The Great Famine, 1958-62 Flashcards
What caused agricultural production to drop drastically?
- little incentive to work hard
- exhausted by long hours of work / chasing vermin
How did Party cadres respond to the drastic drop in production after the communes were established?
- didn’t want to be seen as failures
- didn’t want to criticise the communes (Hundred Flowers)
Sooooooo
Greatly inflated their reports of what their communes had produced
What was the impact of Party cadres greatly inflating their reports of what the communes had produced?
Their bosses in the Party believed there was plenty of food 👮🏼♂️😋
So they set higher production quotas ✅💹🍜
Such a bad misunderstanding:
• Land was left FALLOW! Party believed there would be too much food to store ⛰
• “excess” food sent abroad to FELLOW Communist countries as free gifts! ✈️
Terrible famine. 👻☠️💀
The great famine was…
Evidence of this?
The worst recorded famine of the twentieth century
8m starved to death in Anhui province
7.8m in Henan
9m in Sichuan
1m people died in Tibet
What was the impact of the great famine on life?
Starving peasants launched desperate attacks on food stores: YET anyone discovered trying to steal food was sentenced to death
Birth rates plummeted— women’s fertility dropped
Men sold their wives into prostitution
Many (esp. children, elderly) died of diseases they couldn’t resist— malnourished
Outbreaks of cannibalism
What did people eat during the great famine?
Frogs, worms, tree bark
Cannibalism
What made the great famine worse?
Terrible weather:
Flooding in South China,
Drought in Shandong
How many people are estimated to have died in the great famine, though exact figures are unknown?
30-50 million.
How far was Mao responsible for the great famine?
Historians
Source of debate.
• Chang and Halliday (2005) blame Mao for bringing “utter misery” by ordering grain requisitioning and continuing to export food after the famine had begun
• Some (ie. Jin Xiadoing) blame it on over-ambitious Party cadres: claimed to have collected more grain than they actually had to gain favour with their bosses.
May have been poor judgement, but “poor judgement is not the same as starving people to death
How far was Mao responsible for the great famine?
(His own opinion)
(Why might he be responsible?)
Blamed the weather (particularly bad)
Though he didn’t control the lives of Party cadres,
He created the atmosphere within which they were terrified for their own lives if they:
- failed to meet targets
- questioned Mao’s policies
After the famine being such an embarrassment to Mao, how did Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping take greater control over running the country?
Pragmatists: they quickly moved to restore farming
”Walking on Two Legs” replaced by “Agriculture as the foundation of the economy”
- Communes deducted in size, Peasants allowed to farm small private plots
- If they found unused land, they could farm on it
- They could decide what to grow, how much fertiliser to use
- Could trade their food at markets
The Party sent emergency supplies (insecticides, fertilisers, tools) to farms
By 1965, what had happened to agricultural production?
It had recovered from the Great Leap Forward, returning to 1957 level
