The Human Cost Of Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' | Mao's Great Famine | Timeline

my name's dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video [Music] in 1958 nine years after coming to power mao wanted to bring china out of its almost medieval state of underdevelopment he launched a program of industrialization in towns and in the country intended to take china into the promised land of the socialist paradise in less than 15 years it was the great leap forward [Music] but the crazy dream became a nightmare and dragged 650 million chinese people into hell the country sank into economic chaos which caused an unprecedented famine the terrible death toll was around 45 million [Music] even today mao is an untouchable icon as the founding father of red china he holds the nation together and gives legitimacy to the current authorities so as not to damage his image the chinese communist party has maintained a deafening silence on this tragedy for 50 years for the first time this film is raising the curtain on this bloody episode in chinese history [Music] getting the few witnesses to talk about the period and trying to reconstruct the memory of the great famine is not without danger very few have dared to defy the taboo and break the silence a young historian from the university of hong kong felt she had to take on this task over four years she crisscrossed the chinese countryside to collect the testimony of survivors of this terrible tragedy as soon as i think about that time my legs start to shake and i feel a great sadness i prefer not to think about it because i feel pain when people talk about it she needs you strengthening among the people she talked to many had never had a chance to tell their story and some survivors are very elderly so juchen's task was an urgent one her it isn't only a duty of memory it's also a personal story since several members of her family died of starvation during the great leap forward a journalist and historian published tombstone in 2008 it was the first chinese book on the great famine published in hong kong it has been banned in mainland china his own father died of starvation during that period even if no one from my family had died of starvation i would still have written the book because it's very important as a journalist i had to bear witness i did it so that future generations can know the truth to understand how the great leap forward caused the death of tens of millions of people we must go back to the origins of the communist regime the taking of beijing by the red army in january 1949 [Music] the central government of the people who wanted to make a clean break with the past the task was huge he had to overcome the traditions the mindsets the archaic ways of life of an old-fashioned society he also had to stamp out the endemic famines and their processions of misery the chinese expected a lot from their new regime they had heard the communist promise to build a fairer society to realize his plans mao went to moscow to ask stalin for economic help and to consolidate the strategic alliance with the ussr the chinese leader felt huge admiration for his soviet counterpart who nevertheless treated him with contempt and made him wait two days before seeing him the two countries signed a treaty of friendship the ussr would supply china with huge quantities of arms factories industrial and farming equipment and all kinds of advisors [Music] this treaty sealed china's dependence as the aid didn't come free not only did china commit itself to remaining within moscow's circle of influence and following its economic model faithfully but it would also have to repay the huge debt it had contracted as the first step towards the soviet model less than a year after coming to power the chinese communists started a massive reform of agriculture it affected half of all cultivated land and benefited 300 million poor peasants [Music] [Applause] [Music] all over china these land redistributions were the opportunity for the settling of schools encouraged by the party the poor peasants who had been used to suffering and humiliation for 2000 years raised their heads and gave free reign to their feelings of resentment class violence broke out over a million landowners were executed [Music] the chinese peasants had their best two years between 1950 and 1952 just after the land distribution in the agricultural reform in 1950 they were still poor but life quickly improved from 1952. in my home region we were farming land which was ours and we had enough to eat we gave part of our harvest to the state and we kept the rest for ourselves i was young at the time but i could feel that life was improving the villages organized all sorts of artistic activities during the new year but later all that was stopped [Music] [Applause] [Music] mao the liberator of china and the peasants was revered as a god of the harvests and worshipped as the emperor of the new red dynasty [Music] but from 1953 these land redistributions made mao fear the reappearance of a class of small landowners so on the model of the soviet kolkos the party persuaded the peasants to combine their plots into collectives of up to 50 families this new step was greeted with mistrust as it meant they had to return the land they had been given three years earlier to the community in spite of everything mao still judged the stalinist model as the ideal even though the soviet tyrant died in this same year 1953 then an extraordinary event shook the socialist world in february 1956 in his famous speech at the 20th party congress khrushchev denounced the crimes of stalin his personality cult and his disastrous collectivization campaigns [Applause] as a result in china the stalinist model praised by mao was withdrawn the campaign of agricultural collectivization was suspended and mao's ideas were no longer in favor as always when he had problems within the party mao turned to the people to regain the upper hand as a good tactician he invited the whole country to express themselves freely and to criticize the leadership he called it the hundred flowers campaign and it took an unexpected turn delighted at this exercise in democracy the intellectuals criticized the very nature of the communist regime for mao whose aim was to flush out the critics the strategy worked he could then publicly identify all those who had spoken against the regime as class enemies you're wrong what are your political opinions do