I finished rereading historian Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 which I read for the first time two years ago.
This is history that I think everyone should know something about and that few do, which is the famine in China from 1958 to 1962 that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Let’s begin with some background. What is the Great Leap Forward? It leaps from socialism to communism. It’s an utopia, the idea being that if you can use those people in the countryside and turn every man and woman into a foot soldier in a giant army, that you can then deploy and make them work, you can somehow catapult your country past your competitors.
The first thing Mao did was accelerate the pace of the collectivisation. Collectivisation is the abolition of private property. The land is taken by
the state.
By the end of 1953, he imposed a monopoly on grain. Villages in the countryside have to sell the grain they produce to the state at state-mandated prices.
They are no longer masters of what they produce. A few years later (1955, 1956) came the first wave of collectivisation. In 1958, villagers were herded into giant collectives called People’s Communes. Their pots and pans have been taken away. Sometimes their houses are destroyed and they live in a collective dormitory; children sent to collective kindergartens.
Farmers lost incentive to work. Nothing is theirs. So, how do you get a man or a woman to work when there is no incentive? If they work, they can go to the canteen and earn work points. The points entitle them to a meal, which was not enough to sustain somebody who works all day.
Sometimes they work naked during winter. If you do not work hard enough, you will not be fed or you will be banned from the canteen and cut off from the food chain. Readers might think that collectivisation is based on the military model. In other words, the vision here is that if you turn men, women, and children into foot soldiers, it would be more effective.
Somehow, a villager who decides to plant watermelons is not contributing grain to the state and the state needs the grain to sell on the international market, to buy massive turnkey projects, which will fuel this Great Leap Forward. These local officials are eager to show that they are the ones who really know how to carry out the Great Leap Forward.
Like politicians, they make promises. They promise higher quotas, deliveries of grains, steel and cotton to the state. All of this has to be taken away from the very people who produce it.
But, the key question still is: How do you motivate a man or a woman to work when there is no incentive? At some point you have to use fear. This book also tells us about a certain romance about steel. Steel is a national pride and ego for Mao.
He actually encouraged people to build steel furnaces in their backyards and to devote all kinds of metal from their household; pots, pans, etc. But, the tragedy isn’t that they devoted too many resources. The tragedy is they didn’t get much steel for it. It was a failure in terms of quality and output. People died unnecessarily doing this, not just dying of hunger.
We are talking about four years, 1958–1962. People continue to die of hunger all the way up till 1976 when Mao died.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
