Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Frank Dikotter explains Mao's Great Famine

And so today I'm pleased to welcome acclaimed author and historian Frank Decatur who with us to discuss Mao's Great Famine the history of China's most devastating catastrophe of Mao's Great Famine Kircus reviews right. Writes that it is a direct hard hitting study of China's great leap forward in light of newly opened archival material horrifically eye opening work of a dark period of Chinese history that really cries out for further examination. And from the Sunday Times it is a work of brilliance scholarship that finally reveals the full extent of the horrors visited on the Chinese people by Mao during the Great Leap Forward. Meticulous it is hard to exaggerate the achievement of this book in proving that Mao caused the famine. Dick Hodder is chair professor of human needs of the University of Hong Kong and professor of modern history of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Previous works include the discourse of race in modern China and narcotic culture a history of drugs in China. We're absolutely thrilled to have him with us today. So you please join me in welcoming Frank to Qatar. I happen to like bookshops very much. I spend a lot of time in them and it strikes me

that when you walk into a bookshop in London in Hong Kong law here in Cambridge there was an awful lot you can read on some of the great horrors of the 20th century. For instance take the Holocaust the wonderful Pulitzer Prize winning book by Saul Friedlander is on sale over here not to mention other more recent books for instance by Christopher Browning escape from Nazi slave labor camps. If you look at Solzhenitsyn the classics on the gulag he's very much on sale here as well as more recent work by for instance one of my favorite authors Simon Sebag. But what about the Great Leap Forward is that not one of the great heroes of the 20th century. Well I believe it is. I think that if you take pulp parts and what he did in Cambodia and you multiply that by about 20 now we get somewhere close to what happened in China between 1958 and 1962. Why is there so little in bookshops. Well it was a very good reason for that the regime the

perpetrator these crimes against humanity is very much in power today. There is another reason for it. There's very little documentation available. Unlike the collapse of Nazi Germany unlike the collapse of the Soviet Union China is still very much in power. Today the Communist Party of China is in power today these archives are only very gradually opening up. So when 10 years ago a book came out on the topic by a journalist called Jasper Baca it was actually pooh poohed by many people in the field because it didn't have adequate footnotes. Well what I did so I spend about four years researching this book and now is four years there were six months spent in archives party archives that were opening up very gradually in the years running up to the Olympics. So for a very limited period of time there was a window of opportunity for historians with a good lots of extra dictation to get into his archives and start reading on these events that happened some some

50 60 years ago. I looked at literally hundreds of documents hundreds of documents that range from ordinary letters written by people and addressed sometimes to the Chairman Mao sometimes to the head of state sometimes to a local newspaper. It goes to extremely detailed reports about mass murder written by teams that went into countryside at the very end of the famine 1960 1961 self-concern self confessions by leaders of provinces which presided over the deaths of millions of people for instance in the case of guns who Provence extremely rich material that has not been used to in researching this topic. So let me get one thing out of the way right away what are the numbers how many people died during this event. One reads and hears about so rarely on the basis of an extraordinary range of material that comes for instance from

investigations done by public security bureaus at the level of an entire province like Sichuan Sichuan is twice the size of France. Here we had it we have the head of this bureau who uses everybody at his disposal in that province in 1962 to count how many people died unnecessarily. And he comes up with a number of eight to 10 million people in that one province alone eight to 10 million people who died unnecessarily. Once you start seeing this material and you compile it one cannot escape the conclusion that at least 45 million people died unnecessarily from 1958 to 1962. I still can't get my head around that number. It's an extraordinary number and the number of people it must rank surely as one of the great three horrors of the 20th century if not the greatest case of manmade disaster in all of human history but it's not just the numbers. In fact the title is quite misleading it says Mao's Great Famine

