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Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball

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Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball Monthly Review, September 2006 Over the last 25 years the reputation of furnaces” (small‐scale steel furnaces built in Mao Zedong has been seriously undermined by rural areas). ever more extreme estimates of the numbers of Mao admitted that problems had occurred deaths he was supposedly responsible for. In his in this period. However, he blamed the majority lifetime, Mao Zedong was hugely respected for of these difficulties on bad weather and natural the way that his socialist policies improved the disasters. He admitted that there had been welfare of the Chinese people, slashing the level policy errors too, which he took responsibility of poverty and hunger in China and providing for. free health care and education. Mao’s theories Official Chinese sources, released after also gave great inspiration to those fighting Mao’s death, suggest that 16.5 million people imperialism around the world. It is probably this died in the Great Leap Forward. These figures factor that explains a great deal of the hostility were released during an ideological campaign towards him from the Right. This is a tendency by the government of Deng Xiaoping against the that is likely to grow more acute with the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the apparent growth in strength of Maoist Cultural Revolution. However, there seems to movements in India and Nepal in recent years, be no way of independently, authenticating as well as the continuing influence of Maoist these figures due to the great mystery about movements in other parts of the world. how they were gathered and preserved for Most of the attempts to undermine Mao’s twenty years before being released to the reputation centre around the Great Leap general public. American researchers managed Forward that began in 1958. It is this period to increase this figure to around 30 million by that this article is primarily concerned with. The combining the Chinese evidence with peasants had already started farming the land extrapolations of their own from China’s co‐operatively in the 1950s. During the Great censuses in 1953 and 1964. Recently, Jung Leap Forward they joined large communes Chang and Jon Halliday in their book Mao: the consisting of thousands or tens of thousands of Unknown Story reported 70 million killed by people. Large‐scale irrigation schemes were Mao, including 38 million in the Great Leap undertaken to improve agricultural productivity. Forward. Mao’s plan was to massively increase both Western writers on the subject have taken agricultural and industrial production. It is a completely disproportionate view of the argued that these policies led to a famine in the period, mesmerized, as they are, by massive years 1959‐61 (although some believe the death toll figures from dubious sources. They famine began in 1958). A variety of reasons are concentrate only on policy excesses and it is cited for the famine. For example, excessive likely that their views on the damage that these grain procurement by the state or food being did are greatly exaggerated. There has been a wasted due to free distribution in communal failure to understand how some of the policies kitchens. It has also been claimed that peasants developed in the Great Leap Forward actually neglected agriculture to work on the irrigation benefited the Chinese people, once the initial schemes or in the famous “backyard steel disruption was over. U.S. state agencies have provided someone like the demographer Judith Banister, assistance to those with a negative attitude to one of the most prominent advocates of the Maoism (and communism in general) “massive death toll” hypothesis has to admit throughout the post‐war period. For example, the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in the veteran historian of Maoism Roderick 1973‐5 life expectancy in China was higher than MacFarquhar edited The China Quarterly in the in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and many 1960s. This magazine published allegations countries in Latin America1. In 1981 she co‐ about massive famine deaths that have been wrote an article where she described the quoted ever since. It later emerged that this People's Republic of China as a 'super‐achiever' journal received money from a CIA front in terms of mortality reduction, with life organisation, as MacFarquhar admitted in a expectancy increasing by approximately 1.5 recent letter to The London Review of Books. years per calendar year since the start of (Roderick MacFarquhar states that he did not communist rule in 19492. Life expectancy know the money was coming from the CIA increased from 35 in 1949 to 65 in the 1970s while he was editing The China Quarterly.) when Mao’s rule came to an end. 3 Those who have provided qualitative To read many modern commentators on evidence, such as eyewitness accounts cited by Mao’s China4, you would get the impression Jasper Becker in his famous account of the that Mao’s agricultural and industrial policies period Hungry Ghosts, have not provided led to absolute economic disaster. Even more enough accompanying evidence to authenticate restrained commentators, such as the these accounts. Important documentary economist Peter Nolan5 claim that living evidence quoted by Chang and Halliday standards did not rise in China, during the post‐ concerning the Great Leap Forward is presented revolutionary period, until Deng Xiaoping took in a demonstrably misleading way. power. Of course, increases in living standards Evidence from the Deng Xiaoping regime are not the sole reason for increases in life Mao that millions died during the Great Leap expectancy. However, it is absurd to claim that Forward is not reliable. Evidence from peasants life expectancy could have increased so much contradicts the claim that Mao was mainly to during the Mao era with no increase in living blame for the deaths that did occur during the standards. Great Leap Forward period. For example, it is claimed by many who U.S. demographers have tried to use death have studied figures released by Deng Xiaoping rate evidence and other demographic evidence after Mao’s death that per capita grain from official Chinese sources to prove the production did not increase at all during the hypothesis that there was a “massive death toll” Mao period.6 But how is it possible to reconcile in the Great Leap Forward (i.e. a hypothesis that such statistics with the figures on life the “largest famine of all time” or “one of the expectancy that the same authors quote? largest famines of all time” took place during Besides which these figures are contradicted by the Great Leap Forward). However, other figures. Guo Shutian, a Former Director of inconsistencies in the evidence and overall Policy and Law in the Chinese Ministry of doubts about the source of their evidence Agriculture, in the post‐Mao era, gives a very undermine this “massive death toll” hypothesis. different view of China’s overall agricultural performance during the period before Deng’s The More Likely Truth About the Great Leap “reforms.” It is true that he writes that Forward agricultural production decreased in five years The idea that “Mao was responsible for between 1949‐1978 due to “natural calamities genocide” has been used as a springboard to and mistakes in the work.” However he states rubbish everything that the Chinese people that during 1949‐1978 the per hectare yield of achieved during Mao’s rule. However, even land sown with food crops increased by 145.9% and total food production rose 169.6%. During have sold it to his people, even if he had this period China’s population grew by 77.7%. wanted to. On these figures, China’s per capita food In 1960 the conflict between the two production grew from 204 kilograms to 328 nations came to a head. The Soviets had been kilograms in the period in question.7 providing a great deal of assistance for China’s Even according to figures released by the industrialization program. In 1960, all Soviet Deng Xiaoping regime, industrial production technical advisers left the country. They took increased by 11.2% per year from 1952‐1976 with them the blueprints of the various (by 10% a year during the alleged catastrophe industrial plants they had been planning to of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952 industry build. was 36% of gross value of national output in Mao made clear that, from the start, the China. By 1975 industry was 72% and policies of the Great Leap Forward were about agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that China developing a more independent Mao’s supposedly disastrous socialist economic economic policy. China’s alternative to reliance policies paved the way for the rapid (but on the USSR was a program for developing inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic agriculture alongside the development of development of the post‐Mao era.8 industry. In so doing, Mao wanted to use the There is a good argument to suggest that resources that China could muster in the policies of the Great Leap Forward actually abundance‐labour and popular enthusiasm. The did much to sustain China’s overall economic use of these resources would make up for the growth, after an initial period of disruption. At lack of capital and advanced technology. the end of the 1950s, it was clear that China Although problems and reversals occurred was going to have to develop using its own in the Great Leap Forward, it is fair to say that it resources and without being able to use a large had a very important role in the ongoing amount of machinery and technological know‐ development of agriculture.
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