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Author : Jasper Becker
FOREWORD
One of the most remarkable things about the famine which occurred
in China between 1958 and 1962 was that for over twenty years, no
one was sure whether it had even taken place. Whatever else the
Communists in China might have done, it was widely assumed that
they had at least fed their vast population and had ended China's
seemingly perennial famines. Then, in the mid-1980s, American
demographers were able to examine the population statistics which
had been released when China launched her open-door policy in 1979.
Their conclusion was startling: at least 30 million people had
starved to death, far more than anyone, including the most militant
critics of the Chinese Communist Party, had ever imagined.
Why, and how, did such a cataclysm take place? Who was to blame?
How was it kept secret for so long? And what was life like in the
countryside? How did people behave and how did they survive?
This book is an attempt to seek answers to these questions. Inside
China, the famine is rarely mentioned or discussed, and much of the
story remains shrouded in secrecy. In the official view, there were
merely three years of natural disasters: the real disaster took
place later, during the Cultural Revolution, when senior Communist
leaders were persecuted. Yet in the last few years, a growing
number of Chinese living abroad have written memoirs that shed more
light on the subject. It has become clear that the greatest trauma
suffered by the Chinese people was indeed the famine, not the
Cultural Revolution. However, most of these memoirs are by
intellectuals who, during the famine, were either in the cities or
in prison camps and so knew little about the fate of the vast
majority of the Chinese population - the peasants. It was the
peasants who were the chief victims of the famine but peasants do
not write books, or make films, and rarely have a chance to talk to
outsiders. Even those who obtain official permission to carry out
research in China's countryside are rarely, if ever, allowed to
speak freely to peasants. Invariably, local officials have coached
the peasant beforehand on what to say and insist on being present
at the interview. Often, too, they interrupt to talk on behalf of
the peasants who, in any case, may well speak a dialect
unintelligible to outsiders.
For those who were in the countryside at the time, the horror of
the famine is indelibly imprinted on their memories. As the
dissident Wei Jingsheng has written, peasants talk of those days as
if they had lived through an apocalypse. Even after three decades,
memories are still fresh, as became clear when I started to find
people who had then been in the countryside but who were now living
outside China. Advertisements placed in the overseas Chinese press
in 1994 brought hundreds of responses, ranging from a few scribbled
lines to accounts twenty or thirty pages long. I visited some of
those who replied, at first in Britain and later in the United
States, Hong Kong and eventually Dharamsala in India where I met
Tibetans who had fled to the Dalai Lama's place of exile. Then,
armed with a clearer picture of what had happened, I travelled
around rural areas of Henan, Anhui and Sichuan and talked to older
peasants who had survived the famine.
The background to the famine is drawn from the growing body of
academic work on Chinese agriculture. I was also fortunate in being
able to find written sources to substantiate the cruelties that
eyewitnesses had described. The relative freedom allowed to
obscure publishing houses in the provinces in recent years has
meant that a surprising amount of material about the famine has
become available. In addition, Chinese intellectuals who went into
exile after 1989 were able to provide a number of official
documents about events in Henan and Anhui which offered detailed
facts and figures.
Even so, many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are still missing.
Knowledge of events at the highest levels of the Communist Party at
key moments is often sketchy, making it difficult to understand
clearly why things happened as they did. Much data about death
totals is also absent and it is hard to be sure of the reliability
of what has come to light. Even today Chinese statistics are
rarely coherent, and the central government frequently complains
about the regularity with which the lower levels of the
administration falsify figures. As Walter Mallory wrote in 1926 of
a request for the 'bottom facts' about an earlier famine in China,
'There is no bottom in China, and no facts.' A fuller account of
the famine may have to wait until the Party's own archives are open
to researchers but this is unlikely to occur so long as those who
share responsibility for the famine remain in power. Lord Acton
once spoke of the 'undying penalty which history has the power to
inflict on the wrong': it is no surprise that the Communist Party
believes its control over the past is the key to its future.
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