The Great Famine (1959-1961) is one of the many famines in China’s history. But this does not undermine its significance in China’s modern history. Unlike other tragic famines in the past, the Great Famine of China in the three years at the turning of the 1950s and 1960s was caused by avoidable human mistakes, rather than inevitable natural disasters.

I was in my early 30s when the Great Famine took place. Labeled as a rightist, I was persecuted from 1959 to 1963 along with thousands of others. At that time, many rightists were removed from their posts and sent to the countryside for re-education. And among them, during the Great Famine, many did not survive. They died from hunger and diseases. I was reduced to a bare human form at the end of the Great Famine with a nightmare experience I’d never quite get rid of: hunger. As a survivor, from first-hand experience, I believe many people died during the Great Famine. As an economist and a concerned citizen, I feel the obligation to find out exactly how many people died during the Great Famine. Thanks to honest-to-God correspondents, reporters, and scholars, especially, Mr. YANG Jisheng, we got to be reminded of this darkest time of China. And thanks to Mr. YANG Jisheng’s in-depth work, The Tombstone, this period of great tragedy in China’s history, or even the world history, gets to be recorded truthfully.

The causes of this Great Famine may be open to questions and debates, but the number of the deceased during this period should not be overshadowed by the necessity to be politically correct. It is my obligation, and an obligation of survivors like me, to pin down the number of the deceased population during the Great Famine, so that they can be remembered, and a lesson for the nation can be learned.

In my study, a methodology was applied. As shown in the figure above with the vertical axis being the population and the horizontal axis time (from 1950 to 1970), population of China kept growing before the end of 1958, according to the published statistical yearbook by the government. However, population plummeted from 1959 to 1961 year by year. In 1962, population resumed growing. The blue line in the figure shows the real population of the period. According to the momentum of the previous years, by the method of quadratic regression, the population would have been 711.18 million by 1962 (shown by the red line upward after 1959). Compared with the real population of 658.59 million in 1961, a difference of 52 million is witnessed. What does 52 million mean in this context? It is the would-be new-borns and wouldn’t-be deceased resulted from abnormalities. It is a loss of population.

Two factors contributed to this loss of population of 52 million, one being women not giving births, and the other being death from hunger. If we subtract the would-be new-borns, we will have the number of deceased from hunger, or the victims of the Great Famine. On the other hand, how many babies would’ve been born during the period? Taking into account the average mortality and fertility rates of the period, I concluded that 16 million babies should’ve been born from 1959 to 1961. It’s an easy math now. 52 million minus 16 million makes 36 million. We have the number of unnatural deaths: 36 million. I believe the figures are crystal clear now. During the Great Famine of China from 1959 to 1961, 16 million babies weren’t given birth to, and 36 million died from hunger. The only problem with this calculation is the accuracy of the population statistics from the government. I hold doubts with the statistics from the accounting and statistics bureaus of the government, which may compromise the accuracy of this estimation.

What does 36 million mean? If we take a look at the casualty of the Second World War, we’d probably be amazed. Approximately 30 million to 40 million died in the Second World War, including casualty in the European theatre and the Asian-Pacific theatre. The comparison shows a stunning fact that the Great Famine of China killed as many as the Second World War.

Considering the accuracy of this figure, I am sure it begs for doubts and discussion. 400,000 Japanese died in mainland China after the Lugouqiao Incident (also known as Marco Polo Bridge Incident). This number is trustful as the names of those died in the invasion are listed and shrined in Yasukuni Shrine. But one has to ask how many Chinese people died. We don’t know for sure. Some say 29 million, which means for each Japanese died in the war, 60 to 70 Chinese died. I find this figure hard to hold as true. As I estimate, the casualty of Chinese during the Second World War is less than 10 million.

This is just to show how should have our own judgment about statistics. 36 million is one of my judgments of what happened in the past. You may doubt the accuracy of this figure, but there are no other sources than the accounting and statistics bureau for such information, which is also one of the many impediments for our research.

There are 30 provincial capitals in China. And 36 million deaths equals to the casualty of Nanjing massacre in every capital city for five times. Numbers are senseless, but what I read from these numbers are lives just like you and me. They are deceased long ago, but they leave us an obligation to speak on their behalf, and to tell the truth. We can’t allow people to cover the truth by saying they died not because of the Great Famine but due to their malnutrition or health problems. It’s ruthless and inhuman to deny the facts of such a kind. An infamous Mr. LI Shengming at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences published an article entitled How Did the Lie of the Death of 30 Million Come into Being? in his own journal The China Social Sciences Journal. I was stunned and infuriated by his claim that the number of casualty was wrong and those who died during the Great Famine had nobody but themselves to blame. It’s beyond my comprehension how people could even make such claims.

36 million accounted for 5.5% of the total population at that time which was 660 million. There were 700 people in the small village where I stayed during that period. About 80 to 90 people died from hunger and related diseases. The casualty accounted for 10% of the population of that small village in Shandong. As Mr. YANG Jisheng rightly pointed out, the death rate varies from provinces, with Anhui, Henan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Shandong being the most serious provinces. It’s not how wealthy the province was or how developed the agriculture was in a certain province that accounted for the death rates. Not too many people died even though agriculture was not so developed in certain provinces. But a lot of people died from hunger in provinces like Henan and Sichuan where agriculture was rather developed.

