The Great Leap Forward [Archive]

Kid of the Black Hole

10-25-2007, 07:55 PM

(still looking for a link sorry)

September 2006
Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?
by Joseph Ball

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Over the last 25 years the reputation of Mao Zedong has been seriously
undermined by ever more extreme estimates of the numbers of deaths he
was supposedly responsible for. In his lifetime, Mao Zedong was hugely
respected for the way that his socialist policies improved the welfare
of the Chinese people, slashing the level of poverty and hunger in
China and providing free health care and education. Mao?s theories also
gave great inspiration to those fighting imperialism around the world. It
is probably this factor that explains a great deal of the hostility
towards him from the Right. This is a tendency that is likely to grow more
acute with the apparent growth in strength of Maoist movements in
India and Nepal in recent years, as well as the continuing influence of
Maoist movements in other parts of the world.

Most of the attempts to undermine Mao?s reputation centre around the
Great Leap Forward that began in 1958. It is this period that this
article is primarily concerned with. The peasants had already started farming
the land co-operatively in the 1950s. During the Great Leap Forward
they joined large communes consisting of thousands or tens of thousands
of people. Large-scale irrigation schemes were undertaken to improve
agricultural productivity. Mao?s plan was to massively increase both
agricultural and industrial production. It is argued that these policies led
to a famine in the years 1959-61 (although some believe the famine
began in 1958). A variety of reasons are cited for the famine. For
example, excessive grain procurement by the state or food being wasted due to
free distribution in communal kitchens. It has also been claimed that
peasants neglected agriculture to work on the irrigation schemes or in
the famous ?backyard steel furnaces? (small-scale steel furnaces built
in rural areas).

Mao admitted that problems had occurred in this period. However, he
blamed the majority of these difficulties on bad weather and natural
disasters. He admitted that there had been policy errors too, which he took
responsibility for.

Official Chinese sources, released after Mao?s death, suggest that 16.5
million people died in the Great Leap Forward. These figures were
released during an ideological campaign by the government of Deng Xiaoping
against the legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution. However, there seems to be no way of independently, authenticating
these figures due to the great mystery about how they were gathered and
preserved for twenty years before being released to the general public.
American researchers managed to increase this figure to around 30
million by combining the Chinese evidence with extrapolations of their own
from China?s censuses in 1953 and 1964. Recently, Jung Chang and Jon
Halliday in their book Mao: the Unknown Story reported 70 million killed
by Mao, including 38 million in the Great Leap Forward.

Western writers on the subject have taken a completely disproportionate
view of the period, mesmerized, as they are, by massive death toll
figures from dubious sources. They concentrate only on policy excesses and
it is likely that their views on the damage that these did are greatly
exaggerated. There has been a failure to understand how some of the
policies developed in the Great Leap Forward actually benefited the
Chinese people, once the initial disruption was over.

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.)

Those who have provided qualitative evidence, such as eyewitness
accounts cited by Jasper Becker in his famous account of the period Hungry
Ghosts, have not provided enough accompanying evidence to authenticate
these accounts. Important documentary evidence quoted by Chang and
Halliday concerning the Great Leap Forward is presented in a demonstrably
misleading way.

Evidence from the Deng Xiaoping regime Mao that millions died during
the Great Leap Forward is not reliable. Evidence from peasants
contradicts the claim that Mao was mainly to blame for the deaths that did occur
during the Great Leap Forward period.

U.S. demographers have tried to use death rate evidence and other
demographic evidence from official Chinese sources to prove the hypothesis
that there was a ?massive death toll? in the Great Leap Forward (i.e. a
hypothesis that the ?largest famine of all time? or ?one of the largest
famines of all time? took place during the Great Leap Forward).
However, inconsistencies in the evidence and overall doubts about the source
of their evidence undermine this ?massive death toll? hypothesis.

The More Likely Truth About the Great Leap Forward

The idea that ?Mao was responsible for genocide? has been used as a
springboard to rubbish everything that the Chinese people achieved during
Mao?s rule. However, even someone like the demographer Judith Banister,
one of the most prominent advocates of the ?massive death toll?
hypothesis has to admit the successes of the Mao era. She writes how in
1973-5 life expectancy in China was higher than in Africa, the Middle East,
South Asia and many countries in Latin America 1. In 1981 she co-wrote
an article where she described the People's Republic of China as a
'super-achiever' in terms of mortality reduction, with life expectancy
increasing by approximately 1.5 years per calendar year since the start of
communist rule in 1949 2. Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949 to
65 in the 1970s when Mao?s rule came to an end. 3

To read many modern commentators on Mao?s China 4, you would get the
impression that Mao?s agricultural and industrial policies led to
absolute economic disaster. Even more restrained commentators, such as the
economist Peter Nolan 5 claim that living standards did not rise in China,
during the post-revolutionary period, until Deng Xiaoping took power.
Of course, increases in living standards are not the sole reason for
increases in life expectancy. However, it is absurd to claim that life
expectancy could have increased so much during the Mao era with no
increase in living standards.

For example, it is claimed by many who have studied figures released by
Deng Xiaoping after Mao?s death that per capita grain production did
not increase at all during the Mao period. 6 But how is it possible to
reconcile such statistics with the figures on life expectancy that the
same authors quote? Besides which these figures are contradicted by
other figures. Guo Shutian, a Former Director of Policy and Law in the
Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, in the post-Mao era, gives a very
different view of China?s overall agricultural performance during the period
before Deng?s ?reforms.? It is true that he writes that agricultural
production decreased in five years between 1949-1978 due to ?natural
calamities and mistakes in the work.? However he states that during 1949-1978
the per hectare yield of land sown with food crops increased by 145.9%
and total food production rose 169.6%. During this period China?s
population grew by 77.7%. On these figures, China?s per capita food
production grew from 204 kilograms to 328 kilograms in the period in
question.7

Even according to figures released by the Deng Xiaoping regime,
industrial production increased by 11.2% per year from 1952-1976 (by 10% a
year during the alleged catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution). In 1952
industry was 36% of gross value of national output in China. By 1975
industry was 72% and agriculture was 28%. It is quite obvious that Mao?s
supposedly disastrous socialist economic policies paved the way for the
rapid (but inegalitarian and unbalanced) economic development of the
post-Mao era.8

There is a good argument to suggest that the policies of the Great Leap
Forward actually did much to sustain China?s overall economic growth,
after an initial period of disruption. At the end of the 1950s, it was
clear that China was going to have to develop using its own resources
and without being able to use a large amount of machinery and
technological know-how imported from the Soviet Union.