famine brings to mind this notion of of misguided policies in which gradually food disappears and people die starve to death. What. Does one party state reveals in its extremely detail documentation all one party states under Stalin on the Hitler on the male keep extremely detailed records. Once you start reading it what comes across very clearly is extraordinary amount of violence that it was exercise from 1950 to 58 to 1962 violence. By that I mean people being beaten to death for having stolen a mere handful of grain. The case of 1c yo for instance is reported to the top leadership. Here's a man for having stolen a potato. He's has his legs tied up with iron wire. Somebody dumps a Tenshi low stone on his back. One of his ears is chopped off. And finally he is branded with a sizzling tool in

one small village in Hunan Province soon. Chong was a local leader forces a man to bury his own son alive. Here's a 12 year old kid who is still in a handful of grain. The father was obliged forced to bury him alive. He dies of grief three weeks later. Across the country from archive to archive there are abundant examples of the use of extraordinary levels of violence to get people to do things that they weren't very keen on doing. People were drenched in urine. They were covered in excrement that were buried alive. Something that happened quite a lot in Hunan Province. They were branded with tools that had their noses chopped off. There is lopped off. Levels of violence that one can only explain by looking at what exactly happened during this period and what Mao had in mind with this great leap forward is to create a giant army to transform every man and every woman into some sort of soldier and a giant

army with brigades with with commandos with small armies that could tackle one task after the other in a giant continuous revolution. And by doing that he herded people in the countryside in giant collectives called Peoples communes and before you know it everything was collectivized. People had their land taken away from them. It was only distributed to them a few years earlier. The houses were taken away that cattle vanished. The tools were collectivized very little remained. The food most importantly was distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merits. So before you know it every single incentive to actually work is being stripped away from ordinary villagers who know very well that even if they grow grain the grain will be procured by the state. Even if they work in the fields in the evening they will get a mere greenish concoction

out of a big pot of soup as every incentive is stripped away. The car is underground. The party officials on the other hand have to ruthlessly whip up that work force. They themselves are confronted to the possibility of being purged from the party. They must fulfill an overthrow filled new sets of Court-House fingers in numbers over fulfill the plan to produce more grain more this more that they themselves have to whip up that work force because that character is taken away as all these incentives are gradually stripped. Nothing but a stick remains and some parts of the countryside carders the party officials and farmers of so brutalized that the scope of coercion has to be constantly expanded trading a mounting spiral of violence in which ever greater means of coercion have to be used by cardless to get famished people back into the fields to do some kind of work.

So this is one big thing about this period. The extraordinary extent of the violence exercised by party people against ordinary people about 6 to 8 percent of people didn't die of hunger. They died because they were buried alive. They were summarily executed. They were tortured to death. That makes about 2 to 3 million people who died violently during this period alone. 58 62. But much more effective than a cane to pummel a whip somebody is actually the use of food. And this is something else that comes across very clearly in all that meticulously detailed documentation of that period the use of food as a weapon rather than for somebody with a stick to go and work. It is much more effective for cowards who preside over collective canteens to have the food in their hands to actually deliberately ban people from the canteen if they are seen to be too

weak too vulnerable too old too sick to contribute to the food supply. Don't forget during this period people are reduced to mere digits. Nothing but numbers on the balance sheet. The state is everything the individual is nothing just a resource to be used exploited in the name of a greater future and the greater good like coal like grain. It's very tempting for some of these cartels on the ground to actually extrapolate from these rather macabre calculations and see people as mere livestock. After all once you collectivize people you put them into collective Barrack's collective canteens put the children into collective kindergartens. You actually have to feed them. You have to house them. You have to clothe them. And as there is increased starvation as it starts spreading by 1950

already and sets in by the winter 58 59 becomes very tempting to simply cut off those people who simply don't contribute enough to the food supply. In other words there is a deliberate use of food as a weapon to starve people seemed to be too weak to earn their keep. It goes back to a very simple principle which Lenin announced rather clearly. He who does not work shall not eat. And that is very much the principle that becomes a guiding rule during those years of masturbation. If you can't work you won't eat. People are given work points. But those who can't make enough points are simply banned from the canteen. Those who speak out are banned from the canteen. Those that fall asleep in the fields banned from the canteen. In some cases entire villages are cut off from the canteen with extraordinarily high

