This fine collection contains an introduction and eleven essays, three of which have previously been published (two of those in Chinese). The first half of the book focuses broadly on ideological aspects of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, from its launch amid considerable fanfare in May 1958 to its dismantlement by Liu Shaoqui and his followers from mid-1960. There are chapters on the utopian euphoria and idealism that preceded and initially accompanied the Leap (Richard King, Kimberley Manning), on the associated ideology that made hunger a taboo subject (Felix Wemheuer), and on how the Leap radically socialized housing and dining arrangements (Xin Yi, Wang Yanni).
The remaining chapters are mainly about the ensuing famine. Gao Hua describes the widespread resort to substitute foods during the famine, Chen Yixin offers a comparative analysis of the famine in the neighbouring provinces of Anhui and Jiangsi, Jeremy Brown uses Tianjin, a city of 3.5 million people in 1958, as a case-study of the famine in the city, while Ralph Thaxton and Gao Wangling describe peasant resistance during the famine.
The famine's intensity varied considerably across provinces. This has prompted economists and economic historians to apply statistical techniques to province-level data in attempts at accounting for the variation (for a sophisticated example see Kung and Chen's 2011 article “The tragedy of the Nomenklatura; career incentives and political radicalism during China's Great Leap Famine” in American Political Science Review, 105 [1]). A problem with this approach is that the results are only as good as the data, which typically include proxies for the weather and harvest damage and for “institutional” variables such as procurements and political leadership. This prompts Yixin Chen to argue that the famine “is better explained through a detailed study of the stories and data belonging to each province” (p. 221). He accordingly compares the contrasting outcomes in Anhui and Jiangxi provinces. In terms of GDP per head and resource endowments, Jiangxi was admittedly better off than Anhui, but certainly not by enough to explain why the official death rate in Anhui in 1960, the peak year for mortality, was four times that in Jiangxi. In an impressive contribution, Chen focuses on local politics. Anhui was led by a zealot from Hunan whose eagerness to please Beijing led him to divert five million workers from agriculture to irrigation projects, with disastrous consequences for agricultural output. Jiangxi's four leaders, by contrast, had all been born in the province and empathized with its people. This, Chen argues, made all the difference (pp. 212–8).
The role of local agents is a recurring theme in the book. Just as Chen makes the case for the role of province-level politics in Anhui and Jiangxi, Brown explains how in Tianjin municipal and central leaders went to “extraordinary lengths to prevent urban starvation” (p. 247), and Hua notes how “the great majority of cadres shared in the hardship of the masses” (p. 194). Even Thaxton credits local party activists with supporting the peasants. Such responses both depended on and exacerbated the informational gap between the centre and the regions. Hua refers to Beijing's inability to understand the gravity of the problem due to the failure of local agents to report the truth (p. 179), while Thaxton refers to the “deceitful political habits” of regional and district party leaders, and both Wemheuer and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik highlight the defining moment of Xinyang in October 1960 (pp. 8, 37), when Beijing was finally confronted with the reality of mass famine.
Famines have always prompted the hungry to protest and to resist. Here, and in his formidable monograph Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Ralph Thaxton highlights how China's peasants tried to cope by robbing unripe standing crops in the fields (chiqing) in 1959 and 1960, thereby depriving the authorities of much of the grain harvest. Local cadres often turned a blind eye to a practice common during famines. This perfectly rational response was hardly a panacea, however. For one thing, chiqing was at best a seasonal solution to hunger – much like fishing during the Great Irish famine of the 1840s. Second, given that the harvest was poor, “eating nearly all of the wheat crops” risked making a desperate situation worse. Third, the history of famines generally tells us that as conditions worsen, too often “the ability of famished villagers to cooperate even in the worst of times” degenerates into opportunism, intra-peasant conflict, and ultimately lethargy and fatalism.
How did the famine end? How come there was no famine in 1962 or 1963 when, if official data are to be believed, agricultural output was no higher than in 1959–61? Doubts about official harvest data in these years must be part of the answer. So must grain imports; in 1961/62 they represented one-quarter of total wheat supplies. Shifting food entitlements and economic pragmatism mattered too. Thaxton marginalizes the role of the policy reforms introduced by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping but his claim that class struggle in the form of peasant resistance was the determining factor needs further elaboration to be convincing.
Finally, the book does not advance our understanding of the demographic toll. The editors are content with the claim that “some 15 million to 43 million peasants starved to death” (p. 1), while Ralph Thaxton opts for a toll of “at least 30 to 55 million” (p. 260, emphasis added). This is just one sign of how much we still don't know about the Great Leap famine, despite such an excellent collection of essays.
