| Jiao Shuo, I think perhaps your description of the Zai Huang years as the direct result of the Great Leap forward is oversimplifying the issue, especially your stress on the importance of loss of private property and communal kitchens as a reason. Confiscating iron or eating together in halls was a phenomon of the time as much as the starvation was; not the cause of it. The Great Leap forward attributed to the starvation in 2 major ways, 1) Bad planning. The major problem lie in that ppl in charge had no exp in agricultural manufacturing planning. It wouldn't have mattered if farmers had their own land and their own pans; when all that they grew were regulated - and done so in a very bad way. Your inference that ppl were not allowed to work on fields, is perhaps missleading. People worked very hard those years on the fields; but they were planting acres of potatos on land that won't grow potatos, or cabbages on land that is only suitable for potatos - because the party had planned so. 2) Ambitions and Miss reporting. Why was there suddenly countrywide shortage of food? You'd think the government would see it coming, if it was just bad planning. The central government had set up production goals for local admin to meet, and ppl were very eager at the beginning. Over reporting of yields, either out of personal ambition, fear or pride, from down in the village level caused an very inflated view of production once it got up to Central planners - who raised new goals even higher based on yields that didn't exist. There was such a detachment from reality that the central gov did not realize that ppl were starving until it became a nationwide issue. This said, ppl who say there was no nature disaster is plain wrong; and say so just to support their own views of the Chinese government. There are nature disasters almost every year in China, and in those years it was unfortunately worth. No enough to kill tens of millions of ppl, it was an inability to respond them that caused that, but it was a major factor attributing to the famine. In terms of the worst hit; it wasn't the village folks or the city folks. Villages were close enough to nature to barely live off wild things - roots and tree bark, and the gov. made sure that its major cities got its supplies, no matter how much it had to squeeze elsewhere. It was the towns, and small size cities that faired the worst. |
The Scar in People's Heart