Introduction
At the end of 1960, about 700,000 of Tianjin's (天津) residents were officially diagnosed as suffering from oedema. As a response, the first party secretary of the city, Wan Xiaotang (万晓塘), declared a citywide campaign to establish health clinics for oedema patients in every danwei (单位, work unit). The policy was followed through, but there were notable political problems in implementing it. A report by the Tianjin Construction Bureau to the city government in late January 1961 complained that some of the medical personnel lacked both a proper political outlook and training to judge who really was sick. For example, in a brick factory, a doctor had diagnosed 580 workers of the total workforce of 695 with oedema.Footnote 1 Admitting them all to a clinic would have stopped production. Therefore, the factory party committee had re-examined the cases and found out that there were really only 39 cases of the disease.Footnote 2
This article studies disaster governance in Tianjin during the Great Leap Forward famine and highlights the importance of Maoist disaster management practices for the outcome of the famine in the city and the countryside surrounding it. China suffers from almost all major types of natural disasters, and the Maoist period witnessed a number of these, but disaster management has been a rather under-studied subject in Chinese contemporary history. Nevertheless, building on what we have, this study confirms the older findings by Gordon BennettFootnote 3 and Lester RossFootnote 4 on earthquakes and more recent ones by the author himselfFootnote 5 on floods—that is, that in Maoist China natural disasters were managed largely through mass campaigns. It is argued here that the modus operandi of such campaigns-based disaster management greatly contributed to the outcome of the famine in Tianjin as well.
In many ways, for Tianjin leaders the 1959–1961 famine relief efforts were about mobilizing campaigns, just like any other. Seeing it in this context, the question of the city's ability to carry out disaster mitigation efforts was therefore largely about its ability to carry out campaigns that diverted resources away from other, often more prioritized, campaigns of the Great Leap Forward. At the same time, the city was able to lobby for support from the central government, and the survival of urban residents was due to the successful combination of these two factors. However, the starvation of large numbers of peasants in the Tianjin countryside was also partly a result of local policies that prioritized urban needs over rural ones. The way in which Tianjin city implemented its disaster management activities was therefore of profound importance for the outcome of the famine, not only the central dictates.
Most Western research into Mao-era disasters has targeted the Great Leap Forward famine. So much so, that different schemes on how to classify them have been suggested.Footnote 6 A major area of interest has been mapping out various actors’ culpability in the disaster, from Mao Zedong (毛泽东) down to village party cadres.Footnote 7 Such studies, revealing as they sometimes are of the cruellest of details, are invaluable to our understanding of what happened during the famine. Indeed, for the purposes of this article, it is good to understand the general context of the Great Leap Forward famine. While there were large local variations to the duration and severity of the famine, in the countryside it can be said, generally speaking, to have begun by the spring of 1959 and continued to the summer of 1961. Different researchers have estimated the death toll of the famine to be anywhere between 10 and 40 million people, with most researchers agreeing on a number that lies near the higher end of the figures. Most of the victims were peasants. Big cities, including Tianjin, were the least affected areas by the famine, but mortality rates there also rose during the famine years.Footnote 8
However, researchers on the general course of the famine usually frame their research questions on how the implementation of Great Leap Forward policies caused the famine, not on how authorities responded to the famine while constrained by these same policies. Implicitly, this usually rules out a systematic analysis of disaster management practices during the famine, which is the aim of this article. Indeed, as shown here, there was an evolving effort at managing the food crisis from the very outset of the Great Leap Forward in Tianjin. However, this effort was very uneven with regard to rural and urban areas, and the rigidness of Maoist disaster management practices and structures contributed to the shortcomings of famine prevention in Tianjin.
Another key topic in Great Leap Forward famine disaster studies has been analysing the vulnerabilities of different population groups such as people in different localities, rural and urban areas, cadres, and common people as well as genders or age cohorts. Here either econometric modellingFootnote 9 or historical reconstructions have been relied on.Footnote 10 The Tianjin case underlines how its status as a metropolitan city was one of the key structural factors that made it less vulnerable to the famine; nevertheless, there were other structural factors that created varying vulnerabilities among different groups of the population within the city itself, most notably between its urban and rural residents as well as cadres and ordinary people.
A third aspect of Great Leap Forward famine studies concentrates on human actors and their efforts to prevent and mitigate the effects of the famine. For example, Chen Yixin has shown how measures taken by provincial leadership to prevent famine as well as number of structural factors helped to make Jiangxi (江西) province one of the least affected in the famine.Footnote 11 Chris Bramall also notes the centrality of differences of local cadre responses to food shortages in explaining differences in mortality between counties in Sichuan (四川).Footnote 12 Other scholars have focused on how individuals responded to food shortages and tried to avoid starvation through various, often illegal, measures. An example is the work of Ralph A. Thaxton, who has argued that the role of government relief aid to rural disaster areas was miniscule and that peasants saved themselves mostly by eating crops in the fields.Footnote 13 Such a finding is not applicable to an urban case, but the tension between self- and social protection was also notable in Tianjin, where authorities tried constantly to curb black markets and ‘leaks’ in the food supply chains. The closest study of a distinct disaster management campaign during the Great Leap Forward famine on its own comes from Gao Hua, who has studied the ersatz food production campaign in 1960–1961,Footnote 14 which was also undertaken in Tianjin.