starvation rates. So this is the other discovery that comes through these this massive documentation of the time namely the fact that people didn't simply starve they were starved. So great distinction here between starvation and deliberately starving groups of people to death. So far I've spoken about human beings and the destruction of large quantities of them in the name of the Get better future. But collectivization did a lot more than just destroy human beings. If you look at famines for instance in Bengal or in Ireland well over a century ago of course people themselves start selling bricks from their own houses might eat the thatch on the top of a hut might use a doorframe for fuel. But what you see here

is that radicle collectivization destroys not just human beings but just about everything inside that collectivized realm. Take for instance housie not something that immediately springs to mind when we talk about famine. A very loose word used here in the tidal housing up to 40 percent of housing vanishes in a province like Hunan as reported by number two a man called Yoshio cheap and a private letter addressed to number one called Maltz alone 40 percent of private housing has been destroyed. Why. For all sorts of reasons. First for fertilizer. Initially it seems like a good idea that you might take a mud hut in what's in which animals had been kept and in which some organic matter has been left behind and pulverize it and distributed over the fields. But in the pursuit of higher quotas the destruction of houses becomes part and parcel of collectivisation

1958. In other cases houses are destroyed to build a better village here after all is communism beckoning ahead. Why be content with a backward village. Why not just destroyed and build up something much better. Of course very little is built during those years. The destruction on the on the other hand takes away houses of ordinary people. And what about these collective canteens collective kindergartens collective barracks. They too have to be built on the bricks have to come from somewhere. People contribute. But most of most in most cases actually obliged to give away entire parts of their housing. Houses are destroyed as a form of punishment. Bit by bit farmers stop hiding the grain. A war takes place between those officials who represent the state must prepare your grain at ever increasing rates. And the farmers who try to hide it as best as they can in order to help themselves and their families to survive.

Frequently houses are destroyed in the search for grain by the state as a simple measure of punishment. How about nature. Nature to sustains an attack but it has never seen previously in some parts of the country up to half the forest disappears. Massive irrigation work. Conserve water Conservancy measures in which hundreds of millions of farmers throughout these four years have to work for weeks on end on gigantic projects building dams digging canals making a reservoir a lot of it is very poorly conceived and very poorly executed. So there are landslides Rivers saltation soil of colonization all sorts of very negative effects on the natural environment. Here is a team led by who bang bang you may have heard of a great official who in 1961 spent

three months traveling across the basin of the Yellow River and the White River. And he comes up with one conclusion. When he was asked to explain why there are such devastating inundations right bang in the middle of the Great Leap Forward this conclusion is very simple with all these massive water Conservancy measures by jigging ill conceived canals and reservoirs that whole natural water system has been destroyed transportation grinds to a to a halt because an extremely wasteful system that wishes to pretty much move people and drain from one part of the country to the next. In the case of Hunan province for instance tons and tons of grain are being collected on a waiting by the side of the road. Yet there's nothing that you collected there's not enough fuel transportation system creeks to a halt in one railway station. Drole people dig a ditch that's six meters deep to dump

machinery cement. In some cases bags of food that nobody can collect. It's part of the collective system as part of that great command economy that sends goods from one part of the country to the other. But there's simply not the means available to execute it. Extraordinary waste at every single level. So far I've talked about destruction but I have about 10 minutes left and I want to talk about something else. This is after I throw a book written very much about ordinary people and not just ways of dying but also ways of surviving. Many people died but even more somehow managed to get through this extraordinary catastrophe. And the archives there again give you extraordinary detailed evidence of the kind of strategies that people used on an everyday basis to get through some of that horror. And the most common strategy is simply to try to not