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.

Also the split was due to the tendency of Khrushchev to try and impose
the Soviet Union?s own ways of doing things on its allies. Khrushchev
acted not in the spirit of socialist internationalism but rather in the
spirit of treating economically less developed nations like client
states. For a country like China, that had fought so bitterly for its
freedom from foreign domination, such a relationship could never have been
acceptable. Mao could not have sold it to his people, even if he had
wanted to.

In 1960 the conflict between the two nations came to a head. The
Soviets had been providing a great deal of assistance for China?s
industrialization program. In 1960, all Soviet technical advisers left the
country. They took with them the blueprints of the various industrial plants
they had been planning to build.

Mao made clear that, from the start, the policies of the Great Leap
Forward were about China developing a more independent economic policy.
China?s alternative to reliance on the USSR was a program for developing
agriculture alongside the development of industry. In so doing, Mao
wanted to use the resources that China could muster in abundance-labour
and popular enthusiasm. The use of these resources would make up for the
lack of capital and advanced technology.

Although problems and reversals occurred in the Great Leap Forward, it
is fair to say that it had a very important role in the ongoing
development of agriculture. Measures such as water conservancy and irrigation
allowed for sustained increases in agricultural production, once the
period of bad harvests was over. They also helped the countryside to deal
with the problem of drought. Flood defenses were also developed.
Terracing helped gradually increase the amount of cultivated area.9

Industrial development was carried out under the slogan of ?walking on
two legs.? This meant the development of small and medium scale rural
industry alongside the development of heavy industry. As well as the
steel furnaces, many other workshops and factories were opened in the
countryside. The idea was that rural industry would meet the needs of the
local population. Rural workshops supported efforts by the communes to
modernize agricultural work methods. Rural workshops were very effective
in providing the communes with fertilizer, tools, other agricultural
equipment and cement (needed for water conservation schemes).10

Compared to the rigid, centralized economic system that tended to
prevail in the Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward was a supreme act of
lateral thinking. Normally, cement and fertilizer, for example, would be
produced in large factories in urban areas away from the rural areas
that needed them. In a poor country there would be the problem of
obtaining the capital and machinery necessary to produce industrial products
such as these, using the most modern technique. An infrastructure linking
the cities to the towns would then be needed to transport such
products once they were made. This in itself would involve vast expense. As a
result of problems like these, development in many poorer countries is
either very slow or does not occur at all.

Rural industry established during the Great Leap Forward used
labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive methods. As they were serving
local needs, they were not dependent on the development of an expensive
nation-wide infrastructure of road and rail to transport the finished
goods.

In fact the supposedly wild, chaotic policies of the Great Leap Forward
meshed together quite well, after the problems of the first few years.
Local cement production allowed water conservancy schemes to be
undertaken. Greater irrigation made it possible to spread more fertilizer.
This fertilizer was, in turn, provided by the local factories. Greater
agricultural productivity would free up more agricultural labour for the
industrial manufacturing sector, facilitating the overall development
of the country.11 This approach is often cited as an example of Mao?s
economic illiteracy (what about the division of labour and the gains from
regional specialization etc). However, it was right for China as the
positive effects of Mao?s policies in terms of human welfare and
economic development show.

Agriculture and small scale rural industry were not the only sector to
grow during China?s socialist period. Heavy industry grew a great deal
in this period too. Developments such as the establishment of the
Taching oil field during the Great Leap Forward provided a great boost to
the development of heavy industry. A massive oil field was developed in
China.12 This was developed after 1960 using indigenous techniques,
rather than Soviet or western techniques. (Specifically the workers used
pressure from below to help extract the oil. They did not rely on
constructing a multitude of derricks, as is the usual practice in oil fields).

The arguments about production figures belie the fact that the Great
Leap Forward was at least as much about changing the way of thinking of
the Chinese people as it was about industrial production. The so-called
?backyard steel furnaces,? where peasants tried to produce steel in
small rural foundries, became infamous for the low quality of the steel
they produced. But they were as much about training the peasants in the
ways of industrial production as they were about generating steel for
China?s industry. It?s worth remembering that the ?leaps? Mao used to
talk about the most were not leaps in the quantities of goods being
produced but leaps in people?s consciousness and understanding. Mistakes were
made and many must have been demoralized when they realized that some
of the results of the Leap had been disappointing. But the success of
the Chinese economy in years to come shows that not all its lessons were
wasted.

Great Leap Forward and Qualitative Evidence

Of course, to make such points is to go against the mainstream western
view that the Great Leap Forward was a disaster of world historical
proportions. But what is the basis for this view? One way those who
believe in the ?massive death toll? thesis could prove their case would be to
find credible qualitative evidence such as eye-witness or documentary
evidence. The qualitative evidence that does exist is not convincing
however.

Chinese history scholar Carl Riskin believes that a very serious famine
took place but states ?In general, it appears that the indications of
hunger and hardship did not approach the kinds of qualitative evidence
of mass famine that have accompanied other famines of comparable (if
not equal) scale, including earlier famines in China.? He points out that
much of the contemporary evidence presented in the West tended to be
discounted at the time as it emanated from right-wing sources and was
hardly conclusive. He considers whether repressive policies by the
Chinese government prevented information about the famine getting out but
states ?whether it is a sufficient explanation is doubtful. There remains
something of a mystery here.? 13

There are authors such as Roderick MacFarquhar, Jasper Becker and Jung
Chang who certainly do assert that the evidence they have seen proves
the massive famine thesis. It is true that their main works on these
issues 14 do cite sources for this evidence. However, they do not make it
sufficiently clear, in these books, why they believe these sources are
authentic.

