I was fortunate to be part of an email discussion with Dongping Han of Warren Wilson University.  Donping studied The Great Leap Forward which shaped communism/socialism in China.  The following is posted with permission.

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“I studied the great leap forward in China for many years, after living through the great leap forward myself.

In my village in Shandong, people would say anybody who died in 1959,1960 and 1961 died of starvation, does not matter how old they were.  My village had very little land, less than  one sixth acre per capita in 1959.   There were three years of flooding and drought during these three years.   We did not have enough harvest to sustain ourselves.  But we got relief grain from Shandong Provincial government, from Shanghai, Qingdao’s city.

More importantly, we got a lot of relief grain and dried vegetables from Yunnan Province.  My grandfathers on both my mom and my father died in 1960. They were both over sixty years old.  [Life expectancy was 58 years. – Ed]. But my mom would tell people he died of starvation.  He actually died of a disease.  The public dining hall was open, and people could get three meals a day there. But it does not provide enough, and barely sustained us. I would argue that most people died of some disease. Poor nutrition weakened people’s health, and they became sick and died.  I did not know any of my classmates in primary school who had lost a sibling in my village.

I also studied several Henan villages.  In one big village with two thousand people, I asked people how many people starved during the great leap forward.  People would say one hundred, fifty, all kinds of numbers.   I would gather all the people in the village who were above sixty years of age in 1987, to have a group interview.  I would ask them to tell me collectively who were the people who starved to death.   The most names they were able to come up with were 15, and those people were all over 60 years old, except one.   The exception was a 37 years old man, he had no siblings and no parents, living by himself in the village.  Everybody else tried to eat some green crops while working in the field, but he was too honest to do that.  He just ate what he could get from the public dining hall.   Eventually he fell sick and died.  He may be the only person who could be considered starved to death in that village,  but even he died of a disease.

The Chinese farmers were closest to crops and food in China.   They would cook and eat green corns, sweet potatoes, wheat and soybean while working in the fields.  Everybody did, even village leaders.  They were all hungry, and they all wanted to eat.   They would also eat carrots, cabbage, turnips in the fields.   These crops belonged to the farmers, and they would eat as much as they could.   They would not starve themselves when there were all kinds of foods around them.

After I studied the great leap forward in Shandong, Henan, and Anhui, I would argue that the whole idea of starvation during the Great Leap Forward was fabricated and out of proportion.  The collective ownership of land and crops, and socialist system made it almost impossible for people to starve.  Before 1949, individual landlords owned the land and crops, they would never allow anybody to eat green crops.  But during the great leap forward, everybody owned the land and crops, and they could eat while working in the fields.”

Read Professor Han’s reminiscence, The Unknown Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village. 

Another first-hand account is Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China, by Mobo Gao

Ed Note:  The western thought on the Great Leap Forward is anti-communist and anti-China and ‘Mao killed millions’.

I found it interesting to note the differences of opinion of Mao, and first Stalin and then Khrushchev as to ‘how to do communism or socialism’.   China changed communism as it is a process.  Mao and Khrushchev fought like children.  Stories abound. Mao Zedong purposefully conducted a meeting with Khrushchev in his swimming pool because Khrushchev couldn’t swim and had to wear water wings.   And in turn, Khrushchev offered Mao accommodation during a visit in a peasant house, with bathroom facilities outside.  These may be only legends but are comical nevertheless.

In the late 1950s China and the USSR were heading for a schism. Partly, this was the ideological fall-out that occurred following the death of Stalin. There had been many differences between Stalin and Mao. Among other things, Mao believed that Stalin mistrusted the peasants and over-emphasized the development of heavy industry. However, Mao believed that Khrushchev was using his denunciation of Stalinism as a cover for the progressive ditching of socialist ideology and practice in the USSR.

This very long article goes deeper and I find it quite balanced.  Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?

The work also goes into the Deng period, after Mao, and the author believes Deng skewed the death numbers from the Great Leap Forward for political purpose.

Then, we have the usual suspects of course:

U.S. state agencies have provided assistance to those with a negative attitude to Maoism (and communism in general) throughout the post-war period. For example, the veteran historian of Maoism Roderick MacFarquhar edited The China Quarterly in the 1960s. This magazine published allegations about massive famine deaths that have been quoted ever since. It later emerged that this journal received money from a CIA front organisation, as MacFarquhar admitted in a recent letter to The London Review of Books. (Roderick MacFarquhar states that he did not know the money was coming from the CIA while he was editing The China Quarterly.)