I’ve mentioned before how China’s startlingly recent experience with deprivation still shapes its people’s political thinking. In Mao's Great Famine, Frank Dikötter explores the catastrophe that often gets crowded out of the world’s recollections of the twentieth century. In sheer scale and horror, China’s famine was in a class of its own, and the details are still only beginning to be told. In Chinese, the vast investigation titled “Tombstone,” by former reporter Yang Jisheng, has been banned on the mainland.) Dikötter, whose book is part of a China-themed review in the magazine this week, talked to us about the project:
You’ve written about race, drugs, and other topics. What led you to the subject of the famine?
I have always been interested in how the best laid plans can go awry, for instance in the war on drugs. Is there a more devastating example of a utopian plan gone horribly wrong than the Great Leap Forward in 1958? Here was a vision of communist paradise that paved the way to the systematic stripping of every freedom—the freedom of trade, of movement, of association, of speech, of religion—and ultimately the mass killing of tens of millions of ordinary people. But most of all I wrote about Mao’s Great Famine because in the years before the Beijing 2008 Olympics the party archives were quietly opening up, offering a real bounty of hitherto unseen party records: I saw an opportunity and I seized it.
How much has the political system fundamentally changed in the years since the famine and how much has it not?
There have always been people who have been impatient with the slow pace of the democratic process and have pointed instead at the efficiency of authoritarian models of governance. As Stalin was starving and executing millions of people there were plenty of voices of admiration in Europe and the United States, from intellectuals to the unemployed, a few even voluntarily emigrating to the Soviet Union during the Great Depression. But the electorate in America can vote the government out of office. In China the opposite is true. The so-called “Beijing model” remains a one-party state, despite all the talk of “openness” and “state-led capitalism”: it continues to maintain tight control of political expression, speech, religion, and assembly. Of course, people are no longer starved or beaten to death in the millions, but the same structural impediments to the building of a civil society are still in place, leading to similar problems—systemic corruption, massive squandering on showcase projects of dubious worth, doctored statistics, an environmental catastrophe and a party fearful of its own people, among others.
And one wonders how some of the survival strategies developed sixty years ago during the famine have actually shaped the country as we know it today. Then, as now, party officials and factory managers learned how to exploit the system and cut corners in order to meet quotas imposed from above, churning out massive quantities of pirated, tainted, or shoddy products without any regard for the consequences on ordinary people. When, a few years ago, I read about hundreds of enslaved children working in brick kilns in Henan, kidnapped, beaten, underfed, and sometimes buried alive with the complicity of the police and local authorities, I really did start wondering about the extent to which the famine is still casting its long and dark shadow over the country.
If power and isolation explains the mistakes at the top, what explains the kind of collective madness that overtook the country?
Even before the Great Leap Forward started, ferocious purges were carried out throughout the ranks of the party. From 1957 to 1962 several million cadres in the countryside were replaced with hard, unscrupulous elements who trimmed their sails to benefit from the radical winds blowing from Beijing. In a moral universe in which the means justified the ends, many of them were prepared to become the Chairman’s willing executioners, casting aside every idea about right and wrong to achieve the ends he envisaged.
On the other hand, the farmers who were herded into giant people’s communes had very few incentives to work. The land belonged to the state. The grain they produced was procured at a price that was often below the cost of production. Their livestock, tools, and utensils were no longer theirs. Often even their homes were confiscated. But the local cadres faced ever greater pressure to fulfill and over-fulfill the plan, having to drive the workforce in one merciless campaign after another. In some places both villagers and cadres became so brutalized that the scope and degree of coercion had to be constantly expanded, resulting in an orgy of violence. People were tied up, beaten, stripped, drowned in ponds, covered in excrement, branded with sizzling tools, mutilated, and buried alive. The most common tool in this arsenal of horror was food, which was used as a weapon: entire groups of people considered to be too old, too weak, or too sick to work were deliberately banned from the canteen and starved to death. As Lenin put it, “He who does not work shall not eat.”
What do you think explains the fact that the Chinese people have, by most appearances, pushed this trauma out of sight?
There is no museum, no monument, no remembrance day to honor the tens of millions of victims of Mao’s holocaust. Official efforts to cover up the past are easy to understand—the current leaders are, after all, the heirs of the regime established by Mao—but what about ordinary people? We should bear in mind that most of the victims lived in the countryside, and to this day farmers are considered to be second-class citizens as a consequence of the household registration system introduced during the Great Leap Forward to keep the famished from flooding the cities. To this day farmers are rarely given a voice, while there is nothing to encourage them to remember the trauma of mass killing and mass starvation. But when they are given an opportunity to speak, as my colleagues who conducted interviews with survivors of the famine discovered, they can be both eloquent and poignant, with extraordinarily precise memories. But all too often they take their memories with them to their graves. I think it is Elie Wiesel who once observed about the nature of memory and trauma that “the executioner always kills twice, the second time through silence.”