It therefore remains an open question why the accounts presented by
these authors should be treated as certain fact in the west. In his famous
1965 book on China, A Curtain of Ignorance, Felix Greene says that he
traveled through areas of China in 1960 where food rationing was very
tight but he did not see mass starvation. He also cites other
eyewitnesses who say the same kind of thing. It is likely, that in fact, famine
did occur in some areas. However Greene?s observations indicate that it
was not a nation-wide phenomenon on the apocalyptic scale suggested by
Jasper Becker and others. Mass hunger was not occurring in the areas he
traveled through, although famine may have been occurring elsewhere.
Why are the accounts of people like Becker believed so readily when the
account of Felix Greene and the others he cites is discounted? Of
course, the sympathy of Greene for Mao?s regime may be raised in connection
with this and it might be suggested he distorted the truth for
political reasons. But Becker, MacFarquhar and Jung Chang have their own
perspectives on the issue too. Could anyone seriously doubt that these
authors are not fairly staunch anti-communists?

Before addressing the question of the authentication of sources, the
context for the discussion of these issues needs to be set. Communism is
a movement that generates a massive amount of opposition. Western
countries waged an intensive propaganda war against communism. In power,
communist governments dispossessed large numbers of people of their
capital and land. The whole landlord and business class was robbed of its
social power and status across much of Asia and Europe. Unsurprisingly,
this generated much bitterness. A large number of well-educated people
who were born in these countries had and still have the motivation to
discredit communism. It is not ?paranoia? to ask that those who write
about the communist era take pains to ensure that their sources are
reporting fact and are not providing testimony that has been distorted or
slanted by anti-communist bias.

In addition, the U.S. government did have an interest in putting out
negative propaganda about Chinese communism and communism in general. Too
often discussion of this is dismissed as ?conspiracy theories? and the
evidence about what really happened does not get discussed very
widely.

However, covert attempts by the U.S. to discredit communism are a
matter of record. U.S. intelligence agencies often sought a connection with
those who published work about communist regimes. It must not be
thought that those people they sought this connection with were simply hacks
paid to churn out cheap sensationalism. Far from it. For example, The
China Quarterly published many articles in the 1960s which are still
frequently cited as evidence of living conditions in China and the success
or otherwise of government policies in that country. In 1962 it
published an article by Joseph Alsop that alleged that Mao was attempting to
wipe out a third of his population through starvation to facilitate his
economic plans! 15 This article is cited, in all seriousness, to
provide contemporary evidence of the ?massive death toll? hypothesis in many
later works on the subject (for example in the article ?Famine in
China? that is discussed below).

The editor of The China Quarterly was Roderick MacFarquhar who went on
to write many important works on China?s communist government.
MacFarquhar edited Volume 14 of the Cambridge History of China which covered
the period 1949-1965. He wrote The Origins of the Cultural Revolution
which includes a volume on the events of 1956 and 1957 as well as a volume
on the Great Leap Forward, which puts forward the ?massive death toll?
thesis. He also edited Mao?s Secret Speeches. Printed in the pages of
The China Quarterly is a statement that it was published by Information
Bulletin Ltd on behalf of The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). On
13 May 1967 The CCF issued a press release admitting that it was funded
by the CIA, following an expose in Ramparts magazine 16

MacFarquhar stated when questioned by me that:

When I was asked to be the founder editor of the CQ [China Quarterly],
it was explained to me that the mission of the CCF was to encourage
Western intellectuals to form a community committed to the free exchange
of ideas. The aim was to provide some kind of an organizational counter
to Soviet efforts to attract Western intellectuals into various front
organizations...All I was told about funding was that the CCF was backed
by a wide range of foundations, including notably Ford, and the fact
that, of these, the Farfield Foundation was a CIA front was not
disclosed.
In the 26 January 2006 edition of The London Review of Books
MacFarquhar writes of ?the 1960 inaugural issues of the China Quarterly, of which
I was then the editor.?

He also writes that ?secret moneys from the CIA (from the Farfield
Foundation via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the parent of the CQ,
Encounter and many other magazines) provided part of the funding for the
CQ-something I did not know until the public revelations of the late
1960s.?

The issue goes beyond those, like MacFarquhar, who worked for
periodicals connected with the CCF. It is also alleged that other magazines
received funding that emanated from the CIA more generally. For example,
Victor Marchetti, a former staff officer in the Office of the Director of
the CIA, wrote that the CIA set up the Asia Foundation and subsidized
it to the tune of $8 million a year to support the work of
?anti-communist academicians in various Asian countries, to disseminate throughout
Asia a negative vision of mainland China, North Vietnam and North
Korea.?17

Of course, the issue is not black and white. For example, MacFarquhar
also states that he allowed a wide range of views from different sides
of the political spectrum to be aired in his journal. He argues that
Alsop?s article would have been published elsewhere, even if he had
rejected it and that he did publish replies to it which were negative about
Alsop?s thesis.

This may be true. However, those like MacFarquhar were publishing the
kind of things the CIA might be thought to, in general, look favorably
upon. (Otherwise why would the CIA have put up money for it?) The key
point is that these people had a source of western state funding that
others with a different viewpoint lacked.

In the last few years a new generation of writers has published alleged
eyewitness and documentary evidence for the ?massive death toll?
hypothesis. The key issue with this evidence is the authentication of
sources. These authors do not present sufficient evidence in the works cited
in this article to show that the sources are authentic.

Jasper Becker in his book on the Great Leap Forward, Hungry Ghosts,
cites a great deal of evidence of mass starvation and cannibalism in China
during the Great Leap Forward. It should be noted that this is
evidence that only emerged in the 1990s. Certainly the more lurid stories of
cannibalism are not corroborated by any source that appeared at the
actual time of the Great Leap Forward, or indeed for many years later. Many
of the accounts of mass starvation and cannibalism that Becker uses
come from a 600 page document ?Thirty Years in the Countryside.? Becker
says it was a secret official document that was smuggled out of China in
1989. Becker writes that his sources for Hungry Ghosts include
documents smuggled out of China in 1989 by intellectuals going into exile. The
reader needs to be told how people who were apparently dissidents
fleeing the country during a crack-down were able to smuggle out official
documents regarding events thirty years before.

Also, Becker should have discussed more generally why he believes
?Thirty Years in the Countryside? and the other texts are authentic. In 2001
Becker reviewed the Tiananmen Papers in the London Review of Books.18
The Tiananmen Papers are purportedly inner party documents which were
smuggled out of the country by a dissident. They supposedly shed light
on the Party leadership?s thinking at the time of the Tiananmen Square
massacre. In his review Becker seriously discusses the possibility that
these papers might be forgeries. In Hungry Ghosts, Becker needed to say
why he thought the documents he was citing in his own book were
genuine, despite believing that other smuggled official documents might be
inauthentic.