Important studies to note in this respect are Jeremy Brown's recent article on Tianjin city during the Great Leap Forward famine and book on urban-rural relations under Mao-era in Tianjin.Footnote 15 Brown offers a number of valuable insights into the activities of the city leaders during the disaster. He shows that they were well aware of the crisis and acted to save urban residents from famine by lobbying for grain from the central government, controlling black markets, and conducting a campaign to downsize the urban population. These findings are supported in this article too, but they comprise only half the picture. Brown misses how the whole city was mobilized to economize on its grain consumption, to fight against oedema, and produce its own food through large vegetable growing campaigns. This production was important for survival in the nadir of the famine in the winter of 1960–1961 and therefore the city's survival should not only be attributed to central government grain deliveries, as is usually the case in research.
Between 1959 and 1961 Tianjin's disaster management went through three distinct phases: the early crisis management period from the early 1959 to the summer of 1960, the emergency phase from late summer 1960 to the spring of 1961, and the consolidation phase from the summer of 1961 to late 1962. In the following sections, disaster management during the famine is analysed in more detail, based on the archival and open sources currently available to researchers.Footnote 16
The descent into crisis: early 1958 to summer 1960
When the Great Leap Forward began in Tianjin, all sectors of society were mobilized to carry it out. Industrial investments in the city were to go up ten times compared to the First Five-Year Plan and the level of production in Shanghai was to be reached within five years, which meant the tripling of industrial output.Footnote 17 Tianjin also followed all other national initiatives, including beginning massive waterworks and steel production campaigns. In some aspects, like the communization of urban areas, it even tried to take the lead in the whole country.
In urban Tianjin, the early food crisis was actually a by-product of the nationwide steel production campaign. Nearly two million people, including peasants in suburbs and counties, were mobilized to make steel in the city from autumn 1958 to winter 1959.Footnote 18 The city leaders announced an ‘eat full’ policy and raised grain rations for people participating in the campaign from an average of 29 jin (斤, 500 grams) to 31 jin a month. The steel campaign also took the labour force away from the Tianjin countryside and removed transport capacity from grain shipments and, as a consequence, Tianjin received only 59 per cent of its required grain in the fourth quarter of 1958. By the end of 1958, the city was already eating its granaries empty.Footnote 19 Moreover, because the campaign also removed labour from vegetable growing, crops did not receive enough attention. About 40 per cent of baicai (白菜, Chinese cabbage) crops—25 per cent of city vegetable supplies—rotted in the fields.Footnote 20
As a response to this situation, the first steps in what was to become Great Leap Forward famine disaster management were taken in the city in late 1958. At the end of December, the city government cut the wheat flour proportion of rations from 30 per cent to 20 per cent, while the food industry using wheat flours got a 50 per cent cut. Wheat was to be substituted with rice and sweet potato flours.Footnote 21 In a meeting of leading cadres in January 1959, Party Secretary Wan Xiaotang warned that long-term shortages lay ahead, and urged cadres to encourage people to ‘eat a little less’.Footnote 22 Following this, a citywide campaign to curb grain consumption was mobilized. Although it was originally meant as a temporary measure, it became a permanent feature in Tianjin disaster management throughout the Great Leap Forward.
Rationing as such was not a new thing in Tianjin. It had already begun before the Leap when city grain sales were centralized in 1955. Monthly rations were based on the type of work undertaken by and the age of residents. In Tianjin the population was divided into four categories with 33 grades. A worker with the highest grade in the highest category received 60 jin of dingliang (定量, grain rations) a month, while street residents, who were classified based on their age, received at most 28.5 jin.Footnote 23 There was also a special supply system for cadres. Food entitlements were therefore unequal to begin with. However, in the grain-saving campaign, rationing was combined with the active redistribution of households’ and danweis’ private grain reserves, which was new.
As part of the campaign, the extra rations for steel campaign workers ended in March, and general grain rations were cut by one jin in May 1959,Footnote 24 but actual savings had already begun in February based on ‘voluntary’ cuts in individual rations. Households were expected to hand in their ‘surplus’ grain to street and danwei cadres and accept, and even actively suggest, cuts to their individual rations. In effect, this doubled the reduction of average rations and some families were subject to much larger confiscations of grain from their private reserves throughout 1959.Footnote 25 District Grain Bureau offices and units under them were put in charge of this campaign. They were to take grain back from residents through propaganda work, visiting households and persuading them to cut their rations as well as by conducting house searches in order to find ‘surplus’ grain. Districts could thus proudly report success in getting families under their jurisdiction to cut their rations more than the City Party Committee had ordered.Footnote 26
As a report on the campaign in the Hexi (河西) District, Huidui Street (灰堆街) from October 1959 demonstrates, grassroots authorities actively engaged in the work. In this case, people in the street had complained about ‘grain shortages’ (quotation marks in original document). The report blamed residents themselves for the situation: sometimes people used grain in an unplanned manner, wasting it by keeping excessively large reserves or using it to feed chickens or exchanging grain tickets for cloth tickets. Based on the survey, 25 per cent of households actually received too much grain and only 5 per cent received too little. The 25 per cent had to cut their rations and people were made to return their surplus grain. This allegedly solved the grain shortage problem in the street.Footnote 27 Industrial units also took similar redistributive measures. The City No. 1 Steel Factory was offered as a model for others to emulate for being able to return 140,000 jin of grain to the state between March and December 1959, largely through ‘augmenting’ its foodstuff,Footnote 28 which usually meant adding water to food. It was claimed that the method not only saved grain, but also produced food that was so cheap and good that workers ‘competed to buy it’.Footnote 29 Publishing such positive reports on the campaign in the neibu (internal) Tianjin city government bulletin served a clear propaganda purpose; in reality, the popular reception to the campaign was likely to have been more negative than the reports led the reader to understand.
