Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Yang Jisheng has come under fire from those seeking to play down the famine deaths that resulted from Mao Zedong’s policies.
Published: October 16, 2013
HONG KONG — The famine that gripped China from 1958 to 1962 is widely judged to be the deadliest in recorded history, killing 20 to 30 million people or more, and is one of the defining calamities of Mao Zedong’s rule. Ever since, the party has shrouded that disaster in censorship and euphemisms, seeking to maintain an aura of reverence around the founding leader of the Communist state.
But with the approach of celebrations of the 120th anniversary Mao’s birth on Dec. 26, some of his supporters and party polemicists are stepping beyond the longstanding official reticence about the famine to argue for their own, much milder version of the disaster and to assail historians who disagree.
They deny that tens of millions died in the famine — it was at most a few million, some of them say — and they accuse scholars who support higher estimates of fanning anti-party sentiment.
“The big rumor that 30 million people starved to death in the three years of hardship,” said a headline in September in The Global Times, an influential party-run tabloid.
The headline accompanied a commentary by a mathematician, Sun Jingxian, who has won publicity for his claim that at most 2.5 million people died of “nutritional fatalities” during the Great Leap Forward. He argues that bigger estimates are an illusion based on flawed statistics.
Mr. Sun asserts that most of the apparent deaths were a mirage of chaotic statistics: people moved from villages and were presumed dead, because they failed to register in their new homes.
A new book, “Someone Must Finally Speak the Truth,” has become a touchstone for supporters of Mao, who deny that the famine killed tens of millions. The author, Yang Songlin, a retired official, maintains that at most four million “abnormal fatalities” occurred during the famine.
That was indeed a tragedy, he acknowledges, but one for which he mostly blames bad weather, not bad policies. He and other like-minded revisionists accuse rival researchers of inflating the magnitude of the famine to discredit Mao and the party.
“Some people think they have an opportunity, that as long as they can prove that tens of millions of people died in the Great Leap Forward, then the Communist Party, the ruling party, will never be able to clear itself,” Mr. Yang said by telephone from his home in Zhengzhou, a city in central China.
China’s leaders have not publicly commented on the controversy. But Mao’s reputation remains important for a party that continues to stake its claims to power on its revolutionary origins, even as it has cast aside the remnants of his revolutionary policies. And Xi Jinping, the party leader installed in November, has been especially avid in defending that legacy, even though his family suffered more under Mao than did the families of his recent predecessors.
The Great Leap Forward started in 1958, when the party leadership embraced Mao’s ambitions to rapidly industrialize China by mobilizing labor in a fervent campaign and merging farming cooperatives into vast — and, in theory, more productive — people’s communes. The rush to build factories, communes and communal dining halls into models of miraculous Communist plenty began to falter as waste, inefficiency and misplaced fervor dragged down production.
By 1959, food shortages began to grip the countryside, magnified by the amount of grain that peasants were forced to hand over to the state to feed swelling cities, and starvation spread.
Officials who voiced doubts were purged, creating an atmosphere of fearful conformism that ensured the policies continued until mounting catastrophe finally forced Mao to abandon them.
Beginning in the early 1980s, restrictions on studying the famine began to ease. Historians gained limited access to archives, and sets of census and other population data gradually became available, allowing researchers to build a more detailed, albeit still incomplete, understanding of what happened.
