across
the nation in the late eighteen seventies and then again
between eighteen ninety six and nine hundred. There had also
been a series of serious droughts um in the nineteen twenties,

(01:10):
and famine had followed in the path of the Sino
Japanese War, but the worst of all of these was
definitely following the Great Leap Forward, which we talked about
in the previous installment of this mini series. This movement
began in nineteen fifty eight, and during the Great Leap Forward,
China basically shifted its economy entirely from one that was

(01:32):
based on supply and demand to a command economy, also
known as a planned economy, so the government essentially planned
what was going to be made in where and by whom,
and all the economic decisions became centralized, as well as
all the decisions about production. This process had really started
before the Great Leap Forward, but that's when it really

(01:52):
kicked into high gear. This planned economy didn't really account
for variations in supply and demand, or an expected shifts
in the weather, or differences in labor and arable land
and farming practices from one province to another. And then
on top of that, the people who were making decisions
in this economy didn't always understand the realities of the

(02:14):
labor force or the work they were doing, so consequently
there were some pretty bad decisions. The result was a
huge famine that started in nineteen fifty nine, although there
were a few isolated pockets that started earlier than that.
In China, For many many years. This famine when was
known as the three Years of Natural Disasters or the

(02:34):
three Difficult Years, or sometimes the three Years of Bad Weather.
And while there was some bad weather in some parts
of China, this famine was really not at all the
result of a natural disaster of any sort. No UH.
China's shift to a planned economy affected its agricultural workforce
almost immediately, so there was a big focus on uniformity,

(02:57):
implementing the same agricultural plans this same way in every province,
regardless of what that province's terrain was actually like, and
if there wasn't enough farmland, forest, grasslands and wetlands were
to be made into arable land. Consequently, there was deforestation,
which led to erosion. People also wasted a whole lot
of time and labor, labor and fruitless efforts to transform

(03:20):
lakes and rivers into farmland. In addition to that, people
who had been nomadic livestock herders were displaced when the
grasslands where they had been hurting their uh their animals
were instead made into farmland, and the central planners were
making economic decisions, but they were not farmers. In in
addition to being out of their field. They were separated

(03:43):
from the realities of the workers, the markets, and the products,
so they were basically making decisions and setting goals without
the information they needed to do it well, and some
of the directions they gave were just simply devastating. For example,
and one province, an administrator changed his mind over and
over about what he wanted the people to be planting,

(04:04):
so the peasants would have to dig up every crop
and replace it with another one when he changed his mind.
By the time he actually settled on a crop and
stuck to it, it was too late in the growing
season for it to be harvested before the winter came.
And another example, people in their commune were forced to
plant their crops way too early in the season and

(04:25):
the seeds just froze in the ground, so thanks to
mismanagement from various angles, the harvests were basically primed to
be poor. In addition to the overall effect of these
policies from the Great Leap Forward, one campaign in particular
was extremely destructive to China's crops, and it didn't really
have anything directly to do with farming. On May eight,

(04:49):
Mouse spoke at the second session of the Eighth party Congress,
and there he said, quote, the whole people, including five
year old children, must be mobilized to eliminate the four pests.
So these pests were mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. And
those first three probably make fairly immediate sense to most people. Mosquitoes, flies,

(05:13):
and rats all spread disease, and they're generally thought of
as dirty, and most people do not like them. And
sparrows were on the list because they were eating grain.
So people really set to work. In addition to the mosquitoes,
the flies, and the rats, uh set to work trying
to kill sparrows. Whole classrooms of students would go outside
to knock down sparrows nests. People would ring gongs and

(05:35):
make other noise to try to frighten sparrows away from
their roosts. They would just make really constant noise to
keep the sparrows from landing anywhere ever, and the birds
would eventually disdrop from the sky because they were exhausted.
For a while, sparrows actually became parts of people's diets
until the birds themselves became scarce. And sparrows did eat grain.

