The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine

Beyond the Soviet model

1957 is counted the smoothest year for the economy since 1949: the First Five-Year Plan was complete, the budget was in surplus and industrial and agricultural output rose 10 per cent. But this success rested on the Soviet model of heavy industry first, rule by experts and the extraction of a rural surplus to build urban industry. Taxes and compulsory state purchases took 30 per cent of the 1957 harvest, leaving the countryside little margin. The hukou system introduced in 1956 kept peasants from moving out of their counties without permission, and welfare went first to urban workers. In “On the Ten Major Relationships” Mao Zedong had stressed agriculture, light industry and local initiative and said China would not simply follow the Soviet Union; having silenced the critics in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, he looked for a faster road. 1 2

What stood in that road was the “anti-rash advance” of 1956. When a wind of “rash advance”, raising targets level upon level, blew from late 1955, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian tried in June 1956 to restore balance by cutting capital construction and revising the plan. Mao had already put forward “greater, faster, better and more economical” in 1955 and used it as a weapon against right conservatism. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign the charge by non-party figures such as Zhang Xiruo that Mao and the party were “fond of grandeur and eager for quick success” was branded a “rightist offensive”. On 13 November 1957 a People’s Daily editorial said that with the countryside cooperativised a “great leap on the production front” was both possible and necessary, using the term “great leap” for the first time. 1 2 3

That month Mao went to Moscow for the meeting marking the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. When Khrushchev proposed to catch up with and overtake the United States within fifteen years through peaceful competition, Mao answered at the meeting on the 18th that China would produce 10 to 15 million tonnes of steel in five years and catch up with or overtake Britain in fifteen. On 2 December Liu Shaoqi announced the goal at home for the first time, at the congress of the trade unions. In the winter of 1957–1958 tens of millions of peasants were mobilised for irrigation works on the North China Plain, and Mao drew from this the conviction that a country short of capital and technology could fill the gap by a vast mobilisation of labour. The basic idea of the Leap was that peasants, without major state investment, would feed themselves while supplying the cities with grain, raw materials and even steel. 4 1 2

From Nanning to the General Line

In early 1958 Mao liquidated the anti-rash advance in a series of meetings. At the Nanning Central Work Conference of 11–22 January he said it had cut itself off from most ministers, provincial secretaries and the 600 million people, and that “some comrades are only fifty metres from the rightists”. Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi accepted responsibility for the anti-rash advance, and in June Zhou even asked to resign as premier. The conference drew up the “Sixty Points on Working Methods”. At the Chengdu conference in March Mao said China could catch up with Britain in ten-odd years and with America in twenty-odd. When the metallurgy minister Wang Heshou reported that 15 million tonnes of steel in 1962 and overtaking Britain within ten years were “a fairly realistic idea”, Mao told the other ministries to learn from him. 5 1 2

The second session of the Eighth Party Congress, 5–23 May, adopted the General Line for Socialist Construction: “go all out, aim high and build socialism with greater, faster, better and more economical results.” It also endorsed Mao’s 1957 judgement that throughout the transition the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, between the socialist and capitalist roads, was the principal contradiction, reversing the conclusion of the Eighth Congress’s first session in 1956. Li Fuchun, chairman of the State Planning Commission, proposed 30 million tonnes of steel in 1962, overtaking Britain in seven years and America in fifteen, and the Second Five-Year Plan’s targets rose from 12 to 30 million tonnes of steel and from 500 to 700 billion jin of grain. Mao wrote: “seven years to catch up with Britain, and another eight or ten to catch up with America.” 1 2 6

The General Line, the Great Leap and the people’s communes became the “Three Red Banners”, a sanctum beyond criticism. Mao saw them as a Chinese road distinct from the Soviet one. The principle of the Leap was “walking on two legs”, developing heavy and light industry, town and country, large and small scale, modern and native technique at once, and relying not on technical experts but on the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses and the methods of Yan’an: mass mobilisation, levelling, attacks on bureaucratism and disdain for material obstacles. Spreading local experiments judged successful as national models, “using a point to lead the surface”, became the method of mobilisation. Immediately after the congress a “wind of exaggeration” began to blow in every field. 7 2 1

“People’s communes are good”

