[“The big rumor that 30 million people
starved to death in the three years of hardship,” said a headline in September
in The Global Times, an influential party-run tabloid. It accompanied a
commentary by a mathematician, Sun Jingxian, who has won publicity for his
claim that at most 2.5 million people died of “nutritional fatalities” during
the Great Leap Forward. He argues that bigger estimates are an illusion based
on flawed statistics.]
By Chris Buckley
 |
|
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Yang Jisheng, a historian whose research
has been attacked, called
the denials of widespread famine more than half a century ago a disturbing symptom of present-day political anxieties. |
HONG KONG — The famine that gripped China
from 1958 to 1962 is widely judged to be the deadliest in recorded history,
killing 20 to 30 million people or more, and is one of the defining calamities
of Mao Zedong’s rule. Ever since, the party has shrouded that disaster in
censorship and euphemisms, seeking to maintain an aura of reverence around the
founding leader of the Communist state.
But with the approach of celebrations of
the 120th anniversary Mao’s birth on Dec. 26, some of his supporters and party
polemicists are stepping beyond the longstanding official reticence about the
famine to argue for their own, much milder version of the disaster and to
assail historians who disagree.
They deny that tens of millions died in
the famine — it was at most a few million, some of them say — and they accuse
scholars who support higher estimates of fanning anti-party sentiment.
“The big rumor that 30 million people
starved to death in the three years of hardship,” said a headline in September
in The Global Times, an influential party-run tabloid. It accompanied a
commentary by a mathematician, Sun Jingxian, who has won publicity for his
claim that at most 2.5 million people died of “nutritional fatalities” during
the Great Leap Forward. He argues that bigger estimates are an illusion based
on flawed statistics.
Mr. Sun asserts that most of the apparent
deaths were a mirage of chaotic statistics: people moved from villages and were
presumed dead, because they failed to register in their new homes.
A new book, “Someone Must Finally Speak
the Truth,” has become a touchstone for supporters of Mao, who deny that the
famine killed tens of millions. The author, Yang Songlin, a retired official,
maintains that at most four million “abnormal fatalities” occurred during the
famine. That was indeed a tragedy, he acknowledges, but one for which he mostly
blames bad weather, not bad policies. He and other like-minded revisionists
accuse rival researchers of inflating the magnitude of the famine to discredit
Mao and the party.
“Some people think they have an
opportunity, that as long as they can prove that tens of millions of people
died in the Great Leap Forward, then the Communist Party, the ruling party,
will never be able to clear itself,” Mr. Yang said by telephone from his home
in Zhengzhou, a city in central China.
China’s leaders have not publicly
commented on the controversy. But Mao’s reputation remains important for a
party that continues to stake its claims to power on its revolutionary origins,
even as it has cast aside the remnants of his revolutionary policies. And Xi
Jinping, the party leader installed in November, has been especially avid in
defending that legacy, even though his family suffered more under Mao than did
the families of his recent predecessors.
The Great Leap Forward started in 1958,
when the party leadership embraced Mao’s ambitions to rapidly industrialize
China by mobilizing labor in a fervent campaign and merging farming
cooperatives into vast — and, in theory, more productive — people’s communes.
The rush to build factories, communes and
communal dining halls into models of miraculous Communist plenty began to
falter as waste, inefficiency and misplaced fervor dragged down production.
By 1959, food shortages began to grip the
countryside, magnified by the amount of grain that peasants were forced to hand
over to the state to feed swelling cities, and starvation spread. Officials who
voiced doubts were purged, creating an atmosphere of fearful conformism that
ensured the policies continued until mounting catastrophe finally forced Mao to
abandon them.
Beginning in the early 1980s, restrictions
on studying the famine began to ease. Historians gained limited access to
archives, and sets of census and other population data gradually became
available, allowing researchers to build a more detailed, albeit still
incomplete, understanding of what happened.
Some scholars have concluded that about 17
million people died, while other counts go as high as 45 million, reflecting
varied assumptions about the death rate in normal times as well as other
uncertainties, including how much official statistics undercounted deaths
during the famine years.
“Scholars disagree, but whether their
estimate is somewhat higher or lower, that doesn’t affect the fact that the
Great Leap Forward created a massive disaster,” Lin Yunhui, a retired party
historian at the National Defense University in Beijing who has spent much of
his career studying Mao’s time, said by telephone. “My own estimate is that
there were about 30 million abnormal deaths.”
Few if any mainstream historians place any
credence in the revisionists’ claims, but they express alarm that the party,
which in recent decades has tolerated more open research into the period, seems
to be encouraging a retreat into deceptive orthodoxies.
“I’ve long been maligned and attacked for
my research, but now there are these people who basically deny that there was
ever a mass famine,” Yang Jisheng, 72, a historian and former Xinhua News
Agency journalist in Beijing who has been the main target of the attacks, said
by telephone. He is not related to Yang Songlin.
“Tombstone,” Yang Jisheng’s landmark study
of the Great Leap famine — published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008 and in a
modified, abridged English-language edition in 2012 — is banned in mainland
China but has been read widely there through smuggled and bootlegged copies.
Mr. Yang estimates that 36 million people
died because of brutality and food shortages caused by the Great Leap Forward.
He called the denials of widespread famine more than half a century ago a
disturbing symptom of present-day political anxieties.
“To defend the ruling status of the
Communist Party, they must deny that tens of millions died of starvation,” Mr.
Yang said. “There’s a sense of social crisis in the party leadership, and
protecting its status has become more urgent, and so it’s become even more
necessary to avoid confronting the truth about the past.”
Mr. Xi is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a
colleague of Mao who was purged in 1962 and endured 16 years of imprisonment
and political ignominy.
Mr. Xi’s handling of the past, however, is
driven by political imperatives, not family memories, said Edward Friedman, an
emeritus professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
who was an editor of the English version of Mr. Yang’s book “Tombstone.”
Mr. Xi told officials in January that they
should not belittle or doubt Mao’s achievements. He has repeatedly cited the
collapse of the Soviet Union as a warning of the costs of political laxity.
He approved a directive issued in April
that identified seven main ideological threats to party rule, including
“historical nihilism” — defined as attempts to “negate the legitimacy of the
long-term rule of the Chinese Communist Party” by maligning the party’s record.
“They need their great leader to be pure,”
said Mr. Friedman. “They need to have a vision of the past that’s worth being
nostalgic about.”