(05:57):
I mean, we know that, but we're also eating locusts.
So by ninety nine the sparrow population had dropped so
drastically that locusts actually became a problem in the fields,
and they destroyed crops and contributed to the burgeoning famine.
It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that killing spars is
a bad idea, so in nineteen sixty the government decided

(06:20):
that bed bugs would be the fourth pest um, And
apart from sparrow killing and the clear role that it
played in contributing to a famine, the campaign did actually
reduce the spread of diseases that travel via mosquitoes, flies
and rats. So on the one hand, it did have
a small but measurable positive impact, but the measurable effect

(06:44):
that had on the crops was much bigger and much
more terrible. This is actually We had a couple of
things that led to the this mini series, and one
was that someone recommended this the Foe Pest campaign as
a subject for a podcast. UM. I don't think the
person who suggested it realized quite how huge the consequences were,

(07:08):
because it came about in one of the we would
like something a little lighter to talk about, um, and
we got a lot of things that were not at
all light when we asked for that, and they were
clearly jokes and this was not one of them. Um,
So before were we talked about what happened when this
running out of food caused by the Great Leap Forward
policies and the killing of all the sparrows, before we

(07:30):
talk about how that played out. Let's take a brief
moment for a word from a sponsor. It sounds just fine.
So to return to the famine, Yes, China ran out
of food. The very nature of the People's Communes which
have been created as part of the Great Leap Forward,
actually contributed to the famine. This was both in terms
of contributing to the food shortage itself and contributing to

(07:52):
an inability to deal with the shortage of food. And
Casey missed the episode on the Great Leap Forward. Farm
collectives had been organized in uh together to form People's Communes,
and these were given overly ambitious goals for how they're
big their harvests would be. The goals were simply too
big for people to be able to meet them, no

(08:13):
matter how hard they worked, no matter how many advancements
were made in irrigation and farming equipment. The goals were impossible,
and the government had already proven that it was willing
to crack down hard on discent that was also talked
about a little bit in the Greatly Forward episode, and
that failure was not going to be an option. So

(08:34):
administrators vastly overreported how much they had harvested so it
would look like they had met these ridiculously high goals.
And then the government, believing there to be a surplus,
encouraged the communal canteens at the communes uh and elsewhere
in the provinces to service serve really lavish meals. The
government continued to exporting grain and providing food aid to

(08:55):
other nations. Um Agricultural laborers also needed more food than
before because they were being expected to work in other
industries during their farms off season. So a year or
so into the Great Leap, thanks to all of these
things we've already talked about, many parts of China ran
out of food. And when this happened, the communal canteens,
which were supposed to be a way to keep China's

(09:17):
workers fed, actually became a primary contributor to the famine.
Even before the canteen dran out of food, in the
most remote provinces, it could be miles from where people
lived and worked to where they were supposed to eat, So,
on top of the back breaking labor that came along
with the great leap forwards astronomical projected targets for their production,
people had to then walk great distances to and from

(09:40):
the communal canteens just to get their meals. The canteens
also distributed food based on people's ability to work, so
as food became scarce, children and the elderly especially received
less and less food because they weren't working. So basically,
populations who were already at risk for various health effects
were getting the least food when things got really die

(10:00):
or people even started stealing food from the government run preschools,
daycares and nursing homes. Pregnant women were also particularly at risk,
so their bodies of course needed more nourishment, so they
were already at a disadvantage because the portions were simply
not sufficient to sustain the whole process they were going
through building another human inside of themselves that takes some calories, uh,

(10:23):
and then his workloads got higher and higher, those pregnant
women weren't really able to keep up with the physical
demands that were made of them. So we're not saying
at all that pregnant women can't work, but this was
seriously backbreaking labor that was really hard even on like
very hale and hardy people. So this was driving you know, young,
healthy people to exhaustions. So add to that again creating

(10:47):
another human, which is also very exhausting in many ways.
It's a pretty impossible scenario. When the food supplied dwindled,
the very tool the Chinese government had created to feed
its workers had no means to feed them anymore. The
communes were supposed to be dishing out free meals, and
there just was no more food to dish out. So

