344. Chairman Mao: The Great Leap Forward (Ep 5)

20:28Rana Mitter:It's not a formal title of Mao's, but actually there's a very important book by the scholar Judith Shapiro called Mao's War on Nature, which it actually is in this vein. Essentially, one of the things that comes as part of the wider belief in a type of communist science is that nature can be completely controlled by humans. And I would say that this comes in part from this phenomenon of Lysenkoism. In other words, the idea put forward by pseudoscientists really in the Soviet Union under Stalin, that socialism changes the nature of the naturalist world. And therefore, you can basically find ways through kind of socialist force of will to increase crop outcomes or, you know, produce more steel, whatever it might be, because you're doing it the socialist way.

21:15Rana Mitter:Now, in the case of what actually happens in China, let's take agriculture. This means that, for instance, peasants are encouraged, farmers are encouraged to plant seeds much, much closer to each other in rows of, you know, corn or wheat or barley, because under socialism, the seeds will cooperate with each other and grow much more fully, whereas in the capitalist world, they would have competed with each other because that's the nature of capitalism. So there's not much point having them close to each other. You'll be shocked, shocked to hear that this socialist agriculture did not, in fact, lead to a much richer crop, but actually just devastating crop failures because if you plant seeds too close to each other, they won't sprout.

21:57Yeah, I mean, that's not even the worst of what they did. And I think there was the slogan, the Maoist slogan, man must conquer nature. And forests were chopped down because, you know, the wood feeds the furnaces and that helps make the turd steel, as we're delightfully calling it now. And so you're setting yourself up for an absolute catastrophe. The thing, though, that I always remember is his Four Pests campaign and poor old sparrows get it in the neck. Sparrows are not popular with Mao. Yeah, you've got rats, flies, mosquitoes. Why sparrows? Why the poor old sparrows?

22:32Rana Mitter:So as far as we understand it, Mao got into his head that sparrows were bad because they eat seeds which are being sowed in this socialist manner. However, it also turns out, of course, that A, sparrows don't eat that many seeds and B, they also control other pests. So basically, the destruction of the sparrows meant that some of those insects and other pests then multiplied in number. And eventually they had to end up sort of importing hundreds of thousands of sparrows from the Soviet Union. socialist revisionist sparrows coming in from uh khrushchev's uh uh nest to uh deal with the question yeah and what's this business about beating symbols to keep the sparrows airborne so they drop from exhaustion is this all rubbish or basically by stopping them landing so kind of scaring them off so they couldn't land anywhere you know some of them at least eventually kind of just you know they keep on beating their wings they can't find anywhere to land and eventually they die we had a locust uh invasion on the farm here in Delhi once in the middle of Covid if Covid wasn't bad enough oh yes and I fended them off by putting on Maria Callas at volume 10 and it did the job and they landed next door they didn't like Maria Callas yeah I mean the thing about the symbols though and the sparrows is there I mean the eye-watering numbers that go with this it's an estimated 1.1 to 2 billion sparrows fall out of the sky from exhaustion or being killed or poisoned or whatever it is he's up to.

23:54And then you do have these terrible locusts and plagues of insects who eat things. So, I mean, it is fascinating. Let's take a break here now. Join us after the break where we discuss what happens if you don't have, you know, the pest eaters, but you have lots of pests. And you also have this aggressive form of farming that has been born out of some nutter's head, which is going to really, really deplete the possibility of making food.

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26:27Welcome back. Rana, tell us how these policies eventually lead to what some call the greatest famine in human history.

26:36Rana Mitter:The Great Leap Forward is one of the most catastrophic events really in human history. And it's caused by essentially a massive miscalculation which is then exacerbated by, I think, criminal negligence is the only way you can all, criminal unwillingness to face facts. One of my former teaching colleagues gave me a sentence which sounds like the most banal thing, but actually it's really, really to the point. He said, the history of the Great Leap Forward is the history of Chinese accountancy. And that sounds like, oh my gosh, what is that supposed to mean? What he meant, of course, was that the Great Leap forward was supposed to be, on its face, a kind of highly rationalized bureaucratic system of working out what China could produce and then, you know, working upwards so that you would produce, you know, enough food for everyone to eat and crops that could then be exported to increase China's GDP and everything would be great.