Similarly, Becker cites a purported internal Chinese army journal from
1961 as evidence of a massive humanitarian disaster during the Great
Leap Forward. The reports in this journal do indeed allude to a fairly
significant disaster which is effecting the morale of Chinese troops.
However, is this journal a genuine document? The journal was released by
U.S. Department of State in 1963 and was published in a collection by
the Hoover Institution entitled The Politics of the Chinese Red Army in
1966. According to the British Daily Telegraph newspaper 19 ?They [the
journals] have been in American hands for some time, although nobody
will disclose how they were acquired.? Becker and the many other writers
on the Great Leap Forward who have cited these journals need to state
why they regard them as authentic.

Becker?s book also uses eyewitness accounts of hunger in the Great Leap
Forward. During the mid-nineties, he interviewed people in mainland
China as well as Hong Kong and Chinese immigrants in the west. He states
in his book that in mainland China he was ?rarely if ever, allowed to
speak freely to the peasants.? Local officials ?coached? the peasants
before the interview, sat with them during it and answered some of the
questions for them. Given that there is a good chance that these
officials were trying to slant evidence in favour of the negative Deng Xiaoping
line on the Great Leap Forward it is surely important that the reader
is told which of the interviews cited in the book were conducted under
these conditions and which were not. Becker does not do this in Hungry
Ghosts. Nowhere in this book does he go into sufficient detail to
demonstrate to the reader that the accounts he cites in his book are
authentic.

For a few years, Hungry Ghosts was the pre-eminent text, as far as
critics of Mao were concerned. However, in 2005 Mao: the Unknown Story was
published and very heavily promoted in the West. Its allegations are,
if anything, even more extreme than Becker?s book. Of the 70 million
deaths the book ascribes to Mao, 38 million are meant to have taken place
during the Great Leap Forward. The book relies very heavily on an
unofficial collection of Mao?s speeches and statements which were supposedly
recorded by his followers and which found their way to the west by
means that are unclear. The authors often use materials from this
collection to try and demonstrate Mao?s fanaticism and lack of concern for
human life. They are a group of texts that became newly available in the
1980s courtesy of the Center of Chinese Research Materials (CCRM) in the
U.S. Some of these texts were translated into English and published in
Mao?s Secret Speeches.20

In this volume, Timothy Cheek writes an essay assessing the
authenticity of the texts. He writes ?The precise provenance of these volumes,
which have arrived through various channels, cannot be documented...?
Timothy Cheek argues that the texts are likely to be authentic for two
reasons. Firstly, because some of the texts that the CCRM received were
previously published in mainland China in other editions. Secondly,
because texts that appear in one volume received by the CCRM also appear in
at least one other volume received by the CCRM. It is not obvious to me
why these two facts provide strong evidence of the general authenticity
of the texts.

Perhaps more importantly Chang and Halliday quote passages from these
texts in a misleading way in their chapter on the Great Leap Forward.
Chang claims that in 1958 Mao clamped down on what he called ?people
roaming the countryside uncontrolled.? In the next sentence the authors
claim that ?The traditional possibility of escaping a famine by fleeing to
a place where there was food was now blocked off.? But the part of the
?secret? speech in which Mao supposedly complains about people
?roaming around uncontrolled? has nothing to do with preventing population
movement in China. When the full passage which the authors selectively
quote from is read, it can be seen that the authors are being misleading.
What Mao is actually meant to have said is as follows.

[Someone] from an APC [an Agricultural Producers? Co-operative-Joseph
Ball] in Handan [Hebei] drove a cart to the Anshan steel [mill] and
wouldn?t leave until given some iron. In every place [there are] so many
people roaming around uncontrolled; this must be banned completely. [We]
must work out an equilibrium between levels, with each level reporting
to the next higher level-APCs to the counties, counties to the
prefectures, prefectures to the provinces-this is called socialist order.21
What Mao is talking about here is the campaign to increase steel
production, partly through the use of small-scale rural production. Someone
without authority was demanding iron from Anshan to help their
co-operative meet their steel production quota. Mao seems to be saying that this
spontaneous approach is wrong. He seems to be advocating a more
hierarchical socialist planning system where people have to apply to higher
authorities to get the raw materials they need to fulfill production
targets. (This sounds very unlike Mao-but that is by the by.) He is
clearly not advocating a general ban on all Chinese people traveling around
the country here!

A second, seriously misleading, quotation comes at the end of the
chapter on the Great Leap Forward. First Chang and Halliday write ?We can
now say with assurance how many people Mao was ready to dispense with.?
The paragraph then gives some examples of alleged quotes by Mao on how
many Chinese deaths would be acceptable in time of war. The next
paragraph begins ?Nor was Mao just thinking about a war situation.? They then
quote Mao at the Wuchang Conference as saying ?Working like this, with
all these projects, half of China may well have to die.? This quotation
appears in the heading of Chang and Halliday?s chapter on the Great
Leap Forward. The way the authors present this quotation it looks as if
Mao was saying that it might indeed be necessary for half of China to
die to realize his plans to increase industrial production. But it is
obvious from the actual text of the speech that what Mao is doing is
warning of the dangers of overwork and over-enthusiasm in the Great Leap
Forward, while using a fair bit of hyperbole. Mao is making it clear that
he does not want anyone to die as a result of his industrialization
drive. In this part of the discussion, Mao talks about the idea of
developing all the major industries and agriculture in one fell swoop. The
full text of the passage that the authors selectively quote from is as
follows.

In this kind of situation, I think if we do [all these things
simultaneously] half of China?s population unquestionably will die; and if it?s
not a half, it?ll be a third or ten percent, a death toll of 50
million. When people died in Guangxi [in 1955-Joseph Ball], wasn?t Chen
Manyuan dismissed? If with a death toll of 50 million, you didn?t lose your
jobs, I at least should lose mine; [whether I would lose my] head would
be open to question. Anhui wants to do so many things, it?s quite all
right to do a lot, but make it a principle to have no deaths.22
Then in a few sentences later Mao says: ?As to 30 million tons of
steel, do we really need that much? Are we able to produce [that much]? How
many people do we mobilize? Could it lead to deaths??

