HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Despite these harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958 was very favorable, and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labor diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a devastating locust swarm, which was caused when their natural predators were killed en masse as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign.

At the direction of Chairman Mao, sparrows were killed by the peasants, causing a major ecological imbalance in the environment

Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the new innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the state to supply the towns and cities and to export.

This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. During 1958-1960, China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain "face" and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbooks for 1958 to 1962 mention abnormal weather: droughts followed by floods. This includes 30 inches of rain in Hong Kong in five days in June 1959, part of a pattern that hit all of South China. However, all weather data for these Yearbooks came from Chinese government sources.

In 1959 and 1960, the weather was less favorable, and the situation got considerably worse, with many of China's provinces experiencing severe famine. Droughts, floods, and general bad weather caught China completely by surprise. In July of 1959, the Yellow River flooded in East China. According to the Disaster Center^[3], it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated two million people.

The Yellow River, near Xunhua, in Eastern Qinghai. Note the yellowish water caused by loess.

In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of cultivated land, while an estimated 60 percent of northern agricultural land received no rain at all ^[4].

With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much-reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where, as a result of massively inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country.

However, the provinces that had adopted Mao's reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu, and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China's most populous provinces, known in China as "Heaven's Granary" because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute number of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao's reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, reports of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine.

The agricultural policies of the Great Leap Forward and the associated famine would then continue until January 1961, where, at the Ninth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, the restoration of agricultural production through a reversal of the Great Leap policies was begun. Grain exports were stopped, and imports from Canada and Australia helped to reduce the impact of the food shortages, at least in the coastal cities.