From Free Life, Issue 28, September 1998
ISSN: 0260 5112

This book is an attempt at a history of what seems to have been, in terms both of the extent of the area afflicted and of the total number of victims, the greatest famine ever. It was an effect of the notorious Mao Zedong Great Leap Forward and so, since that policy was enforced throughout the entire Peoples' Republic of China, this famine, unlike its innumerable predecessors, afflicted the population of every region within that vast territory. This famine occurred within the period 1958-62, but its occurrence and its enormity was first revealed to the outside world during the 1980s, after American demographers had been able to analyse then recently released population statistics. They deduced that at least 30 million people must have starved to death during that period.

Jasper Becker served as Beijing Correspondent of The Guardian between 1985 and 1992, and then did a two year stint as Asian Affairs Analyst for the BBC World Service before taking up his present position as Beijing Bureau Chief for the South China Morning Post. During this period China was effectively closed to foreigners who could not be relied on to report only what the authorities wanted to hear. Most of Mr Becker's evidence is therefore provided by interviews with or letters from survivors nearly all now outside China. It has to be since much of whatever accurate official documentation there ever was must have been destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, and what does remain in the files will certainly not ever be revealed willingly.

The reason for this inevitable weakness in Mr Becker's work is at the same time the reason why it is so important. For, as he says in his concluding paragraph, "In China, Mao's reputation, tarnished though it is, cannot be completely destroyed without calling into question the whole edifice of Communist rule... And yet... if the famine remains a secret, the country will draw no lessons from its past nor learn that in a secretive society could so many have starved to death".

Hungry Ghosts - that title phrase is drawn from a Buddhist tradition - is divided, like Caesar's Gaul, into three parts. Part I 'China: Land of Famine' consists of six chapters. The first two are concerned with famine in the history of China previous to the Communist period. The third deals with the famine produced by Stalin's policy of forced collectivization in the USSR, and the fourth with 'The First Collectivization, 1949-1958', in China. The remaining two - 'False Science, False Promises' and 'Mao ignores the Famine' - are about the Great Leap Forward and the Chinese dictator's refusal to recognize its actual effects.

It seems that Mr Becker's purpose in the second four of these six chapters was first to bring out that Mao's original policies sprang from a determination faithfully to follow the Soviet example. Then, after the revelations at the Twentieth Congress, seeing Khrushchev as a betrayer of the Revolution and refusing to accept his warning of the actual consequences of collectivization, Mao resolved to excel the USSR by almost immediately achieving the long promised abundance of full Communism. Both in this Part I and later it would be have been much easier to learn what Mr Becker has to teach if only he had first formulated a clear plan and had then gone on to explain to the reader what he was doing and why. (He should not, by the way, have asserted that private plots produced most of the food consumed in the USSR or suggested that the scientific achievements of Pavlov were on all fours with those of Lysenko.)

Part II 'The Great Hunger' consists of nine chapters. One offers an overview; six treat the impact of famine in particular areas; and the other two deal with 'Cannibalism' and 'The Anatomy of Hunger'. It is an overwhelming and appalling story and, since this most monstrous of famines was brutally produced and maintained by unlimited and overweening government, it is not surprising that the successors of that particular government are resolved that their subjects shall not become familiar with that story.

Part III 'The Great Lie' is a five chapter miscellany. The first of these, 'Liu Shaoqui Saves the Peasants', tells how in early 1961 he, Deng Xiaoping and some others began to oppose Mao's policy. The consequent power struggle culminated in 1966 with the launching of the Cultural Revolution, which eliminated almost all Mao's opponents. "Liu was arrested, interrogated, tortured and then left to die half-naked and forgotten in a cellar..." The next chapter describes the period of stagnation from the end of the Cultural Revolution until the suppression of the Gang of Four. Of the remaining three chapters one considers the question 'How Many Died?' and another asks, enigmatically, 'How to Record the Annals of a place?' The former refers to a Chinese government document seen by a former Communist Party official now at Princeton, who maintains that it recorded under Mao's rule "80 million died unnatural deaths - most of them in the famine following the Great Leap Forward. The latter discusses evidence of the effect on Chinese people when knowledge of the famine does come their way.

The final chapter, on 'The Western Failure', points morals applying nearer home. For Mr Becker has throughout emphasized that a famine on such an enormous scale would never have occurred had it not been kept secret. With the media in China totally silenced the role of outside observers became of vital importance. Had they alerted the world to what was happening then the famine might have been, if not entirely averted, then at least somewhat relieved and limited.

The leading names on the Roll of Dishonour are those of Felix Greene, the BBC journalist brother of the pro-Communist Catholic author Graham Greene, Edgar Snow, the author of Red Star over China, and the part-Chinese writer Han Suyin, all of whom were able to travel widely in China in 1960; and the fellow-travelling China residents Rewi Alley, Wilfred Burchett and Anna Louise Strong. But there are many others who visited China either a little earlier or a little later whose claims to positions in that Roll are almost equally strong. This list includes: from the UK, Sir Herbert Read and Lord Boyd-Orr; from Cuba, Che Guevara; from Sweden, Gunnar Myrdal; and from France, Francois Mitterand. And as if all this was not enough Becker rounds off his account of 'The Western Failure' by pointing to the catastrophic impact upon some Third World countries - above all Cambodia and Tanzania - of misconceptions about Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Antony Flew