Yang Jisheng "Tombstone" and Zhou Xun "The Great Famine" Food and History.pdf

252 Reviews / Comptes rendus YANG Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (London, Allen Lane, 2012), 629 pages, 1 illustration. Price : £30. ISBN 978-1-846-14518-6. ZHOU Xun (ed.), The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 2012, 204 pages, 1 illustration, ISBN 978-0-300-17518-9. The Great Chinese Famine (1958-1962) was one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in world history. There now seems to be irrefutable evidence to prove that this disaster was almost entirely man-made. It was caused primarily by policies introduced by the Communist Party during the Great Leap Forward. Although a number of foreign scholars have written detailed studies of this famine, due to its continuing political sensitivity Chinese historians have been limited in the extent to which they have been able to conduct and publish research. In recent years, however, an increasing number of scholars based in Mainland China and Hong Kong have sought to defy official taboos, and have begun to unearth the hidden history of the Great Famine. One of the most prominent of these scholars is Yang Jisheng, a journalist from Hubei Province who conducted research into the famine for over a decade. He consulted a vast number of official documents only available to those granted admission to exclusive Communist Party archives, exploited informal channels to procure rare documents, and interviewed cadres who governed areas of rural China in 1958-1962. This monumental and courageous research project culminated in the publication of a weighty two-volume study, offering perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the famine yet produced. Unfortunately Yang’s book remains banned in Mainland China. It has now been heavily edited and translated by Stacey Mosher and Guo Jian, and published as Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine. Yang intersperses chapters detailing regional case studies with those providing general analysis of the political causes of the famine. His specific local examples help to shift the focus of the discussion away from an elite-centered perspective that has often dominated the history of famine. He does not totally eschew discussion of high-level power politics. Significant attention is dedicated to cataloguing the court intrigues that raged amongst members of the higher echelons of the Communist Party. Yet the strength of Yang’s study is in its ability to trace links between the Politburo and the People’s Communes. He demonstrates how elite-level decisions were filtered through the particular prisms of local politics, and were intensified by processes of positive and negative feedback. This multilayered perspective constructs an analytical model that dissects the Maoist political system from core to periphery. The image of the system that Yang presents is one beset by horrific repression and desperate survival strategies. Readers seeking further evidence to Reviews / Comptes rendus 253 indict the Maoist regime for its crimes against the Chinese population will not be disappointed. Yang describes widespread cannibalism, torture, cadre corruption and starvation, often in forensic detail. He begins by recalling the death of his own adopted father, whose starvation he personally witnessed (p. 3-12). Given that Yang was motivated to conduct research into the famine by this personal trauma, it is entirely understandable that he writes with a degree of anger and passion that somewhat precludes a fully nuanced approach. His picturesque prose betrays his background in journalism rather than academia. His description of Chinese political culture as “despotic” (p. 484), and his references to the “bellicose temperament” (p. 465) of ethnic minorities, will not appeal to professional historians, who have long questioned such descriptive categories. Yet Yang’s study has much to offer scholars, both in its analytical approach and in its insight into restricted documents. Yang’s study has an unapologetically political agenda. Its primary target is the totalitarian rule of the Communist Party, which, he claims, lacks a “corrective mechanism” to arrest to development of corrosive decision-making patterns (p. 496). He provides a neat aphorism to describe Chinese political culture during the famine, noting how each official “wore two faces: before his superiors he was a slave, and before his subordinates, a tyrant” (p.486). Later he goes further, claiming that everyone bore at least some responsibility for the system that drove China to starvation (p. 496). He somewhat undermines this argument for collective responsibility, however, by insisting upon highlighting the personal culpability of Mao Zedong. He is not content to view Mao as the misguided and callous leader of a dysfunctional system, but rather insists upon uncovering his malign influence at every possible juncture. Thus, on the one hand, Yang argues that responsibility for the famine was dissipated throughout the political system, and yet, on the other, attributes near omnipotent power to Mao. The tension between these dual perspectives is never reconciled satisfactorily. Given that Tombstone repudiates Communist rule so wholeheartedly, it is somewhat intriguing that Yang’s analysis retains so many of the Party’s own explanatory frameworks and rhetorical idiosyncrasies. For example, he refers to the collective psychological dynamics that perpetuated the famine as the “Communist Wind” and the “Exaggeration Wind” (pp. 248-269). Here not only does Yang’s terminology remain rooted firmly in official political discourse, but his explanatory framework also bears a strong resemblance to that given by the Communist Party, which sought to disavow its former radicalism in later years. Similarly, Yang describes an idealist/pragmatist split that arose within the Party, claiming that the latter faction defied the hard-line Maoists to precipitate the end of the famine (p. 518). Here his explanation shares an oblique parallel with official Communist Party historiography, promoted by the pragmatist faction in the post-Mao years. Some historians now dispute this 254 Reviews / Comptes rendus narrative, and suggest that it was widespread civil disobedience against grain procurement policies, rather than the internal rectification of policy errors, that finally ended the famine.12 Whilst Yang demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Great Famine, his analysis suffers from a severe lack of historical context. In particular, he makes very little reference to the fact that famine had struck China repeatedly throughout its history, and had grown particularly acute since the mid-nineteenth century. Whilst it is certainly true that no previous crisis had begun to approach the magnitude of the 1958-1962 famine, several had been significantly more intense, causing greater per-capita losses within a limited geographical region. The Incredible Famine of 1876-1879 killed an estimated 9-13 million people, and the Northwestern Famine of 1928-1930 10 million.13 In over 500 pages, Yang’s discussion of previous famines is largely confined to a single paragraph, during which he presents a misleading picture of the historical consensus on the