Rationing was an important method in trying to guarantee constant, if smaller than before the Leap, levels of food supplies to residents, but it is important to note that not only the size of rations mattered for survival. While official urban rations changed by only about 5–6 jin from the highest to the lowest average monthly amounts during the famine, more important was that, as the food shortages continued, rations increasingly contained inferior and less nutritious products in varying proportions. The crop cycle worked so that during the year the flour proportion of rations fluctuated between 10 per cent (before harvests) and 60 per cent (after harvests). The rest was made up with what was available, often tubers such as sweet potatoes, but when these were in short supply, other parts of vegetables such as the tops, petals, and leaves of plants were counted as ‘grain’. The supply for rice also fluctuated. Between 1959 and 1961 Tianjin residents were sold on average 1 jin of rice per month but, in the low points of supply, this was not real rice at all but its residues and millet.Footnote 30 The picture was similar with vegetables, which were in high supply in August–November and in low supply in January–March. Here supplies fluctuated between 2–5 liang (两, 50 grams) a day, but official targets could be as high as 7–9 liang.
The sweet potato was already making up much of the ‘grain’ ration in 1959. As part of the grain consumption economizing campaign, Tianjin food processing industries began to use sweet potato flours and other substitutes for wheat during the spring of 1959, reporting great success in saving grain this way.Footnote 31 Sweet potato growing was also promoted throughout the spring of 1959 because of its higher hectare yields than other tubers.Footnote 32 In the Tianjin countryside, dried sweet potato flour was made into tasteless buns, which caused sore throats and stomach cramps, but by now for many this was already the only alternative available.Footnote 33 As noted, rations were also ‘augmented’ by such means as adding water to them. Urbanites were therefore more poorly supplied than official rations records would lead one to believe.
The second disaster management method that the city began to use in spring 1959 was stricter enforcement of grain supply regulations to block ‘leaks’ in the grain supply system and restrict city food supplies to Tianjin's urban residents only. Connected to this policy, reducing the urban population became part of the political agenda in the spring of 1959. The City Planning Bureau complained in April that in 1958, 6.6 per cent of Tianjin's rural population had been transferred to other jobs, totalling 195,000 people. In addition to this, a large number of ‘blind migrants’ (that is, usually peasants moving to cities in search of work and food without official authorization) had also appeared in the city—127,500 people in 1958—constituting up to 13 per cent of the rural workforce in some of the city's counties. This inflow continued in 1959. It was now demanded that city work units must cease wantonly recruiting peasants and follow centrally approved recruitment plans. Further, illegally hired people should be sent back. This was especially the case with those with ‘bad’ class backgrounds who were to be deported ‘without exception’, while ordinary peasants without permanent employment would only have been deported home ‘generally’.Footnote 34
Managing the numbers of blind migrants, in effect often famine refugees, became a key issue in Tianjin disaster management. In April–May 1959, district grain bureaus began a campaign to check the residence permits (hukou, 户口), the grain accounts, and how people's rations corresponded to their real situations to make sure that nobody was getting rations that were not due to them.Footnote 35 Henceforth, such checking and verification campaigns became a constant feature of disaster management in the city.