you realize what you're saying are you a teacher of the people or not do you take the point of view of a teacher of the people mao ordered violent repression the slightest wrong word could be fatal [Music] between five hundred thousand and one million people mostly teachers were labeled as rightists and deported to force labor camps where many died of starvation three thousand of these dissidents were sent to the jaibiango labour camp on the edge of the gobi desert a so-called re-education camp they were covered with a thin layer of sand and over time their skeletons gradually came back to the surface these are the remains of this mass grave just a few years ago there is a climate of terror that reaches all the way to the top levels of leadership entire heads of provinces are being removed in 5758 and replaced by hard unscrupulous man who are often willing to benefit from the very radical winds that blow from preaching the repression of the rightists removed all opposition and don't put up the way for the great leap forward the communist party was able to do what it wanted without any resistance because no one dared speak out anymore by silencing his enemies mao regained total control of the party he returned to moscow in november 1957 but his long-standing ally became his main rival when khrushchev declared that the soviet union's economic production would exceed that of the usa in 15 years mao took up the challenge he said that china's steel production would exceed that of the united kingdom in the same period [Music] 100 million peasants were recruited from all over the country to work almost with their bare hands on building projects on an epic scale constructing roads railways dams and canals for mao there was no doubt the great leap forward to a communist society had really begun the slogan dare to think dare to act became the official line of the party mao symbolically went out to work sites to lend the peasants his support [Applause] to underline the fact that he had rallied the whole party behind him he was accompanied by liu xiao the party's second in command and zhu and lai his closest comrade in arms [Applause] lou confirmed his support for mel by saying hard work for a few years happiness for a thousand [Music] all means were used to mobilize the masses and to stimulate revolutionary zeal in an extraordinary campaign mao identified a new enemy sparrows were accused of eating the crops the chinese were called out in their millions to prevent the birds landing as a result the sparrows died of exhaustion and gave way to a new enemy insects they profilerated and ate part of the harvest this absurd campaign was followed by another step towards radical collectivization during a journey mao saw a banner in a field praising the merits of the first experimental people's commune set up in henan province he declared with enthusiasm the people's commune will be the bridge that will carry china towards the socialist paradise [Music] the saying was taken up in all provinces and in just one summer thousands of communes were formed they consisted of up to two thousand families there were even plans for enormous communes combining up to ten or twenty thousand households which would be headed by cadres who were totally dedicated to mao [Music] [Applause] the working days started at dawn and finished after dark accompanied by music to the glory of the great leap forward [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] as the basic unit of the future society the commune experimented with a completely new way of life here everything was designed to immerse the individual in a collective life geared towards production all private property was abolished houses animals land and production tools became collective property nurseries and free compulsory schools liberated women from their maternal duties so they could work in the fields [Music] at that time i was very young i was a member of the youth league and in charge of propaganda so that shows that i believed in communism i thought communism was fantastic when we were tiny we were taught that the communist paradise would soon come and we only had to endure a little suffering and make a few sacrifices to reach it that was how i saw them [Music] [Applause] [Music] the family unit disappeared and children were made to live by the new rules of collective life the individual was nothing more than a cog in a big machine [Music] [Laughter] socialism is good something like that but i can't really remember did you sing different songs when you were at home we only sang in school outside life was very hard there was never any let up why would we want to sing [Applause] men and women were separated and grouped in dormitories sexual relationships were regulated men and women were separated and couldn't live a married life some couples went to the fields to continue their sex life but when they were caught they were publicly humiliated some women found it unbearable and many committed suicide so you pulled everything and all lived together the household items were pooled in the first year the furniture was seized for firewood and everything that could be destroyed was destroyed the pigs the sheep everything was collectivized even the pots and pans were seized because families weren't allowed to cook no one cooked at home anymore the aim was to force the peasants to take their meals in the commune's collective canteens in some of them they even abolished money a system of work points was established food was distributed according to merit i.e each person's capacity to fulfill the production objectives the notion of wages disappeared it was compulsory to turn up every day if your name wasn't on the attendance list you were punished and you lost work points yes but without work points you had nothing to eat the fewer work points you earned the less food they gave you i can tell you that life was brutal for everyone at that time except the cadres those people lived well the party cadres became the officers of the people's communes which were transformed into real barracks every day the peasants underwent military training because the masses had to be mobilized for the national defense [Music] every morning the peasants gathered at the entrance to the village and waited for the group leader to allocate the tasks at the end of the day the leader shouted works over and the peasants went to eat they weren't motivated and productivity was very low that was one reason