Taking away all means of private food production (in some places even cooking utensils), forcing peasants into mismanaged communes, and continuing food exports were the worst acts of commission. Study of famines shows how easily they can be ended (or prevented) once the government decides to act-but the Chinese government took nearly three years to act. 5 The greatest omission was the failure of China's rulers to acknowledge the famine and promptly to secure foreign food aid. These three attributes recur in all modern manmade famines. Total and per capita grain production in China, 1950-70Īs an essentially social catastrophe, the famine showed clear marks of omission, commission, and provision. 4 In reality, grain harvest plummeted (fig (fig1) 1) and since supply and demand of food before 1958 were almost equal, by the spring of 1959 there was famine in a third of China's provinces. These gross exaggerations were then used to justify the expropriation of higher shares of grain for cities and the establishment of wasteful communal mess halls serving free meals. 3Īt the same time, fabricated reports of record grain harvests were issued to demonstrate the superiority of communal farming. Peasants were forced to abandon all private food production, and newly formed agricultural communes planted less land to grain, which at that time was the source of more than 80% of China's food energy. This frenzied enterprise did not produce steel but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools. Instead of working in the fields, tens of millions of peasants were ordered to mine local deposits of iron ore and limestone, to cut trees for charcoal, to build simple clay furnaces, and to smelt metal. 2 Mao, beholden to Stalinist ideology that stressed the key role of heavy industry, made steel production the centrepiece of this deluded effort. This mass mobilisation of the country's huge population was to achieve in just a few years economic advances that took other nations many decades to accomplish. The origins of the famine can be traced to Mao Zedong's decision, supported by the leadership of China's communist party, to launch the Great Leap Forward.
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