Xinyang incident
신양 사건
The mass starvation in Xinyang prefecture, Henan, from October 1959 to April 1960, caused by forced procurement matched to inflated output reports and by violence. The prefecture’s final report said that 1.07 million of its 8.08 million people died in the year from November 1959. The most notorious local case of the Great Famine, it was exposed by a central investigation at the end of 1960.
In depth
Chayashan in Suiping county, in Xinyang prefecture, was where the first people’s commune was set up in April 1958, and the prefecture won fame with “sputnik” harvest reports. In March 1959 the centre fixed national procurement on the 1958 basis, and after Lushan Wu Zhipu, first secretary of Henan, ordered “little Peng Dehuais” rooted out. Xinyang’s real output in 1959 was little over 2 billion jin, but the prefecture reported 5 billion; on that basis the province set a quota of 900 million jin, raised to a billion on the way down. Of the prefectural standing committee only the commissioner Zhang Shufan said output could not exceed 3 to 4 billion, and he was attacked for it. Militia searched house by house for “hidden grain”, and peasants were tied up, strung up and beaten.
As starvation spread the prefecture set up checkpoints on the roads to stop people fleeing and locked them in detention centres, and the post office confiscated letters begging for help. In Gushi county alone official records note 200 cases of cannibalism, and the prefectural secretary Lu Xianwen said that “it is not that there is no grain; ninety per cent is a question of thinking”. In February 1960 an Interior Ministry inspection and a telegram from Gushi reached the State Council secretary-general Xi Zhongxun and Dong Biwu of the Central Control Commission, and in October Li Fuchun passed an investigation report to Mao.
The death toll differs by source: the prefecture reported 380,000 to the province, the local gazetteer gives 483,000, the central investigators 1.05 million, and the prefecture’s final report of January 1961 1,070,321 (13.2 per cent). In 2012 researchers at Nanjing University, adding births lost and out-migration, estimated a population loss of about 1.25 million. Mao defined the incident as “class revenge by the Kuomintang under a Communist signboard”, and in a “supplementary democratic revolution” the party replaced cadres wholesale, dismissing 983 and arresting 275. Lu Xianwen got three years in prison and the Guangshan county secretary Ma Longshan a suspended death sentence, while Wu Zhipu got off with three self-criticisms. The incident prompted the emergency Twelve Articles of November 1960.