Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union by Wemheuer Felix

Author:Wemheuer, Felix. [Wemheuer, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The uprisings were also a reaction to the major policy changes by the central and provincial governments. Before the Great Leap Forward, the party treated minority areas as special cases and was aware of the problems that radical social change would cause.65 However, the Great Leap radicalized policies regarding the minorities. With the establishment of the People’s Communes in August 1958, “backward customs” came under attack. Tibetan women in Gansu Province were told that the weight of their elaborate headdresses slowed down work in the fields.66 In 1958, the CCP launched a class struggle in the nomadic areas and mobilized the poor herdsmen against the herd owners. Literally overnight, peasants in the minority areas, who did not have experience with the lower stages of collectivization, were organized into People’s Communes in a “single strike.”67 New multi-ethnic communes broke down the borders of the villages and increased the pressure for assimilation.

During the early Great Leap in June 1958, the provincial government of Qinghai started an over-ambitious campaign to open up wastelands and to turn grasslands into agricultural land. In April 1959, the party committee of the province even set a goal that the prefectures should become self-sufficient with grain, vegetables, and fodder within two years.68 According to the official history, this campaign seriously damaged the grasslands, and conflict between peasants and nomads increased. Grain production on the new land remained very low.69 Until 1958, collectivization had not been implemented in the minority regions in Qinghai, but with the Great Leap land and livestock were collectivized. The policy of settling nomads and uniting agriculture and animal husbandry (nongmu jiehe) led to disastrous results, and a huge number of cattle died. According to official statistics, the number of cattle decreased from 15 million in 1957 to 10.8 million in 1958 and 9.3 million in 1960.70

The meat rations of the nomads decreased, but grain to balance the loss was lacking. According to Li Jianglin, the uprising in Qinghai was linked to hunger. Death by starvation occurred as early as in the first half of 1958 in some areas of the province.71 By the end of the year, the nomadic areas of the province were hit by famine. As with the Soviet treatment of the Kazak famine of 1931, the PLA treated nomads who fled the famine as “bandit rebels” (banfei).72 The conflicts about collectivization also turned into a rebellion against the Han Chinese. As a result of the “democratic reforms,” the number of monasteries was significantly reduced because religious institutions lost their land and monks had to perform labor. According to official numbers, 731 out of 859 monasteries were closed in Qinghai by the end of 1958, and 24,613 out of 54,287 monks and nuns had to join agricultural cooperatives.73 In 1962, the central government readjusted the policy toward the minorities and reviewed the closing or destruction of the monasteries critically. An official report claimed that in Qinghai only 1 percent of the original number of monasteries had been preserved; in Gansu, only 2 percent; in Sichuan, 4 percent; and in Tibet, 6.

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