Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by Yang Jisheng

Author:Yang Jisheng
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

THE HORROR OF CANNIBALISM

Liang Zhiyuan recorded a large number of cases of cannibalism. He found,

The extensiveness of the practice, the number of incidents, and the length of time that it continued is exceptional in human history. Based on the nearly one-million-word journal I kept of my work in the countryside over the course of three years, in which I checked and verified cases as well as recorded cases that I personally witnessed and heard, there was not a single commune where cannibalism was not discovered, and in some production brigades not a single village was untouched by the phenomenon.74

The county government initially imposed harsh penalties on cannibalism, but enforcement relaxed until these “special cases” were largely ignored. The cases were highly confidential, and disclosure could bring fierce attack even during the Cultural Revolution. For that reason, cases such as those described by Liang Zhiyuan remained all but unknown for decades.

The county party committee handled its first “desecration” case in spring 1959, when police at Wobei detained a vagrant cooking the flesh of a dead child. The county public security bureau had no idea how to handle the case, but finally designated it a “desecration of human remains” and formally arrested the perpetrator. The county party committee’s secretary of politics and law decided that the “criminal” was in a state of emaciation and had no political objectives, whereupon he was given two steamed buns and a lecture and then released. The county party committee, however, had the criminal detained and jailed, only to release him again when further inquiries determined a lack of political objectives. Subsequently the head of the Wobei police station was heard repeating a line from a historical drama: “People eat people, dogs eat dogs, rats are so hungry they gnaw on bricks.” During the 1959 campaign against right deviation, he and the secretary of politics and law were struggled, demoted, and transferred.

Cannibalism reached a peak in the spring of 1960. Human flesh was consumed cooked or raw; it was sliced from the bodies of the dead, or the living were killed to obtain it. Some people bought it at the market (already cooked), passed off as pork by vendors. About 40 percent of those who ate human flesh subsequently suffered attacks of diarrhea and died. Others ate human flesh on a regular basis without ill effect, especially if they chose lean meat and mixed it with vegetables, ate smaller amounts spread over several meals, or ate more foods preserved through pickling and salting.

As elsewhere, cannibalism often involved family members. Zhu Li from Zhuzhai Village was the sole survivor of her four-member household. Desperate with hunger, she gnawed the flesh of her dead daughter, falling severely ill afterward. In Zhangzhuang Village, a survivor named Zhang Cuiliang recalled, “In the spring of 1960, a four-member family had been reduced to just the mother and her emaciated daughter. Driven to madness by starvation, the woman killed her daughter and cooked her flesh to eat, after which she became completely deranged and repeatedly cried out her daughter’s name.

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