Mao’s China · CHAPTER 7 ·
Great Chinese Famine
Chapter 7 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “The Great Famine”
The famine of 1959–61, the largest in recorded history, was caused by policy. The Great Leap had diverted labour from the fields and replaced family kitchens with mess halls, and the state took grain on the basis of inflated harvest claims; after the Lushan purge of 1959, warnings were silenced.
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The map above is the world of China, 1960 — The Great Famine at its worst.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1960 · Europe in 1960.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In 1959–61 China suffered the largest famine in recorded history. The map shows its uneven course: charcoal provinces recorded official death rates three to six times normal in 1960, while the rate roughly doubled in the hatched provinces. The memorial markers stand for villages where most of the dead were never counted by name.
The disaster grew out of the Great Leap, Mao’s 1958 drive to transform China through mass labor. Workers left the fields, private plots disappeared, and communal mess halls replaced family kitchens. Meanwhile the Communist Party, which ran the state at every level, demanded grain through compulsory purchase at a fixed price—procurement, effectively a tax in grain. Quotas rested on inflated harvest claims for 1958–59. After Mao dismissed his defense minister for criticizing the Leap at Lushan in 1959, reporting shortages could earn an official the label “right opportunist”: a Party member who had lost his revolutionary nerve, rather like a defeatist in wartime. Correcting the figures meant admitting a failure that the system punished.
Estimates of the dead range from about 15 million to 45 million. Demographers reconstruct deaths from flawed censuses and registers, making different assumptions about missing records, migration and normal mortality; historians using local Party reports also face incomplete records. The Party retreated in 1960–61, though for decades it called the period the “three years of natural disasters”. Weather alone cannot account for the contrast between neighboring Anhui and Jiangsu, with similar land and weather: Anhui recorded 68.6 deaths per thousand and Jiangsu 18.4. Local leaders’ choices helped determine who lived.
The full story
China’s leaders entered 1959 expecting grain that the countryside could not supply. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, begun in 1958, had sent workers from fields to furnaces and dams. Output fell from 195 million tonnes in 1957 to about 170 million in 1959, and then to about 144 million in 1960. Yet the state’s demands were based on the much larger harvests officials had reported, rather than the crops villagers actually had.
Procurement was compulsory purchase at a fixed price, in effect a tax paid in grain. In 1959 the state took close to two-fifths of the real crop, its highest share of the decade. When Guangdong officials reported early that year that peasants were hiding grain, drives to find “concealed” supplies spread. Cadres—the local Party officials who served as employer, police and tax office—searched homes and beat those who resisted. Grain continued to be collected even when there was evidence that people were hungry.
Households had little protection against this loss. Communal mess halls had replaced family kitchens in 1958, and families had surrendered their pots and stores. When the halls ran short in the winter of 1959–60, the families who depended on them had nothing left to draw on. Deaths peaked in late 1959 and 1960.
National policy was carried out by provincial and local leaders, and the results varied sharply. Anhui under Zeng Xisheng, Henan under Wu Zhipu, Sichuan under Li Jingquan, and Gansu, Guizhou and Qinghai recorded death rates three to six times normal. Provinces with more cautious leaders or more grain fared much better. In Henan’s Xinyang prefecture, officials blocked roads and punished “hiders”; around one million people died among some eight million inhabitants.
Food continued to leave places where people were starving. Sichuan, China’s most populous province, shipped grain to cities and for export along the Yangtze route traced by the red arrow. Ration cards protected city residents, and household registration tied people to one place, rather like a passport valid in only one town. China exported 4.2 million tonnes of grain in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union, while refugees fled toward the northeast. Both a person’s location and the decisions of the officials there mattered to survival.
The leadership began to reverse course after a Party investigation exposed the deaths in Xinyang in 1960. In November the “Twelve Articles” restored private plots and small markets and reduced the size of farming units. Mess halls closed in 1961, and that year China imported about 5.8 million tonnes of grain from Canada and Australia.
Mao never admitted the scale of the catastrophe. The Party blamed drought, floods and Soviet pressure, and for decades retained the phrase “three years of natural disasters”. Poor weather affected some regions, but it cannot explain a famine of this scale. Official figures show that the population fell by about ten million in 1960 alone; historians estimate 15 million to 45 million famine deaths. Survivors and historians have spent decades trying to break the silence in Chinese public life.
FULL EXPLANATION
Counting the dead: why the estimates differ
The dead were never counted completely, so each total has to be reconstructed. Demographers use the censuses of 1953, 1964 and 1982 together with registration data to estimate births and deaths year by year. They then subtract the deaths expected at a normal rate. A higher assumed normal rate lowers the excess-death figure, as does treating some missing people as migrants; correcting for unregistered deaths, especially of infants, raises it. Jiang Zhenghua arrived at about 17 million, Peng Xizhe at 23 million and Ansley Coale at 27 million. Basil Ashton and colleagues and Judith Banister estimated about 30 million. Other researchers assembled different records: Cao Shuji used thousands of county gazetteers to reach 32.5 million, Yang Jisheng used provincial data and interviews to reach 36 million, and Frank Dikötter argues from Party archives and security reports for at least 45 million premature deaths. A few writers in China have claimed fewer than five million, a view demographers reject. The range reflects difficult choices about evidence, but every serious method places this among history’s deadliest famines.
Why some provinces suffered far more
The map invites a question: why did the same national program produce such different provincial death rates? Researchers using official figures have traced several routes by which local policy mattered. James Kung and Justin Lin found more radical pursuit of the Leap in provinces with fewer Party members per head, mostly areas taken late in the civil war, as if their leaders needed to prove loyalty. Kung and Chen Shuo found higher procurement and mortality where alternate Central Committee members, ambitious men seeking promotion, led provinces. Dali Yang found higher mortality where more peasants ate in communal mess halls. Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared argue that quotas could not adjust to poor harvests, so the most productive areas paradoxically lost the most food. These studies use official figures that undercount deaths; Tibet has no reliable data at all. Taken together, they show why national orders and the incentives of those implementing them must be considered alongside one another.