(11:07):
in nineteen fifty nine and nineteen sixty the government's recommendations
turned to food augmentation and food substitution. The government had
actually actually already decreed that people not eat meat at
all before they started making these recommendations, so people were
already making some dietary swaps. Um you know, anyone who
had eaten meat previously and no longer could. People were

(11:29):
already swapping other things into their diet before these official
official recommendations came into play, and food augmentation was basically
a collection of cooking and preparation methods that added bulk
to meals without requiring more ingredients. So it started by
augmenting rice dishes with corn until corn also became scarce,

(11:51):
and then it evolved to taking rice that was partly cooked,
grinding it up in a mill, adding yeast, and steaming
it as it started to leven. And this ushed buns
that required less flour than normal. Yeah. The reason that
corn was considered an augment when we think of corn
as food is that corn was more used for animal
feed than for people. Um At that point, different augmentation

(12:15):
methods were devised based on what was available to eat
in various regions of China, and while these methods might
have yielded a larger volume of food, they didn't really
increase the nutritional content of the food. So while people
had physically more food to eat, they didn't have a
corresponding increasing calories or nutrients. So edema or fluid retention,

(12:37):
which is a side effect of malnourishment, became endemic. In
July of nineteen sixty, when it was clear that augmentation
was simply not enough to solve the problem, China started
encouraging food substitution. First, people were encouraged to swap fruits
and vegetables into their diet in place of grain. That
by this point, even before the government made this commendation,

(13:00):
a lot of provinces had already run out of their food,
their fruit and vegetables surplus because people were doing exactly that.
Uh people started scavenging bark, roots and even wild plants.
Some resorted to eating white clay, which contained calcium but
also sometimes caused constipation, in some cases so badly that
it was fatal. People cultivated clorella, which is a type

(13:24):
of algae that was being used as pig feed for
human consumption, So they either grew it in puddles or
in pots in their homes, and they would feed the
clorella urine, either their own urine or urine from their animals,
and the list of food substitutes grew. The husks and
stocks of grain crops like corn and rice became adopted

(13:45):
as food items. Potato stems, lichen insects, tree bark, at
least for the trees had not been felled to make
room for farmland. Wild vegetables, and wild fungi were all
kind of added into the diet wherever possible, but that
some of these substitutes, especially the wild vegetables and the fungi,
were really either inedible or poisonous, and people got sick

(14:08):
from eating them. People also got sick from eating food
that was spoiled. And there was one UH official that
was on a tour and found a home where people
were using human waste as fertilizer. But the human waste
they were using was basically all fiber, because all they
had been eating was this undigestible husks and stalks of

(14:30):
other plants. And in some provinces this again hearkens back
a little bit too um the previous episode in this
mini series, people's cooking implements had been confiscated to force
them to eat in the communal canteens. But in these
parts of China, people couldn't prepare substitutes for themselves even

(14:50):
if they wanted to, so because of all this, people
were dying through starvation, poisoning, and malnutrition related diseases, as
well as a sharp increase at in violent crimes and suicides,
and in desperation, some people also turned to cannibalism. There
were more than one thousand reports of people being eaten,

(15:11):
sometimes after being killed. Human flesh was even traded on
the black market as a meat. People also trafficked women
and children in exchange for food. Just dire. All around.
It was extremely dire. I saw various statistics. A lot
of their record keeping during this period was not great,

(15:32):
and some of it was actually pretty good, but has
been kept secret for a really long time. Um huge
spikes in all kinds of violent crimes, just because people
were so desperate for anything to eat at all, and
China had been strict and swift and punishing people who
spoke out. So most of the resistance on the part
of workers was in the form of idoling. They would

(15:53):
pretend to work, they would work slowly uh there was
some food stealing, or they would conceal what they had
harvested and they would squirrel away the rest of it.
People also ate food raw in the fields as they worked,
and so when harvest time arrived in nineteen sixty, some
places actually had nothing to harvest because of this. The
food had literally been eaten right out of the crops.

