Living through the Great Famine in a poor village
After the last Great Famine’ article, I received an email from Professor Dongping Han who, as a skinny kid in a poor village, lived through the Great Famine. The last line of his story is the best ‘famine’ debunker I have read. Enjoy.
From: Dongping Han <dhan@warren-wilson.edu>
Re: starvation in China
I studied the great leap forward in China for many years, after living through the great leap forward myself.
In my village in Shandong, people would say anybody who died in 1959,1960 and 1961 died of starvation, does not matter how old they were. My village had very little land, less than one sixth acre per capita in 1959. There were three years of flooding and drought during these three years. We did not have enough harvest to sustain ourselves. But we got relief grain from Shandong Provincial government, from Shanghai, Qingdao’s city.
More importantly, we got a lot of relief grain and dried vegetables from Yunnan Province. My grandfathers on both my mom and my father died in 1960. They were both over sixty years old. [Life expectancy was 58 years. – Ed]. But my mom would tell people he died of starvation. He actually died of a disease. The public dining hall was open, and people could get three meals a day there. But it does not provide enough, and barely sustained us. I would argue that most people died of some disease. Poor nutrition weakened people’s health, and they became sick and died. I did not know any of my classmates in primary school who had lost a sibling in my village.
I also studied several Henan villages. In one big village with two thousand people, I asked people how many people starved during the great leap forward. People would say one hundred, fifty, all kinds of numbers. I would gather all the people in the village who were above sixty years of age in 1987, to have a group interview. I would ask them to tell me collectively who were the people who starved to death. The most names they were able to come up with were 15, and those people were all over 60 years old, except one. The exception was a 37 years old man, he had no siblings and no parents, living by himself in the village. Everybody else tried to eat some green crops while working in the field, but he was too honest to do that. He just ate what he could get from the public dining hall. Eventually he fell sick and died. He may be the only person who could be considered starved to death in that village, but even he died of a disease.
The Chinese farmers were closest to crops and food in China. They would cook and eat green corns, sweet potatoes, wheat and soybean while working in the fields. Everybody did, even village leaders. They were all hungry, and they all wanted to eat. They would also eat carrots, cabbage, turnips in the fields. These crops belonged to the farmers, and they would eat as much as they could. They would not starve themselves when there were all kinds of foods around them. After I studied the great leap forward in Shandong, Henan, and Anhui, I would argue that the whole idea of starvation during the Great Leap Forward was fabricated and out of proportion. The collective ownership of land and crops, and socialist system made it almost impossible for people to starve. Before 1949, individual landlords owned the land and crops, they would never allow anybody to eat green crops. But during the great leap forward, everybody owned the land and crops, and they could eat while working in the fields.
This account, above, was not in the original edition of Professor Han’s wonderful reminiscence, The Unknown Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village.
Another first-hand account is Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China, by Mobo Gao