It is very important that a full examination of the sources Chang and
Halliday have used for their book is made. This is a call that has been
made elsewhere. Nicholas D. Kristof?s review of the book in The New
York Times brought up some interesting questions. Kristof talks about
Mao?s English teacher Zhang Hanzhi (Mao attempted to learn English in adult
life) who Chang and Halliday cite as one of the people they
interviewed for the book. However, Zhang told Kristof (who is one of her friends)
that though she met the two authors she declined to be interviewed and
provided them with no substantial information. 23 Kristof calls for
the authors to publish their sources on the web so they can be assessed
for fairness.

Deng?s Campaign Against Mao?s Legacy

There were some proponents of the ?massive death toll? story in the
1960s. However, as Felix Greene pointed out in A Curtain of Ignorance
anti-communists in the 1950s and early 1960s made allegations about massive
famines in China virtually every year. The story about the Great Leap
Forward was only really taken seriously in the 1980s when the new
Chinese leadership began to back the idea. It was this that has really given
credibility in the west to those such as Becker and Jung Chang.

The Chinese leadership began its attack on the Great Leap Forward in
1979. Deng moved against Mao supporters directing the official press to
attack them.24 This took the form of an ideological campaign against
?ultraleftism.? As Meissner, says in his study of the Deng Xiaoping era,
?multitudes of scholars and theoreticians were brought forth to expound
on the ?petty bourgeois? social and ideological roots of the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution.?25

The reason for this vilification of the Great Leap Forward had much to
do with post-Mao power struggles and the struggle to roll back the
socialist policies of 1949-76. After Mao?s death in 1976 Hua Guofeng had
come to power on a platform of ?upholding every word and policy made by
Mao.? Deng Xiaoping badly needed a political justification for his
usurpation of Hua in 1978 and his assumption of leadership. Deng?s stated
stance of Mao being ?70% right and 30% wrong? was a way of distinguishing
his own ?pragmatic? approach to history and ideology from his
predecessors. (The pro-market policies Deng implemented suggested that he
actually believed that Mao was about 80% wrong.)

The Chinese party did everything it could to promote the notion that
the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe caused by ultra-leftist
policies. Marshal Ye Jian Ying, in an important speech in 1979 talked of
disasters caused by leftist errors in the Great Leap Forward.26 In 1981 the
Chinese Communist Party?s ?Resolution on Party History? spoke of
?serious losses to our country and people between 1959 and 1961.? Academics
joined in the attack. In 1981 Professor Liu Zeng, Director of the
Institute of Population Research at the People?s University gave selected
death rate figures for 1954-78. These figures were given at a public
academic gathering which drew much attention in the West. The figures he gave
for 1958-1961 indicated that 16.5 million excess deaths had occurred
in this period.27 At the same time Sun Yefang, a prominent Chinese
economist publicly drew attention to these figures stating that ?a high
price was paid in blood? for the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward.28

As well as the internal party struggle Deng wanted to reverse virtually
all of Mao?s positive achievements in the name of introducing
capitalism or ?socialism with Chinese characteristics? as he described it.
Attacking the Great Leap Forward, helped provide the ideological
justification for reversing Mao?s ?leftist? policies. Deng dissolved the
agricultural communes in the early 1980s. In the years following the Great Leap
Forward the communes had begun to provide welfare services like free
health care and education. The break up of the Commune meant this ended.
In an article about the Great Leap Forward, Han Dongping, an Assistant
Professor at Warren Wilson College, described a ?humorous? report in
the New York based Chinese newspaper The World Journal about a farmer
from Henan province who was unable to pay medical bills to get his
infected testicles treated. Tortured by pain he cut them off with a knife and
almost killed himself.29 This kind of incident is the real legacy of
Deng?s ?reforms? in the countryside.

It is often said that Deng?s agricultural reforms improved the welfare
of the peasantry. It is true that breaking up the communes led to a 5
year period of accelerated agricultural production. But this was
followed by years of decline in per capita food production.30 Despite this
decline, western commentators tend to describe the break-up of the
communes as an unqualified economic success.

In fact, breaking up the peasant communes created sources of real
hardship for the peasants. By encouraging the Chinese ruling class to
describe the Great Leap Forward as a disaster that killed millions, Deng was
able to develop a political line that made his regressive policies in
the countryside seem legitimate.

Deng Xiaoping Blames Mao for Famine Deaths

For Deng?s line to prevail he needed to prove not only that mass deaths
happened from 1959-61 but also that these were mainly the result of
policy errors. After the Great Leap Forward the official Chinese
government line on the famine was that it was 70% due to natural disasters and
30% due to human error. This verdict was reversed by the Deng Xiaoping
regime. In the 1980s they claimed the problems were caused 30% by
natural disasters and 70% by human error. But surely if Mao?s actions had
led to the deaths of millions of peasants, the peasants would have
realized what was going on. However, the evidence is that they did not blame
Mao for most of the problems that occurred during the Great Leap
Forward.

Long after Mao?s death, Professor Han Dongping traveled to Shandong and
Henan, where the worst famine conditions appeared in 1959-1961.

Han Dongping found that most of the farmers he questioned favored the
first interpretation of events, rather than the second, that is to say
they did not think Mao was mainly to blame for the problems they
suffered during the Great Leap Forward.31. This is not to say that tragic
errors did not occur. Dongping wrote of the introduction of communal eating
in the rural communes. To begin with, this was a very popular policy
among the peasants. Indeed, in 1958 many farmers report that they had
never eaten so well in their lives before. The problem was that this new,
seeming abundance led to carelessness in the harvesting and
consumption of food. People seemed to have started assuming that the government
could guarantee food supplies and that they did not have responsibility
themselves for food security.

