Read Mao's Great Famine Online
Authors: Frank Dikötter
Mao's Great Famine (53 page)
The two men soon calmed down, and Mao agreed that an economic policy of adjustment should continue.
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But the Chairman was now convinced that he had found his Khrushchev, the servant who had denounced his master Stalin. Liu, he concluded, was obviously the man who would issue a secret speech denouncing all his crimes. Mao was biding his time, but the patient groundwork for launching a Cultural Revolution that would tear the party and the country apart had already begun.
No photographs other than those taken for propaganda purposes are known to exist from the years of the famine
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Chairman Mao pensively overlooks the Yellow River in 1952. A large dam was built in 1958–60 to attempt to tame the river known as ‘China’s Sorrow’, but, as with many dams and dykes all over the country built during the Great Leap Forward, it was so poorly designed that it had to be rebuilt at huge expense.
Mao and Khrushchev at the Kremlin in November 1957. Mao saw himself as the leader of the socialist camp and believed that the Great Leap Forward would allow China to forge ahead and make the transition from socialism to communism, leaving the Soviet Union far behind.
On 25 May 1958 Chairman Mao galvanises the nation by appearing at the Ming Tomb Reservoir to help move earth (the original photo also shows Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, but he was later airbrushed out of the picture).
Building a cofferdam of straw and mud to divert the Yellow River at the Qingtong Gorge in Gansu, December 1958. Forced labour on water conservancy schemes all over the country claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of exhausted villagers already weakened by hunger.
The people of Beijing collect scrap iron in July 1958. In a frenzy to produce more steel, everybody was required to offer pots, pans, tools, even door knobs and window frames to feed the backyard furnaces, which more often than not produced useless lumps of pig iron.
Breaking stones for the backyard furnaces in Baofeng county, Henan, October 1958. To fuel the furnaces, the forests were denuded of trees while many houses in the countryside were stripped of wood.
Carrying fertiliser to the fields in a spirit of competitive emulation, Huaxian county, Henan, April 1959. Attempts to set new agricultural records encouraged a scramble for fertiliser, as every conceivable kind of nutrient was thrown onto the fields, from animal manure to human hair. Everywhere buildings made of mud and straw were torn down to provide fertiliser for the soil, leaving many villagers homeless.
Chairman Mao inspecting an experimental plot with close cropping in the suburbs of Tianjin in August 1958. Close cropping, whereby seeds were sown far more densely than was usual, was seen as a cornerstone of innovative tilling, but the experiment only contributed to a famine of unprecedented proportions.
A bumper harvest of sugar cane in Guangxi province, November 1959. During the Great Leap Forward reports came in from all over the country of new records in cotton, rice, wheat or peanut production, although most of the crops existed on paper only.
On the right, Li Jingquan, leader of Sichuan province where more than 10 million people died prematurely during the famine, shows off a model farm in Pixian county, March 1958.
Chairman Mao on a visit to Wuhan in April 1958, with Hubei provincial leader Wang Renzhong on the right of the photo; Shanghai mayor Ke Qingshi, also a staunch supporter of the Great Leap Forward, appears on the left behind Marxist philosopher Li Da, standing in the middle.