27:30Rana Mitter:And that depended, of course, on accurate statistics being kept and passed on. And of course, none of this actually happened. I mean, when you get, First of all, these kind of methods being used that we discussed just before the break in terms of how socialist agriculture could increase crops, but actually ended up destroying many of them. You find that, in fact, the countryside is simply not producing the kind of level of crops that are needed to keep body and soul together, let alone export. But basically, because all the figures are being fiddled by officials who are too terrified to give the real information in case they get arrested or, you know, kind of fired from their jobs, they pass on statistics upwards saying, yes, it's all going great.

28:08Rana Mitter:and we're kind of producing huge amounts of grain and products. And up, you know, in the cities, and then, you know, beyond that to Beijing, the guys at the top are saying, oh, well, this is great. Well, in that case, we can export lots to the Soviet Union. So you have the kind of obscenity of out in the countryside, there isn't enough food for people to eat, while the grain is being seized and exported from the country to bring in money for the state. This is very much a rural phenomenon. And that's significant, because of course, shortly before this, the system which still exists today was started up in China, of a sort of Soviet-style internal passport system.

28:39Rana Mitter:It's called the hukou, or a household registration scheme. And it basically means that you can't just simply wander around wherever you want in China. You have to sort of have internal permission. So people in the cities were no longer really kind of interacting that much with the countryside. They were kind of almost separated off. And while people in the cities, you know, found there was a certain amount of deprivation, the devastation was really out in the countryside, where essentially it turned into mass starvation about 1959, 1960, 61, it became clear in the countryside there simply wasn't enough food to go around.

29:08Rana Mitter:But when the news came through to the top leadership, including Mao, he basically chose to ignore it. He didn't exactly deny it, but he basically said, well, you know, we need to keep going. And I think at one point he said something like, if things are not going so well, then let's just not say anything about it and keep going. And that led to one of the great confrontations of that period, which is the conference. Communist Party top-level conference held at Lushan in 1959, where he was confronted by one of his most important lieutenants, you might say, Peng Ge Huai. Peng Ge Huai had been one of the great generals of World War II, the guy who commanded one of the few major set-piece battles that the communists had fought during World War II, the Battle of the Hundred Regiments in 1940.

29:51Rana Mitter:Kind of grizzled character, military veteran, well-respected. And he had got information, I think not least from his own home area, that people were starving to death. So he confronted Mao at this conference and was purged, promptly purged. Mao made it very clear that he would not permit any talk of this sort. And that, of course, shut down discussion for years. Yeah. And so, I mean, you've got people who dare to say the truth to him being purged. You've got these Sputnik harvests being reported that everything's fine, nothing to see here. And in meantime, just to put some numbers on this, Rana, it's estimated, and tell me if this sounds right to you, 30 to 50 million people die between 1959 and 1961.

30:33I think most responsible scholars,

30:36Rana Mitter:including some from within China itself, have been very, very brave. And, you know, obviously, it's a completely taboo subject even now, have put the number of people who either starve to death or, you know, essentially kind of, you know, population losses in those sorts of numbers, certainly tens of millions of people. And I think very few people, you know, asked honestly about this would dispute that. For obvious reasons, it's still very difficult to get a really accurate number because the Chinese Communist Party is not, you know, fully releasing the archives to let people know exactly what went on.

31:06Rana Mitter:It's worth, if I may, mentioning a couple of things that are well worth bearing in mind if one wants to get a sense of the scale. The book that I think really

31:17Rana Mitter:exemplifies bravery beyond measure, but also the difficulty in dealing with this, is a book called Tombstone by Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist and historian, who painstakingly compiled huge numbers of documents. He had an official position in China, which gave him permission to get into various archives and places where there are documents. But I think people in there didn't know what he was actually doing. And he produced this astonishing book, which of course, you can't get it in China, but it is published elsewhere. And it's also translated into English by, I think, Stacey Mosher. So that's well worth looking at to get an idea of how a Chinese, a dogged Chinese investigative historian has looked at this question.