work at all to conserve energy. So apathy at work what is in the factory or in the countryside. Apathy at work is not just the result of malnutrition. It's a strategy. People become masters of time faffed in the countryside. For instance farmers will work under the watchful eye of a local official. But once the man's very often a man once the man is gone Bob just dropped the tools sit by the field and waits and rest. In some cases where local village leaders somehow side with the farmers very powerful ways of resisting the state develop an entire village is somehow sleep through the winter. But more than that it's not so much the time which is being stolen. It is actually the food itself. Theft is endemic very much ruled by

opportunity and need opportunities are the greatest in the city. Sales people rummage in the back of the store. People in charge of granary pilfer the grain shippers take it out from bags people fake receipts in order to gain something. But most of all need is what determines the countryside and that ordinary farmers try to steal throughout the entire cycle of production. And this starts even before the grain that is being grown in the countryside is green before it even reaches maturity. People try. You it while they work in the fields to somehow clip off a spike of grain and then trustee's green kernels in their hands and eat it discreetly without any cooking or cooking. In any event would be very difficult pots and pans have been confiscated. Any fire I would immediately point out where somebody is preparing food

outside of the collective canteen and that would be punished by a ban on the canteen or some form of physical punishment. So people try to eat all of this raw land wants to Granges thrashed it's bulked up sometimes by farmers on their own sometimes by villagers that somehow banded together and tried to resist the state bulked up with water. So that less of it or less of it has to be delivered to the state once grain is on the move it is exposed to all sorts of thieving hands. People in charge of grand juries steal it. Shippers use bamboo chews that they plug into grain sacks. Sickout the grain and replace it by sand at every level. People try to get by as best as they can but in many cases starvation really sets in and the fabric of society starts unraveling. People have very little choice but to

turn onto each other. They start stealing from neighbors sometimes inside the family conflicts develop. In one case reported just outside of the city of Nanjing a man called Wang Dzogchen deliberately and systematically takes the grain away from his daughter who was aged eight. The middle of the winter he also takes a cotton jacket and a trousers. The girl died dies in the middle of the winter many cases where people turn on each other and in the end when nothing is left they try to trade. The only thing they have left which are their children for a handful of grain that will give them away. Let me read briefly from page two hundred and eighty four to show what happens when no food is available. But mud when there is nothing left to eat there is a white porcelain kind of mud that people resort to to fill their stomachs. I'll read from my uncle because my sight is very

bad. This is what a team sent by the provincial party committee discovers in one county and Sichuan Province. It was a vision of hell as serried ranks of ghostly villages queued up in front of deep pits their shrivelled bodies pouring with sweat under the glare of the sun waiting for that turn to scramble down the hole and carve out a few handfuls of the porcelain white mud children the ribs starting through the skin. Fainted from exhaustion. The grimy bodies looking like mud sculptures shadowing the earth old women in ragged clothes burnt paper charms and bowed hands folded mumbling strange incantations. In one village alone two hundred and fourteen families out of a total of two hundred and sixty two had eaten mud several kilos per person. Some of the villagers filled their mouths with mud as they were digging into pits. But most of them added water and needed the soil

after mixing it with chaff flowers and weeds making mud cakes that with filling even if they provided little sustenance once eaten the soil acted like cement drying out the stomach and absorbing all the moisture inside the intestinal tract. Defecation became impossible in every village. Several people died a painful death. The colon is blocked up with soil. But not everybody waits. In some cases farmers banded together and actually attack grantors torch government offices or take over entire freight trains. This happens just to give one example in the province of guns. In one month January 1961 in that remote province up to 500 cases of attacks on trains. The pig farmers banded together wait for the train and assaulted. In one case at the end of the month

up to four thousand farmers take over an entire freight train strip every removable portion of property but most of the time the violence is exercised against ordinary people and not by ordinary people. People in the countryside have to find ways of absorbing grief. Of course as the Chinese say taking anger and pain living with loss on a devastating scale how do we summarize this entire period. Well I referred to the Holocaust in the beginning but many memoirs and I'm I have no doubt that this bookshop you will find the book written by primo lévy who escaped from Alice which And he described what happened is out wish our switch as a gray zone. He noticed that while he had been able to survive everybody who had to live under the law of survival of the fittest had to somehow make

