Mao's Great Famine (25 page)

Few factories provided sufficient heating: one of the four enterprises inspected had none in the bitterly cold winter of 1958–9. Workers would resort to burning coal balls in small stoves, which resulted in several deaths from coal-gas poisoning. Influenza was common. Rubbish accumulated everywhere; theft was widespread. Bullying was rife, in particular in the case of new arrivals. In the Liulihe Cement Plant, separately inspected by the Federation of Trade Unions in March 1959, three canteens designed for a total of a thousand people had to provide for over 5,700 workers. Older workers were simply pushed aside by young men eager to jump the queue, many never eating anything but cold food.
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A year later a similar investigation noted few changes, adding that ‘hooliganism’ – a criminal offence taken from the Soviet penal code and covering a wide range of acts such as foul language, destruction of property and illegal sexual behaviour – was common in dormitories. Workers used power and influence to upgrade from one bed to another, finding space for friends and family despite overcrowding.
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By 1961 up to half of the workforce in Beijing suffered from famine oedema.
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Industrial diseases were common, some 40,000 workers having been exposed to silicon dust. A report written by the city’s People’s Congress estimated that one in ten workers suffered from a chronic disease.
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The real situation was probably much worse.

Many new factories opened during the Great Leap Forward were described as ‘run by the people’ rather than ‘run by the state’. They fared no better. Most were jerry-built affairs, quickly set up in buildings confiscated from the public and often inadequate for industrial production. One chemical workshop in Nanjing, put together in a residential dwelling, had a bamboo roof and paint peeling from mud walls. It employed some 275 workers. Radioactive waste permeated nooks and crannies, accumulated on the floor of the common room or lay in open vats, from where it was spread by wind and rain. Workers suffered from throat and nose irritations, as the protective equipment they were meant to wear was not used properly. The masks and gloves were often turned inside out, and were carried to the dormitories without thorough cleansing. Of the seventy-seven female workers medically inspected, eight were pregnant or breast feeding, although they were in contact with radioactive material for several hours daily. No showers were taken in the winter.
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This was not an isolated example. In the twenty-eight factories ‘run by the people’ in the Gulou district, the old centre of town where drums used to mark the night watches, rubbish was found everywhere. Ventilation was non-existent in the smaller concerns. Many of the workers were women who had joined during the Great Leap Forward. Most had no work experience and were given very little protective equipment, some only donning straw hats. Exposure to chemical components and silicon dust commonly caused red eyes, headaches, itches and rashes. Some of the women had the cartilage separating their nostrils eaten away by constant inhalation of chemicals. Heatstroke, with temperatures near the furnaces ranging from 38 to 46 degrees Celsius even in the middle of the winter, was a frequent occurrence.
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In a health check carried out on 450 women working in a factory producing electron tubes in Nanjing, more than a third suffered from lack of menstrual periods, a symptom of malnutrition. In the Nanjing Chemical Plant a quarter had tuberculosis, while one in two suffered from low blood pressure. Half had worms.
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However abysmal their living conditions, workers were better off than the farmers who produced the food they ate. But few could afford to support their families or remit money to the village many had left behind. Their salaries were eroded by inflation and depleted by food purchases, necessary to complement the meagre rations they were given in the canteen. In the Shijiazhuang Iron and Steel Company, workers spent three-quarters of their salaries on food.
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In Nanjing many workers had to borrow money, incurring debts ranging from 30 to 200 yuan. Given the paltry salaries that most workers earned, these were crippling liabilities. A Grade Three worker made 43 yuan a month, although the food alone for a family of five cost 46 yuan. No savings were made in the canteen, where the fare was often poor and expensive.
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But few people ever managed to rise to a Grade Three. The majority of salaries ranged from 12.7 to 22 yuan a month.
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In the more deprived factories ‘run by the people’ over a third of the workforce were paid less than 10 yuan a month. Many had to borrow money or pawn the few personal items they had left, selling spare clothing during the summer only to shiver through the winter.
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And then came the medical fees, for which workers often had to pay. A close look at one chemical plant in Beijing in 1960 showed that hundreds of workers were in debt as a result of medical treatment. Chong Qingtian looked after his sick wife but owed some 1,700 yuan by the time she died. He was taken to court and was required to pay 20 yuan each month, leaving him with just over 40 yuan to live on. He was an excellent worker, but many were in a less enviable position, ending up being ruined by the medical fees incurred to treat illnesses caused by appalling working conditions.
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When all the problems inherent in the planned economy were taken into account – uncontrolled capital spending, enormous wastage, defective products, transportation bottlenecks, woeful labour discipline – the performance of most factories was dismal. The actual costs were difficult to calculate in the financial morass created by central planning. Not only did accountants cook the books, but sometimes they did not even know how to handle the sums. In Nanjing some forty large production units had a total of only fourteen accountants, of whom a mere six were able to keep track of the money. Many factories did not even maintain a log for outgoings and incomings, and nobody had the faintest idea of the costs incurred.
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But some approximations indicate the extent of the damage, as the example of steel, which is basically iron reinforced with carbon and hardening metals, shows. In Hunan 2.2 tonnes of iron were used to produce a tonne of steel, meaning enormous waste. The cost of making a tonne of steel was 1,226 yuan, which had to be sold at a state-mandated price of 250 yuan – or a loss of about 1,000 yuan per tonne. In 1959 the province lost about 4 million yuan each month on steel.
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Better prepared to make steel in a cost-effective way were the technologically advanced mills and furnaces of Shijiazhuang. Founded in 1957, Shijiazhuang Iron and Steel made a profit before the Great Leap Forward, but soaring costs soon sent it plunging into the red. In 1958 a tonne of steel cost 112 yuan, turning a profit for the plant of some 16 million yuan. In 1959 the cost per tonne went up to 154 yuan, pushing the plant into a deficit of 23 million yuan, followed in 1960 by costs of 172 yuan per tonne and losses in excess of 40 million yuan. By that time the plant relied on a variety of poor iron ores coming from mines as far away as Hainan Island.
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As the losses started piling up, output collapsed. After several years of breakneck growth, the economy moved into a deep slump in 1961. The supply of coal – the fuel of modern industry – dried up. In the coal mines the equipment had been so badly treated during the Great Leap Forward that most of it was defective. New machinery often did not last longer than six months on account of the low-grade brittle steel used in its production. The miners themselves were leaving in droves, disgusted at the soaring cost of food and housing, fed up with the shortages of such basic items as soap, uniforms and rubber shoes.
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And even if the coal was hauled out of the mines, fuel shortages consigned much of it to pile up unused. The four big coal mines in Guangdong province produced some 1.7 million tonnes of coal in 1959 but managed to transport less than a million.
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In Gansu the radical leadership of Zhang Zhongliang made sure that coal production soared from 1.5 million tonnes in 1958 to 7.3 million tonnes in 1960, at considerable human cost, but after the petrol ran out some 2 million tonnes were abandoned in the mines.
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As coal production plummeted, factories around the country came to a standstill. In Shanghai in December 1960 the China Machinery Plant worked at a third of its capacity because of a lack of electricity. The Number One Cotton Mill had 2,000 workers idle all day long.
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In the first half of 1961 the mandated amount of coal delivered to Shanghai was decreased by 15 per cent, but a third of that reduced amount was never actually delivered. Close to half of all the iron and timber needed to feed the city’s heavy industry was missing as well.
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Because it was an industrial centre of strategic importance, Shanghai was given the highest priority by the planners. The situation was worse elsewhere, as the shortcomings of the economy spiralled out of control. In Shaoguan, the heavy-industry city of Guangdong, a survey of thirty-two state enterprises in the summer of 1961 showed that production had nosedived, with soap down by 52 per cent on the previous year, bricks by 53 per cent, pig iron by 80 per cent, matches by 36 per cent, leather shoes by 65 per cent. In the shoe factory each worker produced one pair a day where three had been made before the Great Leap Forward.
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Table 9 shows what happened in the whole of Hunan province. These figures refer only to output, which more than doubled from 1957 to 1960, only to be halved again in the following two years. Had the cost of this obsession with quantity over quality been calculated, it would have pointed to a disaster of gargantuan proportions, inversely commensurate with the ambitions of the master plan. But no factories went bankrupt: that was a capitalist phenomenon associated with the boom-and-bust cycles that the planned economy was designed to avoid.

