Fifty years after China's Great Leap Forward, reporting on the issue by domestic media is still forbidden, according to a recent report in Hong Kong’s Ming Pao Daily News.
The 1959 Great Leap Forward saw a string of unrealistic policies like “achieving a grain production of 75,000 kg per hectare,” “doubling steel production,” and “surpassing Britain in 10 years and the U.S. in 15 years.” Current U.S. yields for corn hover at around 4,000kg per hectare.
The campaign required everyone in China to become involved in steel-making, forcing farmers to leave their crops.
These policies resulted in a nationwide famine that cost more than 40 million lives, and was explained officially as a “Three-Year Natural Disaster.”
News was blocked after the disaster, according to Ming Pao’s report. Militias were on guard day and night to restrict people from going out begging for food and reporting to higher authorities.
Results of surveys of Chinese in the Xinyang area showed that the majority of the local farmers had forgotten about the incident, according to Ming Pao. Most villages are now decimated due to urban migration.
Mr. Jiang, from Xie County, Shanxi Province, who now teaches in the city, described the misery during the Great Famine: “Many small villages were wiped out where the farmers’ whole family starved to death,” he said. “People ate anything. There were deaths in every family. Dead bodies were everywhere. Finally, people started eating humans, including living ones and relatives.”
When the peasants were so hungry as to snatch cereals from the grain depots, the Communist Party ordered shooting at the crowd to suppress the looting and labeled those killed as “counter-revolutionary elements.” A great number of peasants were starved to death in many provinces including Gansu, Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Guangxi.
Still, the hungry peasants were forced to take part in irrigation work, dam construction, and steel-making. Many dropped to the ground while working and never got up again. At the end, those who survived had no strength to bury the dead. Many villages died out completely as families starved to death one after another.
In central China’s Xinyang Area, Henan Province, there were over one million deaths during a three-month period. The Xinyang incident remains a sensitive topic, and media coverage is banned in China.
Though the Great Famine seems to have left no trace in Xinyang, local farmers say they still unearth human bones.
Read the original Chinese article.
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