Mao’s Great Leap to Famine
Frank Dikötter The New York Times December 15 2010

The worst catastrophe in China’s history and one of the worst anywhere was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962. It was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958. Detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives.

Inside the archives is an abundance of evidence from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations.The records suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for [b]at least 45 million deaths[/b].

Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”

As the catastrophe unfolded people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled they abused one another stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25 1959 he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

Frank Dikötter is a professor at the University of Hong Kong on leave from the University of London. His books include “Mao’s Great Famine.”