The “Incredible Famine” of 1876–79, which claimed between 9 million and 13 million lives, was the second most lethal famine in China's history. Only the Great Leap disaster (1959–61) killed more people. Through the imaginative use of local sources gathered on visits to Shanxi Province, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley provides an insightful account of the episode and describes a perfect storm of severe drought, serial crop failures, a beleaguered Qing state, and transportation problems that proved to be deadly impediments to relief efforts. The numbers and images are shocking. Shanxi, the epicenter of the disaster, lost one-third of its population; in some counties, up to 80 percent of the people perished. Families were forced to make agonizing decisions about sacrificing some members so that others could live. Beyond capturing such traumatic experiences, the core of the book explores debates about the meaning of the famine, and it analyzes images of women and cannibalism as examples of the “semiotics of starvation” (p. 159ff). Edgerton-Tarpley convincingly demonstrates that for survivors and observers, interpretations of the Incredible Famine varied widely. By juxtaposing local accounts against elite debates and drawing parallels to contemporaneous disasters in Ireland and India, the book provides both “ground-level” and panoramic views of an event that fatally transformed Shanxi's landscape.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part recounts the course of the disaster, drawing from survivor accounts that describe the experience of famine in moving and disturbing detail. The second part shows how observers explained the famine in divergent ways, as local literati, high imperial officials, treaty port residents, missionaries, and Chinese philanthropists debated its causality, assigned blame, and proposed solutions. The third part explores cultural images used to represent the famine, focusing on the themes of gender and cannibalism. Finally, an epilogue reflects on present-day memories of the famine in Shanxi.
The most engaging sections of the book examine literary and pictorial representations: what the author, borrowing a term from the works of Arthur and Joan Kleinman, calls “icons of starvation” (see “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 [1996]: 11). Two chapters on family and gender demonstrate how women were central to elite anxieties about the collapse of the moral order and pivotal for proto-nationalist concerns about the fate of the nation. “Eating Culture,” the penultimate chapter, considers pervasive images of cannibalism and concludes that most reports of human flesh consumption were either rumors or metaphorical expressions of horror. Edgerton-Tarpley argues that while isolated instances may actually have occurred, people used the trope of cannibalism for disparate rhetorical purposes. To Western observers, stories of people devouring each other epitomized China's savagery. Jiangnan elites, on the other hand, used such images to portray the desperation of the victims, in order to inspire donations to their fund-raising campaigns. Meanwhile, local accounts in Shanxi drew on intrafamilial cannibalism as a metaphor for the destruction of the family. Instead of conforming to the proverbial convention of “exchanging children and eating them” (pp. 215–16), survivors recorded harrowing images of people who killed and ate their relatives to signal the catastrophic breakdown of society.
Most intriguingly, memories of this cannibalistic past were resurrected in the early 1960s. During the Great Leap Forward, local officials collected sources about the Incredible Famine and introduced them to schoolchildren and villagers, to deflect attention from the famine occurring on their watch. This campaign of distraction thus produced and preserved some of the most valuable sources that Edgerton-Tarpley uncovered in her research. It also revived memories of the Incredible Famine, such that her informants could repeat folktales and proverbs about the events of the late nineteenth century.
Tears from Iron is at its best when addressing issues of cultural representations and the multiple meanings of the Incredible Famine. But the book meets the considerable challenge of moving between lived experiences and representations of those experiences with uneven success. For instance, sources that describe acts of cannibalism are analyzed as metaphorical representations, but also used to substantiate empirical claims. In presenting different interpretations of the famine, Edgerton-Tarpley sometimes avoids asserting concrete conclusions. Thus, the reader is left wondering, how much did opium cultivation in Shanxi actually contribute to the severity of the famine? Was Relief Commissioner Yan Jingming a conscientious official or an ineffective administrator? And given its ubiquity in image and discourse, were there any verified cases of cannibalism in Shanxi? Finally, the book focuses on the famine and its reincarnation in the 1960s, passing over other devastating disasters that afflicted Shanxi and other areas of northern China in the twentieth century: a major flood in 1917, drought famines in 1920–21 and 1928, and years of dearth under Japanese occupation in the 1940s. Although these disasters never approached the death tolls of the Incredible Famine, it would be interesting to compare how disasters of more recent vintage have been represented and remembered.
This book is a distinctive contribution to new research on famine in late imperial China, a timely complement to Lillian Li's socioeconomic study Fighting Famine in North China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). It will be of genuine value to anyone who is interested in the history of disasters and philanthropy in general, the history of Shanxi in particular, as well as issues of gender, trauma, and memory.