(16:16):
As the famine got worse, some people started to leave
the rural areas. Tens of millions of people moved into cities,
and this was actually in defiance of bands on migration.
People often didn't have much better lives in the city.
They wound up doing the most menial, dangerous and dirty
work available, usually for the least money. This big influx

(16:39):
of new residents also strained the city's resources. In some places,
like the whole health care system basically collapsed because of
the influx of sick and starving people from the country,
and the government, for its part, chalked up the famine
and all of these deaths to quote class enemies who
were sabotaging the people's communes in their opinions. The government's

(17:01):
slogan at this point was good days make up for
the bad ones. During the famine, dignitaries from other nations
who visited China were generally given escorted tours that went
to areas that weren't affected. You know, although food was
scarce and pretty much all of China things were the
worst in world rural areas and even within China, there

(17:23):
was for almost two years a great effort at every
level to make it seem as though things were proceeding normally,
and even so, other nations really did get wind that
something was not quite right, something was amiss. The Red
Cross offered aid, but made the mistake of starting by
asking whether Tibet needed help, and this was just after

(17:43):
the uprising in Tibet that led to the Dali Lama's
flight to India. When China replied that Tibet was fine,
the Red Cross asked whether China was okay too, since
China's position was that Tibet was part of China, there
was really some umbridge taken, and Unial maatterly declined the
Red Cross's attempt to help, yeah that that this was

(18:04):
basically the biggest faux pa that the Red Cross could
have made when asking if China needed their help was
to insinuate that Tibet was not part of China. Um Eventually,
a couple of Chinese officials were instrumental in convincing Chairman
Mao and the rest of the Chinese Communist Party that
they had to end the greatly forward and stopped the famine.

(18:25):
One was Lu Shaochi, who at that point was the
head of the Chinese head of State and for a
while he was considered to be Mao's heir apparent in
terms of leading the CCP. Lou saw conditions in China
that horrified him when he toured it in April of
nineteen sixty one. People were starving to death and entire
villages were virtually empty. The homes of the people who

(18:49):
had died or fled had even been dismantled and used
as fuel for the fires, and no one would tell
him the truth about what happened. One of these stops
was in his home village, where he found really horrific conditions,
including a communal canteen that had almost nothing to eat.
A lot of people were starving or had starved. He
realized when he was visiting that the reason he had

(19:11):
stopped getting letters from home was that the people who
knew him couldn't lie to him, and they were also
too afraid to tell him the truth, so consequently they
just stopped writing. He held a village meeting at which
he said quote, I haven't returned home for nearly forty years.
I really wanted to come home for a visit. Now
I have seen how bitter your lives are. We have

(19:33):
not done our jobs well, and we beg for your pardon.
From that point on, you became an important, outspoken critic
of the Great Leap Forwards policies, placing the blame for
it directly on the Chinese Communist Party, not on the
weather class enemies or any of the other skategoats that
have been used thus far. He came to a sad end,

(19:55):
which we will probably talk about in our next episode
in the since alment. Uh Lee Fu Chune, the chairman
of the State Planning Commission, was another person who really
helped the Chinese government backtrack out of this mess. He
orchestrated the nation's retreat from the Great Leap Forward plan.

(20:15):
He had really supported the plan and had stuck to
the party line before lose scathing criticisms when he came
back from his visit to his home village, Lee described
the Leap Forward as too high, too big, too equal,
to dispersed, to chaotic, too fast, and too inclined to
transfer resource. Under his direction, they put plans together to

(20:38):
lower the astronomical production targets and to write the economy.
He still really stood by Chairman Mao, though, and said
that his directives had been entirely correct, but that everyone
else had made mistakes in implementing them. Um this famine
actually had some enormous consequences long term for China, and

(20:58):
we will talk about those after another brief word from
a sponsor, so to talk about the consequences of the famine.
As the famine reached a really critical point, the Chinese
government started returning private plots of land to the peasantry
so people could grow food again. And this was a solution,
but of course not one that was immediate. They didn't
instantly have food in the manute the minute they got farmland,

(21:21):
necessarily unless it just happened to be the right season.
They also got rid of the dining halls and started
importing grain to feed people. China's own supply of grain,
having been so damaged by all of this, didn't really
start to grow back again until nineteen sixty two, at
which point the government started redistributing some of the harvest
back to the people. A lot of the greatly forwards

