Mao: The Unknown Story

While all this was happening, there was plenty of food in state granaries, which were guarded by the army. Some food was simply allowed to rot. A Polish student saw fruit “rotting by the ton” in southeast China in summer — autumn 1959. But the order from above was: “Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation” (e-si bu-kai-cang).

CLOSE TO 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward and the famine, which lasted four years. The figure is confirmed by Mao’s No. 2, Liu Shao-chi himself. Even before the famine had ended, he told Soviet ambassador Stepan Chervonenko that 30 million had already died.

This was the greatest famine of the twentieth century — and of all recorded human history. Mao knowingly starved and worked these tens of millions of people to death. During the two critical years 1958–59, grain exports alone, almost exactly 7 million tons, would have provided the equivalent of over 840 calories per day for 38 million people — the difference between life and death. And this was only grain; it does not include the meat, cooking oil, eggs and other foodstuffs that were exported in very large quantities. Had this food not been exported (and instead distributed according to humane criteria), very probably not a single person in China would have had to die of hunger.

Mao had actually allowed for many more deaths. Although slaughter was not his purpose with the Leap, he was more than ready for myriad deaths to result, and had hinted to his top echelon that they should not be too shocked if they happened. At the May 1958 congress that kicked off the Leap, he told his audience they should not only not fear, but should actively welcome, people dying as a result of their Party’s policy. “Wouldn’t it be disastrous if Confucius were still alive today?” he said. The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, he said, “was right to lounge and sing when his wife died. There should be celebration rallies when people die.” Death, said Mao, “is indeed to be rejoiced over … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.”

This airy yet ghoulish “philosophy” was relayed down to grassroots officials. In Fengyang county in Anhui, when one cadre was shown the corpses of people who had died from starvation and overwork, he repeated almost word for word what Mao had said: “If people don’t die, the earth won’t be able to hold them! People live and people die. Who doesn’t die?” Even wearing mourning was forbidden; even shedding tears — since Mao said that death should be celebrated.

Mao saw practical advantage in massive deaths. “Deaths have benefits,” he told the top echelon on 9 December 1958. “They can fertilise the ground.” Peasants were therefore ordered to plant crops over burial plots, which caused intense anguish.

We can now say with assurance how many people Mao was ready to dispense with. When he was in Moscow in 1957, he had said: “We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.” That was about half the population of China then. Indeed, Mao told the Party congress on 17 May 1958: “Don’t make a fuss about a world war. At most, people die … Half the population wiped out — this happened quite a few times in Chinese history … It’s best if half the population is left, next best one-third …”

Nor was Mao just thinking about a war situation. On 21 November 1958, talking to his inner circle about the labor-intensive projects like waterworks and making “steel,” and tacitly, almost casually, assuming a context where peasants had too little to eat and were being worked to exhaustion, Mao said: “Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one-third, or one-tenth—50 million — die.” Aware that these remarks might sound too shocking, he tried to shirk his own responsibility. “Fifty million deaths,” he went on, “I could be fired, and I might even lose my head … but if you insist, I’ll just have to let you do it, and you can’t blame me when people die.”

North Korea’s Kim Il Sung turned out to be less stupid than Mao on this issue. Mao had pressed him to emulate China’s anti-sparrow campaign. To humor Mao, Kim drafted a “3-Year Plan for Punishing Sparrows,” but then did nothing while he watched to see how Mao’s campaign turned out.