Given the poverty of China in the late 1950s this was an error that was
bound to lead to serious problems and the Communist leadership should
have taken quicker steps to rectify it. Three years of awful natural
disasters made things much worse. Solidarity between commune members in
the worst effected regions broke down as individuals tried to seize
crops before they were harvested. Again, this practice made a bad situation
worse. However, it must be stressed that the farmers themselves did
not tell Han Dongping that errors in the organisation of communal eating
were the main cause of the famine they suffered. Han Dongping, himself,
severely criticizes Mao for the consequences of his ?hasty? policies
during the Great Leap Forward. However he also writes ?I have
interviewed numerous workers and farmers in Shandong, Henan, and I never met one
farmer or worker who said that Mao was bad. I also talked to one
scholar in Anhui [where the famine is alleged to have been most
serious-Joseph Ball] who happened to grow up in rural areas and had been doing
research in the Anhui, he never met one farmer that said Mao was bad nor a
farmer who said Deng [Xiaoping] was good.? 32

It may be argued that Han Dongping?s, at least partial, sympathy for
Mao might have colored his interpretation of what he heard from the
peasants. However, it must also be noted that two of his grandparents died
of hunger related diseases during the Great Leap Forward and Han
Dongping often sounds more critical of Mao?s policies in this period than the
peasants he is interviewing.

Massive Deaths? The Demographic Evidence.

The relative sympathy of the peasants for Mao when recalling the Great
Leap Forward must call into question the demographic evidence that
indicates that tens of millions of them starved to death at this time.
Western academics seem united on the validity of this evidence. Even those
who query it, like Carl Riskin, always end up insisting that all the
?available evidence? indicates that a famine of huge proportions occurred
in this period.

In fact, there is certainly evidence from a number of sources that a
famine occurred in this period but the key question is was it a famine
that killed 30 million people? This really would have been unprecedented.
Although we are used to reading newspaper headlines like ?tens of
millions face starvation in African famine? it is unheard of for tens of
millions to actually die in a famine. For example, the Bangladesh famine
of 1974-75 is remembered as a deeply tragic event in that nation?s
history. However, the official death toll for the Bangladesh famine was
30,000 (out of a single-year population of 76 million), although
unofficial sources put the death toll at 100,000.33 Compare this to an alleged
death toll of 30 million out of a single-year population calculated at
around 660-670 million for the Great Leap Forward period. Proportionally
speaking, the death toll in the Great Leap Forward is meant to be
approximately 35 times higher than the higher estimated death toll for the
Bangladesh famine!

It is rather misleading to say that all ?available evidence?
demonstrates the validity of the massive deaths thesis. The real truth is that
all estimates of tens of millions of Great Leap Forward deaths rely on
figures for death rates for the late 1950s and early 1960s. There is only
very uncertain corroboration for these figures from other statistics
for the period.

The problem is that death rate figures for the period 1940-82, like
most Chinese demographic information, were regarded as a state secret by
China?s government until the early 1980s. As we shall see, uncertainty
about how these were gathered seriously undermines their status as
concrete evidence. It was only in 1982 that death rate figures for the 1950s
and 1960s were released (see Table 1).

They purportedly showed that the death rate rose from 10.8 per thousand
in 1957 to 25.4 per thousand in 1960, dropping to 14.2 per thousand in
1961 and 10 per thousand in 1962. These figures appear to show
approximately 15 million excess deaths due to famine from 1958-1961.34

Table 1. Official Death Rates for China 1955-1962

Year
Death Rate(per thousand)

1955
12.3

1956
11.4

1957
10.8

1958
12.0

1959
14.6

1960
25.4

1961
14.2

1962
10.0

1963
10.0

1964
11.5

(Source: Statistical Yearbook of China 1983)

U.S. Demographers and the Chinese Statistics

Chinese data on famine deaths was used by a group of U.S. demographers
in their own work on the subject. These demographers were Ansley Coale,
John Aird and Judith Banister. They can be said to be the three people
that first popularized the ?massive death toll? hypothesis in the
West. Ansley Coale was a very influential figure in American demography. He
was employed by the Office of Population Research which was funded by
the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1980s when he was publishing his work
on China. John Aird was a research specialist on China at the U.S.
Bureau Of The Census. In 1990, he wrote a book published by the American
Enterprise Institute, which is a body that promotes neo-liberal
policies. This book was called Slaughter of the Innocents and was a critique of
China?s one-child birth control policy. Judith Banister was another
worker at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. She was given time off from her
employment there to write a book that included a discussion of the
Great Leap Forward deaths.35 John Aird read her book pre-publication and
gave her advice.

Judith Banister produced figures that appear to show 30 million excess
deaths in the Great Leap Forward. This is nearly twice the figure
indicated by official Chinese statistics. She believes the official
statistics under-estimate the total mortality because of under-reporting of
deaths by the Chinese population during the period in question.

Banister calculates the total number of under-reported deaths in this
period by first calculating the total number of births between the two
censuses of 1953 and 1964. She does this using data derived from the
census and data from a retrospective fertility survey carried out in 1982.
(Participants in the survey were asked to describe the number of
babies they had given birth to between 1940 and 1981). Once the population
of 1953 and 1964 is known, and the total number of births between these
two years is known, it is possible to calculate the number of deaths
that would have occurred during this period. She uses this information to
calculate a total number of deaths for the eleven year period that is
much higher than official death rates show.

To estimate how many of these deaths occurred in the Great Leap
Forward, Banister returns to the official Chinese death rate statistics. She
assumes that these figures indicate the actual trend of deaths in China
in this period, even though they were too low in absolute terms. For
example, she assumes that the official death rate of 25 per thousand in
1960 does indeed indicate that a huge increase in the death rate
occurred in 1960. However, she combines this with her estimates of
under-reporting of deaths in the period 1953-1964 to come up with a figure of 45
deaths per thousand in 1960. In years in which no famine is alleged the
death toll also increases using this method. In 1957, for example, she
increases the death rate from the official figure of 10.8 per thousand
to 18 per thousand. Banister then compares the revised death rates in
good years with the revised death rates in alleged famine years.
Banister is then able to come up with her estimate of 30 million deaths excess
deaths during the Great Leap Forward.36

Questions Over the Chinese Statistics

A variety of Chinese figures are quoted to back up this thesis that a
massive famine occurred. Statistics that purport to show that Mao was to
blame for it are also quoted. They include figures supposedly giving a
provincial break-down of the increased death rates in the Great Leap
Forward,37 figures showing a massive decrease in grain production during
the Great Leap Forward38 and also figures that apparently showed that
bad weather was not to blame for the famine.39 These figures were all
released in the early 1980s at the time of Deng?s ?reforms.?

