Who China Lost
23rd June 2013
John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, reviews Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker.
The greatest human calamity of our century — greater than the Holocaust, greater than World War Two itself — was the famine that swept China in the “three bad years” 1959-61. At least thirty million died.
For a long time the Chinese authorities and their shills in the West denied that there had been a famine at all. As evidence of the catastrophe began to accumulate they fell back to grudging admissions of “severe shortages” caused by “natural disasters” and “adverse climatic conditions.”
Beginning in the early 1980s, researchers in the West (and a few brave Chinese) began probing into Chinese population statistics. The results of those inquiries are now in, the conclusions incontrovertible. There were no natural disasters. The climate in those years was mild. The famine was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist government, under the inspiration of Mao Tse-tung. The facts have now been set out for a general readership by the British sinologist Jasper Becker (Hungry Ghosts, Free Press, 1997.)
The physical details of the famine — even just the bare statistics — make harrowing reading. Children seem to have suffered especially, not only in the famine itself but in later years, dying from the after-effects of severe malnutrition. In 1957 half of all Chinese who died were under 18; in 1963 half were under 10. These were not the most unfortunate. In the extremity of mass starvation, when rats and insects had long gone and the very bark from the trees had been consumed, peasants resorted to the ghastly custom of yi zi er shi — swap children, then eat. Since no-one could bear to eat his own children, you exchanged yours with a neighbor. Then you ate his, he ate yours.