Mao's Great Famine

It is hard to exaggerate the sheer chilling effect this book by Frank Dikötter can have. It has made me realise that the statement by Gordon Kerr, in his primer, A Short History Of China, that the death tolls in China, throughout its documented 4000 years of history are ........”often staggering, demonstrating not only a disdain for human life” and with that also providing a “vast and inexhaustible supply of manpower”. In the end this book brings the disdain and inexhaustible supply into focus.

This book is in 6 parts with the first 2 parts “The Pursuit of Utopia” and “Through the Valley of Death” covering the history of The Great Leap Forward. The final 4 parts discuss the effects on all parts of Chinese life from the lowly peasant through to the political consequences. There is “An Essay on the Sources” that is a vital explanation of the research used to produce this history.

There have been and still are debates as to what Communism is. I, in a way, hardly care because, after reading this book, to my mind the Chinese Communist Party during the Great Leap Forward was attempting a form of State Corporatism that has had nothing comparable historically except maybe Stalinist USSR?

I could no doubt real off the statistics on the death and destruction etc that Dikötter has researched but in the end I might bring to the attention of the reader of this review a strange little chapter called “Nature” in Part 3 “Destruction”. It seems to me that the Chinese have been “fighting” nature for many a long century from attempts to control the various floods and other natural events that blight all nations. During The Great Leap Forward the “fight” against nature was at times, to use a word from Dikötter, bizarre. Historically China had depleted it forest for various reasons such as need for firewood etc but The Great Leap Forward at the behest of Mao took it to a new level. “there is a new war: we should open fire on nature” he said and so they did. Forests were decimated, mountains levelled as backyard furnaces flourished in some egotistical attempt to outstrip British steel production. It reached a point that after the destruction of the forests that farmers took to felling their orchards to keep warm during the winters. The consequences of that are obvious. In the end drainage systems became blocked with mud and silt as the rains caused even more issues to the many thousands of square kilometres of barren lands and with that the villages and towns that suffered flooding and starvation. Hu Yoabang traveled heavily during 1961 and denied the effect of the rains as a cause of the devastation stating “the rainfall was basically normal”.

Dikötter covers other areas in the fight against nature such as the over use of pesticides, pollution, etc but the war on nature well and truly reached the heights of bizarre in 1958 with Mao's call to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. The war on sparrows reaches the point of being weirder than fantasy. Sparrows were targeted because they ate grain, the fruits of the labour of the masses, and so began a mass mobilisation to conquer them. For several days nests were attacked, sparrows shot out of the air with thousands of people banging drums etc forcing petrified sparrows to fall from the air from exhaustion. Shanghai reported that it had eliminated 1,367,440 of this pesky bird. Shanghai also eliminated 1,213,05 cockroaches for good measure. By April 1960 the realisation was that sparrows ate insects but it was then too late as they were now almost extinct. Insect infestation ruined crops and with that further famine. Locusts had a great time as well.

One of the consequences of The Great Leap Forward was the loss of reputation of Mao within the party. But he fought back with the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Dikötter has had access to various archives hence this book and The Tragedy of Liberation: A history of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957. Hopefully he writes a book on The Cultural Revolution as this would be an excellent trilogy on the Mao years.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone with interest in the astonishing and always fascinating history of the Middle Kingdom.