From: xyang@bcars279.UUCP (Sherry Yang)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: More info on cannibalism and famine in China
Date: 22 Aug 92 16:26:03 GMT
Reply-To: xyang@bnr.ca
Organization: Bell-Northern Research Ltd., Ottawa, Canada

I am reading a book "Wild Swans (three daughters of China)"
written by a Chinese female writer, Jung Chang (she is from
Sichuan, any one know her there? for example lix also from
Sichuan?) in Britain. Needless to say the book is fantastic in 
terms of the true stories from three generations of Chinese 
women (I'll come back to this later in this posting) it also 
mentioned almost every important event (political campaign 
may be more appropriate? ) happened after
1949. I was at the chapter "Capable Women Can Make a meal
without Food (Qiao3 fu4 len2 zuo4 wu2 mi3 chui1)-- Famine" 
last week. I believe what she described in the chapter is
true and quite convincing so that I'd like to share the 
information with other netters.

------------ excerpt start here ------------------
(famine:)

...
In Changdu, the monthly food ration for each adult was reduced
to 19 pounds of rice, a third of an ounce of cooking oil, and
3.5 ounces of meat, when there was any. Scarcely anything else was
available, not even cabbage. Many people were afflicted by edema,
a condition in which fluid accumulates under the skin because of
malnutrition. The patient turns yellow and swells up. The most
popular remedy was eating chlorella, which was supposed to be
rich in protein. Chlorella fed on human urine, so people stopped
going to the toilet and peed into spittoons instead, then dropped the 
chlorella seeds in; they grew into something looking like green
fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out of the
urine, washed, and cooked with rice. They were truly disgusting to 
eat, but did reduce the swelling.
...

These people with edema were mostly peasants. Starvation was much
worse in the countryside because there were no guaranteed rations.
Government policy was to provide food for the cities first, and
commune officials were having to seize grain from the peasants by
force. In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested or
beaten and tortured. Commune officials who were reluctant to take
food from the hungry peasants were themselves dismissed, and some
were physical maltreated. As a result, the peasants who had actually
grown the food died in the millions all over China.
...

In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me 
that he believed that the total number of people who had died in 
Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire 
population of a rich province. An accepted estimate for the death 
toil for the whole country is around thirty million.

...

(cannibalism:)

One day in 1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying's
next-door neighbor in Yiben went missing. A few weeks later the
neighbor saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that
looked like her daughter's. She went up and examined it: it had a mark
which identified it as her daughter's. She reported this to the police. 
It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling 
wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and 
sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple were executed 
and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing 
did go on at the time.

Years later I met an old colleague of my father's, a very kind and
capable man, not given to exaggeration. He told me with great
emotion what he had seen during the famine in one particular commune.
Thirty-five percent of the peasants had died, in an area where the
harvest had been good-although little was collected, since the men 
had been pulled out to produce steel, and the commune canteen had 
wasted a large proportion of what there was. One day a peasant burst 
into his room and threw himself on the floor screaming that he had 
committed a terrible crime and begging to be punished. Eventually it 
came out that he had killed his own baby and eaten it. Hunger had been 
like an uncontrollable force driving him to take up the knife. With 
tears rolling down his cheeks, the official ordered the peasant to be 
arrested. Later he was shot as a warning to baby killers.

...

(causes of the famine:)

...

One official explanation for the famine was that Khrushchev had suddenly
forced China to pay back a large debt it had incurred during
the Korean War in order to come to the aid of North Korea. The
regime played on the experience of much of the population, who had
been landless peasants and could remember being hounded by 
heartless creditors to pay rent or reimburse loans. By identifying
the Soviet Union, Mao also created an external enemy to take
the blame and to rally the population.

Another cause mentioned was "unprecedented natural calamities."
China is a vast country, and bad weather caused food shortages
somewhere every year. No one but the highest leaders had access
to nationwide information about the weather. In fact, given the 
immobility of the population, few knew what happened in
the next region, or even over the next mountain. Many thought then,
and still think today, the the famine was caused by natural disasters. 
I have no full picture, but of all the people I have talked to from 
different parts of China, few knew of natural calamities in their 
regions. They only have stories to tell about deaths from starvation.

....

----------------excerpt ended here--------------------

According to the book and the information posted in the net
I would say that even though cannibalism
did occur during the Famine the scale is very small and
the government did try to condemn it. Obviously, "kill
count-revolutionists " intentionally for food during
that period, as the original posting suggested, is out of 
question. The mass killing of 'black background people' 
(hei1 wu3 lei4) occurred during the Culture Revolution was another
story which has nothing to do with cannibalism. It was the
result of personal revenge or 'class struggle', which did show
the ugly side of Chinese peasants, and call it a massacre would
be more appropriate.

I'd recommend this book to every one who was born later
50s or 60s and does not know much about what happened during
the first 30 years of CCP's control. I liked the most in
her book is besides the simple true fact telling she added 
her own understanding to the lives of various Chinese people 
and what happened to them during those hard times. I think I
learned a lot from the book. There are so many terrible things 
I had viewed them as norms in Chinese people's daily life before.
I consider this as part of the brainwash from CCP as well as 
my own ignorance to the fate of other ordinary Chinese.
Reading the book is like seeing a world from someone else's
eyes, who had very similar experience as mine but 
better understanding, which is really a merit to learn.

BTW, I'd also like to know how is her life in England now.
Can someone from UK tell me something more about her?
From the book she said she went UK in 1978 as a student. She
was graduated from Sichuan University in 1976 majoring
English. Her father was the director of provincial propaganda 
department (sen3 wei3 xuan1 cuang2 bu4 bu4 zhang3) before
the Culture Revolution and died in 1975.  Her name at home 
is: Chang, Er Hong.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china