Related to this, Tianjin leaders tried to restrict entitlements to food to Tianjin residents alone by other means, too. In April 1959, the city authorities limited the amount of foodstuff people could export from Tianjin. Organizations could export foodstuff only if they had the relevant certificates, and individuals could only carry small amounts of food (such as snacks) outside the city. In May 1959, the Post Office was ordered not to carry shipments containing foodstuff. A bureaucratic campaign was launched to enforce these regulations. The Grain Bureau sent inspection teams, which operated with the police, to catch people smuggling grain out of the city. Twenty-six checkpoints were placed around the city to check outgoing people for contraband. It was discovered in many places: in coffins, inside clothing, women faking pregnancy and even inside false babies carried by their ‘mothers’.Footnote 36 In September 1959, the city forbade non-hukou people (that is, those without residence permits) from buying any foodstuff in city markets.Footnote 37
Another disaster management method used by city authorities early on was to try to better control the food supply chain. A major problem from the point of view of city authorities was that individuals broke market regulations and engaged in black marketing and trading with rationing tickets, while many danweis circumvented the official supply chains and purchased their food directly from the producers in villages. Time and again the city issued directives banning such activities. This had already begun by November 1958, but it is clear that danweis did not follow the directive, because the ban was reaffirmed at least five times in 1959 alone.Footnote 38 Food prices also tended to rise above list prices, even at official retail outlets, which the City Price Committee tried to regulate.Footnote 39
City leaders also started to tentatively promote food production by urban residents. Early in 1959, the city mobilised urban residents to collect farmyard manure for the suburban areas to improve vegetable production.Footnote 40 In March 1959 urban work units were told to participate in an oil plant growing campaign taking place in the city's countryside where ‘idle land’, such as roadsides and ditch embankments, was being used to grow castor-oil plants and sunflowers. However, unlike peasants, urbanites were not given production quotas as yet.Footnote 41 In June a ‘fourteen cities meeting’ in Beijing laid out a central policy of making ‘vegetables the key’ for the suburbs. According to this policy, city suburbs were to concentrate on serving their central cities by providing them with vegetables. It was planned that there would be a 40 per cent increase in vegetable supplies in winter 1959–60. In Tianjin, city leaders planned to dedicate notable resources to improve its food supplies in this way. The workforce for this was to come from sending 80,000 surplus temporary workers from the city to the suburbs to feed the city.Footnote 42
These early measures in Tianjin can be regarded as short-term measures to adapt to lower food supplies. In early 1959, no-one knew for how long the crisis would continue and how severe if would become. There would be new harvests in June and August. Official estimates for the national harvest were upbeat and Leap targets were being revised downwards. However, demonstrating how disaster management was always a part of the bigger picture in Maoist China, political developments interfered even with these modest crisis management initiatives. After the Lushan (庐山) conference in August 1959, the Great Leap Forward entered another high tide when Mao rekindled its already somewhat moderated objectives. Tianjin party leaders followed the cue and called for intensified efforts in production. Industrial and agricultural units were ordered to inspect themselves for rightists and a hefty 31 per cent general growth in value target was set for city's production in 1961.Footnote 43
The campaign against rightist opportunism also had a direct impact on disaster management in Tianjin. Grain-saving targets for the year were raised and the campaign for ‘voluntary’ grain returns was stepped up under ‘red flag competitions’ in work units where people were expected to hand some 12 million kilograms (circa 4 kilograms per resident) of grain back to the city as a yearly total.Footnote 44 In the third quarter of 1959 the city residents saved 11.3 per cent more grain than had been planned.Footnote 45 The city government bulletin would offer as a model a man who underwent self-criticism for not being able to hand in all agreed ‘surplus’ grain to his residential committee.Footnote 46 In the last quarter, the city's population grew by 190,000 people, but grain consumption went down by 1 million jin.Footnote 47
In the newly radicalized atmosphere, the Tianjin countryside was targeted with a rush grain procurement campaign during the autumn harvest. City government instructions stressed meticulous threshing and collecting every granule to send to granaries as the key to a bumper harvest. Cadres were told to educate peasants to oppose any wasteful ways of thinking such as, ‘If I lose few granules it does not matter in the big picture.’Footnote 48 The harvest was proclaimed to have been completed successfully by mid-November.Footnote 49 But in reality, rush procurements did not help the city. The 1959 grain procurement target was 90.5 million kilograms, but the actual amount collected was only 60.5 million kilograms.Footnote 50 Even during normal times Tianjin was a grain-deficit area and its own production could cover only about 10 per cent of its demand. The rest was supplied by the central government, which now became the target of active lobbying by Tianjin authorities for more grain. This was possible because the city was allocated grain directly by the central government and not by Hebei (河北) province, under which the city was administratively located at this time. Tianjin had therefore a lobbying channel upwards which it used repeatedly.
The political atmosphere also affected supplementary foodstuff production in a contradictory manner. The campaign that had been planned for increasing vegetable production by sending part of the non-city-hukou population back to the suburbs fell through as the workforce was needed to continue the industrial leap.Footnote 51 In fact, as we have seen, the city's population grew by 190,000 people in the last quarter of 1959 when grain production was going down. This alarmed city leaders so much that in late November 1959 the City Party Committee issued a directive on curbing the hiring of new personnel for work units.Footnote 52
At the same time, city leaders could actually use the more radical atmosphere to intensify some of their crisis management measures. In October 1959, the city began a campaign to better control blind migration and established the Office for Dissuading Agricultural Workforce from Blindly Taking Refuge, later named the Office for Repatriation of the Blindly Migrating People.Footnote 53 The name was well chosen, as sending a ‘workforce’, not refugees, back to its places of origin was easier to justify even under the newly radicalized conditions. A large migrant reception station, in effect a refugee camp, was erected at Tianjin East Railway Station and all city districts established their own shourong (收容, reception and treatment) offices. In 1959–61 some 600,000 blind migrants were handled through this system.Footnote 54
Promoting supplementary food production was also stepped up. Already in July 1959, the Central Committee had made a decision on this, calling for zili-gengsheng (自力更生, meaning self-reliance in economic construction) in local efforts to produce their own supplementary foodstuff and only ask for central assistance as a last resort.Footnote 55 Then in October Chairman Mao expressed his support for the Wujiaowang Xiansi People's Commune (吴桥王谦寺公社), which had begun to promote pig growing. It was now made a model for the rest of the country to emulate. Based on these two policies, in November the city government bulletin announced that the city's goal was to attain self-sufficiency in all supplementary food products by 1962. This meant increasing vegetable growing two-and-a-half times and making all work units raise their own pigs.Footnote 56 The Party Centre kept up the pressure on the policy by circulating Finance Minister Li Xiannian's (李先念) speech during the second big cities meeting on supplementary food production in Beijing in early December. Li noted how the big cities should keep up the campaign for supplementary food production with regard to vegetables and especially emphasized raising pigs in order to obtain self-sufficiency in meat production within two years.Footnote 57
According to official figures, over half of work units in the city were made to engage in vegetable production and raise pigs during the winter and spring of 1959–1960. Reportedly, the number of pigs in the city increased by over 100 per cent to two million and vegetable growing acreage was expanded by 36 per cent.Footnote 58 Pig-raising was not popular as work units lacked the resources and experience to carry it out properly, but criticizing this ill-conceived policy was regarded as showing a rightist attitude. The city officials responsible for the campaign also stuck to the figure of two million pigs as the achievement of the campaign, but this can be regarded as suspect as pork disappeared almost completely from supplementary food rations during this time.