31:53Rana Mitter:But the one thing that always struck me as extraordinary, but from the point of view of the party, so fortunate in getting away from responsibility is that unlike the Cultural Revolution and unlike many other famines around the world, including in China, again, like the 1942 famine, which is a really big wartime famine, there are no photographs that we know of of people starving during the Great Leap Forward. That's true. I'm sure they must exist somewhere. I'd be staggered if they didn't, but I assume that they're kind of locked up very, very deep in some archive somewhere. Purged. And you will not find pictures of starving peasants in the streets or the streets in the villages.

32:28Sort of the bloated stomachs and ribcages that you know even from fairly recently. You have those images see it into your mind. Very much so.

32:38Rana Mitter:And the lack of visual content is one of the things that helps shape or fails to shape our understanding of these things in the 21st century, I do think. Yung Chang has stories of cannibalism and 35 % of some communes dying. Does that sound credible? Sure. Yeah, I mean, again, cannibalism is a story. I mean, you hear that through much of Chinese history. It's something that, you know, when there are famines in general, it's always reported that, you know, the people are reduced to each other and that, you know, the young people die and the old people die and so forth. I mean, 35 % sounds perfectly plausible.

33:18It's very high, isn't it? Yeah.

33:20Rana Mitter:Certainly, we do know from the records that we have. But again, you know, I say do look at Tombstone by Yang Qishong. extraordinary accounts of the horror that were visited on huge numbers of people in the countryside in China during the Great Leap Forward. Rana, one of the issues which is, I think, never really kind of mentioned much in China, but which is still an absolutely massive thing here in India, where I'm speaking from... Hinduchini Pai Pai. Sino-Indian War. Particularly, remember today, under the Modi government, This is regarded as one of the great failures of Nehru's sort of understanding of the world.

33:59Rana Mitter:Well, yes. And I've on various occasions, I think, you know, talked to various kind of now quite senior and grizzled members of the Indian military who have usually have a peg of old monk or something. We'll tell you tales of what it was being a young officer in the Himalayas, you know, facing the Reds on the other side. I think the Sino-Indian War of 1962, it is a very interesting and extraordinary event for a couple of reasons. One is that, of course, China and India launch into war, you know, what is basically the end of the Great Leap Forward. This is a time of huge internal trauma for China.

34:29Rana Mitter:So the idea that they would also decide essentially to get involved in a border war at this time is, I think, an extraordinary choice in some ways. More than that, I think one of the other things that's really interesting is the disparity of memory. As you say, 1962, even now, I mean, you know, it's only 70 years ago. It's a very long time ago. It's still remembered as a huge trauma for the Indian military, you know, a terrible inevitable event, defeat in a sense, which must be understood and analyzed and never be allowed to happen again. And events such as the Galwan Clash of 2020. When Indian troops get beaten to death by Chinese men with barbara staves.

35:05Rana Mitter:Yes, they're extraordinarily brutal, the battle between the two, and literally hand-to-hand combat in a way that most much the world thought in the era of drones and so forth would never happen again. So it matters a great deal in Indian military thinking. China talks about the Sino-India War of 1962 very little. You know, there are researchers who do work on it, but it's really a minority pursuit. And I would say that one of the things that more generally defines the relationship between India and China is that India worries about China a great deal, and China really doesn't think about India all that much.

35:39It doesn't take India at all seriously, does it? There's an extraordinary sort of feeling of dismissal whenever you talk to Chinese about India.

35:45Rana Mitter:It's just that, yeah, you know, the Chinese are really obsessed with the United States, as the United States indeed is obsessed with China. And other actors such as Japan also loom quite heavily in their minds. And India just doesn't fit into that kind of category. I mean, there are things that the Chinese and the middle class tend to think about India, which include, you know, the idea that actually it's a place where you might go for some spiritual renewal and so forth. I don't know what India thinks about this, but, you know, there's almost a kind of rather classic sort of Herman Hesse type view about some of this sort of thing.

