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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OFCHINA
General editors
DENIS TWITCHETT and JOHNK. FAIRBANK
Volume 14
The People's Republic,Part 1:
The Emergence ofRevolutionary China 1949-1965
8The Chinese economy under stress, 1958-1965
by NICHOLAS R. LARDY
THE INCIDENCE OF THE CHINESE FAMINE
Little is known about theincidence of this massive famine, but two hypotheses can be advanced. First,the famine was disproportionately a rural phenomenon. Second, even within ruralareas, deaths were highly concentrated regionally.
Several typesof empirical evidence suggest that the famine was disproportionately rural.First, as shown in Table 5, the decline in grain consumption on average was farmore severe in rural areas. By 1960 rural consumption of cereals had fallen 24percent, while urban consumption had fallen less than 2 percent. In 1961, whenaverage national consumption reached its lowest point, rural consumption hadfallen 52 kilograms or 25 percent, while urban consumption was off only 15kilograms or 8 percent. In absolute terms, consumption of vegetable oils andpork fell by more in urban than in rural areas, but the urban consumption ofthese items remained twice that of rural areas. Moreover, since caloric intakewas derived so overwhelmingly from direct consumption of cereals, there islittle doubt that urban consumers suffered less deprivation than peasants.
Second,Chinese data which divide mortality into "municipal" and"county" components suggest that deaths occurred disproportionatelyin rural areas during the famine years. Even in average or normal times,"county" mortality rates, which include deaths in rural areas as wellas in small towns, were from 30 to 60 percent higher than those inmunicipalities. Data in Table 6 show that in 1960, the year of peak nationalmortality, deaths registered at the county level rose to a level more thantwice as high as the mortality rate recorded in municipalities.
Even thesefigures almost certainly understate the degree to which the differentialbetween urban and rural mortality rates widened during the Great Leap Forward.The county data aggregate mortality in towns, where a large share of thepopulation was eligible for grain distributed through the rationing system, andin the surrounding countryside, where government-supplied grain was generallynot available.
The empiricaldata on consumption, disaggregated into its urban and rural components, and onmortality, disaggregated into its "municipal" and "county"components, are supported as well by other types of evidence showing that thefamine may have been predominantly rural. First, the rare references inpublished Chinese sources to famine invariably refer to famine in the villages(nung-ts'un chi-huang) and omit reference to urban mortality.33Second, the pressure on rural consumption standards is borne out by a sharp declinein animal stocks. Pigs were slaughtered first, since they were raised for foodand the cash income they generated through the sale of pork in rural markets.The number of pigs dropped sharply - by more than 70 million head, or 48percent, between 1957 and 1961.But peasants also slaughtered more than 30percent of their draft animals, a significant loss of farm assets in thepre-tractor era.34 These declines are comparable with the loss ofanimal stocks during the Soviet collectivization campaign and the ensuingfamine crisis.
Third, acuteshortages of food in rural areas led after 1959 to a massive shift ofcultivated area out of cash crops and into cereals. Total economic crop areadeclined by 35 percent between 1959 and 1962, when the share of farm areaallocated to nongrain crops reached its lowest level. The largest share of the declinewas accounted for by a collapse of the area sown to cotton, China's mostimportant nongrain crop.35 The sown area of less important cashcrops declined
by even largerproportions.
Fourth, theextraordinary pressure on rural living standards is suggested by thepersistence through 1962 of starvation levels of food supplies in certain ruralareas. As late as the spring of 1962 the grain consumption of 70 percent of thepopulation in Tunhuang, Yiimen, Chiuch'iian, and Chint'a counties in northwesternKansu was less than one-quarter of a kilogram daily, a level about half what issometimes stated to be the "semi-starvation" standard. Cerealconsumption of half the rural population in Changyeh county, Kansu, was evenlower - 3 ounces per day.36 Examples such as this suggest that eventhough the national data show mortality dropping back to the level of 1957,famine conditions persisted in 1962, particularly in more remote areas.