Since Mao called for faster cooperativisation in 1955 the countryside had passed through mutual-aid teams of 5–15 households, elementary cooperatives of 20–40 and higher cooperatives of 100–300. In spring 1958 a proposal came from Chayashan in Suiping county, Henan, to merge the higher cooperatives into a large one, and in April the first experimental commune was set up; here for the first time private plots were abolished entirely and communal kitchens introduced. In August Mao said: “People’s commune seems a good name: it includes workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants, and manages production, livelihood and political power”, and his remark on an inspection tour, “people’s communes are good”, was printed in the newspapers and spread across the country. They were called people’s communes, he explained, because they were big and public. 2 1 8

The enlarged Politburo meeting at Beidaihe on 17–30 August resolved to set up people’s communes in the countryside. Communisation went far beyond the trial scope and the “by next spring” timetable Mao had mentioned. By the end of the year 740,000 higher cooperatives had been merged into about 26,000 people’s communes, taking in 120 million households, over 99 per cent of the peasantry; the average commune had 5,200 households and 24,000 people. The commune combined production, administration, the militia, education and health care, and replaced wages and money with work points. Every peasant aged sixteen to sixty was enrolled in the militia and labour was organised on military lines. Some localities declared that they were “running into communism”. 9 10 8 2

The symbol of the commune was the public dining hall. Household kitchens were abolished, pots and even tables were donated to the commune kitchen, and the halls practised “eat your fill” free supply to whoever came, regardless of work points. The aim was also to collectivise housework, childcare and laundry so as to draw women into work outside the home. But in the optimism of autumn 1958 many halls ate a year’s food in a few months, and the “communist wind” of commune-level “equalisation and requisition without compensation” moved the property of production teams and households at will. Khrushchev likened the Chinese communes to the communes the Soviet Union had abandoned in the 1920s and called them a mistaken practice, and Mikoyan said in the United States that such communes would not work without a system of incentives. 11 8 1 12

Marshal Steel and the “sputniks”

The Beidaihe conference set 1958 steel output at 10.7 million tonnes, double that of 1957; the plan at the start of the year had been 6.248 million. Under slogans such as “take steel as the key link” and “Marshal Steel ascends his throne”, 90 million people went into the hills in the autumn to dig ore, cut down forests and fire “native furnaces” built of earth. In September Zeng Xisheng, party secretary of Anhui, showed Mao a steel ingot from a native furnace, and Mao urged the method on the whole country. Households melted down pots and farm tools. The target was met in numbers, but of the 11.08 million tonnes of steel announced for 1958 only 8 million were up to standard, and over 3 million were unusable. The State Statistical Bureau put the losses of native steelmaking at 5 billion yuan. 13 1 14 15 2

In agriculture “sputniks were launched”. On 8 June the People’s Daily reported that the Weixing (Sputnik) cooperative in Suiping, Henan, had harvested 2,105 jin of wheat per mu on five mu, and the reports inflated competitively until in September rice in Lian county, Guangdong, was claimed at 60,437 jin per mu. Rice was transplanted from other fields to show inspection teams, and the same basket was weighed several times. Visiting Xushui county, Hebei, on 4 August, Mao asked what they would do with all the surplus grain: “you can eat five meals a day!” In 1957 Xushui’s actual yield had been 138 jin per mu. The People’s Daily ran the headline “The bolder the man, the more the land will yield”, and the physicist Qian Xuesen wrote that, calculated from solar energy, yields twenty times the present were possible. 1 16 17

The farming methods Mao promoted made matters worse. “Close planting”, based on the theories of the Soviet agronomist Lysenko and his colleague Maltsev that seeds of the same species do not compete, had seedlings sown three or four times as densely, and “deep ploughing” had the earth dug one to two Chinese feet deep. In Anhui close planting cut yields from 400 jin per mu to below 200. In December 1958 these principles were bundled into the “Eight-Character Charter for Agriculture” and sent down nationwide. The Four Pests campaign against rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows killed sparrows in such numbers that insect pests multiplied; only in 1960 were sparrows replaced on the list by bedbugs. Above all, while labour was drawn off to steel and irrigation, about 10 per cent of the crop of autumn 1958, a good harvest thanks to the weather, rotted unharvested in the fields. 17 2 18 19 1

