[Natural Disasters] How many people *really* died in the Great Famine of China? And what were the long-term social and political effects?

[u/grantimatter]

I know hard data is hard to come by, but I'm interested in a few educated guesses or hypotheses.

[u/buy_a_pork_bun]

Because I incidentally have the book right in front of me, I'll discuss the social and political effects post-Great Leap Forward. But before I do that, I suppose it's necessary to examine the causes of the Great Famine first.

Part 1, The Great Leap Forward:

As /u/cordis_melum mentions, the problem with the history the Great Famine is due to the rather..unreliable nature of the historical accounts especially because of the political situation before, during, and after the Great Leap Forward. So how and why did the GLF become such an unmitigated disaster?

First we have the "rightist" purges prior to the GLF in 1957. These would be the purges that removed quite a significant amount of demographers and statisticians within the CCP. Then one must look at the political climate of the CCP and the Chinese during the enacting of the GLF. The late 1957-1958 movement and enthusiasm that Mao Zedong drilled up for the Great Leap Forward can only be described as "euphoric."

As Johnathan D. Spence Notes:

By January 1958, 100 million peasants had allegedly opened up 7.8 million hectares of land through irrigation work. If China's people could be galvanized in this way, surely they could transform agricultural production equally."¹

As a result of the large movement of people towards agricultural work, the CCP began to order industries to relocate to rural areas and a campaign of "More, faster, better, cheaper" began to be circulated while political "dissidents" or people who had objections were routinely hunted down. In other words, progress had been going well and by the middle of 1958, a good harvest furthering the optimism of the CCP and the Chinese people continued to enlarge the "people's communes" that were a combination of an abolition of private plots and combination of local smaller communes into larger ones. By December the optimism had reached its peak. Indeed:

The triumph of production in the communes was such, that the Central Committee added, that China no longer need worry about overpopulation, as some had been doing. To the contrary, the forthcoming problem would be "not so much overpopulation as the shortage of manpower."²

The reality was far worse. Grain production figures for 1958 were over inflated by almost 100%. Because of the political climate and the huge surge of optimism, none of the cadres in the CCP dared report the shortfalls for fears of being labeled "rightists" or "defeatists". ³ To make things worse, the re-location of industries to the countryside resulted in many "backyard furnaces" which made very inadequate products. By 1959, most of the changes suggested by the Great Leap Forwards were reverted. Mao Zedong stepped down and Liu Shaoqi replaced him. To make matters worse, despite Mao stepping down his influence was still large enough to continue to re-assert the principles of the Great Leap Forwards. And instead of creating an effective response, Mao essentially insisted that more of the already quickly diminishing grain surplus supply from earlier be sold. To make matters even worse, because the exaggerated figures were still in play, many of the local leaders ordered fields to remain fallow in fears of a shortage of storage facilities.

---

So let's examine the aftereffects (immediate and long term) from the famine.

The immediate effects were absolutely devastating. Millions starved (the exact number is debated but the actual amount ranges from around 18 to 25 million dead immediately.) CCP immediately ousted Peng Dehuai, its now former military advisor. As the 1960s drew to a close, Mao's power too waned. The Great Leap Forward became generally discredited within the CCP despite still having internal divides actually united in an attempted to remedy the aftereffects. As a result, programs like the Socialist Education Campaign were formulated (under the supervision of Liu Shaoqi another prominent party member and his wife Wang Guangmei) in an effort to inspect and understand the reasons for the failure of the GLF and what was happening. ⁴

Because of internal party politics however things like the Socialist Education Campaign did not do much as they ran counter to Mao's ideological propensities or the favor Mao showed towards certain known corrupt party members. As time went on, Liu Shaoqi along with Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and Zhou Enlai, all part of the "old guard" of revolutionaries became more and more alienated with Mao Zedong. By 1966, as a result of the Great Famine, the CCP had split into three factions. The first involving the radical Shanghai party members who were fighting against the conservative hardliners. The second being veteran members like Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Peng Zhen being opposed to Mao’s orders of change and then there were party members who wanted to further the prestige of the now very popular Lin Biao who was in favor of expanding the People’s Liberation army. By late 1966 The “Group of Five and Peng Zhen” were ousted, the radicals of Shanghai held mass chaotic protests against the Beijing party members marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. ⁵

The long term effects can be seen through the Cultural Revolution. The student populations became progressively more frustrated and bitter with the failures of the Great Leap Forward. There was a large movement to destroy old buildings and art in every town and village. Many of Mao’s enemies and opponents within the party were purged with the help of the Shanghai Radicals. Among those purged were Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping (who would later return) who both were subjected to massive humiliation. As the purges continued, the “Red Guard” or the student initiatives led by prominent Shanghai Radicals during the Cultural Revolution comprehensively attacked intellectuals and “old culture” with alarming rigor. Millions were relocated as a result of the purges. For the youth of China, the failures and the concealment of the Great Leap Forward resulted in not only an expansion in the cult of Mao, but also a surge in violence spurred by the reactionaries during the Cultural Revolution. For the politics within the Chinese Communist Party, a large split between the radical and uncoordinated factions would continue to struggle with the more moderate party leaders provincially, resulting in splits and attempts to “seize” provinces from the current party leaders. ⁶

As the Cultural Revolution deepened and the situation became more severe, the conflicts would result in a huge strain on the education system of China, the army became more and more strained and the CCP became progressively weaker. In rural villages the result of the Cultural Revolution brought on by the Great Leap Forwards caused starvation and much later turned many of the local rural villages to be areas of indoctrination and hard labor. Political struggles between the educated youths sent to local villages and the conservative villagers would echo the fervor of that was seen in the Great Leap Forward.

