For the sake of building his own brand of Chinese socialism, and as campaigns to undermine any real or imagined opposition in the party hierarchy, Mao would institute new waves of radical social transformation. The most famous of them was the Great Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. But the Great Cultural Revolution had its beginning in an earlier campaign — the Great Leap Forward of 1958-62. China's peasants were to be fully incorporated into the collective farm system and China was to launch a massive steel production campaign in every village and collective farm throughout the country to bring China into the industrial world within a handful of years.
It is this earlier Great Leap Forward campaign that is the theme of Jasper Becker's Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine. That the Great Leap Forward resulted in a massive loss of human life has been known to experts in Chinese communism. R.J. Rummel, in his detailed account, China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991), devoted two chilling chapters to this period of Chinese history.
But Mr. Becker's book is the first account that is based on personal interviews with the survivors in many parts of China, as well as drawing upon new or recently released documents on the magnitude of this human disaster. In short, at least 30 million people died from a planned famine.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0697f.aspKnowing nothing about agriculture, Mao insisted that all the food China needed could be produced in less time on a fraction of the land then under cultivation. To curry favor with the "Great Helmsman" in Beijing, provincial and local party leaders throughout China drew up production plans promising to deliver fantastically unrealistic quantities of wheat and rice. No only did the harvests fall far short of the projections, but they fell far below previous levels of output. With millions of people diverted for Mao's gigantic infrastructure projects and with the basic tools needed for farm production stripped out of the peasants' hands for steel construction, it was inevitable that agricultural yields would drastically decline.
But the local and regional party leaders were determined to meet their targets for delivering what had been promised to the chairman. To meet their targets, they reduced the amount of food left for the peasants to live on. Teams of cadres were sent out to the villages to search for any hidden caches of grain not turned in to the authorities. Tens of millions were left with nothing to eat.
All the time, the peasants were in fact starving — in the millions. In their dreadful state, the peasants sank to the lowest form of human survival — they resorted to cannibalism. They dug up the bodies of the recently dead. They hid the fact that family members had died: first, to continue to obtain an extra food ration from the party distributors; and second, to hide the fact that the deceased had been eaten. Then, finally, at the lowest level of an instinct for survival, adults began to kill and eat their own children, usually trading their living child for that of a neighbor's, so they would not have to literally murder and eat their own son or daughter. Children would beg their parents not to let them be eaten.
And where was all the harvested grain seized by the provincial and local party officials? The vast majority of it was stuffed into government granaries. When some of the higher party officials received reports from relatives and friends around the country about the real state of the peasantry, Mao refused to be moved. He could not admit he had been wrong, both because it would undermine his own utopian fantasies and because it might shift power and influence away from himself to others in the party.
Finally, granaries were either opened or broken into. Peasant revolts occurred in various areas. Mao was forced to reverse course, but not publicly. All the shifts in policy were made to seem normal change and adjustment on the continuing road towards communism.
Thirty million people may have died because of his folly, but Mao would not forget that others in the party had challenged him — that they had made him admit that physical laws of nature had stood in his way of making China over in his own image. And in 1966, Mao launched the Great Cultural Revolution
