Decades after the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 killed an estimated 36 million people, most Chinese under fifty have never been told it happened. A survivor from one of the worst-affected counties in Anhui province describes what he witnessed, and identifies the four interlocking policies issued by Mao Zedong that transformed a bad harvest into the deadliest man-made famine in recorded history.
My great-uncle walked more than twelve miles to reach the train station. He was trying to flee. The famine had emptied the village of food, and the station was his last chance. But government officials were stationed at every platform, turning back any farmer who tried to board. He turned around and started walking home. He collapsed less than two hundred meters from the station entrance and died there in the road.
He was not unusual. In 1960, bodies lined the roadsides across rural China. Patches of grass grew unusually lush in the fields for years afterward, fed by the bones beneath them.
I survived because I was a middle-school student and received a small daily ration at the dormitory. My classmates and I would eat half our midday corn bun and save the rest to bring home on weekends for our families. Every few days, someone’s relative would arrive at the school gate with news of another death. The student would rush home and return wearing a strip of white mourning cloth around his waist.
I am from a county in Anhui province that was among the hardest hit in the country. Roughly one in four farmers in our commune died. About one in three members of my extended family died. In early 1961, a provincial Party work team dispatched to investigate our commune documented in its report that 14,072 people had perished there, representing 26.9 percent of the population.
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That report existed. The numbers were known. The famine was not an accident of nature or a failure of information. It was the direct result of four specific policies that Mao Zedong personally designed and enforced.
The Party called it natural disaster: the deaths came in six months
The official Communist Party label for this period, the “Three Years of Natural Disasters,” is a fabrication. Meteorological records show no unusual nationwide drought or flood during those years. The conditions in my home county were typical: a poor harvest caused largely by the removal of able-bodied farmworkers to smelt steel in backyard furnaces, under Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign. Even so, the grain that was actually collected should have been sufficient to keep everyone alive, had it not been seized in its entirety by the state.
The deaths did not spread evenly across three years. Most of the killing happened within a single six-month window: from late November 1959, after the autumn harvest was in, to late May 1960, before the spring wheat could be cut. March, April, and May of 1960 were the worst months. In my home county, when local farmers use the phrase “the year sixty,” they mean those months specifically.
Across the country, an estimated 36 million people died, according to the calculations of Anhui-born historian Yang Jisheng, whose landmark book Tombstone documented the famine in exhaustive detail before being banned in mainland China. At the peak of the dying, roughly 160,000 people were starving to death every single day.
The regime’s other explanation, that the Soviet Union was demanding loan repayments and draining China’s grain supply, is equally false. Historical records show that Soviet officials actually offered to lend China grain during this period. Mao Zedong refused.
As Zhao Ziyang, who later served as the Party’s general secretary before being purged for opposing the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, observed: “Our Party never admits its mistakes. When it truly cannot avoid doing so, it finds a scapegoat — Lin Biao, the Gang of Four. When there is no scapegoat available, it blames a natural disaster.”
Fabricated harvest reports triggered impossible grain quotas
The mechanism that set the famine in motion was the Party’s culture of mandatory exaggeration.
Under Mao, local officials who reported large grain harvests were rewarded with promotion and praise. Officials who reported honestly, or reported shortfalls, faced public criticism, demotion, or imprisonment. The pressure to invent ever-larger numbers was structural and relentless.
Mao himself encouraged this. He read the inflated harvest figures printed in the People’s Daily and believed them, or chose to believe them. Qian Xuesen, one of China’s most celebrated scientists and a pioneer of the country’s ballistic missile program, published an article in 1958 arguing that photosynthesis research showed grain yields of 200,000 catties per mu were theoretically achievable. Mao cited the article approvingly. That single piece of scientific-seeming validation helped convince the chairman that the fantastic numbers his subordinates were reporting were plausible.