First adjustments and the targets that stayed high

From the winter of 1958 some of the problems became visible at the top. At the first Zhengzhou conference in November and the enlarged Politburo meeting at Wuchang, Mao took up the communist wind, the high targets and the wind of exaggeration. Of the figures in the draft “Forty Articles on Fifteen Years of Socialist Construction” he said they lacked grounds, should be shelved for two years and kept from outsiders: “do not chase an empty name and suffer real harm.” The Sixth Plenum at Wuchang in November–December cut the 1959 steel target from 30 million tonnes to 18–20 million and adjusted distribution in the communes. But the Beidaihe estimate of 750 billion jin of grain for 1958 was not much revised; actual 1958 output was 400 billion jin (200 million tonnes). 1 17

Inflated harvests became the basis of procurement. In March 1959 the Shanghai conference, despite signs of a shortfall, decided to procure 135 billion jin of grain nationwide on the 1958 basis. Output fell 11 per cent in 1959 while procurement rose 14.7 per cent, and the grain left per peasant fell from 250 jin in 1957 to 174. Net grain exports rose from 2.7 million tonnes in 1958 to 4.2 million in 1959. In an “inner-party letter” of 29 April Mao wrote that land that had yielded 300 jin a mu last year did well to add 100 or 200, and that talk of 800, 1,000 or 1,200 jin was “just bragging”, telling cadres to ignore the targets from above and look only at what was really possible; but in some provinces, Anhui among them, the letter was never passed down. On the 27th of that month Mao stepped down as state chairman and Liu Shaoqi succeeded him. 1 15 2

Local cadres were squeezed from both sides. Superiors counted fulfilled targets as merit, and after the Anti-Rightist Campaign reporting low figures risked being labelled “right-leaning”. The statistical reporting system had passed from statisticians to party cadres in 1957, putting political considerations ahead of accuracy, and Xue Muqiao, head of the State Statistical Bureau, is reported to have said in 1958 that “we give whatever figures the upper levels want”. Participants in meetings recalled production figures inflated up to ten times the real amount; the more officials competed for honours such as the chance to meet Mao, the bigger the exaggeration, and the state bought grain on those figures that production teams could not spare. In 1958 alone non-agricultural state employment rose by 21 million, and the rationed urban population, which swelled by 31.24 million by 1960, added to the burden on the countryside. 2 17 20

Lushan: criticism becomes “anti-party”

The enlarged Politburo meeting that opened on Mount Lu in Jiangxi on 2 July 1959 was meant to cool the Leap and settle practical problems; at first Mao himself called the backyard steel campaign a “great catastrophe” and criticised himself for rushing communisation. Peng Dehuai, the defence minister, who had voiced his discontent with the Leap to Khrushchev and others on a tour of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that spring, said in group discussion that “everyone was responsible for the mistakes of the Great Leap, including Chairman Mao”, and on 14 July sent Mao a private letter. Without denying Mao’s “great achievement”, it criticised the wind of exaggeration, the native furnaces that produced useless steel and the commune militia, called the steel drive one of “losses as well as gains”, and traced the errors to “petty-bourgeois fanaticism”. 21 22 1

Mao had the letter printed and circulated to the meeting on 17 July, and Zhang Wentian, first vice-minister of foreign affairs, gave a long speech itemising the economic errors of the Leap; the chief of staff Huang Kecheng and Zhou Xiaozhou, former party secretary of Hunan, also sided with Peng. On 23 July Mao struck back. Saying he was under combined attack from inside and outside the party, he asked whether the poor and lower-middle peasants keen on communes and canteens could be called “petty-bourgeois fanatics”. If nine out of ten things were bad and all were printed in the press, he said, we would perish, and then “I will go to the countryside to lead the peasants to overthrow the government. If those of you in the Liberation Army won’t follow me, then I will go and find a Red Army, and organize another Liberation Army.” No one, Zhou Enlai included, supported Peng. 23 21 24 1

The Eighth Plenum of 2–16 August adopted a resolution on “the anti-party clique headed by Peng Dehuai”, stripping Peng, Huang Kecheng, Zhang Wentian and Zhou Xiaozhou of all their posts. Mao said they were “only 30 kilometres from the rightists” and defined the dispute as the continuation of the life-and-death struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat in the socialist revolution of the past decade. Li Rui, one of Mao’s secretaries, who refused to denounce Peng, lost his party membership and was sent to a labour camp. Khrushchev’s public criticism of the communes in Poland on 18 July, in the middle of the conference, added to this, and Mao went so far as to say that Peng had gone “behind the back of our fatherland to collude with a foreign country”. In September Lin Biao became defence minister and purged Peng’s supporters from the army. After the plenum an “anti-right-deviation” campaign spread across the country in which more than three million cadres and party members were criticised or punished as “right opportunists”, among them Zhang Kaifan, the Anhui vice-governor who had ordered public dining halls disbanded. 21 25 26 27 28 29 17 1