severity of these events (p. 13). This absence of context is particularly telling during Yang’s discussion of the impact of the famine in Henan. He concludes that a minimum of three million people perished between 1958-1962 (pp. 80-82), yet fails to mention that a comparable number died during the 1941-1943 Henan Famine.14 This oversight is indicative of a deeper problem with Yang’s approach. He does not seem to be motivated by a desire to assess the impact of the 1958-1962 famine, but rather by an attempt to find evidence to support the most damning indictment of the Communist Party possible. In order to pursue this political objective, he seems content not only to sacrifice subtlety, but also to overlook the inconvenient deaths of millions of Chinese people who perished in the years before Mao came to power. Yang’s research was aided considerably by his status as a journalist. This provided him with the cover to access government documents, and to discuss the famine extensively with former cadres. The Hong Kong-based scholar Zhou Xun adopted a different approach, exploiting a relaxation in the rules governing archival access at the end of the last decade to conduct a groundbreaking research project into the Great Famine. Between 2006-2010 she travelled to nine provinces and gathered over one thousand documents. A selection of these is reproduced with introductory remarks in The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History. For the first time, 12 Ralph A. THAXTON, “How the Great Leap Forward Famine Ended in Rural China: “Administrative Intervention versus Peasant Resistance”, in Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine, ed. Kimberely Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer (Vancouver, 2011), pp. 251-271. 13 Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s (Stanford, 2007), p. 284. 14 Ibid, p. 284. Reviews / Comptes rendus 255 non-Chinese readers and those without access to Communist Party archives are able to examine 121 official documents. These are an important resource, as they not only provide evidence of widespread cannibalism, political repression, violence and starvation, but also demonstrate the extent to which the government was aware of such problems. Zhou collates her documentary collection by theme and chronology. The documents work best when they are revealing the everyday experience of villagers attempting to survive. We learn how the famine led to the disintegration of communities and families, and forced individuals to pursue desperate survival strategies. Zhou also describes less well-known aspects of the famine, providing, for example, a fascinating chapter about religious movements that challenged the legitimacy of the Communist Party (pp. 91-113). One of the most illuminating documents describes how women were coerced into working topless during the Great Leap Forward (pp. 39-42). What is particularly arresting about this account is not so much the tyrannical nature of local cadres, for which abundant evidence is provided throughout Zhou’s collection, but rather how those inflicting sexual humiliation seem to have believed, at least partially, that their actions were ideologically justified. Forcing women to remove their clothes, it was reasoned, emancipated them from the oppression of feudal tradition. Even the most skillful historian would struggle to describe the terrifying logic of the People’s Communes in a more evocative manner. In such moments, Zhou reveals the power that primary evidence has in illuminating the darkest and most inexplicable moments of history. Zhou collaborates closely with historian Frank Dikötter, who has provided several of the archival documents cited in his own study of the famine for this collection.15 Zhou’s analysis follows her collaborator closely, and she repeats several of his more controversial claims without reference to subsequent critiques.16 At one point she reproduces a document used by Dikötter as proof of Mao’s personal culpability for the famine (pp. 23-25). It is claimed that Mao ordered the continuation of grain procurement policies in full knowledge that they were causing starvation. The picture that emerges from the document itself, however, is far more ambiguous. Certainly Mao did assert that it was “better to let half the people starve so that the other half can eat their fill” (p. 25), yet it is far from clear whether he was speaking literally. In allowing this document to be published, Dikötter has demonstrated the extent to which he relies upon somewhat ambiguous evidence to bolster his polemical claims. 15 Frank DIKÖTTER, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958- 62 (London, 2010). 16 For example, Zhou repeats mortality statistics disputed in Cormac Ó GRÁDA, “Great Leap into Famine: A Review Essay”, Population and Development Review, March 2011, 191-210. 256 Reviews / Comptes rendus On occasions Zhou’s study might have been improved had she interrogated her sources more thoroughly. The reader is confronted with numerous official documents that decry severe systemic problems. Yet there is no reflection upon the fact that this evidence was itself produced by the very political system that it serves to indict. Admittedly, this methodological difficulty confronts any scholar attempting to produce a documentary history of a society in which the dissemination of information is so rigidly controlled. Yet whilst this problem may be inevitable, it should be acknowledged and incorporated into analysis. Whilst Zhou does enjoin readers to “maintain a critical distance” from the sources (p.xiii), there is no significant attempt to explore the partiality of evidence, or to explain how it may have been distorted by the cadres and investigation teams responsible for its production and preservation. Taken in concert, these two studies not only highlight the horror of Maoist misrule, they also demonstrate the staggering extent of official knowledge about the famine. No longer is it possible to make a credible argument that one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes resulted from a failure to disseminate information from the grassroots to policy makers. Thus, whilst these studies may not always offer the most nuanced analysis, they are an excellent resource for historians and students. Perhaps most importantly, they contribute to an ever-expanding dossier of evidence that fundamentally undermines official Communist Party history. Whilst neither study manages to provide irrefutable evidence of Mao’s personal culpability, they both serve as a powerful indictment of the system he helped to create. Historians should now desist from perpetuating the rather sterile debate about Mao’s role, and instead focus upon the areas of the famine that remain less well understood. Yang and Zhou have provided detailed analyses of the official knowledge of the famine, dealing exclusively with Party documents. The voices of ordinary Chinese people remain frustratingly absent. If historians can now integrate the evidence offered by these official documents, with oral history testimony and information gathered from outside the apparatus of the state, then they will begin to reveal the true unknown story of the Great Famine. Christopher Courtney, University of Manchester