a moral compromise had to undergo routine degradations for instance by not sharing a hand full of food that he might have discovered. So at every level from the very top of the party standing by with number one mounts along all the way to ordinary farmers. At some point or another most people had to make extremely difficult choices about death and survival primal leave we call this the gray zone. And I would call these four to five years. The gray zone of China. Thank you. I was in London a month ago. You know why is a very good reason. It's both personality and system. If you look at the famine under Stalin in the Ukraine or you look at the one right here with the great leap forward or later on on Pol Pot where many people died of famine. And of course more recently North Korea is very much the same system that creates very similar facts. And the why has to do I believe with radical collectivization to believe that by

holding everything together one can somehow reach achieve much greater results. But why at that particular point in time why did Mao not look back at collectivization under Stalin precisely at a time in 1958 when this was being denounced by the number one in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev Well first of all here's a man who thinks that he can do it a lot better than that little fat man called Khrushchev or even that man who is now dead. For Joseph Stalin Mao believes that he's got the real way forward. He's discovered the bridge from socialism communism. That bridge is to liberate these hundreds of millions of people and pull them together into a massive continuous revolution that people's communes. That is something that he sees as the answer to poverty the answer out of misery. The way to really catapult China past its competitors. And then there is something else too of course by 1958 Mao has been

pretty much in power for 10 years. He's becoming impatient. He's getting old and he'd like to see some results on it like most of all to show up. The real leader of the socialist camp namely Mr. Khrushchev and this is why he pushes ahead against the advice of number three. Joe and lie who he will publicly humiliate the base undermine to make sure that number three Joe and falls in line. He purges the party getting rid of hundreds of thousands of Kano's who are unwilling to go along with it. So I was one man's vision and a particular system that that make a very for a very bad combination. I would say it starts with the purge at the very very top already 1957 mouth starts purging people inside the party who oppose them. And it starts with the ritual debasement of Number Three John Lai who must be a top official. And of course he does it in front of other

leading party members who who see this and have a very simple choice to make. And indeed in the following months in early 1958 several top leaders at the provincial level are being purged have to step down violently taken out by by working teams sent by Maltz along and then at much lower level. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary cards as opposed to 1958 by the time that you reached 1961 millions of them have been removed and are replaced by very hard unscrupulous man who are quite willing to execute anything in order to benefit from these radical winds that are blowing from Beijing. So that that's one explanation and then the biggest most extraordinary finding is that despite all of that. And when I say that people are being beaten to death Caldas to a being beaten to death for not following a line for resisting for refusing to inflict punishment on ordinary poor farmers. And

they are being subjected to torture. So despite all of that there are hundreds of thousands. God knows how many people willing to actually speak up. And this is the beauty of it. The beauty of the archives is that before we were able to read in these archives we had the image of a very powerful general called punka why when the summer of 1959 speaks out against the Great Leap Forward. And this creates a backlash by Moul. You of course gets rid of him and anybody associated with him. But now that we can go through these archives we see that at every level there were people quite willing to stick out their necks and actually write a report about what was going on. We have people in the public security bureau who insist on delivering what they think are the accurate figures for unnecessary deaths that they're being told to modify it and they refuse to do it and end up in

the labor camp at every level people either through mistake or through sheer conviction actually speak out. And highlight one or several problems generated by radical collectivisation. And of course by the time this country is no longer able to go anywhere it is so surrounded by catastrophe that Moussa Tung himself has no other option but to step back at that point a number of more powerful leaders start very subtly criticizing the entire enterprise. That happens in 1961 1962 and you know what happens a few years later. Every single person who actually said something against number one is being taken out during the Cultural Revolution. So the Great Leap Forward is the key moment here. Well literally tens of millions die in the society. But a couple of years later those who criticize