Lushan changed the course of the Leap. The adjustment of the first half of 1959, meant to pull back the high targets, stopped, and in an atmosphere where no one dared to “pour cold water”, exaggeration and coercive procurement revived. The blade of the anti-right-deviation campaign turned cadres who reported starvation into “little Peng Dehuais”. Lushan was the first time since 1949 that policy disagreement in the leadership spilled into open conflict, and it left a sense, even within the leadership, that Peng had been treated unfairly and the party’s norms violated. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of 1962 Mao recalled that Lushan had been meant to discuss the work until Peng jumped in and made a mess of it. That is why the 1965 attack on Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was read as an allegory of the Peng Dehuai affair. 21 17 22

Famine: Xinyang and Anhui

Grain output fell from 200 million tonnes in 1958 to 170 million in 1959 and 143.5 million in 1960. The 1960 harvest was over 26 per cent below 1957, cotton was down 35 per cent, oil crops by more than half and pigs by 56 per cent, back to the level of 1951. Yet the state did not reduce procurement, and in 1960 it still exported 2.72 million tonnes of grain while repaying 1.973 billion yuan of debt to the Soviet Union. Where the centre believed state granaries would hold 50 billion jin in 1960, they held 12.7 billion. Starvation was concentrated almost wholly in the countryside: the cities got reduced rations, but peasants bound by the hukou could not leave their villages, and “black elements” such as landlords, rich peasants and rightists came last in the allocation of food. 17 1 30 2

One of the worst places was Xinyang prefecture in Henan. Wu Zhipu, first secretary of Henan, claimed 70.2 billion jin for the province’s 1958 grain output, actually 28.1 billion, and 45 billion for 1959’s 21 billion, and on returning from Lushan ordered “little Peng Dehuais” rooted out. Xinyang’s real 1959 output was little over 2 billion jin, but the prefecture reported 5 billion and the province assigned it a procurement quota of 900 million jin. Militia searched house by house for “hidden grain”, and peasants were tied up, strung up and beaten. Deaths from starvation poured in from October 1959 to April 1960. The prefecture set up checkpoints on every road to stop people fleeing, and the post office confiscated letters begging for help. People died at the doors of the grain warehouses. 31 32 17

Word reached the State Council secretary-general Xi Zhongxun, and then Dong Biwu of the Central Control Commission, through an Interior Ministry official’s inspection in February 1960 and a telegram from Gushi county. In October Li Fuchun passed a report by the Organisation Department and the Control Commission to Mao, who told Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai to discuss measures at once. The prefecture’s final report of January 1961 said that of a population of 8.08 million, 1.07 million, or 13.2 per cent, had died between November 1959 and October 1960; the figure it had reported to the province was 380,000, and the local gazetteer gives 483,000. Mao defined the Xinyang incident as “class revenge by the Kuomintang under a Communist signboard”, and the party replaced cadres wholesale in a “supplementary democratic revolution”. The prefectural secretary Lu Xianwen got three years in prison; Wu Zhipu got off with three self-criticisms. 31 32 6

The damage varied with the zeal of provincial leaders. In Anhui Zeng Xisheng, backed by Mao’s confidence, drove irrigation works and concealed the famine, branding the vice-governor Zhang Kaifan, who objected, a member of the “Peng Dehuai anti-party clique”. The official Anhui provincial gazetteer admits 4.07 million deaths, and the province’s death rate in 1959–1961 is estimated at 18 per cent. In Sichuan, “Heaven’s Granary”, the provincial secretary Li Jingquan followed central procurement and demands for grain to be sent elsewhere to the letter, and death rates in the Sichuan region including Chongqing reached 13 to 15 per cent, with over eight million dead even by official statistics. The Jiangxi leadership, by contrast, openly opposed some Leap programmes and limited the damage. Peng Xizhe’s analysis finds Gansu, Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan, Guangxi and Anhui hardest hit, with the rise in urban death rates about half that in the countryside. 15 17 33 34 2