36:17Rana Mitter:But yeah, I think it's not a rivalry of equals in the mind of the Chinese. That bothers Indians so much, let me tell you, because they know it and they hate it. You can hear them over your pegs of old monk grumbling about it that they're not taken as seriously as they should. Just to cast our minds back to what the world is doing in 1962 when this Sino-Indian war that no Chinese really care about very much was going on. This is in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So you've got Chinese forces launching coordinated attacks across this disputed Himalayan border with India. Is it deliberately brilliant timing, Rana?

36:54Is it timed because everyone's looking at Cuba, everyone's turning their attention somewhere else? So he thinks, in a brilliant way, let's do it now.

37:02Rana Mitter:Good question. I couldn't give you a definitive answer on that, not least because foreign ministry archives in China are not necessarily very accessible. There was a while actually they began to release them in the early 2000s and they suddenly sort of shut everything down about 2013 and they'd never been opened again. But again, one thing I certainly can say is that Mao and those around him kept a very close and beady eye on what was happening in the wider world. And they certainly also regarded essentially more as, to use a good Marxist kind of jargon, adventurist views of the world as being a good thing.

37:36Rana Mitter:In other words, things like détente or trying to kind of calm down tensions. This was not Mao's preference at all. Not his vibe. Not his vibe, indeed so. So I'd say that the idea that there might be a confrontation between the US and the Soviets in Cuba or elsewhere, he would have taken that not only with equanimity, I think more than that, I think he would have taken it with enthusiasm actually. Oh, right. Interesting. And this is, I mean, we should say this has deep British colonial roots because it is the uncertainty of the status of Tibet that kind of fires these problems off between India and China.

38:11Rana Mitter:Yes. I mean, even today, there is huge disputes in the large parts of the province of Northeastern India called Arunachal Pradesh is claimed by China as being their territory. I Aaron Nutschilis can't get into China because they don't have a Chinese stamp on their passport. I've known Aaron Nutschil writer friends who tried to get to China and they get turned back at the border. Sounds about right. So, you know, this is an issue that China certainly isn't letting go, nor is India, to be fair. But at the same time, it's clearly one of the things that continues to be a big running saw and sometimes be a deadly one.

38:51Rana Mitter:But it never sits at the absolute sort of top level of Chinese consideration, partly because you mentioned Tibet and the conquest of, you know, essentially what we'd regard as the main part of the Tibetan plateau happens in 1950. And China has kept it completely and massively under control since then. And this is the moment that the Dalai Lama escapes and arrives and moves to India. He stays around for a while and then disappears, I think, in 1959 to head to Dharamsala in India, of course. So at that point, essentially China then as now has very significant control over much of the Tibetan plateau, some of which is also in the provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan.

39:33Rana Mitter:And therefore, the level of sort of uncertainty existed during the nationalist period on that western border doesn't exist in quite this way. So the Indian border is more about sort of trying to push for as much territory as possible. it's not because I think the Chinese really think that there's some fundamental security issue that needs to be solved there. Yeah but so you know Chinese forces do push in quite substantially into Indian territory and you have a huge number of casualties but then China declares a unilateral ceasefire and I'm trying to understand what's the thinking behind suddenly okay you know we're ceasefire now and why in you know exactly a month after the initial attack do they decide they've had enough.

40:13Rana Mitter:Yes. So I put it, so I couldn't give a definitive reason until the archives are open. I don't think anyone can necessarily, but I could. Have a guess, Rana. Have a guess. Have an educated guess. How about an extrapolation? I think that one of the things that's very notable about the way in which China has dealt with its border disputes is that unlike some countries, Russia, you know, in Ukraine at the moment, to give a very current example, it can be quite ambivalent about how far it wants to push. The main comparison I think of is the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, which is about five weeks long.