Negligence, ideology or crime?
That policy caused the famine leaves another question: what did the leaders intend? In Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikötter calls it a mass killing. He emphasizes that perhaps two and a half million people were beaten or tortured to death and that Mao pressed on after being told of deaths. Dikötter quotes Mao in March 1959 saying it was better to let half the people die so the others could eat their fill; Anthony Garnaut argues that the remark concerned cutting back industrial projects and has been misread. Most historians, including Felix Wemheuer and Cormac Ó Gráda, describe leaders accepting rural deaths without intending them, as ideology, false information and protection of cities and exports produced famine. Party investigations record violence, mass flight and, in some places, cannibalism; county gazetteers and survivors’ oral histories provide further evidence. The dispute concerns intent, not the immense scale or human cause of the catastrophe.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Procurement based on false harvests. The state announced a 1958 harvest of 375 million tonnes, though the real figure was about 200 million. Its 1959 quotas were built on that claim. Officials who had invented the harvest could not admit the discrepancy, and to fulfill the quotas they took seed grain and food villages needed to survive. In a year when villages had least to spare, the state collected its largest share of the decade.
Households with nothing of their own. A household could once keep grain against a hard year. Under the communes, private plots and family livestock disappeared, rural markets closed, and pots and stoves were collected for furnaces. Families surrendered their reserves and relied on mess halls. When the halls ran out, they had no stores, no land of their own to dig and nothing to sell. A system meant to free people from household cares had removed their defense against hunger.
The Lushan purge silenced the alarm. Peng Dehuai’s dismissal in August 1959 changed the cost of raising an alarm. The campaign against right opportunists punished officials who questioned targets, and millions of cadres were criticized or demoted. A report of hunger or deaths implied that the Leap had failed. Instead of retreating, provincial leaders raised procurement in autumn 1959; the worst deaths followed in the winter and spring.
Cities and exports came first. The shortage had to fall somewhere. Ration cards and household registration protected a minimum supply for urban residents, shifting the burden to the countryside. China refused foreign food aid and continued exports: 4.2 million tonnes in 1959, mainly to the Soviet Union to pay for machinery and repay debts. Drought and floods worsened conditions in some regions in 1959–60, but people in the capital who would not go hungry made the political decisions about who bore the shortage.
THE TURNING POINT
Xinyang, winter 1959–60. Henan’s leaders had championed the Leap. Through the winter of 1959–60, their campaign against concealment in Xinyang brought searches, beatings and blocked escape routes, while about one million people died. A central investigation reported in 1960, putting written evidence from the Party’s own officials before the leadership. Mao endorsed the purge of local leaders and the November retreat in the Twelve Articles. The famine did not end at once, but the policy responsible for it began to be reversed after Xinyang.
What it changed
The great retreat. Recovery required the Party to undo much of the Leap. From late 1960 it restored private plots, rural markets and smaller farming units, closed mess halls and imported grain. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun led the recovery of 1961–65; by about 1965 food production had returned to its 1957 level. The managers whose reforms saved lives would become Mao’s targets in 1966.
A wound in Mao’s authority. The disaster weakened Mao’s standing among leaders who had seen the evidence. He withdrew further from daily government and made a limited self-criticism in 1962, while privately blaming lower officials. He came to fear that colleagues might repudiate him as Khrushchev had repudiated Stalin. That fear helped shape his attack on the Party in 1966: the Cultural Revolution was, among other things, his answer to the famine’s verdict on him.
Missing births and a lasting scar. Deaths were not the only demographic loss. Births collapsed, and demographers estimate that around 30 million were lost or postponed. The cohort remains a deep notch in China’s population pyramid. Studies of people conceived in 1959–61 have also found lasting effects on health and height: the famine marked children too young to remember it.
Memory without a monument. The Party has never published a death toll. Its 1981 Resolution acknowledged “serious losses” but attributed them to errors, natural calamities and Soviet perfidy together. There is no national memorial; archives have been closed again since the 2010s, and works including Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone are banned in China. Families have often preserved memories privately, while historians have relied in part on people who recorded them at their own risk. Remembering remains political.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent was the Great Famine the result of deliberate choices by China’s leaders?
The policies were deliberate. Leaders set quotas on inflated harvests, abolished private food, purged Peng Dehuai and revived the Leap after Lushan. They protected cities, continued grain exports and refused foreign aid. The provincial variation on the map strongly suggests that local choices mattered far more than weather. A further question is whether leaders intended people to die. Dikötter argues that Mao knew of mass deaths and continued, making the famine a mass killing. Wemheuer, Ó Gráda and others see leaders accepting rural deaths as the price of their priorities without seeking them: a famine of ideology and willful blindness. Evidence of Mao’s private knowledge in 1959–60 is incomplete and disputed. The distinction is essential: deliberate policies caused the deaths, while an intention to kill is not proven. A system that punishes bad news can kill on a vast scale even when no leader wants that result.
An interesting fact
In 1959 Yang Jisheng returned as a student to his village in Hubei and found his father dying of hunger. He says he believed the official explanation at the time. Yang, a Party member and Xinhua journalist for more than three decades, later spent over a decade gathering provincial records and interviews. The result was Tombstone, published in Hong Kong in 2008 and the most detailed history of the famine. He described its title as a tombstone for his father, for the millions who died and for the system that caused their deaths.
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