The supplementary foodstuff production campaign and stricter population policies did not prevent the food situation from getting worse throughout the winter of 1960. In January 1960, worsening food shortages made city leaders monopolize trade on all vegetables that formerly had been partly free.Footnote 59 In March 1960, the City Council reissued a directive to the urban masses to use idle land to plant oil plant seedlings.Footnote 60 This policy was not successful as the production of edible oils actually dwindled throughout the year.Footnote 61 In March 1960, all processed foods were rationed and the city also began to require grain coupons in restaurants. In April another campaign to control hukous and restrict the blindly migrating people started.Footnote 62 The city government bulletin at this time claimed that ‘a majority of the people who claim that there is not enough food are from this group’,Footnote 63 and indeed many of them were fleeing famine in their home villages. Following this, the summer of 1960 witnessed an intensifying continuation of the campaign to save grain through the ejections of people without a city hukou. Yet, as some were captured and sent home, others entered the city in their stead.
The situation was much worse in the Tianjin countryside, where the food situation was turning into an outright disaster. In December 1958, the city had acquired 12 counties from the Tianjin Prefecture which had been abolished. Eight southern counties in particular that had been part of the prefecture were regarded as poor and produced little surplus grain—in effect the city inherited a large disaster zone through this merger. There had been reports of widespread food riots in the prefecture and of people fleeing to Tianjin to beg for food before the merger,Footnote 64 and the situation did not improve with it. Brown has argued that Tianjin city leaders were ill equipped to handle rural affairs to begin with, and the mergers over-strained their resources, which led to the relative neglect of rural areas in Tianjin disaster management.Footnote 65
While one must agree that Tianjin leaders took far more active measures to save the city from the famine than its rural areas, and many of their measures actually worsened the situation in the countryside, they did intervene in 1959–1961 a number of times in counties suffering most from the famine. The first time such intervention took place was in early summer 1959 when a report to the City Party Committee revealed that an oedema epidemic had developed in a number of southern counties, with 8,446 diagnosed oedema patients. The report also indicated that the main cause of the epidemic was the lack of protein in the food people were eating, which comprised mostly wild vegetables. The report also indicated that number of people had died of poisoning after eating the wrong types of wild vegetables. The City Health Bureau responded to the report by sending medical teams to affected villages and providing patients with protein-rich nutrition.Footnote 66 The same pattern repeated itself in October 1959, when a medical team was dispatched to Ninghe (宁河) County to cure oedema patients there. A number of other counties followed Ninghe, and by March 1960, 11 of the 12 counties in Tianjin had reported cases of oedema and even ‘unnatural deaths’, as famine deaths were euphemistically called.Footnote 67
In March 1960 Wan Xiaotang personally led inspections teams to Wuqiao (吴桥) County. One person in an inspection team described what he saw as ‘wretched’. People looked famished, staring blankly and moving without energy in the fields. The old, infirm, sick, and handicapped could not withstand the hunger and were dying in large numbers.Footnote 68 In April, an emergency intervention was decided by the City Party Committee to help Wuqiao and two other counties under the pretext of mass poisonings of people eating poisonous weeds. A temporary City Disease Prevention Office was set up under the auspices of the Health Bureau and 196 medical and cadre personnel were dispatched to counties with medicine and equipment. That the campaign was about saving famine victims was shown in the nature of the ‘medicine’: extra noodles, rice, biscuits, and milk powder. Reportedly, ‘people welcomed this warmly’.Footnote 69 Some neighbouring provinces and Beijing (北京) also sent relief aid to the victims, which shows that this disaster relief operation had central approval. Officially, the poisoning case had some 10,000 victims, 40 of whom died, although an internal report noted that only 90 per cent of victims recovered.Footnote 70 However, it is clear that such sporadic interventions provided only short-term relief in the countryside. They did not solve the widespread oedema epidemic and ‘unnatural deaths’.