40:49Rana Mitter:And again, it's even more brutal in terms of numbers of death than the war with India in 1962. I have very clear memories of watching it on television at school and being very frightened that this was a kind of world war coming, these massive rocket salvos firing off. In that particular case in 1979, essentially it was becoming clear, I think, quite quickly that the Vietnamese were getting the better of the Chinese. And so, Deng Xiaoping, I think very sensibly, decided that he would declare victory and go home and basically said, well, we've won, basically. And then, you know, all the troops withdraw and they go back into China.

41:21Rana Mitter:I know that from behind the scenes that actually this was hugely traumatic for the Chinese army at the time not to be able to declare a genuinely complete victory. I don't think that was quite what was going on on the India front, but I think the sense of, and this might sound ambivalent compared to what I said before, but I think it's worth noting, there are always cautious elements too. Now, could you find figures, I'm going to say people like Zhou Enlai and others, who maybe just think that actually this could be dangerous? You know, the end of the Great Leap Forward is a very perilous time in terms of China's domestic political economy.

41:52Rana Mitter:You know, people are starving to death. They're having to reintroduce kind of limited form of market socialism. This is one of the things Deng Xiaoping does that gets him into trouble in the Cultural Revolution. Do you really want an all-out war with India on the border as well at the same time? I would be very unsurprised to find out there was basically a conversation at top level saying, well, we've shown the Indians that we know how to put a bit of stick about. Let's leave it there. Let's not overextend at this point. Got it. So Rana, you have a cessation in hostilities against India, but what you do find is a ramping up around about the same time of hostilities against his own people.

42:29And these are people that he deems to be rivals or people who can get in the way. And the weapons he chooses against them are, I mean, honestly, children, aren't they? The Chinese youth is sort of launched against them.

42:41Rana Mitter:Yes, there's a whole set of campaigns that happens at exactly this moment that we've just talked about, 1962, because Mao is convinced by this stage that he's being sidelined by the other members of the leadership, because basically he's so powerful, they can't really say, you got the Great Leap Forward horribly wrong. But in practice, that's really what they're doing. They have to reintroduce a sort of limited form of market socialism to, you know, get food moving around the country again. And there is something called the Socialist Education Campaign, which launches, you know, in response to try and remind people that it's important to be kind of faithful to the revolution first.

43:14Rana Mitter:You get also a kind of push to learn from the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, to try and stress military values. And this character, Lei Feng, who is the sort of the rustless screw, as they call him. What is meant by the rustless screw? Well, basically like a sort of screw who you can keep turning a piece of machinery together. He never rusts because he's always working hard. He's a sort of model worker figure. Like Stakhanov in Russia, sort of a similar kind of Stakhanov thing. Yeah, exactly that. Whether he actually existed or not is not entirely clear, but certainly he becomes an archetype at that point.

43:44Rana Mitter:But we have to learn from it. We have to learn from Leifeng. We have to learn from the PLA. And the Little Red Book is of this period, isn't it? Yes, I think the Little Red Book emerges as part of the Learn from the PLA campaign. and is first distributed in China to the army, in fact. I think it sort of spreads out from there. Bearing in mind, this is the kind of rise of Lin Biao, the defense minister, who is beginning to be designated, thought of as potentially male successor at some point. So this is one of the things that emerges that the army and the PLA gets stressed as an institution that has particular standing at this point.

44:21But this is the, I mean, Willie mentioned the Little Red Book, But then, you know, the little red book, in my head at least, is the era of chanting, you know, sort of not thinking for yourself, but reading the same doctrine again and again and again, being able to recite it from memory. It is so Orwellian and nightmarish. Father is close, mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao. Well, exactly. Yeah, I mean, exactly that. I mean, what's the aim then to say, you know what, children of China, we are the ones that matter, not your mum, not your dad. Legitimately, family ties are bourgeois.

44:54We don't want them anymore. Is that what the message is?