But how trustworthy are any of these figures? As we have seen they were
released during the early 1980s at a time of acute criticism of the
Great Leap Forward and the People?s Communes. China under Deng was a
dictatorship that tried to rigorously control the flow of information to
its people. It would be reasonable to assume that a government that
continually interfered in the reporting of public affairs by the media would
also interfere in the production of statistics when it suited them.
John Aird writing in 1982 stated that

The main reason so few national population data appear in Chinese
sources, however, is central censorship. No national population figures can
be made public without prior authorization by the State Council. Even
officials of the SSB [State Statistical Bureau] cannot use such figures
until they have been cleared.40
Of particular interest is the question of the circumstances under which
the death rate figures were arrived at by the State Statistical
Bureau. The figures given for total deaths during the Great Leap Forward by
U.S. and Chinese academics all depend on the key death rate statistic
for the years in question.

Of course, if we knew in detail how information about death rates was
gathered during the Great Leap Forward we might be able to be more
certain that it is accurate. The problem is that this information is not
available. We have to just take the Chinese governments word for it that
their figures are true. Moreover, statements provided by Aird and
Banister indicates that they believe that death rate figures were estimates
and not based on an actual count of reported deaths.

Aird states that ?the official vital rates [birth and death rates] of
the crisis years [of the Great Leap Forward] must be estimates, but
their basis is not known.?41

Banister writes that China did try to start vital registration in 1954
but it was very incomplete. She writes, ?If the system of death
registration was used as a basis for any of the estimated death rates for 1955
through 1957, the rates were derived from only those localities that
had set up the system, which would tend to be more advanced or more
urbanized locations.?42

Banister suggests that the situation did not improve very much during
or after the Great Leap Forward. She writes:

In the late 1960s and most prior years, the permanent population
registration and reporting system may have been so incomplete and uneven that
national or provincial statistical personnel had to estimate all or
part of their totals. In particular, in the 1950s the permanent
population registration and reporting system was only beginning to be set up,
and at first it did not cover the entire population. All the national
population totals for the 1950s except the census total, were probably
based on incomplete local reports supplemented by estimates.43
She also writes that ?In all years prior to 1973-75 the PRC?s data on
crude death rates, infant mortality rates, expectation of life at birth,
and causes of death were nonexistent, useless, or, at best,
underestimates of actual mortality.?44

The reader searches the work of Aird, Coale and Banister in vain for
some indication as to why they can so confidently assert figures for tens
of millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward based on official
death rate figures. These authors do not know how these figures were
gathered and especially in Banister?s case, they appear to have little faith
in them.

Alleged Deaths Among the Young in the Great Leap Forward

Some demographers have tried to calculate infant death rates to provide
evidence for the ?massive death toll? hypothesis. However, the
evidence they come up with tends to muddy the picture rather than providing
corroboration for the evidence from death rates.

One calculation of deaths made by this method appears in the 1984
article ?Famine in China.?45 This article reviewed the previous work of
Aird, Coale and Banister. It accepted the contention of these latter
authors that a massive level of deaths had occurred, overall, during the
Great Leap Forward. However, the authors also try to calculate separate
figures for child and adult deaths in this period. The evidence this
latter article tries to put together is very frequently quoted by those
writing about the era.

The authors of ?Famine in China? calculate infant deaths using the 1982
Retrospective Fertility Survey. They use this survey to calculate the
number of births in each year of the Great Leap Forward. Once the
number of births is estimated for each year it is possible to calculate how
many of those born in the years 1958-1962 survived to be counted in the
census of 1964. This can be compared with survivorship rates of babies
born in years when no famine was alleged.

They use model life tables to calculate how many of the babies dying
before the census died in each famine year. They then convert this figure
into a figure for the number of deaths of those aged under ten in each
of the famine years. This final figure is arrived at by using life
tables and period mortality levels.

The authors of this article argue that the famine began in 1958-9. They
calculate that 4,268,000 excess deaths for those aged under 10
occurred in this period which represents a doubling of the death rate for this
age group (see Table 2). Yet at the same time there was an excess
death figure of only 216000 for those over 10 (in a country of over 600
million this figure is surely well within any reasonable margin of error).
The explanation is that in the absence of effective rationing,
children were left to starve in this period. But in famines, it is
traditionally both the very young and the very old who both suffer. But in this
year only the young suffer. Then in 1960-1961 the number of excess deaths
for under 10s is reduced to 553,000 whereas the number for over 10s
shoots up to 9 million. Even more bizarrely, 4,424,000 excess child
deaths are calculated for 1961-62 but no excess deaths for those over 10 are
calculated to have occurred in this period.

Table 2. Estimated Excess Deaths Due to Famine 1958-1962

Fiscal Year
Estimated deaths under age 10 ('000s)
Estimated deaths under age 10 and over ('000s)

1958-59
4,268
216

1959-60
2,291
7,991

1960-61
553
9,096

1961-62
4,424
0

(Source: Aston et al 1984)

There is clearly a paradox here. According to the death rate provided
by the Chinese, 1960 was the worst calendar year of the famine. The
death rate increased from 10.8 per thousand before the famine to 25.4 per
thousand in 1960 which was by far and away the peak year for famine
deaths. If this was true, then we would expect 1959-60 and 1960-61 to be
the worst fiscal years in terms of numbers of child deaths. Yet according
to the authors only 24.6% of excess child deaths occurred in these
fiscal years as opposed to 98.75% of the excess deaths of those aged ten
or over!

It is hard to understand why there would have been such a large infant
mortality rate in 1958-59. Everyone agrees that 1958 was a bumper
harvest year even if grain production figures were exaggerated. The bulk of
the Chinese crop is harvested in autumn 46 so it?s difficult to see why
massive deaths would have begun at the end of 1958 or even why so many
deaths would have all occurred in the first three months of 1959. As
we have seen, Han Dongping, Assistant Professor in Political Science at
Warren Wilson College, questioned peasants in Shandong and Henan where
the worst effects of the problems in the 1959-1961 period were felt.
They stated that they had never eaten so well as they had after the
bumper harvest of 1958.47 Official death rate figures show a slight increase
from 10.8 per thousand in 1957 to 12 per thousand in 1958. Why were
infant deaths so much worse in the fiscal year 1958-59 according to the
figures that are presented by demographers? Why did the situation
improve in the year of alleged black famine?