why productivity didn't increase in the people's communes peasants had no right to free speech their skills weren't taken into consideration anymore everything was decided by the authorities who mostly knew nothing about the subject they decided everything the distance between each rice seedling the type of seed the amount of fertilizer to be used land suitable for one type of crop was used for another as a result the peasants became totally demotivated and poor harvests caused the first food shortages but mao always wanted more to increase agricultural production he made communes compete against each other the ones that recorded the biggest harvests were rewarded in ceremonies organized by the party while the inhabitants of the communes were terribly short of food this was a world where achieving record production called launching a satellite went hand in hand with announcing falsified figures the cadres were caught up in an escalating spiral at the provincial meeting my superiors asked me what i thought about it all some places have launched plenty of satellites and declared high levels of production what do you think my back was against the wall and i had to say that i would respect the quotas without fail but in reality i couldn't keep those commitments they showed soviet advisors a field of wheat where the ears were so extraordinarily close together that they supposedly supported the weight of six people the photo was on the front page of the people's daily everyone was fooled and those who weren't were too scared to say it was a con lying became common at all levels of the hierarchy the figures for agricultural and industrial production were falsified throughout the country to meet and even exceed the target set by the party [Music] in the autumn of 1958 although there was some wheat there was a shortage of food the town of dangshang in the region of shangsu boasted about good harvest and we went to take a look it was supposed to be a fertile area where the cereals were on the top but underneath was just straw huh [Music] as a consequence of these exaggerations the tax paid in grain by the communes was calculated on a false basis in some regions the result was that the state demanded almost all the amounts really harvested to make matters worse the spring harvest in 1959 was disastrous the wheat had hardly been cut when all the members of the commune were made to carry the crops on their back to a boat took them away they did it at night by torchlight as soon as the crops were gathered the wheat was taken away yes they were shipping it out to pay debts yes do you know which country had to be paid back how would i know so who told you that the debts had to be paid the cadres said that at every harvest deng xao ping said debts had to be repaid even if the country was very poor did they leave you a little bit or not the famous debt was the one that china had contracted with the ussr for the purchase of hundreds of factories that were delivered ready for use beijing undertook to repay moscow in the form of agricultural produce mao wanted to accelerate repayment even if it meant people starving in the countryside in some regions people really had nothing to eat i was sent out of the village on a mission but the members of my family who stayed behind were reduced to eating the bark of medler trees tree bark yes tree bark they ate the roots of banana trees too anything they could find people also ate mud a sort of white mud stems of rice too we were so hungry that we filled our stomachs with whatever we could find once i saw an adult collapse he fell to the ground while trying to eat a sort of bean paste he died in front of me and he still had the food in his mouth soon afterwards we started eating the leaves of that tree they citizens [Music] in other provinces the shortage of food gave the cadres who distributed it the power of life or death over the inhabitants of the commune in theory peasants were entitled to 250 grams per day but the cadres allocated themselves much more they were so corrupt that they stuffed themselves shamelessly those who didn't get on with the leader of the production team or those who dissipate his orders were starved to death he who does not work shall not eat that is the principle that was applied from 1958 to 1962 meaning that entire categories of people deemed to be unfit deemed to be too weak of vulnerable pregnant women were deliberately cut off from the canteens and starved to death that qualifies as murder were the catches here very violent very cruel i remember that when they caught some peasants who had stolen some roots from the fields they tied them up from head to foot [Music] the collective canteens became a sort of weapon in the hands of the cadres who manage them i know of many examples like the case of one man in charge of a collective canteen in a village in the province of ching hai who one day summoned a very beautiful woman she was suffering a lot from the famine and the cadre asked her how many days it was since she had eaten and he ordered her to undress when he saw her naked he said why your breasts shriveled the woman answered my chest is now as flat as a man's cardrey demanded that she bring him her daughter her daughter was very young but she accepted in exchange for two miserable loaves of bread she killed herself soon afterwards in the spring of 1959 mao's frenzy took another form the great helmsman demanded 100 million tons of steel in the next three years since the production of the steel factories was insufficient the peasants also had to contribute to the effort they made small blast furnaces out of whatever they had to make the small blast furnaces we used mud mixed with hair to make it stronger many female comrades had to cut their hair my youngest daughter also had to cut her hair and she cried poor child but it was compulsory not that really down here nearly all the trees in china were cut down for fuel forests were raised and people had to melt down pots and kitchen utensils even school bells the population was used in an absurd way anyone did anything society as a whole fell into a sort of indescribable madness officially china started producing millions and millions of tons of steel in reality all that came out of these foundries was an unusable metal these small blast furnaces worked day and night and mobilized tens of millions of peasants for nothing steel is one of these magic indicators of progress within the socialist