In the city, the quality of food supplies went down further during spring 1960. In March 1960, up to 90 per cent of rations were ‘augmented’.Footnote 71 In early June 1960, at a low point in the supply cycle, the city only had grain reserves for 10 days. Retail shops only sold grain in three-to-five day portions. Residents stood in long grain queues for hours on end, sometimes getting nothing. Complaints were common. The situation was somewhat mitigated in June when a central emergency directive ordered grain-producing provinces to ship ‘surplus’ grain to big cities, including Tianjin. A representative from Tianjin also took part in discussions that preceded the central government's decision.Footnote 72 Thanks to the decision, and the summer harvest, the flour ration went up to 60 per cent in July, but only for urbanites—a city government decision dictated that people in the suburbs had to settle for half of this.Footnote 73
The emergency phase: late 1960 to late 1961
Starting in July–August 1960, Tianjin disaster management can be said to have entered the emergency mobilization phase. This time central government decisions led to the real prospect of famine tipping over into urban areas. However, at the same time, more active disaster management became possible when, in its August–September decisions, the Party Centre began its withdrawal from the Leap, deciding to curb basic construction and reallocate labour to agriculture. It also started, belatedly, to pay more attention to the ‘livelihood’ matters of citizens, which was a euphemism for disaster relief measures. First, in July 1960, average monthly grain rations in the city went down by 8–10 per cent (2–3 jin), depending on the person's grade, then in early September a central directive cut them by a further 2 jin,Footnote 74 while edible oil rations were also cut so that workers and cadres received 5 liang, and street residents just 3 liang of oil per month.Footnote 75 By November the ratio of flour in grain rations had plummeted to 10 per cent.Footnote 76 These developments can be seen as marking the end of a relatively tolerable situation in urban Tianjin and the beginning of the descent into widespread hunger even there.Footnote 77
Tianjin leaders were acutely aware of the magnitude of the problems. In September 1960 Wan Xiaotang again personally visited the famine areas in the countryside, this time in Cang (沧) county, witnessing how the food situation was ‘extremely tense’ there and how, even after the autumn harvest, the county only had enough grain reserves to last until the end of year. After October, all counties began to report states of disaster to the city government. Cases of oedema and people dying from starvation increased daily in the rural areas and oedema also spread into the city, soon becoming an epidemic there as well.Footnote 78
In August the Central Committee ordered an urgent increase in the agricultural workforce giving, inter alia, the grain supply shortages in big cities as the reason.Footnote 79 Tianjin made quick plans to reduce the population in urban areas and thus the number of mouths to feed. In a meeting of leading cadres in September, the vice-director of the People's Committee Finance, Grain and Merchandise Office, Hu Yunchang (胡运昌) noted how there were 210,000 ‘excess’ people in the city: 60,000 relatives of temporary workers and those employed by urban households, 40,000 mangliu, 40,000 temporary visitors, and 70,000 dispatched workers (that is, those workers who had been sent to Tianjin by their own work units or localities to carry out tasks there, such as company purchasers). Not only did the presence of these outsiders increase grain consumption in the city, but they were not contributing to agricultural production. A strict new policy that people ‘can go out, but cannot enter’Footnote 80 was proposed by Hu and it guided population policy in the city thereafter. The city began to eject people in the abovementioned groups. For peasant refugees the city government issued an order to ‘strictly receive and promptly repatriate, make things clear in one day within the reception,’Footnote 81 which essentially meant repatriating all refugees, ideally on the same day that they arrived in Tianjin.
Following this, in August, another ‘three checks’ campaign was launched to clarify and inspect hukous and to verify job classes and individual rations in danweis.Footnote 82 The city government once again ordered that companies be prohibited from hiring any more peasant labourers. Neither were they allowed to transfer personnel from their own operations from outside the city into the city, except with special permission, otherwise the police would refuse the hukou transfer, and the Grain Bureau would not supply grain tickets for the newly recruited personnel.Footnote 83 In October, the City Party Committee set a target of 120,000 ejections by December.Footnote 84 In the countryside, communes were to transfer the workforce away from any production that was not related to grain production. This included commune industrial workers, but also theatre troupes and even sports teams that were to be disbanded and their members send to support grain production.Footnote 85
The ongoing supplementary food production campaign was stepped up in July and a big push on promoting ersatz food production was now added to it. The Tianjin city government bulletin called for a mass uptake in the promotion and use of ersatz food production in the city.Footnote 86 The Central Committee's decision in August on ‘producing grain in a big way’ included a call to also increase the production of ersatz food,Footnote 87 and in the same month all danweis in Tianjin were ordered to grow mushrooms and ‘small ball’ algae.Footnote 88 By March 1961, 1,352 danweis were producing ersatz food and 80 per cent of canteens in the city were serving it, providing 2–4 liang a day per person.Footnote 89 The actual nutritional value of ersatz food has, however, been disputed. Much of it contained hardly any calories, and some of it was even harmful to consume.Footnote 90
Now that manpower restrictions set by other campaigns were easing, an even larger campaign was mobilized to promote vegetable production. In late July, a grand meeting to arrange a rushed vegetable-planting campaign was convened by the City Party Committee and government in order to mobilize all people in the city to reach and surpass the previous year's planting targets. A work group of 70 leading cadres was selected to run the campaign and responsibilities were divided between districts and counties. All urban units were urged to grow vegetables on idle land and have offices to handle the implementation of the policy.Footnote 91 In a speech to leading cadres in November, Wan described vegetable growing as the ‘the way out’ of difficulties in all areas suffering from food shortages.Footnote 92 Everybody got involved. By 1962, 3.5 million people were mobilized to grow vegetables on unused land for their own consumption.Footnote 93 The policy achieved at least moderate success. Acreage used to grow vegetables grew from 170,000 mu (亩, 0.0667 hectares) to 230,000 mu in 1960,Footnote 94 and the Supplementary Food Bureau was able to purchase 7.15 million kilograms more vegetables in 1960 than in 1959.Footnote 95
However, the extent to which the vegetable growing campaign succeeded in 1960 is actually difficult to assess. The crop increase sold to the city provided on average only a paltry 0.5 grams more vegetables per resident per day (389 grams in 1959 and 389.5 grams in 1960). Indeed, these figures indicate that the average yield per hectare of vegetables declined drastically in 1960. A positive reading of this is that the policy was able to offset the decline in the absolute production numbers of vegetables. Following this logic, if vegetable production had kept the same acreage in 1960 that it had in 1959, production would have been about 30 per cent lower. In the tense food supply situation of late 1960, this ‘extra’ amount of vegetables per day probably made a difference for many urban residents.