The famine did not kill by hunger alone. Yang Jisheng’s research records people beaten to death for reporting the true harvest, sounding the alarm, refusing to hand over their last food, trying to flee, begging or stealing scraps. By one estimate about 7 per cent of those who died during the Leap were tortured to death or summarily killed, and the beatings of struggle sessions were lethal to starving bodies. People ate bark and earth, and in Gushi county alone official records note 200 cases of cannibalism. Births collapsed too: the birth rate fell from 2.9 per cent in 1958 to 2.1 per cent in 1960 and the death rate rose from 1.2 to 2.5 per cent. In 1960 and 1961 China’s population fell for only the third time in 600 years. In November 1960 a special supply system providing food and necessities only to senior officials was set up nationwide. 2 20 31 17

Retreat: from the Twelve Articles to the year of investigation

In summer 1960 the crises compounded. On 16 July the Soviet government announced it was recalling all its experts working in China; the withdrawal was complete between 28 July and 1 September, halting many industrial projects. The Beidaihe work conference of July–August decided to cut capital construction and protect agriculture, and the State Planning Commission’s report on the 1961 plan of 30 September first put forward the eight-character policy of “adjustment, consolidation, filling out and raising standards”. In April Shanghai cotton mills had stopped for lack of cotton, and many people from the Pearl River Delta fled to Hong Kong. As reports of starvation deaths mounted, Mao gave up meat from October, and Zhou Enlai cut his own grain ration. 1 17 12

In November the “Urgent Directive Letter on Current Policy in the Rural People’s Communes” drafted by Zhou Enlai, the Twelve Articles, ordered the communist wind corrected and for the first time allowed peasants small private plots and household sidelines, restoring team-based ownership and rural markets. Emergency shipments and imports of grain, sharp cuts in procurement and higher grain prices followed. The Ninth Plenum of 14–18 January 1961 formally adopted the eight-character policy, which is held to have ended the Leap in practice. At the same meeting, though, Mao said a third of political power in the country was not in Communist hands, blamed a restoration of landlords and rich peasants and “peaceful evolution”, and called for socialist education in the countryside. In 1961–1963 China bought large quantities of grain from Australia and Canada to supply the cities and ease procurement in the countryside. 31 1 2 17

Mao declared 1961 a “year of investigation and research” and sent his secretaries to the countryside; his secretary Tian Jiaying sent back from Hunan a report questioning the very logic of the Leap. Liu Shaoqi spent 44 days in villages of his native Hunan in April and May and reported that the peasants called the famine “three parts natural disaster, seven parts human error”; at the central work conference of 31 May he said that in most places mistakes in work had been the main cause, and Deng Xiaoping agreed the same day. The “Regulations on the Work of Rural People’s Communes”, the Sixty Articles, cut communes to a third of their size and moved the basic accounting unit down to the production team. In 1961 Zeng Xisheng spread “responsibility fields” across Anhui, and a survey of 36 counties found output up by an average of 38.9 per cent. 35 17 1 8 36

The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference and “never forget class struggle”

From 11 January to 7 February 1962 an enlarged central work conference brought together 7,118 cadres from the centre, provinces, prefectures and counties, major enterprises and the army in Beijing. On the drafting committee for the report Peng Zhen said that “Chairman Mao is not without errors either; the three-to-five-year transition and the canteens were approved by the Chairman”, and that failing to examine even one per cent or one per mille of Mao’s errors would leave a bad influence on the party. Zhou Enlai shielded Mao, saying the blame lay with those who had supplied wrong information. On 27 January Liu Shaoqi, in a report of some three hours, openly admitted that agriculture had not grown but fallen sharply in 1959–1961 and that industrial output had dropped by over 40 per cent in 1961, and, in the words of the Hunan peasants, called it “three parts natural disaster, seven parts human error”. 37 38 1 39

On 30 January Mao spoke on democratic centralism and made a self-criticism. Rebuking cadres afraid of criticism from the masses, he said: “For shortcomings and mistakes made in the last few years, the primary responsibility should be borne by the Centre; at the Centre the primary responsibility is mine.” But, quoting Liu’s report, he added that the line of the past four years had been correct and the achievements primary, and he kept the “Three Red Banners” off limits. The defence minister Lin Biao praised Mao Zedong Thought as the guiding light for the future without a word about the failures of the Leap. After the conference Mao stepped back from day-to-day work to the “second line”, leaving the economy and party affairs to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. 40 38 2