world the consequence of course is that the farmers are worked literally to death and the grain is taken literally out of their mouth but that's a price worth paying in miles view [Music] here was the top leadership meeting in shanghai dining [Music] drinking wine buying cheap cameras being entertained [Music] the idea that mao somehow didn't realize that there was mass famine in the countryside is a myth it's a complete myth [Music] a top secret document found in the archives reveals that not only was mao completely aware of the peasant's distress but it was part of his strategy to sacrifice the countryside in order to feed the cities and the industrial and political centers it's a report on the debates in a politburo session dated 25th of march 1959 mao stated when there is not enough to eat people starve to death it is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill and at that very same conference in shanghai he actually orders procurements of grain to be increased to one third an unheard of level he says it very clearly says if you take up to one third of the grain the farmers will not rebel he makes available thousands of trucks to go and carry out that task in july 1959 mao gathered the leaders of the party in luchan far away from beijing the original objective of this conference was to correct the increasingly apparent issues with the great leap forward the famous marshal peng de hai was the only one who dared express himself in an open letter to mao the son of a peasant he was upset by the destruction in people's lives caused by mao's policy he begged him please think of the people this was an insult to mao he forced him to resign from his post as minister of defense this episode marked a tragic reality no one else would dare to defy mao as he persisted the years that followed were terrible [Music] to the north of cheng as soon as we arrived we saw the houses were empty totally deserted people were lying on mats with empty stomachs and their bodies swollen from lack of food we could see they were dying of starvation it was obvious in that county 120 000 people died out of a total population of one million around one inhabitant in 10 died of starvation countless others were suffering from edema to spend your days with nothing to eat you got very thin and as you got thinner at a certain point you had swelling you'd be so swollen that it scared people you had bruises all over your body and in those cases you shouldn't eat salt of constipation after eating mud to ease their hunger he didn't even have a coffin to bury my grandfather in so we buried him directly in the earth [Music] did no one bury the people who starved to death they often died by the road far from their families who weren't strong enough to bury them god [Music] [Music] on i came across another body child's that time gave me such a frightening [Music] the most shocking part of all this is that the population wasn't starving to death because of a complete lack of food the state's granaries were full in the time of the dynasties the emperors opened the reserves and distributed the food to the people in distress conversely the leadership of the communist party a regime that claims to serve the people refused to help the people who were starving and didn't open up the granaries that were full whole populations were camped around the granaries communist party give us a little food they begged until the starvation finished them off it was unimaginable the regions where the famine raged were cordoned off it was forbidden for people or information to circulate but many sought to escape the few people who could move about saw that the destitution was widespread when the train stopped in the station i saw crowds of starving people stretching their hands through the windows to ask for food everyone was suffering from hunger at that time all those people were fleeing the famine children old people they all ran around the train to beg food from the passengers from 1958 onwards the cities are quite literally protected from the countryside people are not allowed to just move about freely a farmer who brings a cow to market will need to travel with a permit from his local kaaba people who try to flee the countryside are sent back [Music] mao's radical methods caught the attention of his soviet counterpart nikita khrushchev who was informed by his advisors on the ground during the grandiose ceremonies for the 10th anniversary of the chinese revolution he took mao aside and begged him in vain not to repeat the excesses of stalinist collectivization khrushchev would say later mao thought he was an envoy of god charged with the divine task of building socialism before the soviet union mao ignored khrushchev's warnings he gave the order not just to carry on but to increase production figures which he said were necessary to the successes of the great leap forward nine months later khrushchev suspended cooperation agreements with china and repatriated 15 000 advisers it was the beginning of the split between the two countries liu xiaoxi elected president of the republic in april 1959 tried to restrain mao who was still chairman of the party but another year would go by before liu xiaoxi ordered investigations into the reality of the famine on the ground i went to investigate in cheng which is the biggest county in the shangsu region because i wanted to know what was really going on wasn't under my jurisdiction it was under chang when the local leader found out that i was investigating he told me lies he ordered all the people i saw to repeat the same about the death toll from starvation he said that in total 90 000 people had died unnatural deaths in reality the total was 120 000 people as we said at the time you couldn't say they had died of starvation he instructed each district to declare a certain number of deaths so that the total never exceeded 90 000. all that was to hide the truth from us three high-ranking officials started investigations they came to a result of several tens of millions dead from starvation they wrote a report for mao and chew and lie but cho is working with frank dakota who has accessed certain testimonies from those investigations these documents show terrible realities which confirm the report of these three high-ranking officials there's a very detailed report by a high-ranking military who goes back to his home village in hunan and he sees that the graves in the fields have been tampered with they've been