However, alternatively, it might be that, at this point, the vegetable growing campaign did not help much at all. The problem was the general shortage of seeds, which city government policy announcements addressed repeatedly. Work units were told to solve this problem by relying on the masses and the spirit of zili-gengsheng, which was of meagre comfort to them. One practical way proposed was to plant seeds more sparsely,Footnote 96 and the declining hectare yields were probably partly due to such gimmicks, typical of Maoist economic policy-making during the Great Leap Forward. It is, however, difficult to estimate how much this accounted for the total decline per hectare, as other factors such as the lack of fertilizers and using land that was ill-suited for vegetable growing were also contributing factors. This said, it is clear that in the larger picture, self-produced vegetables did contribute to the survival of urban residents in Tianjin. The vegetable production campaign helped to keep at least this part of the food supply constant when all the other supplies were going down.
In a speech he gave in November 1960 to leading city cadres, Wan Xiaotang reflected on the situation. He now saw the City Party Committee's first priority as being to protect people from famine, prevent oedema, and generate recovery. Wan therefore emphasized the slogan of managing people's livelihood issues (that is, food, shelter, fuel, and health). According to Wan, about half the workforce in the villages should be dedicated to managing livelihood issues and only a little of their energy should be spent on waterworks and other tasks. In the city, all first party secretaries were to dedicate between a third and two-thirds of their working time to solving livelihood issues. Wan stressed that livelihood questions were not ‘general’ or economic problems, but political problems, about the relationship between the Party and the masses.Footnote 97 Following this, the City Party Committee began a campaign targeting the ‘livelihood’ issues of urban and rural residents and established the Peasant People's Livelihood Office and the People's Livelihood Committee for urban areas.Footnote 98 The city also established the Disease Prevention Office at the Public Health Department, which was put in charge of improving people's health and dealing with oedema and malnutrition, which were now officially acknowledged as existing (in internal publications, but not in public).Footnote 99 Disaster management was now a clear priority for city leaders.
At this point, city authorities even tried to control people's eating habits and calorie consumption. In November 1960, alongside the promotion of ersatz food production, the City Government Secretariat adopted the slogan of ‘eating smart’. Wan followed the Party Centre's orders,Footnote 100 and emphasized how people should ‘make coarse food fine’ and ‘strike a balance between work and rest’.Footnote 101Danweis implemented a ‘uniting work with rest’ policy, whereby weaker people were allowed to work for half a day and rest half a day or even the whole day.Footnote 102 In many cases, this just acknowledged the existing reality, but striking a balance between work and rest meant that, in a very typical Maoist paternalistic way, the city was not only trying to control what the residents put in their mouths, but also seeking to control how many calories their bodies burned.
The situation in the city warranted swift action. In December urban people were getting 10 per cent of their rations in flour and 15 per cent in rice, and the rest was made up on an ‘eat whatever there is [available]’ basis.Footnote 103 Apart from vegetables, average supplementary food rations for a month included 3 liang of meat (pork and/or mutton, depending on religion), 2 liang of fruit sugar, and 3 jin of fish as well as some biscuits and fruits.Footnote 104 A survey of a Nankai (南开) District urban commune revealed that residents’ average grain ration was only 24.02 jin a month and that, quite alarmingly, 26 per cent of commune members lacked food for a week or longer every month. According to the same survey, the best supplied were those households where all adults had jobs in industrial danweis.Footnote 105 The grain situation was bad. A central directive in mid-October noted how, in the big cities, including Tianjin, grain reserves had not increased at all during the autumn harvest, which was unprecedented. The Party Centre ordered all localities to make grain shipments their number one priority in transportation,Footnote 106 but this did not help Tianjin as there was little surplus to ship around. In December the city had grain reserves left for three days, at a time when the central criterion for big cities was a minimum of one month. Wan Xiaotang saw that if anything went wrong with grain transports, there would be chaos in the city. Therefore, he made the City Party Committee write an urgent report to the Party Centre and sent vice-mayor, Song Jingyi (宋景毅) as a supplicant to ask for more grain from Beijing. This action is said have solved the immediate problem.Footnote 107
As a part of the emergency mobilization, a large health campaign was launched in late November. Medical teams were dispatched to the countryside to treat patients with famine-related diseases,Footnote 108 and in the city, Wan ordered cadres in all danweis to screen for oedema patients and establish special clinics for them. The numbers of treated patients, which rose rapidly, were to be reported to the City Party Committee on a daily basis.Footnote 109 At the end of the year, the city districts had reportedly diagnosed some 700,000 residents with oedema.Footnote 110 However, these official figures have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as the Construction Bureau report cited at the beginning of this article attests to. The real figure was probably even higher. The number of people who got extra subsidies also had a clear bias in favour of cadres. In the January–March 1960, about one-sixth of all the workforce in the Construction Bureau was diagnosed with oedema, but about one-third of cadres were given the same diagnosis.Footnote 111 This was explained with cadres’ generally more difficult living conditions, such as distances between work and home, but one has to assume that the fact that it was cadres who were diagnosing other cadres played a role in the outcome, too.
