China's Past, China's Future by Smil Vaclav;

Author:Smil, Vaclav;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Modern China: famine and its consequences

When it came to power in 1949, the Communist regime inherited just two small fertilizer plants producing annually about 27,000t of ammonium sulfate (CIA 1975; Chang 1977). Intensive recycling of a large variety of organic wastes and cultivation of green manures remained the mainstays of the country’s nitrogen supplies during the first two decades after the establishment of the Communist regime. Historical reconstructions of nitrogen inputs into China’s agriculture show that synthetic fertilizers provided only about 5 per cent of the nutrient during the late 1950s and that the share was still less than a third of the total by 1970. Construction of small, coal-based ammonia plants producing ammonium bicarbonate began in 1958, the year Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward. Ignorant of economic and technical complexities, but obsessed with the idea of making China a great power, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party followed a primitive Stalinist model of development that equated economic modernization with the large output of steel produced in small plants by mass mobilization of the country’s huge population.

The catastrophic consequences of this decision, combined with other fateful blunders in agricultural policy, have been described in the opening section of this chapter: in the three years between 1959 and 1961 some 30 million Chinese died in the greatest famine in human history. More pragmatic policies favored by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping finally put the end to that tragedy. One of their measures was the purchase of five medium-sized ammonia-urea plants from the UK and the Netherlands between 1963 and 1965. By 1965 synthetic fertilizers supplied about 20 per cent of all nitrogen reaching China’s fields. Then this more normal development was cut short, once again, in 1966 with the launching of Mao’s destructive spell of ideological frenzy, political vendettas and localized civil war that became known, most incongruously, as the Cultural Revolution.

In a state of anarchy, China’s population grew without any controls from 660 million people in 1961 to 870 million by 1972. The addition of more than 200 million people in a single decade represented the fastest population growth in China’s long history, and the highest absolute decadal increment ever recorded by any nation (and not to be surpassed by India’s growth during the coming decades). At the same time, industrial and urban expansion and Maoist policies of agricultural mismanagement were shrinking the extent of China’s arable land, and the traditional organic agriculture had reached its production limits set by the availability of recyclable nutrients.

In just two to three years after the end of the great famine average yields of staple crops recovered to the pre-1959 level – but then they began to stagnate. By the end of the 1960s China’s harvests could not keep up even with the basic food needs of the country’s growing population. By 1972 China’s average per capita food supply was below the levels of the early 1950s, the time when the country was emerging from decades of instability and war. As

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