opened the nobody's inside so he wonders what what is going on it's a rainy day he sees the house of the local party secretary the smoke coming out he walks up to the house opens the door he sees four large pots in which body parts are being boiled down and it turns out that the local party secretary has decided that you can actually recycle human bodies simmer them and then use it as fertilizer on the fields thousands of cases of cannibalism were recorded there are plenty in the archives i know of one case where people ate their own dead relatives the mother before she died said to her daughter there's nothing left of my body to eat just my heart when i die you can eat my heart in one case in hunan province very well documented by a top working team sent into the countryside they found out that a man was forced to bury his own child alive because this child had also stolen some food the father who was forced to bury that child died of grief three weeks later in the spring of 1961 president liu xiao qi went to investigate for over a month in his home province of hanan he found out that friends and members of his family had died of starvation without him knowing about it because the local katras had hidden the truth from him he was upset for lou the great leap forward had to be stopped but it was only in 1962 that the party brought together seven thousand cadres from all across the country to put an end to the crazy undertaking of the great leap forward liu xiao qi said that the party was largely responsible for the famine he contradicted mao on that issue because from the start mao had estimated the harmful aspects of the party's policy to be only 10 percent of the reason for the famine although the famine continued to claim victims until the end of 1962 the situation slowly improved with the re-establishment of farming on privately owned plots of land and free markets radical collectivization in the countryside and senseless quotas for farming production as well as steel production in small blast furnaces were all stopped the great leap forward was over but i have called the foreign minister here mr tabish has and has got permission to photograph freely in p king and i think that if this information were communicated to the people whose permission you were asking the world knew nothing about these four years of tragedy the regime at the time put everything in place to hide the truth that all costs there were western journalists working at the new china agency they translated our articles into english in the 1960s these foreigners regularly took their holidays in the province of annui everything was arranged for their arrival the shops around where they were staying were filled up with food stylishly dressed girls were conscripted to canoe on the lake close by the staging was magnificent and the foreigners wrote articles when they returned swearing that there was no famine in china everything was staged to make the western journalists believe that china was a paradise of virtue and plenty in the same way foreign political leaders were taken in returning from china in 1961 francois mitterand described mao as a humanitarian and certainly not a dictator he said mao had assured him the chinese people are not on the verge of famine i repeat in order to be clearly understood there is no famine in china it was an enormous lie the chinese leadership knew perfectly well that their policy was killing tens of millions of people the question of who should answer for these acts before history was an issue of power more than ever before yoshiochi was called to see mao zedong by swimming pool and leo xiaoqi made a mistake when he said you and i are responsible for the famine and all of it including cannibalism will go into the history books history will judge us at that point in time i think mao already sealed the fate of leo joshua i thought this man is my worst enemy [Music] mao didn't want to be placed in difficulty by this subject or by others so to regain power once more he led the chinese youth into the movement of the cultural revolution against the party bureaucrats [Music] he took advantage of the radicalization of the situation to have lu xiaoqi criticized and then arrested by young red guards imprisoned and without medical care lou died in a cell in 1969 from then on no one would dare speak of the great famine again and of mao's responsibility in this tragedy who is responsible for what happened there can only be a very simple answer to that or a very complicated one the very simple answer is that mao chairman wow was responsible he initiated he started it it was his vision he stopped it he was responsible from beginning to end mao ranks as one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century the more complicated version is how did one man get away with all of this so it seems to me that it is both a man and a system who are both responsible for this it's a it's a collective responsibility of the communist party of china at that time why 50 years after the great famine did the authorities still refuse to recognize the reality of it to discuss it and to draw lessons i think they're attitudes the authorities are convinced that it would damage the legitimacy of the communist regime and threaten its leadership in my opinion their fears are unfounded do you know why i wrote my book tombstone i'm a member of the communist party myself i wrote this book primarily to lighten the shoulders of the communist party which continues to bear the huge burden of this history certainly one day it will have to rid itself of this weight when mao died in september 1976 he left behind a country in ruins the nation paid tribute to the great helmsman in a grand funeral but in the gathered crowd many must have been thinking about their loved ones who died in the great famine today the figure for the death toll still divides historians yang josheng estimates that the four years of the great famine killed at least 36 million people frank dakota estimates the death toll to be at least 45 million other chinese historians put forward the figure of 55 million almost the same as the total number of victims in the second world war [Music] there is no monument in china to commemorate them apart from this modest edifice in the middle of the hennan countryside it was put up a few years ago by a peasant who defied the silence that the communist leadership has always imposed on this unspeakable holocaust [Music] [Music] is