This, it is claimed by the authors of ?Famine in China?, is because a
rationing system was introduced that assisted all those of working age
and below but left the old to die. Certainly, there is some evidence
that the young of working age received higher rations than the old because
the young were performing manual labour.48

However, in 1961-2, when the authors allege the famine was still
occurring, the death rate for under 10s shoots up to 4,424, 000 and the death
rate for over 10s reduces to zero. It is alleged that rationing was
relaxed during this period allowing the young to die. It is not explained
why no old people died during this period as well. Are the authors
claiming that in famines, Chinese families would let their children die
but not old people? The authors provide no evidence for this
counter-intuitive implication of their analysis.

They try to back up their thesis with figures that claim to show a
reduction in the numbers of those in older age groups between the two
censuses of 1953 and 1964. The argument is that in a country that was
developing in a healthy way the numbers of old people in the population
should grow rather than fall. They argue that the figures for China in this
period show a decline in the numbers of old people due to the way in
which they were denied rations during the Great Leap Forward.

But the figures they quote are not consistent with mass deaths caused
by a shortfall in rations for all people over a certain age. The authors
state that age specific growth rates fall for males aged over 45 and
for females aged over 65 between the two censuses. What kind of a
rationing system would have led to such a disparity? One that provided
sustenance to women aged 45-65 but not men of the same age? Besides even
after the age of 65 the figures for women are not consistent. The number of
those aged 75-79 grew by 0.51% on the figures presented. This figure
compares well with the growth rates of age groups under 65. For example,
the numbers of 20-24 years old grew by 0.57% and the numbers of 45-49
year olds by 0.55%. The figures for women do not show a pattern
consistent with a rationing system that discriminated against the old. Faulty
source statistics are a far more plausible explanation for the
confusing figures the authors present, than their own difficult to swallow
hypotheses about rationing.

Table 3. Intercensal age- and sex- specific growth rates in population
1953-1964

Age
Male growth rate (%)
Female growth rate (%)

10-14
3.83
4.58

15-19
1.30
1.61

20-24
0.66
0.57

25-29
1.42
1.13

30-34
2.07
1.47

35-39
1.13
0.91

40-44
0.90
1.02

45-49
0.48
0.55

50-54
0.47
0.83

55-59
0.16
1.27

60-64
0.00
0.96

65-69
-0.64
0.11

70-74
-1.02
-0.37

75-79
-0.08
0.51

80+
-0.54
-0.22

(Source: ibid)

This article does not dispel doubts about massive famine deaths. It is
true the authors of the article can point to some corroboration in the
evidence they present. For example there is a reasonable correlation
between the number of births given by the Fertility Census of 1982 and
birth rate figures allegedly gathered in the years 1953-1964. Also there
is reasonable correlation between the survivorships of birth cohorts
born in the famine to the 1964 census and their survivorship to the 1982
census.

If different pieces of evidence, supposedly gathered independently of
each other, correlate, then this provides some evidence that the
author?s hypothesis is true. In which case there might seem to be a stalemate.
On the one hand there is the correlation between this evidence, on the
other there is the huge mismatch between child mortality and adult
mortality in alleged famine years.

However, we must remember the concerns that exist about the general
validity of population statistics released by the Chinese government after
the death of Mao. In the light of these uncertainties, the
correlations between the birth rate figures and the Fertility Survey figures are
not really decisive. Correlations between Chinese population figures
occur elsewhere and have been considered by demographers. Banister speaks
in another connection of the possibility of ?mutual interdependence? of
Chinese demographic surveys that were supposedly conducted
independently of each other. She notes that the census figure for 1982 and
population figures derived from vital registration in 1982 were supposedly
gathered independently. However, there is an extremely great correlation
between the two figures.49 The possibility of such ?mutual
interdependence? between the Fertility Survey figures and the birth rate figures
should not be ruled out.

In addition it must be said that the authors of ?Famine in China? only
present one estimate of the survivorship of babies born during the
Great Leap Forward. Ansley Coale?s article, published in the same year50
shows a reasonably significant but much smaller dip in survivorship in
the years 1958-59 to the 1982 census than that shown in ?Famine in
China.? This would indicate far less ?excess? infant deaths in the years in
question. In addition Coale?s figures show no dip in survivorship of
babies born in 1961-2 to the 1982 census, in contrast to the figures
presented in ?Famine in China.?

Doubts about the survivorship evidence combined with doubts about the
death rate evidence greatly undermine established beliefs about what
happened in the Great Leap Forward. Overall, a review of the literature
leaves the impression that a not very well substantiated hypothesis of a
massive death toll has been transformed into an absolute certainty
without any real justification.

Questions About Chinese Census Information

A final piece of evidence for the ?massive death toll? thesis comes
from raw census data. That is to say we can just look at how large the
number of those born in 1959-1961 and surviving to subsequent censuses is
compared to surrounding years in which no famine has been alleged. We
can get this evidence from the various censuses taken since the Great
Leap Forward. These indeed show large shortfalls in the size of cohorts
of those born in famine years, compared to other years.

Even, if it was granted that such shortfalls did occur they do not
necessarily indicate massive numbers of deaths. Birthrate figures released
by the Deng Xiaoping regime show massive decreases in fertility during
the Great Leap Forward. It is possible to hypothesize that there was a
very large shortfall in births without this necessarily indicating that
millions died as well. Of course, there had to be some reason why
fertility dropped off so rapidly, if this is indeed what did happen.
Clearly hunger would have played a large part in this. People would have
postponed having children because of worries about having another mouth to
feed until food availability improved. Clearly, if people were having
such concerns this would have indicated an increase in malnutrition
which would have lead to some increase in child mortality. However, this is
in no way proves that the ?worst famine in world history? occurred
under Mao. The Dutch famine of 1944-1945 led to a fertility decline of
50%. The Bangladesh famine of 1974-1975 also led to a near 50% decrease in
the birth rate.51 This is similar to figures released in the Deng
Xiaoping era for the decline in fertility in the Great Leap Forward.
Although, both the Bangladesh and the Dutch famines were deeply tragic they
did not give rise to the kind of wild mortality figures bandied about in
reference to the Great Leap Forward, as was noted above. In Bangladesh
tens of thousands died, not tens of millions.

However, we should not automatically assume that evidence from the
single year age distributions are correct. There is a general problem with
all efforts to derive information from single-year age distributions
from the 1953 and 1964 censuses. These figure only appear