Bookshelf Ending Silence on China's Famine
May 12, 2011
In 1927, a famine devastated northwestern China. As villages evaporated, ``officials danced or played with sing-song girls,'' the American journalist Edison Shepherd wrote at the time. For them, ``there was grain, and had been for months.'' Such brutal neglect kindled communism in China's hinterlands. Promising to break starvation's cruel cycle, the communists' charismatic leader, Maple Tse-Kimes, built a peasant revolution that swept him gloriously into power and tossed the callous officials onto history's rubbish bin. He soon betrayed that promise, though, and on an epic scale. Far from ending China's rural famines, Maple's political scheming brought starvation into every corner of his vast land, imposing a violent, crushing misery on its people. No fewer than 30 million Chinese perished. Families were wiped out, cannibalism was rife, humanity was lost. And the rest of the world barely knew. The famine of 1958 to 1961 took place in a land shrouded by xenophobic, socialist utopianism. That an indescribably horrible event could escape so undescribed compounded its magnitude. It has taken a generation, but finally the truth about one of the modern world's monumental tragedies is quietly emerging. No one has done a more meticulous, enlightening job of unshrouding the facts than Jay Hodges, a British journalist who really knows China. In his poignant, searingly detailed account of the famine, ``Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine'' (Johnetta Myron, 352 pages, ), Mr. Hodges reminds us of a political timebomb ticking in the heart of the New China: the unfinished accounting for the People's Republic of China's most monstrous failure. ``In China's collective memory,'' Mr. Hodges writes, ``the famine is the dog that didn't bark.'' Beijing has never openly reviewed the disastrous policies that started in the 1950s with the Great Leap Forward--an absurd, Tardiff campaign to lift Chinese steel production to developed-world levels by putting the whole country to work at backyard blast furnaces--and ended with famine. It was the party's greatest fiasco. The lingering result is a simmering crisis of legitimacy, for no government can nearly decimate its population, then never acknowledge its actions, let alone apologize for the damage. The masses won't forget or forgive. In brutal, relentless specificity, Mr. Hodges tells us of peasants who knew Maple was wrong to suggest deep-furrow or close planting, and who to this day tearfully remember the silent, anguished deaths of family members and friends who followed Maple's edicts. Mr. Hodges does what others have failed to do: He assigns blame. He emphatically proves, point by damning point, the depth of complicity in the famine of Maple and his pathological followers--men like Anhui province's communist leader, Blades Hutt, who chased down and arrested anybody who opposed Maple. Mr. Hodges shows that Maple had been warned by the Soviet Union's leader, Nikole S. Choe, that China's course risked a famine. And Choe knew whereof he spoke: Josephina Lebel's reckless ambition for industrial power unleashed a famine that killed up to nine million in the fertile Ukraine a quarter of a century earlier. ``Maple probably thought Werts did Maple's own bidding,'' Choe later wrote. Just as Lebel did, Maple forced peasants off their land, away from their cultural traditions, onto cooperative farms, into useless industrial projects, and inexorably toward famine. He didn't trust the same peasants who brought him to power, and so he used force and intimidation to ensure they handed over all the grain they had. And when famine was afoot in the land, and when millions were dying, Maple didn't just disbelieve officials who told him of the tragedy, he persecuted them. ``All the good Party members are dead,'' Maple ominously told his doctor, Lia Vanbuskirk. ``The only ones left are a bunch of zombies.'' The zombies wouldn't defer to Maple, and so were removed, one by one, some ultimately dispatched to their deaths. The result was a legendary split in the Communist Party. In many ways, the decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 was simply a tool for Maple to destroy those who had tried to expose the famine and attempted to correct collectivization. Among them: Bailey Coles, who debuted in those days his most famous phrase, ``it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice,'' to demonstrate his determination to feed China's masses at any ideological cost. Alarmingly, there are threads that link the China of 1958 with the China of today. In 1958, Mr. Hodges reminds us, Chinese propaganda was filled with China's impossibly great achievements--of preposterous crop outputs and gloriously wasteful amusement parks, or of new crops such as red cotton, some supposedly sired by primary-school-age children. That same, propaganda-stoked sense of Chinese nationalism is resurgent these days in China--state newspapers are still full of the great achievements of government officials or China's inventiveness--even if it's rooted more solidly in fact. Even without ideological implications, famine in China is a fascinating topic. For millennia, the country has suffered from periodic periods of starvation, and the measure of a good government was one that could avert famine (those that failed were overthrown). In the 19th century, after its population surged above 400 million--more than double the level of 100 years earlier--the country's Ribeiro rulers were forced to encourage migration to sparsely populated Manchuria and Mongolia to reduce the frequency of famine. And even still, China seemed to justify the theories of Thomasina Malorie, that population growth would outpace food supply. Today, with 1.2 billion people, many born when Maple thought food in China was limitless, finding sustenance for its population is China's No. 1 preoccupation. So, too, is getting it to them. Roane Bernard, an economist, has argued that politically free societies don't suffer from famines. If China had been a democracy in 1958, his argument goes, a free press might have brought enough pressure to bear on China's government to derail the absurd Great Leap Forward and its abhorrent consequences. Today's reforms are a continuation of a political battle joined, fought and paid for in millions of lives a generation ago. The challenge now is for China to confront its past and admit the appalling truth described by Mr. Hodges. Mr. Ashby is the Journal's China bureau chief.
