From: lix@BUCRSB.BU.EDU
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Famine during late 1959 to mid 1963 -- (2)
Date: 20 Aug 92 04:40:15 GMT

The famine was graduately felt in the late 1959. At that time, I was in
the 3rd (last) year in my junior high school, ChengDu.

Before that time, we had a period of "communism" -- that means we could
eat as much rice as we could in dining hall. However, school later decided
that poridge should be better for us to digest.

Later, it was suggested that chlorella contains huge amount of protein
and to answer the Party's call, one of the excercise-fields of our
school was dug into a large pool, we all took part in the work. At the
same time, a Biology teacher started the experiment to cultivate chlorella.

The culture got greener and greener. Everybody was excited to watch this
on a table outside of the dining hall. Finally, few small fishes were put
into the culture as the last step of the experiment. The fishes all died
soon. This was explained as the chlorella was so dillicious and fish could
not help eatting too much. The experiment was a complete success.

So we started to cultivate chlorella in that pool. However, when students
saw the fertizer was our own output from the toilet (CeiSuo), our excitement
demilished rather fast. The culture got greener and greener. When it was
suggested that to get the culture directly into our poridge, there were
some objection from teachers and students. Finally, it was decided that
the dried chlorella powder should be extracted from the culture and then
put into our poridge.

But it happened that dry chlorella powder never appeared. And our poridge
got thinner and thinner.

A new movement to make "artificial meat" was called. Teachers and students
were all required to find some plants which can be used for this purpose.
I remembered the best was root of plantain. There was a city-wide competition
of artificial meat for all schools.

At that time, talking about famine was a taboo. I incidentally found a book
in a store of used-books, it was published in 30's, titled "How to survive
a famine". I found it interesting and wrote down some crazy techniques to
survive -- the only thing I could recall now was to put 100 grains of
sesames into a pot of boiling water. By drinking a pot of such water
everyday, one can survive for 100 days. I am sure no cannibalism mentioned
in that book:-)  The trouble came because some good students reported my
story to teacher. Then teacher asked me why I wrote down this and told it
to classmates and whether I implied anything. The investigation was not
very serious though, maybe because I was only twelve. I later learned
that more than 3 millions of people were classified as "Right-tendecy
opportunists" at that time if they dared to imply that famine is coming. 

Because there was no famine officially, but everybody was hungry, some
cover-up effort was made by cadres -- I don't know the scale though.
"Double streaming rice" may be widely spreaded, I learnd in Chengdu at
that time, and heard from Cantonese later. The head of our dinning hall
was blamed to be responsible to students' complaints about hunger and
was put into jail. He was an easy target because he was a former captain
in KMT army. I don't know whether such cases happened in other places.

The criticism to "Right-tendecy opportunists" was relatively mild in
Chengdu. I saw no beating. But I later learnd there was large scale of
beating in HongYa county at that time. The harvest was bad, but the
agriculture tax increased. So cadres at levels from distrct down to
production team were under tremendous pressure. If a cadre could not
complete the quota of his district, he would be beaten by other candres
in the county's meeting and possibly classified as "Right-tendecy oppor-
tunists". Under such pressure, the beating was more and more severe
down to village's level. I learn this directly from several who were
beaten. I only know one case of beaten to death though. It was in the
village I mentioned in the last installment. A young kid of 16, saw
cadres eating rice in the dinning hall after the dinner for farmers
officially ended. He rushed in and grasped a handful of rice and ran out.
But he was caught up, and beaten hanging on a branch. After beating, he was
still alive, but cadres did not allow his mother to release him from
the branch for a few hours. Also no drink was allowed even his mother
cried and begged them. The boy died after he was finally released. I
knew these details because his three brothers, who were all serving in
the PLA at that time and later retired, wanted to sue the cadre who was
in charge in the beating and they asked me to write some documents. The case
was not successful, because they could not prove it was an intentional
murdering, while according to the policy, common beating at that time was
only mistakes in working, not a criminal case.