Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine by Jasper Becker

Author:Jasper Becker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Social Science, Asia, General, China, World, History
ISBN: 9782844050342
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1998-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

An eyewitness from another commune in the same region described much the same situation: ‘The famine lasted from 1962 until 1965. My brothers went around picking up whatever food they could find. Sometimes they found bones, which might have been human, and ground them into a kind of paste, adding barley husks. We did not have tsampa but we ate this instead. We had to work very hard and were very hungry. Many people died at this time.’

As elsewhere in China, the authorities began seizing grain from the Khampas in early 1959. Those caught hoarding grain were sentenced to long prison terms as ‘rightists’. In prison, the majority starved to death. The inmates of one prison were fed a ration of just 11 lbs of grain a month.4 Out of 300 inmates, 160 died. In another prison at Barkham, half of the 1,000 inmates perished.5

Another part of Sichuan, the Aba prefecture, had been detached from Qinghai after 1949. Here, the ‘democratic reforms’ started later and the monasteries were closed only in 1958. The worst year of famine was 1961. One monk recalled in an interview what it was like there:

Everyone opposed what the Han cadres did, so there was a rebellion. Two-thirds of the men were arrested and were sent to labour camps, mostly at Guanxian near Chengdu. About 70 per cent died of hunger because they were fed only three ounces of food a day. A few returned in 1964 and others in 1977. Those who remained at home had to work from early in the morning until night. People were frightened to talk to each other, in case they were called counter-revolutionaries and beaten. Many people were beaten. No one could leave the commune. There was enough food but it was taken away by the Chinese. A few of us fled to the mountains and lived there for years.

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