The consequences cascaded downward. If a commune claimed a harvest of ten times what it actually grew, the state calculated its procurement quota against the fictional figure. The commune then had to hand over grain it did not have. In Xinyang prefecture in Henan province, local officials reported an autumn 1959 harvest of 7.2 billion catties at a regional production conference. The actual harvest was just over 2 billion catties. State procurement agents arrived expecting to collect based on the reported figure. Xinyang prefecture subsequently lost approximately one million people to starvation.
Mao personally set the national grain procurement target for 1959 at 110 billion catties, an impossible figure derived from the fabricated harvest reports flooding into Beijing. Production brigades across the country were stripped of their entire harvest, including the grain designated as seed stock for the following year’s planting.
House-to-house searches seized the last food families had hidden
When procurement drives fell short of their targets, as they inevitably did when the targets were based on fictional harvests, the Party concluded that farmers were hiding grain.
In February 1959, Mao Zedong personally drafted a Central Committee directive launching a campaign called “Anti-Concealment and Anti-Private-Distribution.” The campaign’s mass implementation came in the autumn of 1959, precisely when a post-harvest crackdown on concealment would do the most damage. Production brigade leaders across the country were interrogated, beaten, and in some cases killed to force them to reveal where hidden grain was stored. Search teams went house to house carrying iron rods and spades, probing walls, digging up floors, and confiscating every kernel of food they found.
My family had gleaned the fields after the harvest and collected roughly thirty catties of soybeans and mung beans. We sealed them in a tin box and buried it under firewood in the kitchen floor. The search team found it and took it.
This was a state-organized robbery. The Party called it socialist grain collection.
Communal dining halls gave local cadres the power to let families starve
In 1958, as part of the People’s Commune campaign, Mao ordered the establishment of communal dining halls across rural China. Private cooking was banned. In many areas, officials confiscated household cooking pots to enforce the prohibition. Farmers no longer received individual grain rations. They ate what the canteen provided, in quantities determined entirely by the canteen manager and the brigade leadership.
In the early weeks, the canteens served full meals. Then the rations shrank. By the autumn of 1959, after the state had seized the harvest, the canteens were rationing state “resale grain,” a small allocation returned by the government to nominally cover basic subsistence. The government, having collected the grain on the basis of inflated harvest reports, believed the brigades had additional reserves and allocated the resale ration accordingly. In reality, the brigades had nothing.
By spring 1960, the daily ration in many areas had fallen to around two liang, roughly one hundred grams of food per person. Brigade and village-level officials ate from the same canteen system, and they ate better. A qian is one-tenth of a liang, roughly ten grams. A saying circulated among farmers: “One liang a day, the squad leader stays fat. One qian a day, the canteen manager still eats well.”
In 1960, across the villages I knew, no family with a cadre member starved. In nearly every ordinary farming family, someone died.
An official who disliked a family could instruct the canteen manager to cut off their ration. The family had no recourse and no alternative food source. In my village, the canteen manager ladled soup from the bottom of the pot for families he favored, where the solids had settled, and from the surface for families he did not, where the liquid was nearly clear. Farmers would carry the thin liquid home, skim off whatever small amount of substance had settled to the bottom, add whatever wild greens they could forage, and reboil it. That was dinner for the entire family.
When canteens finally ran out of anything to distribute, they closed. Farmers stripped the fields of grass and bark.
A central government order made fleeing starvation a criminal offense
In all of recorded Chinese history, farmers facing famine had one option of last resort: leave. The right to flee a disaster and beg for food elsewhere was never questioned. Mao abolished it.
On March 11, 1959, the Party’s Central Committee and State Council jointly issued an emergency directive titled “Notice on Preventing the Blind Outflow of Rural Labor.” Based on instructions Mao gave at the Second Zhengzhou Conference, the notice authorized local governments to station personnel at every railway station, bus terminal, and ferry dock to intercept farmers attempting to leave. Those caught were held in detention centers and returned to their home villages.
My great-uncle was one of thousands who encountered those checkpoints. Young people who discovered they could not board trains sometimes climbed onto open coal freight cars instead. One young relative of mine, six or seven years old at the time, escaped by clinging to a coal car with older children. He became separated from his family and was not found again for thirty years.