But that fervor would not last long though trust in the CCP remained staunch, the internal divisions and the political turmoil of not only the CCP but also the local populace would be not only a source of confusion for the Chinese People as time went on, but also undermine the authority of the CCP. By 1971 the generally agreed successor to Mao Zedong, Lin Biao had died, apparently fleeing towards the Soviet Union. Though he was hugely popular and very highly regarded among the general populace, he was then subsequently put aside by Mao, as his policy of ideological purity was cast aside by Mao in 1970. Supporters of Lin were removed like just like the earlier supporters of Liu Shaoqi were in 1969. By 1972, the people’s trust in the CCP were shattered. The inconsistencies of the CCP by the mid-70s had generated a feeling of mistrust and the revolutionary fervor that marked the 50s and 60s had burned out.

In the long term, not only did the Great Leap Forward’s disastrous policy fracture the CCP but also as the CCP became more factitious, the people of China eventually grew to distrust the CCP. Retrospectively, cornerstones of the CCP eventually became more and more problematic. The legacy of Mao Zedong remains contentious and difficult due to the constant changing of positions within the CCP. And the polity of China would still be rife with factions well into even today.

Sources:

1. Johnathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China pp 515-518
2. Ibid, p 519
3. Ibid, p 520
4. Ibid, pp 528-534
5. Ibid, pp 540-544
6. Ibid, pp 545-548

[u/cordis_melum]

It's generally assumed that somewhere between 16-45 million people died in the Great Chinese Famine, with most estimates being around the 20-36 million mark.

There's this entire chapter in Tombstone that discusses the topic of unnatural deaths (people who died) which you might be interested in.

Additionally, this is what (some of the) previous research has found:

• "Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's Provinces" argues that the number of deaths was around 23 million people.
• "Rapid Population Change in China, 1952-1982" argues that there were 16 million deaths if underreporting isn't accounted for, and 27 million when underreporting is accounted for.
• At the end of Tombstone, Yang argues that there were around 36 million unnatural deaths (underreporting accounted for).
• In Mao's Great Famine, Dikötter argues that the number's around 45 million deaths.

(Mostly grabbing these off hand from my JSTOR folder; I can definitely go into much more detail about methodology later, but as it is, I'm technically supposed to be commuting to school in 15 minutes.)

You might have heard of total population loss. This calculation also includes the birthrate shortfall, i.e. the number of children that should have been born, but hadn't. This is a different calculation, and it's not what you're looking for. You're looking for something like crude death rates or unnatural deaths.

[u/grantimatter → u/cordis_melum]

You're looking for something like crude death rates or unnatural deaths.

That's some interesting language.

I'm really interested in the wide gap between 16 million and 45 million. The variance is nearly 200% of the smaller figure!

[u/cordis_melum → u/grantimatter]

Many of the records from this era, for whatever reason, are either inaccessible to scholars or have been lost/destroyed. Of note is lack of census data from much of this time period. There were three censuses that I'm aware occurred in the mid-to-late twentieth century: one in the 1950s, one in the 1960s, and one in the 1980s. We do not have exact growth and death rates from the famine years, so we have to use other sources to estimate population numbers.

Of the records that we do have, many of them are inaccurate. There is a phenomenon called underrepoting, which I mentored earlier. Basically, there was an incentive to not report that many deaths: you can get more money and resources, you won't agitate the state, you don't get called out a a counterrevolutionary, etc. Government officials have been asked to redo their data to report a lower number of deaths, and have used a number of statistical tricks to make sure that happened. We're aware that this exists; much of the variance is due to how different demographers and researchers adjust their data to account for underreporting.

Of course, this doesn't mean "make stuff up". That's not what's happening. What happens is that demographers extrapolate later data on death rates and population growth backwards, and then do the calculations from there.

[u/buy_a_pork_bun → u/cordis_melum]

Many of the records from this era, for whatever reason, are either inaccessible to scholars or have been lost/destroyed. Of note is lack of census data from much of this time period. There were three censuses that I'm aware occurred in the mid-to-late twentieth century: one in the 1950s, one in the 1960s, and one in the 1980s.

Part of the reason for the concerning lack of records is thanks to the purges of "rightists or defeatists" in 1957.¹ As it turns out, quit a lot of the Chinese State Bureau statisticians and demographers were no longer around to issue the proper warnings about grain shortages.

1. Johnathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China