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,329,933

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, mao, chairman mao, great leap forward, china cultural revolution, mao zedong, the great leap forward, chinese communist party, great famine, chinese famine, timeline, timeline world history, timeline channel, timeline world history documentaries

Id: AHR15JxckZg

Length: 52min 20sec (3140 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Mrgray123]

Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikotter is a great read on this. It was just insane to read about how party officials, with no farming experience, simply tried to impose ideological farming and irrigation methods and simply lied in report after report when they failed.

[u/fultirbo]

He kept China a net exporter of grain and refused aid while millions of his people starved, all to protect his pride

[u/SporesM0ldsandFungus]

There's a saying that every famine is man made. By greed, political posturing, incompetence, corruption, or just plain cruelty.

[u/dirtdingo_2]

"Revolution is not a dinner party."

-Mao Zedong

[u/nevm]

Mao by Jung Chang covers this in great detail along with many other despicable things he forced on the populace.

[u/insaneintheblain]

Can someone cross-post to r/China?

[u/caucasoidape]

Chaircat Meow didn't look like he was starving.

[u/TesseractToo]

Thanks to u/whnthynvr who posted a clip of this so I was able ti track down the full documentary :)

[u/haroldgraphene]

Despite the epic failure of the Great Leap Forward, docs like this would never admit that maos policies massively increased life expectancy. Just look at world bank and UN graphs. The famine is represented around 1960 with a straightening out of a huge downward trend.