44:56Rana Mitter:Yes. So you can look both backwards and forwards on that. In some ways, what you might call ideological capture, the idea that by reading specific things you shape minds, in some ways goes back about 20 years previously, when we mentioned in the previous episode of the podcast, the rectification movements of the 1940s, where getting into the Communist Party meant that you had to be, essentially, pretty much off by hard, 22 key texts, 18 of which were by Mao. So this idea of using texts as a means to control thinking has that flavor to it. Breaking Up Family Links was also very big in the Great Leap Forward.

45:30Rana Mitter:At the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, you get these sort of collective socialist canteens in which kind of household cooking is abandoned to make way of a kind of big collective kitchen. So the idea was that the organization, not the family, would provide your food. The place where, directly inspired by Mao, the breaking up of Family Links would go the furthest was less than a decade later, you know, a few hundred miles away, thousand miles away in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge where family links were completely destroyed in that sense you know nobody was really allowed to acknowledge family connections that was never quite true in China but it wasn't true in China really at that level but the idea that the party should take a kind of superior status compared to the family yeah and also if you think about it go way back to you know one of the first episodes of the podcast with the May 4th movement Mao's writing very early on about how arranged marriages, forced marriages, and Confucian family life in general is this sort of hideously destructive force which is destroying China's society.

46:29Rana Mitter:With that sort of thought in his mind, why wouldn't he get to power and then start to think about how to destroy the traditional Chinese family? Oh, God. I mean, again, the human cost to people who've already been suffering for such a long time. The most precious thing that you have left, you don't have wealth, you don't have the guarantee of having food, but you have your children and you don't even have that anymore. In 1966, Rana, there's something really interesting that happens. There are rumours flying around that Mao is dying. Was he sick at the time? Where did those rumours come from? How true were they?

47:00Rana Mitter:Possibly rival factions. It's always useful. I remember that way back in the days of the Jiangxi Soviet, about 1930, one of the party newspapers published an obituary of Mao, which suggested in those days that someone didn't wish him entirely well. Obviously, it was much more powerful by the 1960s, but it's possible people were sort of muttering, oh, yes, you're not looking very abrupt. And, you know, he was old. He was bloated. He clearly wasn't looking after himself. I already mentioned his dental hygiene left a lot to be desired, and I think that, you know, beyond that, suggests a general lack of personal care.

47:32How old is he? He's sort of early 70s by this point, is he?

47:35Rana Mitter:Yeah, so he was basically born in 1893. so uh if we're talking about say 1966 the beginning of the cultural revolution then at that point he is what 73 years old and it's worth noting in later decades one of the reasons that dung xiao ping you know basically pushed to have people retire by the time they were about 66 66 67 70 was in part because i think of this way in which mao had sort of gone on but certainly at that point he wants to make it very clear that he has no intention of retiring you know from the uh from the front line. And so famously takes a swim in the Yangtze to show that he's still hearty and hale of body.

48:14Rana Mitter:I mean, again, even there, they can't resist sort of overhating the pudding. I can't remember the exact figures, but he probably happened to have. Oh, they said he swam 15 kilometers. That's what they said. In an hour, yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's right. So world record holder, you know, just crazy. Yeah, sort of Mark Spitz of the Yangtze. I mean, practice, of course, he would have no doubt have been sort of born in the right direction by the currents as well. But even so, the wider symbolism of basically going for the dip in the Yangtze. And again, we remind ourselves, this was a very un-Confucian thing to do.

48:43Rana Mitter:Basically, going and kind of vigorously swimming in the river was not what a Confucian gentleman would have done. And so, symbolically, it was very important to continue to say that he would maintain the legacy of that sort of social Darwinist, survival of the fittest type thing that he espoused back in the 1910s, 1920s. Which actually makes it so ironic what happens next. We're going to end here, but look, with this newly invigorated record-breaking swimmer of a Mao at the age of 73 years of age. In the next episode, we're going to talk about the flex that this man who is proving his vitality is going to make.

49:19And it is the cultural revolution. Join us for that. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durrumpur.

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