I concluded before that the death rate of the Great Famine was 5.5%. And then I calculated the average death rate of the 3 decades of MAO Zedong’s rule, which was 11‰. This means 11 people die of diseases, earthquakes and other reasons out 1000 during MAO’s rule. And the average death rate in the 3 decades after the reform and opening up was 6.6‰, decreased by almost a half from 11‰. In addition, there are another 10 milion people died for various reasons in political movements, among which are the Cultural Revolution and many a persecution alongside. Roughly estimated, about 3 to 4 million peopled died during the Cultural Revolution. I’ve done extensive work to estimate the unnatural deaths during MAO’s rule. But still I am not confident in my judgment which is mostly based on common sense and information from the mass media. During the 3 decades under MAO’s rule, 230 million died. Death due to political reasons amounted to 45 million to 50 million. For every four normal deaths, there was one abnormal death case. After the reform and opening up, death due to political reasons was decreased to about 200 to 300 thousand, which is a huge progress. I think the most remarkable achievement of the reform is the death for political reasons are greatly reduced, because during MAO’s rule, one could only count on his fate to die or survive.

As pointed out by Mr. YANG Jisheng, China exported 4.15 million tons of food during the Great Famine. 4.15 million tons of food can feed 20 million people for a year with one person consuming some 200 kg food annually. This means most of the death during the famine can be avoided, if there were no food export and the food were reasonably distributed. As a matter of fact, food was sufficient in the international market during that period. MAO was complacent and arrogant to decide to export food and pretend the New China was doing a great job in feeding its people. But what has it turned out?

MAO Zedong, along with some other people, should be held responsible for the death of so many people in peace time. I am not accusing him of killing people intentionally. The Lushan Plenum was supposed to set the right track by correcting the problem of radicalness. But it took a shift as MAO targeted at PENG Dehuai, which was purely MAO’s responsibility. As Mr. YANG Jisheng said, 20 million people wouldn’t have died if the Lushan Plenum were not held. Besides, the famine was reported to MAO Zedong continuously in 1959 and 1960, but MAO chose to ignore. Later MAO sent LIU Shaoqi and ZHOU Enlai to deal with the famine but to no avail. I doubt if MAO ever felt guilty, because he later persecuted LIU Shaoqi and other comrades of his. And I think it is purely deluded and ill-informed to still uphold his flag in China. Chinese people are a great people and they can’t be blinded by MAO’s mistakes.

Mr. YANG Jisheng was right to point out the institutional reasons for the great death of the Great Famine. The deaths were caused by a system characterized with monopolies and food stamps. Starvation did not happen in urban areas in the scale even close to that of the countryside. The reason was rather simple. Urban population was guaranteed with food stamps which enabled them to obtain 15 kg food a month. No matter how exactly much food one could get, starvation sounded like a farfetched idea as one still had access to food anyway. People in rural areas were not provided with food stamps. They grew their own crops, and after submitting a considerable proportion of the food they grew and selling the surplus, the remaining was at their own disposal. If the government decides to collect more from the farmers, then the farmers are left with less or nothing to eat.

To take a step back, what is more reliable, food stamps or currency? If one loses his food stamps, he cannot expect to get another from other people since nobody has got any extra. In that time, food stamp was life. But in another scenario, one can also borrow some and buy whatever pleases him if he loses his money. Money is not limited, but food stamps are provided at a very limited amount. People tend to think that the government has got their backs, but the truth was pointing otherwise. Now the government is undertaking construction projects of the so-called “Baozhangfang” (secure housing). Beware there might not be sufficient housing once the government sets the project off.

During the Great Famine, I was 30 years old and working at the Railway Research Institute. Our basketball court was transformed into a field to grow wheat. The authorities asked the people not to waste our energy in order to save food. Not only was our basketball court turned into fields but other places in other institutes were transformed thusly to grow crops. A Mr. Lester Brown from the US once warned that there are too many golf courts in China which could endanger the food supply. This claim from an economist is way below his professional standards and judgments. Golf courts can only be developed if there is sufficient land. Suppose there is a food shortage, empirical observations tell us even basketball courts was turned to grow crops, how will there even be golf courts? It’s simply the optimal distribution of economics. I can only speak for myself that I hold doubts about the professionalism and ethical standards for someone like Lester Brown. It’s a shame that he’s popular in China.

Chinese government has been trying one way or another to ban talks and discussion on the Great Famine. This leads to a bigger concern of mine. How can a society sustain when it is built on lies? Famine sounds like a far-fetched topic of the modern world, but the Great Famine along with the great toll is real. The lessons we learned are not in vain, and they should remain so even if my generation passes away. The current regime of China, may it be under the rule of JIANG Zemin, HU Jintao, XI Jiping, or even DENG Xiaoping, should not hold itself accountable for the Great Famine. DENG Xiaoping may still be involved one way or another, but this regime under President XI Jinping should not associate itself with the one in the past. Therefore, it does not make any sense to cover the truth and stand by the guilt of MAO’s rule as the legitimacy of the current regime is not dependent on MAO’s rule but on the success of the reform and opening up.

I hope Chinese people will not forget the Great Famine and I believe the lesson learned from it shall throw light upon the future.

(This article is edited from MAO Yushi’s original comments on the speech of Mr. YANG Jisheng at the Biweekly Academic Seminar at Unirule Institute of Economics on September 27, 2013. The study of the casualty of the Great Famine is gracefully supported by my assistant Mr. ZHANG Lin. This article is translated by Mr. MA Junjie.)