(21:43):
industrial projects were never finished because the labor to do
them starved to death. According to the Chinese State Statistical Bureau,
ten million people died. According to western estimates that have
been extrapolated from census records, the number was really were
like between thirty five million and forty five million, and
it wasn't all because of starvation, as we've said in

(22:06):
a couple of episodes now, some of it was due
to disease and suicide and violent crime. In Sinyong, sixty
seven thousand people were clugged to death for various infractions.
And not surprisingly, the famine also took a pretty significant
toll on China's birth rate. In ninety seven, China's total

(22:26):
fertility was six point four children per woman. By nineteen
sixty one, it was three point three children per woman.
Birth dropped from thirty four per one thousand people to
just eighteen point two per thousand. This whole subject was
taboo in China and was censored for many many years
until in May of twelve, Lindsey Bo, who was head

(22:49):
of the Gansu branch of the People's Daily News Service,
made some posts that denied that the famine had ever
really happened. First person accounts of it then went viral
on Chinese social media. Uh Yang Jishang, who was once
a Chinese reporter, spent ten years on a secret effort
to find as much documentation of what has really happened

(23:09):
as he possibly could. He combed through official accounts that
have been buried or hidden, and the result is an
enormous two volume work that is banned in China but
circulated through bootleg copies. It was at least banned as
of twelve and we weren't able to determine whether it
is still banned today. And his point of view is
he he doesn't care that it's being bootlegged and passed

(23:31):
around China. He wants people to have access to the
history that is found there. The English version is much shorter.
UM it's sort of a more edited, streamlined version that
his two volume one is basically everything he could find
at all. UM. The Folk History Project collected oral histories
of the famine through the work of a hundred and

(23:51):
eight volunteers who put their work into different UM creative
and documentary projects. A lot of people. Chairman Mao is saying,
when there is not enough to eat, people starved to death,
it is better to let half of people die so
that others can eat their fill. And while he did
definitely say that, it seems from context that he was
speaking metaphorically about workloads. The rest of the statement that

(24:15):
quote comes from is about production, not about people literally
having enough food to eat. So people pull that quote
out in reference to this, but kind of out of contact.
It came from the same era. That is the thing
he said. It was probably not the most thoughtful thing
to say during a time when people were starving to death,
but it came up. It's from a sort of paragraph

(24:38):
at a meeting that's all about like industry targets. That's
not about people actually having enough food to eat. So
that is like the quote itself is accurate, but I
think people apply it to the famine when it was
not really about the famine. And how clear are we
on how much he actually realized what was going on.

(25:01):
There is concrete evidence that he and the rest of
the Chinese Communist Party leadership were aware that people were
starming as early as n UM, but action was not
really taken. They so when we had our episodes about
the the Irish potato famine, we we told this story

(25:23):
of basically government in action. Like for a long time
everybody was like, yeah, the adult sort itself out, and
this was not that. It was more like, we just
have to stick to the plan and it will work
out if we just get over this hurdle, right, And
they thought it was a growing pain of the process
and not yeah, and that you know, maybe these augmentations

(25:44):
and substitutions would be enough to get them over this
and it it would it would work. I also found
reference in one place too, uh the Great Leap Forward
having implemented farming practices that were bad and planning crops
that were not compatible with each other in the same field.
I could not find any uh confirmation of that besides
this one source. So I don't know if that really happened,

(26:05):
but um, yeah, it was sort of they had this
stubborn insistence that this would really work and it was
the way to make China great because that was all
part of a plan to try to put China on
par with the UK in fifteen years and with the
United States and thirty so nobody wanted to back down
from it, which is devastating really. Yeah, Like these were

(26:32):
not evil people who wanted people to starve to death,
but they also were not They thought that was sort
of like a sacrificial period they were going to have
to get through to get to the amazing part. A
little misguided, uh, in less upsetting you have, I do
have listener mail. I also have a correction, but a

(26:52):
couple of people have written to us about in our
episode about the discovery of longitude. There's a shipwreck that
is very into that story. That shipwreck happened off the
aisles of Skilly, not the island of Sicily. Is my
reading comprehension error. I think that's a pretty common one. Yeah. Well,

(27:17):
and as I was like, I typed it in and
uh and Wikipedia came up and the very top of
Wikipedia is like not to be confused with, Like, oh yeah,
thanks Wikipedia, I was confused with um anyway, to reiterate,
we do not use Wikipedia as a source on this podcast.
I also have actual listener mail. It is from Brianna.

