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China's Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961: A Survey and Comparison to Soviet Famines

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Abstract

China's Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–1961 ended as a catastrophe as widespread famine claimed millions of human lives. This paper reviews the literature on this historical crisis. The collapse of grain production was primarily attributable to failures in central planning that diverted agricultural resources to industry and to malnutrition among peasants, which lowered their productivity. The resulting decline in grain availability and the urban bias in China's food distribution system were the main causes of the famine. This paper also compares China's experience with the Soviet famines of 1931–1933 and 1947.

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Notes

  1. The Chinese government did not publish mortality statistics for the years 1959–1961 for two decades. Isolated, yet important, mortality data were published in 1980 by two Chinese demographers, Zhu (1980) and Liu (1980), who inferred the total famine deaths of 14–16.5 million people in China in the crisis years. A Chinese economist, Sun (1981), provided an estimate of 15 million extra deaths for the Great Leap famine. Parallel to these studies, Western demographic researchers also suggested the occurrence of a large-scale famine (Coale, 1981; Aird, 1982), which was mentioned in popular media as well (eg, Sterba, 1981). Soon after, scholars of China carried out systematic and detailed analysis of the disaster (Bernstein, 1984; Walker, 1984).

  2. See Yang (1996) and the references therein for the analysis of the calamity from the perspective of political science. Becker (1996) presents a historical account of the tragedy based on hundreds of interviews and years of painstaking detective work that uncovered facts and personal experiences related to the famine.

  3. The output figure for 1958 is perhaps most unreliable because it has been revised several times. In 1958, the People's Daily (10 September 1958) forecasted a total grain output of 525 million metric tons for that year, or more than 2.6 times the grain output in 1957 (see Table 1). The ‘actual’ output was estimated to be 375 million metric tons, before it was revised downward to 250 million metric tons in 1959. The last revision of 200 million tons was published in the 1980 Statistical Yearbook of China.

  4. While the total excess mortality of the GLF crisis was the highest among all recorded famines, its excess death rate of less than 20 per thousand is modest compared to other worst famines in history, such as those of 120 per thousand in Ireland in the second half of the 1840s and 60 per thousand during the 1921–1922 famine in the USSR. O'Grada (2007) presents the estimated death tolls of many major historical famines in both relative and absolute terms.

  5. In 1985, the fungus p. infestans made its appearance in the Irish potato crop; potato output fell by half in that year. Potato growers mistakenly believed that the drop in output was temporary, but in fact the productivity of seed potato due to the fungus was permanent. In the second year, there was no significant decline in the planting of seed potato relative to the previous year, yet output fell by 80%. See Mokyr (1983), O'Grada (1989), and Bourke (1993) for additional economic analysis of the Irish famine.

  6. Lin's explanation for the abrupt collapse of Chinese agriculture provoked a heated debate over the nature of incentives within agricultural collectives. The articles that appeared in the 1993 symposium issue of the Journal of Comparative Economics were, in effect, criticisms and comments on Lin's paper. The debate focuses on two critical issues: (a) theoretically, whether the right to exit is necessary for high effort-supply among cooperative members, and (b) historically, whether there was voluntary participation during the collectivisation movement before the GLF movement (see additional evidence on this issue by Kung and Putterman (1997)). Although the symposium did not fully resolve the disputes, there was convergence on a key issue: that the elimination of exit right caused a decline in agricultural productivity during the collectivisation period of 1958–1978.

  7. Riskin (1987) gives a similar estimate of 41 million workers, or 21% of the agricultural labour force, who left farming between 1957 and 1958. Among these workers, approximately 17 million worked in the iron, steel, and other heavy industrial undertakings in the countryside, while close to 16 million migrated into cities, working in state industrial enterprises. See Ashton et al. (1984), Walker (1984), and Bernstein (1984) for additional information on sectoral labour allocation during the GLF, including the corrective policies of sending workers back to their rural homes for reducing urban food demand and increasing agricultural labour inputs.

  8. The national output of pig iron and steel was 11.3 million tons in 1957. It increased dramatically to 21.7, 35.8, and 45.8 million tons in the next 3 years, before it returned to the trend level of 14.7 million tons in 1962. Most of these increases in steel output were produced in China's rural areas.

  9. Anecdotal evidence used by Chang and Wen (1997) suggests that the total waste of food was enormous in some rural areas. For instance, ‘in some rural areas the grain consumed by peasants in a three-month period amounted to what usually sufficed for six months’ (Peng, 1987). ‘In some places, three months' supply of grain was consumed in merely two weeks’ (Yang, 1996). There is also anthropological evidence from Potter and Potter (1990): ‘According to one peasant, everyone “irresponsibly” ate whether they were hungry or not, and in 20 days they had finished almost all rice they had, rice which should have lasted for six months’. While these descriptions could be true as isolated events, they cannot be used as scientific evidence to support the hypothesis that communal dining was a major cause of the famine.

  10. Chang and Wen (1997) provide a quantitative estimate made by a Chinese economist Xue Muqiao that the over-consumption of grain by peasants in 1958 amounted to 17.5 million tons, which was 8.78% of the total domestic production in that year. However, the authors did not explain the method used to derive this estimate.

  11. Since information on the density of party membership is available only for 1956, the data are used for the analysis of the GLF period, with the implicit assumption that the ratio did not change much in the period of several years.

  12. As Lin and Yang (1998) and Kung and Lin (2003) point out, the range of variations in DPM was very narrow, with a low of 0.71 and a high of 3.41%, which raise the question of whether 1%–2% differentials in non-party membership would lead to significant differences in the degree of radicalism. Second, it is not clear whether party or non-party members were more zealous and loyal to the party centre. Third, it is likely that top provincial leaders played a much more influential role than low-level cadres in formulating local GLF policies.

  13. Note that the percentage of rural people in a province measures the percentage of people who did not have legally protected rights to food in that province. An alternative entitlement measure would be the state grain procurement and transfers from rural areas of a province, representing the deprivation of food entitlement of that province. However, the procurement and transfer information was not available to the authors at the time of their research.

  14. Prior to agricultural collectivisation, two other large-scale famines also occurred in the Russian Empire and the USSR in recent history. The 1891–1892 famine resulted in 0.4–0.5 million excess deaths; the death toll in the 1918–1922 famine reached as many as 10–14 million. These two famines, which were primarily attributable to natural calamities, rural revolution, civil wars, and famine-related infectious diseases (Davies and Wheatcroft, 2004, pp. 402–406), are not covered in the subsequent discussion.

  15. See O'Grada (2007) for a survey of the major studies and their findings.

  16. See Davies and Wheatcroft (2004, pp. 432–433) for a summary of the estimates of substantial decline in rural food availability from several independent sources. They also point out a more severe decline in the consumption per head of meat and diary products during the famine years.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Meg Gottemoeller, James Kung, Ryan Monarch, James Wen, and two anonymous referees for making constructive suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful for the financial support from the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE) at Tsinghua University, where I carried out much of the research of this paper while serving as Senior Research Fellow at the CCWE.

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Yang, D. China's Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961: A Survey and Comparison to Soviet Famines. Comp Econ Stud 50, 1–29 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.2008.4

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