19

Trade

Many goods never reached the shops. The Bank of China calculated that some 300 million yuan was missing in Hunan in 1960 as a result of fake receipts, goods lost en route, sold on credit without permission or simply misappropriated. That was just in one province. At a national level the State Council estimated that some 7 billion yuan in funds was held that year by state factories instead of contributing to the circulation of goods.
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At every level of the distribution network, corruption and mismanagement took their share, nibbling away at the supply of goods that the plan had allocated to the people.

When goods actually managed to leave the workshop floor, their first call was in a depot, where special storage companies accredited by the state sorted them according to their final destinations. In the Storage and Transportation Company in Shanghai, hundreds of objects worth well over 100,000 yuan – telephones, refrigerators, medical equipment, cranes – accumulated in boxes because of sloppy paperwork, incorrect accounts and illegible inventories. A hundred vats of shrimp paste rotted outside in the rain for a month, the documents having gone astray and the company having forgotten all about them. But, above all, goods vanished because the profit motive never quite disappeared: what was ‘lost’ could be traded privately on the black market.
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Then there was the wait for a train or a lorry. China was a poor agrarian country that never had the capacity to send goods and supplies from one end of the realm to the other, and the flow was rapidly dislocated by a crumbling transportation system. As early as the end of 1958 the economy ground to a halt, and mountains of goods were heaped everywhere about stations and ports. Each day some 38,000 freight vehicles were required by the plan, but only 28,000 were available. Having inspected only the loading areas along the coast north of Shanghai, the planners found that a million tonnes of material was waiting for transport.
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Lack of equipment, spare parts and fuel only made the situation worse over the next three years. By 1960 in Tianjin, Beijing, Hankou, Guangzhou and other cities, goods entering the railway stations exceeded those leaving by an amount equivalent to 10,000 tonnes each and every day. Much of this was simply piled up in makeshift storage facilities, which reached a quarter of a million tonnes by mid-October. In Dalian 70,000 tonnes of uncollected freight languished in the station, while hundreds of tonnes of expensive imported rubber had been lying around the port of Qinhuangdao for six months. In the transportation hub of Zhengzhou a ditch six metres deep was dug to dump goods, from cement bags to machinery. Much of it was damaged, a forlorn mound of bags and bundles, crates, barrels and drums.
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In Shanghai, by the summer of 1961, goods estimated to be worth 280 million yuan had accumulated in canteens, dormitories and even on the streets, including 120 million metres of much-needed cotton. Much of the stock simply rotted or rusted away.
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