At the enlarged Politburo Standing Committee meeting held in the West Building of Zhongnanhai on 21–23 February, Chen Yun revealed a deficit of 5 billion yuan behind an apparently balanced budget and inflation from excess currency issue, and proposed a bold retreat: three to five years of recovery and a cut in the urban population under “fewer troops and simpler administration”. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Deng Zihui backed the “three freedoms and one contract” of private plots, free markets, responsibility for profit and loss and household contracting, and Deng quoted the proverb that “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat”. To Mao, though, this was the undoing of collectivisation. At Beidaihe in August he said class struggle must be talked about “every year, every month and every day”, and in September the Tenth Plenum raised “never forget class struggle” and closed the period of adjustment. Mao returned to the centre of power through the Socialist Education Movement of 1963 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966. 41 38 42 36 3

Assessment: how many died, and who was responsible

The death toll is still disputed. Official statistics put the 1961 population 14.58 million below that of 1959, and the second volume of the History of the Chinese Communist Party (2011) admits only that the 1960 population fell by 10 million from the year before. Researchers’ estimates of excess deaths vary widely with method and data: 15 million deaths from malnutrition by a Chinese Academy of Sciences study group (1989), 17 million by Jiang Zhenghua (1986), 27 million by Ansley Coale, about 30 million by Judith Banister (1987) and Basil Ashton and colleagues (1984), 32.5 million by Cao Shuji (2005), 33 to 35 million by the public-security demographer Wang Weizhi, 36 million by Yang Jisheng (2008), 43 to 46 million by Chen Yizi of the System Reform Institute and 45 million by Dikötter (2010). At the other end are low estimates such as Utsa Patnaik’s 11 million and the mathematician Sun Jingxian’s 3.66 million (or under 2.5 million). Tombstone (2008), written by the former Xinhua reporter Yang Jisheng from local archives and testimony, was published in Hong Kong and is banned on the mainland; adding 40 million births that never happened, Yang puts the population loss at 76 million. 1 2 17 20 43

There are reasons the estimates diverge. Even China’s total population at the time was not known to within 50 to 100 million; the statistical system had collapsed under politics after 1957, and much of the State Statistical Bureau’s material was burned in the Cultural Revolution. Many families did not report deaths so as to keep drawing the dead person’s ration, and migration complicated the count. Dikötter holds all the earlier estimates to be undercounts and argues that at least 2.5 million died from beatings, torture or summary execution; Daniel Vukovich objects that the figure rests only on an interview remark by Chen Yizi and cannot be verified, and Mobo Gao notes that anti-Communist writers stretch the numbers as high as possible and those sympathetic to the revolution as low as possible. According to a CIA document, Mao told Field Marshal Montgomery in autumn 1961 that “unnatural deaths” in 1960–1961 exceeded five million. 2 17 43

Views also differ on causes and responsibility. The Chinese government long called the period the “three years of natural disasters”, renaming it the “three years of difficulty” in June 1981. The Resolution on party history of that month said the difficulties of 1959–1961 were mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap and the struggle against right opportunism, compounded by natural calamities and the Soviet government’s perfidious scrapping of contracts, and admitted that the criticism of Peng Dehuai had been “entirely wrong”, but gave no death toll. Yang Jisheng, citing meteorological records, holds that the weather was no worse than usual and blames Mao’s policies and the totalitarian system, writing that public granaries held some 22 million tonnes of grain at the height of the famine. A 2005 study by Houser and colleagues attributed 69 per cent of 14.8 million excess deaths to national policy. Echoing Amartya Sen, Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared found that aggregate output was enough to avoid famine and that the inflexible procurement system explains at least half the mortality, and by one calculation the net grain exports of 1959 and 1960 alone could have fed 16 million people. 17 2 20

The Great Leap left the socialist movement a heavy question. It was an attempt by a poor agrarian country without capital or technology to industrialise at a stroke through mass enthusiasm and organisation while avoiding the costs of Soviet-style development, and some things remained from it: women’s entry into the workforce, rural health care, irrigation works, tractor and fertiliser production, and the Daqing oil field. But in a system where criticism became “anti-party”, information from below could not rise, and figures from above turned into starvation below. Stuart Schram set the post-Leap hunger beside the achievements of land reform and the First Five-Year Plan, and Mobo Gao points less to malice than to the structure of ruling a vast country in one uniform way. The rift in the leadership over responsibility for the Leap became a root of the Cultural Revolution, and the responsibility fields of Anhui and the “three freedoms and one contract” of the early 1960s became precedents for the household responsibility system after 1978. 2 44 45 36