The claim that Mao Zedong engineered a famine and killed 50 million people is pervasive among Western liberals. It's been repeated so often that it has become accepted without serious historical analysis. This article examines that claim and asks a simple question: did Mao Zedong intentionally engineer a famine that killed 50 million people?
Answering this question first requires situating the Great Leap Forward famine within the broader historical conditions of China.
What Caused the Great Leap Forward Famine?
The Great Leap Foward famine was the last in a long history of cyclical famines that occured frequently. Between 108 BC to 1911 AD, there was at least 1,828 recorded famines throughout China.³ Famines in China were historically caused by a multitude of intersecting factors, such as weather conditions like floods, typhoons, pests, plant diseases, and feudal agricultural infrastructure and farming methods. The CPC inherited this history of famines and the conditions that created them.
As economist Utsa Patnaik notes in their article Revisiting Alleged 30 Million Famine Deaths during China’s Great Leap¹ and their book, The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays,² there were three years of bad harvests in China including droughts, floods, and pest infestations that caused foodgrain output to fall by 30%. To understand the significance of the environmental conditions of the time, consider the Yellow River flood of 1958, in which heavy rainfall flooded 1,708 villages, destroyed 3.04 million mu of farmland and 300,000 houses, and claimed the lives of 740,800 people.⁴
Natural disasters like this coincided with, and were exacerbated by failed policies of the Great Leap Forward, such as the Four Pests Campaign and the drafting of millions of peasants into industrial labor. This was further compounded by the withdrawal of Soviet technical advisors, which led to the cancellation of hundreds of projects.
The famine was not intentional, it was caused by a complex interaction of environmental conditions and human action. To write the event off as merely a man-made famine or a crime against humanity, is to manipulate and distort the failures of the Great Leap Forward to serve political ends and ignore the extreme weather conditions of the time.
15 million? 30 million? 40 million? 50 million?
There are many outrageous estimates for how many people died from the famine. Most Western academics fall somewhere between 30 million to 55 million. However, it's been revealed that Western academics often use dishonest and faulty methodologies to inflate the numbers.
For example, in their article, Utsa Patnaik outlines the methodologies by which Western academics arrive at inflated conclusions. One approach is the use of population deficit calculations. Demographers compared China’s actual population growth between 1959-1961 to a projected growth based on pre-1958 trends. When the population fell short of these projections by 27 million people, this deficit was equated with famine deaths. The issue here is that fewer people than expected does not automatically mean people died.
An explanation for the deficit actually comes from a decline of birth rates during the years of famine. In this period China's birth rate fell from 29 per thousand in 1958 to 18 per thousand in 1961, meaning millions of people were never born. This means at least 18 million people counted as dead from the famine never even existed. Counting births that never occurred as famine deaths is a basic methodological error.
How Many People Really Died?
Patnaik came to a much lower conclusion than Western academia did. Their 2011 article states:
If we take the remarkably low death rate of 12 per thousand that China had achieved by 1958 as the benchmark, and calculate the deaths in excess of this over the period 1959 to 1961, it totals 11.5 million. This is the maximal estimate of possible ‘famine deaths.’
However even Patnaik's 11.5 million estimate has been called into question, as more modern research has come to lower conclusions.
For example, Sun Jingxian's research from 2016, Population Change during China's 'Three Years of Hardship' (1959 to 1961)⁵, concluded that there was an estimated 3.66 million excess deaths caused by the famine:
If we are correct about China's actual total deaths as 29.27 million during 1959-1961, then using the adjusted mortality rate of 1957 as the baseline, the famine death toll due to starvation should be about 3.66 million.
Yang Songlin's 2021 book, Telling the Truth: China’s Great Leap Forward, Household Registration and the Famine Death Tally⁶, is some of the most groundbreaking and recent research on the subject. Yang Songlin found that:
...the number of excess deaths in 1959–1961 is approximately 3.6 million, or anywhere between 2.6 million and 4 million.
The findings of Sun Jingxian and Yang Songlin significantly narrow the range of estimates for excess deaths. Rather than tens of millions, their research points to roughly 3 to 4 million. This is not to deny the famine or policy failure, of course, but it directly refutes claims that “Mao Zedong killed 50 million people.”
Beyond the 50 Million Myth
What remains is not a story of intentional mass killing, but a new revolutionary state grappling with significant material constraints and policy errors. China was coming out of centuries of feudal underdevelopment while attempting to rapidly industrialize under extreme conditions. To reduce the famine to mass murder by one individual is to distort and manipulate the history of the famine to serve political ends.
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