#ChinaGreatFamine #Coronavirus
The famine that killed up to 45 million people remains a taboo subject in China 50 years on. A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.
The topic of the People’s commune and the degree in which it influenced the famine holds contention in regards to its overall influence. Each region dealt with the famine differently and timelines of the famine are not uniform across China. The overarching argument is that excessive eating that took place in the mess halls directly led to a worsening of the famine and that if excessive eating did not take place then, “the worst of the Great Leap Famine could still have been avoided in mid-1959.However, dire hunger did not set into Da Fo until 1960 and the public dining hall participation rate was found to be meaningless in terms of causation in Anhui and Jiangxi.
Government policies that were implemented, particularly the Three Red Banners and the Socialist Education Movement (SEM), proved to be ideologically detrimental to the increasing famine. The Three Red Banners of the CCP “sparked the fanaticism of 1958” and the implementation of the General Line, one of the three banners which told people to, “go all out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, better, and more economical results” directly links to the pressures officials felt when reporting a superabundance of grain.The SEM, established in 1957, also led to the severity of the famine in many ways, including the illusion of superabundance. Once the exaggerations of crop yields from the General Line were reported, “no one dared to ‘dash cold water'” on further reports.The SEM also led to the establishment of conspiratory thoughts in which the peasants were believed to be pretending to be hungry in order to sabotage the state grain purchase.
In the second half of 1959, I took a long-distance bus from Xinyang to Luoshan and Gushi. Out of the window, I saw one corpse after another in the ditches. On the bus, no one dared to mention the dead. In one county, Guangshan, one-third of the people had died. Although there were dead people everywhere, the local leaders enjoyed good meals and fine liquor. … I had seen people who had told the truth being destroyed.
There are widespread oral reports, and some official documentation, of cannibalism being practised in various forms, as a result of the famine.[44][45]:352[a][46] Due to the scale of the famine, the resulting cannibalism has been described as “on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century