This collection of eleven essays provides fascinating and nuanced discussions of China's Great Leap Forward Famine of 1959–61. It is a significant addition to a flood of scholarship on the Famine published since 2008, in particular monographs by Yang Jisheng (Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai dajihuang jishi [Tombstone: A Report on the Great Famine of the 1960s in China] [Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 2008]), Ralph Thaxton, Jr. (Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008]), and Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 [New York: Walker & Co., 2010]). Three of the many accomplishments of Eating Bitterness stand out. First, as the first work to bring mainland Chinese and Western scholarship on the Great Leap Famine (GLF) together in one volume, it opens a dialogue between what have been largely independent research communities. The essays by four mainland scholars introduce readers to new debates about the origins, inner workings, and impact of the disaster, while Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik's essay provides an insightful overview of how the famine has been approached in China by Party historiographers and literary figures as well as academics.
Second, by highlighting grassroots perspectives on the GLF, Eating Bitterness furthers ongoing efforts in the China field to “‘rescue’ Chinese history from national frameworks” by foregrounding the local and the particular (Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ed., Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches [London: Routledge, 2003], p. 7; see also Joseph P. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006], pp. 17–9). Drawing on previously unavailable sources such as oral histories and county archives, its contributors demonstrate that the GLF was “a dynamic and highly fragmented process” rather than “the unified imposition of authoritarian high modernism” (p. 20). Felix Wemheuer and Jeremy Brown explore the glaring disparity between urban and rural experiences of the disaster. Wemheuer argues that the Great Leap program was in part a response to widespread peasant discontent over the privileges received by city dwellers at the expense of the rural population. Brown's study of the famine in Tianjin demonstrates that, although the food situation there was far better than that of the surrounding countryside, the city's leaders were able to utilize the central government's prioritization of heavy industry and fear of urban starvation to procure extra grain for Tianjin. Chen Yixin's study of death rates in two neighboring provinces, Anhui and Jiangxi, brings home the tremendous diversity in rural experiences of the famine. Eschewing interpretations based solely on national-level data, Chen argues that only a careful examination of factors such as the geography, agricultural tax regulations, and leadership structure of each province can explain why some regions survived the famine better than others.
Third, a number of essays in Eating Bitterness examine the complex interplay between the Party-state and rural society during the famine. Xin Yi's essay on the food distribution system in the People's Communes argues that the provision of free meals in public dining halls enjoyed “enthusiastic support” from poorer villagers at the beginning of the Great Leap, though it quickly resulted in disaster (pp. 141–43). Kimberley Manning's exploration of gendered dimensions of mass mobilization also finds some degree of rural support for Great Leap radicalism. Some of the women that the Party recruited as rural leaders in the early 1950s, she finds, grew to identify closely with Maoist rhetoric about overcoming one's physical limitations, and at times put “a work ethic that required total devotion and a Herculean effort” above policies aimed at protecting women's health (p. 83). Richard King's essay on literature published early in the Great Leap contextualizes the radicalism of some of Manning's interviewees. He shows how a rural woman named Li Shuangshuang became “the cultural success story of the Great Leap” by proving herself to be “a man's equal (or superior)” in initiative, labor, and ideology (p. 63).
Other essays highlight considerable peasant resistance to Great Leap policies. Gao Hua's discussion of the government's Food Augmentation and Food Substitutes campaigns documents the deep dissatisfaction with food substitutes expressed “at all levels of the social strata” (p. 190). Wang Yanni's haunting case study of communization in Macheng County argues that peasants were so traumatized by the widespread destruction of family homes and gravesites during the Great Leap that their efficiency and productivity were impaired. Gao Wangling, Thaxton, and Wemheuer discuss a wide array of behaviors that Gao terms “counter-action” (fanxingwei). Examples include the kind of “everyday forms of resistance” analyzed by James C. Scott such as foot dragging, evasion, pilfering (“Everyday Forms of Resistance,” in Forrest D. Colburn, ed., Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance [Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989], p. 27), as well as eating un-ripened crops before they were harvested (chiqing) and concealing grain (pp. 260, 272). Wemheuer looks at how the Maoist state used reports of such behaviors to develop a discourse that made it impossible for people to talk about hunger without being attacked. Thaxton, taking issue with the claim, most recently voiced by Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, pp. 118–23, 335–37), that the famine was brought to an end by the “administrative intervention” of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, argues that it was instead rural resistance that ended the famine. He and Gao find that low-profile forms of resistance threatened “the fiscal foundations of state power,” thus forcing the state to modify its policies, and resulting in a strained peasant-Party relationship that persists today (pp. 39, 251, 264, 291).
The editors' insightful introduction does an admirable job of drawing connections between eleven fairly disparate essays. It could do a bit more to identify key areas of change and continuity regarding Chinese responses to famine in different time periods. Given that interview data is a crucial source for many of the contributors, an expanded, more critical examination of the “politics of memory” also would be helpful (p. 21). Overall, this is an important collection that contributes both new perspectives and rich data. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the Great Leap Famine and the early years of the PRC.