(27:39):
She says, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I've been listening to
your podcast for the last six months and you have
quickly become my favorite thing to listen to in the mornings.
Your podcast actually makes me look forward to my commute
each week, which is a small miracle. I'm writing in
response to your Battle of Blair Mountain episode. You talked
about company towns created by the mines in West Virginia,
and I wanted to bring to your attention another company

(27:59):
town which many people have never heard of, Lanice City, Hawaii.
I was privileged to live on Lanai, a tiny island
next to Maui, Hawaii, for six months, and I fell
in love with the people in culture. Lanai is privately
owned and was once the world's largest pineapple plantation, owned
by James Dole until he sold it in nine When

(28:20):
I lived on the island, I heard from the people
there that Mr. Dole sent his foreman to the Philippines
in nineteen twelve to bring back uneducated Philipino Filipino men
to work on his plantation. He didn't want them to
read or write and organize against him. Ultimately, women were
allowed and families began to grow. Workers didn't own their homes,
used tokens to shop at the company owned store, and

(28:40):
had to deal with an abrupt change in lifestyle once
Dole moved their plantation, ironically to the Philippines. In I've
never been able to find any research on the island
to confirm what I heard from my friends there. In fact,
there's not not much written about it at all. I've
hope I've given you enough info to pique your interest.
I think Lena and the Dull Plantation would make for

(29:02):
a fantastic episode. This may be true, However, I will
confess that when listeners write to us and say I've
looked a lot for this information and I can't find it,
usually we can't find it either. Uh, we don't have
a magical portal. I wish we did. I mean we
we you know, we get paid to do this among
other of our jobs, so we can devote some extra time,

(29:26):
did you we And we're both I think fairly good at,
you know, ferreting out things that might be a little
bit difficult to locate. Well. Yeah, having a boyfriend who's
a librarian is also quite easy. Lord it over us. Um.
But yes, if you if it's hard for you to
find much information, especially if you live there in the
midst of it. Uh, I mean that'd be so easy,
but you never know what will happen. Yeah. She goes

(29:48):
on to say that, um, it's the island has changed
hands a few times and now it's owned by Larry
Ellison of Oracle. I think the best way to research
this is to get on a plane and go to Hawaii.
I was thinking the best way to research it is
to go to Disney World and eat dull whip. That's
what I kept thinking about every time, because it's just Disneyland,
that's closer to Hawaii. Yeah, every time, she says, dull,

(30:10):
thank you very much Brandon for this letter. Uh. Maybe
we will manage to find some information. But I have
a feeling but if you have looked for information and
not found it, that we probably will not find it either,
which is you never know. Well, maybe we'll see if
you would like to write to us. We're a history
podcasts at how stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook
at Facebook dot com slash mist in history and on

(30:31):
Twitter at mist in History. Are tumbler is missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest at
pinterest dot com slash miss in History. We have a
spreadshirt store full of all kinds of awesome merch and
that is at miss in history dot spreadshirt dot com.
If you would like to learn more about what we've
talked about today, come to the website of our parent company,
how stuff Works dot com and put the word famine

(30:53):
into the search bar. You will find the depressing read
how Famine Works. You can also come to our website
you will find the show notes for this episode that
will include all of the sources that we used on it.
If you would like more details about specifics. There are
a couple of books. Uh. There are at least two
books that I read on this list. There are three
books and four There are four books on this list

(31:16):
uh that you may be interested in. If you would
like more detail about it, you can do that at
our website, which is missed in history dot com. Or
you can read about Tamin on how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com