Others tried to walk, avoiding the checkpoints by staying off main roads. Walking meant not being able to go far, and the famine extended to neighboring counties. My great-uncle managed the twelve miles to the station only to be turned back. He fell two hundred meters from the gate.
For years after 1960, if you walked the roads of rural Anhui, you would sometimes see a patch of grass growing unusually dense beside the path. There was a body underneath.
Farmers had no way to know who had killed them
By the time the dying was at its worst, farmers were physically incapable of resistance. A person subsisting on one hundred grams of food per day cannot walk, much less organize. The commune and brigade structure was controlled by officials who commanded armed militia. The central government had an army and a police force. Farmers had neither weapons nor organization.
Most farmers also did not know who was responsible. They had no access to outside news, no radio, no telephone, no newspaper that would tell them the truth. The Party’s propaganda apparatus told them the hardship was caused by Soviet debt collection and natural disaster. Many believed it. Decades later, elderly survivors in my home area still sometimes repeated the explanation they had been given. They knew they had suffered. They did not know why.
After the famine’s worst effects became impossible to conceal within the Party itself, Mao deflected blame downward. Between 1961 and 1962, at the direction of senior leaders including Liu Shaoqi, who had served as China’s head of state, and Deng Xiaoping, who served as the Party’s general secretary, a wave of county, commune, and brigade officials were removed from their posts or imprisoned. Mao framed this as the removal of “class enemies who had infiltrated the Party.” Popular anger was absorbed, and the people most likely to document what had actually happened were destroyed.
Mao’s fear of accountability drove the Cultural Revolution
At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of 1962, Liu Shaoqi confronted Mao directly, characterizing the disaster as “seven parts human error, three parts natural.” Mao heard that as a personal threat. He drew a direct parallel to how Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had posthumously denounced Joseph Stalin’s crimes, and concluded that Liu and his allies intended to do the same to him.
From that moment, eliminating Liu Shaoqi became Mao’s overriding objective. The Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966 and officially explained as a campaign to purge capitalist influence from the Party, was in substantial part a preemptive strike against the people most likely to hold Mao accountable for the famine. Liu Shaoqi died in detention in 1969, denied medical treatment. The historians, officials, and writers who might have documented the truth were imprisoned, killed, or silenced.
As Liu had told Mao to his face: “The death of so many people will be recorded in history. Cannibalism will be recorded in history.”
Beijing has never acknowledged what happened
In the relative political openness of the 1980s, Chinese scholars and journalists began to document the famine in detail. Yang Jisheng spent years collecting testimony and records for Tombstone, his two-volume account, before publishing it in Hong Kong in 2008. The book remains banned on the mainland.
Since roughly 2012, research into the famine has become effectively prohibited in China. Academic conferences cannot address it. Journalists cannot investigate it. The Communist Party has never issued a formal acknowledgment of the death toll, never offered an apology, and never permitted the famine to appear in school history curricula.
The survivors are aging. The firsthand witnesses are dying.
I am from the generation that watched neighbors starve. I watched classmates come back from home wearing mourning cloth. I watched my family’s hidden food dug up by government search teams. I write this because when our generation is gone, and if the Party has its way, there will be no one left who can say: this happened, it was deliberate, and these were the policies that caused it.
The dead deserve to be counted, the policies that killed them deserve to be named, and the people who designed those policies deserve to be identified by history for what they were.
By Lao Pinnong
The author, writing under the pen name Lao Pinnong (Old Poor Peasant), is a survivor of the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 from a severely affected county in Anhui province. This article is adapted from a longer Chinese-language account he has been developing for more than twenty years, drawing on personal testimony, provincial work-team reports, and central Party documents bearing Mao Zedong’s annotations. The views expressed are the author’s own.
Note: The death toll from the Great Famine remains a subject of scholarly debate. Estimates range from 15 million to 55 million excess deaths. The figure of approximately 36 million cited in this article is derived from the research of Yang Jisheng, whose book Tombstone is considered one of the most comprehensive documentary investigations into the famine to date.