Finally,shortages of food in rural areas are reflected in an extraordinary increase inrural market prices of available foodstuffs. In the second half of 1959 theCentral Committee of the CCP sanctioned the reopening of rural markets that hadbeen closed at the onset of the commune movement in 1958. Initially thesemarkets were restricted to commodities not subject to unified stateprocurement. But that prohibition was not widely enforced as early as 1960. Asa consequence of the acute shortages, by the second half of 1960 the ruralmarket prices of most agricultural products had shot up to a level two to threetimes the prices paid by the state. But the prices of cereals had soared to tentimes the state fixed price, and in 1961 this gap widened.37 Therural free market price of grain was from 2 to 4 yuan per kilogram, a 1 y to30-fold multiple of the procurement price for all cereals, which averaged .13yuan per kilogram. Pork prices rose
to 10 yuan per kilogramon the market, a 14-fold multiple of the state procurement price.38 Theseprice increases for foodstuffs substantially exceed recorded increases in othercases of severe famine, lending further support to the demographic datadiscussed above.39
Historicallyunprecedented rates of extraction of cereals from the countryside by thegovernment, published references to famine in the villages, the drop in animalstocks, the shifting pattern of cropping, and the sharply higher rural marketprices for food all suggest that the famine was predominantly rural. But evenwithin rural areas, it appears that famine deaths were concentrated in certainregions. That supposition rests on two a priori observations and limited data.First, national cereal output exhibits relatively small year-to-yearfluctuations because national output is produced over widely varying climaticand cropping conditions. But fluctuations are much more substantial if onelooks at regions such as the North China Plain, the
Northwest loess plateau,and even larger if we look at the provincial level. For example, grain outputin Liaoning Province in i960 fell to a trough of 3.1 million metric tons, halfthe level of 1958 and 40 percent below the level of 1957, declinessubstantially greater than the
national average.40
In the 1950sthe central government redistributed substantial quantities of graininterregionally not only to support specialized cropping patterns or provinceswith large urban populations but to alleviate localized food shortages due toflood, drought, or some other natural disaster. Liaoning, for example, becauseit was the most urbanized province, during the 1st FYP annually received about1.66 million metric tons of transferred grain, the largest amount of anyprovince.41 In the GLFthese interregional commodity flows were curtailed. In 1958, for example, theamount of grain moving interprovincially was reduced by 1.5 million metrictons.42
In part thatcurtailment occurred because local self-sufficiency was an integral part of theideology of the commune movement, but it also occurred because extremepolitical mobilization made it difficult for local political leaders to requestfood assistance from the center. Indeed, there are reasonably documented casesin which local political cadres suppressed the flow of information on local foodshortages because it was inconsistent with the "bumper harvests" theyhad reported previously. Because the interregional flows of commodities thatnormally alleviated local food shortages were curtailed, regions with unusualshortfalls in production were less able to rely on transferred grain.
Chinesesources refer to "abnormal deaths" in 1960 in localities in Shantung,Honan, Shansi, Anhwei, and Kiangsu provinces.43 Of these,Anhwei probably was the most severely depopulated. In 1960 the provincial deathrate soared to 68 per thousand, more than 3.5 times the national average. Sincethe birth rate in i960 was 11 per thousand, the population of the province musthave declined by almost 6 percent, or more than 2 million persons, in a singleyear.44 The populationdecline in Anhwei alone would account for fully 20 percent of the officiallyreported decline in national population in 1960. It is noteworthy that theincrease in the death rate in Anhwei in 1960 far surpassed that which occurredin the Indian state of Bengal
during the massivefamine in 1943.45
Second,famine deaths must have been more severe in regions that traditionallyspecialized in nonfood crops. Under normal conditions, peasants in these areasbought grain in local rural markets or relied on grain purchased from thegovernment. At the outset of the GLF, local rural trade was disrupted bywidespread market closures. Even after these markets had reopened, the terms oftrade effectively moved sharply against these peasants. Where grain could bepurchased, its price had increased manyfold while the prices of fiber crops -tobacco, sugarcane, and so forth - that they might be able to sell eitherdirectly to the government or in rural markets increased little or perhaps evenfell. Those dependent on grain sold by the government may have been still worseoff because of the chaotic conditions of the period and an emphasis onself-sufficiency that curtailed government resales.
In eithercase, the ability of producers of nongrain food crops or animal husbandryproducts to trade their output for cereals that normally provided a lessexpensive source of calories was reduced, while producers of fibers and othernonfood crops were also less able to obtain cereals. Similar concentrations ofdeaths among rural nonfood producers are commonly observed in famineconditions. The validity of this supposition for the Chinese famine appears tobe borne out by qualitative evidence. Some peasants from northwest Shantung, atraditional cotton-producing area that was devastated during the Great Leap,survived the early 1960s by traveling to areas south of the Yellow River, wherethey were able to barter their clothing and otherpossessions for grain.46 That phenomenon suggestsa breakdown of government redistribution of available cerealsupplies.
Peasantsunable to travel or living farther from regions with surplus grain fared lesswell. One example is Ku-yuan county in southern Ninghsia, a remote pastoralcounty where rural prosperity in the 1950s was achieved in large measurethrough the sale of hides, meat, and wool. Mortality was so high that thepopulation, 275,000 in 1957, fell in both 1959 and 1960.47 Qualitativeaccounts of adjacent counties within Ku-yuan prefecture suggest starvation waseven more widespread than just in the one county. Famine in animal husbandryareas of the Northwest bears many similarities to the Ethiopian famine of1972-74 in which the hardest hit areas were pastoral regions within Wolloprovince in the northeast, especially in the Afar' and within Harergheprovince. In these cases, the declining price of livestock and livestockproducts relative to the price of grains effectively diminished the ability ofpastoralists to sell animal products to buy grain, which in prefamine times wasthe major source of caloric intake.
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