There are widespread oral reports, though little official documentation, of human cannibalism being practiced in various forms as a result of the famine. To survive, people had to resort to every possible means, from eating soil and poisons to stealing and killing and even to eating human flesh. Yang Jisheng, a retired Chinese reporter, said “Parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents. And we couldn’t have imagined there was still grain in the warehouses. At the worst time, the government was still exporting grain.” Due to the scale of the famine, some have speculated that the resulting cannibalism could be described as “on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century”.
Causes of the famine
The Great Chinese Famine was caused by a combination of radical agricultural policies, social pressure, economic mismanagement, and natural disasters such as droughts and floods in farming regions.
Great Leap Forward
Main article: Great Leap Forward
The Chinese Communist Party introduced drastic changes in farming policy during the Great Leap Forward.
People’s communes
During the Great Leap Forward, farming was organized into people’s communes and the cultivation of individual plots was forbidden. Previously farmers cultivated plots of land given to them by the government. The Great Leap Forward led to the agricultural economy being increasingly centrally planned. Regional Party leaders were given production quotas for the communes under their control. Their output was then appropriated by the state and distributed at its discretion. In 2008, former deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu and author Yang Jisheng would summarize his perspective of the effect of the production targets as an inability for supply to be redirected to where it was most demanded:
In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, “Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us”. If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.
The degree to which people’s communes lessened or worsened the famine is controversial. Each region dealt with the famine differently, and timelines of the famine are not uniform across China. One argument is that excessive eating took place in the mess halls, and that this directly led to a worsening of the famine. If excessive eating had not taken place, one scholar argued, “the worst of the Great Leap Famine could still have been avoided in mid-1959”. However, dire hunger did not set in to places like Da Fo village until 1960, and the public dining hall participation rate was found not to be a meaningful cause of famine in Anhui and Jiangxi. In Da Fo village, “food output did not decline in reality, but there was an astonishing loss of food availability associated with Maoist state appropriation”.
Agricultural techniques
Along with collectivization, the central government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques that would be based on the ideas of later-discredited Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko.[82] One of these ideas was close planting, whereby the density of seedlings was at first tripled and then doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other. In natural cycles they did fully compete, which actually stunted growth and resulted in lower yields.
Another policy known as “deep plowing” was based on the ideas of Lysenko’s colleague Terentiy Maltsev, who encouraged peasants across China to eschew normal plowing depths of 15–20 centimeters and instead plow deeply into the soil (1 to 2 Chinese feet or 33 to 66 cm). The deep plowing theory stated that the most fertile soil was deep in the earth, and plowing unusually deeply would allow extra-strong root growth. While deep plowing can increase yields in some contexts, the policy is generally considered to have hindered yields in China.
part 1 of the Chinese great famine
https://wohistorynlocalgist.com.ng/part-1-the-great-chinese-famine/
Part2. Death toll The Great Chinese Famine
https://wohistorynlocalgist.com.ng/part2-death-toll-the-great-chinese-famine/
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