are being purged from the party. No no I think there are several explanations here to start with. There is a law that says theoretically but after 30 years a document ought to be open to the public. Now of course like all laws this can be respected or not. It seems to me having followed Zarqawi's for the best part of my career which is now 20 years. There has been an effort to open up more and more material. There is the example of the Soviet Union with which to part is constantly being confronted. Look at what they did. They opened their archives but most of all I think there was a moment of goodwill. There was a sense of opening up before the Olympics. The one two years before the Olympics and off again they only opened up. A part of the archives partly declassified God knows what is in for instance the central archives which is still very much behind looking at God knows what we'll find out what what was once all of this will be opened. So it's only a

fraction of the archives that have opened up. And I think it's also fair to say that as a lot of this material was declassified some places some of these collections may have gone too far. They may have gone too far in particular when it comes to the great leap forward because the big obsession the big political no no goal and that the forbiddance zone is of course the cultural revolution. It is as if the extraordinary obsession with the cultural revolution somehow allows what happened in the early years to to to to to go under under the radar. To start with is such a catastrophe on such a scale one might imagine that the impact is immediate but very often for instance in the case of Ireland it took almost a century before historians actually started writing about the Second World War solve some of the first real good writings about the Irish famine that had happened to the you know much the 1830s 40s.

So it does it does take a while. The transatlantic transatlantic slave trade took a very long time before there was any serious research on that. So I guess it does take time but there's one thing one I think in my mind I traced directly back to the great leap forwards and that is food the importance of food. And beyond that not just eating and eating a lot a lot a lot but acquiring objects material goods houses that house we lost during the Great Leap Forward Let's have that brick house. Now let's have that food. Extraordinary. Extraordinary level of importance given to material objects as in Europe after the second world war. People eat a lot to compensate for the memories of loss decades earlier. There are no doubt other effects but I don't want to go there too

much. It's a very common reaction not just in the case of the People's Republic of China in the case of say Nazi Germany but frequently one has to wait at least one generation. It's it's it's easier apparently for grand parents and mothers to talk to the grandchildren to skip one generation. But there is there is. A part of this project it was interviews and there a whole database of interviews that were taped and transcribed and will be deposit with a public library. And once you get to speak to people not me but local people speak to other local people rather isn't a great willingness to talk nonetheless to finally open up and and have this story out there. So what is the direction of people's republic. There will be a translation in Chinese which is being prepared right now by both poor to send about the person who published the memoirs of just so young. I can only say that for every one hate mail I get I get about 12 emails on average from

somebody in the mainland who has heard about the book and wishes to let me know but he or she is looking forward to seeing this in Chinese. So my feeling is that when you go through such a catastrophe and there's no monument there's no remembrance day there's no museum there's no real public memory to talk of this. There is a real willingness to to read and understand about what happened that time is about rights about 50 60 years now. Yes I think the example you just gave of your grandfather living in a village where there was grain and in a public storage facility but it wasn't opened up and 10000 people died. You say I'm not surprised. That's precisely the difference between people starving to death and people being starved to death. Some argue that there's no food available being starved. There is food but it's not being distributed. And in some cases it goes beyond mere politics and economics as in this

grain. We will not give it to you because we need to ship it to the Soviet Union. The grain rots as the example of the grain that was stored by the tarn along along roads in Hunan Province under simply weren't the facilities available to transport it so it rots the food actually rots as people are obliged in some parts of the country to eat mud. The extraordinary level of waste chaos and disorganization. While the Taiwanese knew very well the time is knew very well. Which makes me think that the Americans must have known too. The Brits sidestepped the whole issue. I think that's that's the key to it. It's rather it's much easier to sidestep the whole issue and ignore it than it is to actually confront it openly. Yes. No. In fact some of the people in the British Embassy at the time go out of their way to write reports about how rumors about famine are highly exaggerated and how this has

very little to do with what happened under Stalin earlier on. So at that level there is some deliberate ignorance of sidestepping of the issue that is extraordinary.