To stop the epidemic in the city, clinics were to supply extra rations and medical care to patients. On paper, supplementary rations included 2 jin of beans, 1 jin of brown sugar, 1 jin of jujubes, and 3 jin of fish,Footnote 112 but there were reports that not all clinics had such resources and that instead they served, for example, ersatz food to their patients.Footnote 113 The number of oedema cases peaked in late January and then started to go down in the city. The City Party Committee ordered the epidemic be cured by April in urban areas, but even with this citywide campaign, oedema took a longer time to disappear. Cutting rations and augmenting them with inferior quality products for about two years had taken their toll. The result was general malnutrition, which was visible everywhere in the city.
In the countryside the situation was even worse. The medical teams dispatched to counties as part of the health campaign reported back a distressing situation. In December, a report by the Health Bureau team dispatched to Cang County was circulated in the Tianjin Party which reported ‘serious’ mortality in the county where death rates had doubled since the same time the previous year, due to malnutrition. The report called it a result of activities by ‘bureaucrats and bad persons’ and the City Party Committee commanded all cadres to take swift action to prevent such incidents from happening again.Footnote 114 The report was carefully worded not to implicate Great Leap Forward policies for the famine as such, but it did not leave much room for denying the disaster itself. Blaming local cadres for excesses became a face-saving way out from the famine for the party-state, but it could be used by whistle-blowers to protect their own backs, too.
The city also continued to shut its doors to outsiders ever more tightly. In December 1960, the city ordered an almost total halt to inviting ‘common domestic visitors’ and giving them presents. Only diplomats, foreign guests, and overseas Chinese could still be invited to the city.Footnote 115 In early January 1961, the repatriation campaign was extended to cadres and dependants of military personnel stationed in the city without approval. All district police stations were told to strengthen their inspection work on hukous. Cases where people had not applied for a hukou or had taken someone else's place by assuming his or her identity had to be investigated and handled properly. The dead, arrested, and those sent to laogai (劳改, labour camp) had to be promptly removed from residential records. Newborns were not to be registered twice. It was further ordered that control of temporary residential permits for visitors had to be strengthened and no stays longer than half a month should be allowed.Footnote 116 Tianjin was becoming a closed city because of the famine.
In early 1961 the central government finally stepped in to improve the nutrition situation in big cities, including Tianjin. First, some improvements in the diet came from the central decision to supplement urban residents’ rations with half a jin of soya beans. Then, although denying that any famine existed, China began to import wheat from the West. Tianjin was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this policy change. The first ship delivering grain arrived at Tangu (塘沽) Harbour in early February 1961 with a cargo designated for Beijing and Tianjin. In 1961, Tianjin received some 41 per cent of all grain shipments that came in through Tangu, amounting to about 490 million kilograms of grain.Footnote 117 However, Tianjin also had to lobby for this grain, as it was not delivered automatically to the city.
As a result of this action, city residents’ rations were raised from the average of 27.27 jin a month to 28.2 jin in early March 1961.Footnote 118 At this time more vegetables were also becoming available due to the vegetable growing campaign and a more relaxed policy on markets. In late spring 1961, city leaders decided on a trial of rural markets to improve supplementary food supplies. Produce not seen for years, like eggs and some vegetables, appeared in open city markets once again.Footnote 119
In the countryside the situation remained bad throughout 1961, but the city government finally began to make clear efforts to manage the disaster there as well. In late January 1961, the City Party Committee decided to send 300 million kilograms of emergency aid consisting of grain, ersatz food, coal, and daily necessities to its rural areas.Footnote 120 In early January work units were also told that they could now kill and eat the pigs they had raised themselves.Footnote 121 This was an embarrassing end to the ill-conceived pig-raising campaign, but otherwise the supplementary food production campaign continued and expanded.
Throughout the first half of 1961 the city continued its efforts to curb the oedema epidemic. In February 1961, the City Party Committee adopted the slogan ‘stop two, change one’—that is, stop healthy people from becoming sick and sick people getting worse, while achieving a turn for the better in one month, recovery in two, and resuming production in three.Footnote 122 Implementing this policy proved slow and the oedema epidemic remained acute throughout 1961, especially in the countryside. Party Secretary Wan visited villages personally, touring at least all eight southern counties in 1961, witnessing how the situation remained bad, especially in Jinghai (静海), Cang, and Huanghua (黄骅) counties.Footnote 123 As late as August, Wan Xiaotang was still describing the oedema situation in the city as ‘serious’.Footnote 124
The recovery phase: summer 1961–1962
The recovery phase can be said to have started in Tianjin in summer 1961. This means that food supplies were not declining any more and in some sectors they were improving. However, staple food supply problems persisted throughout 1961. This was the lowest grain production year that had been recorded in China, and also in Hebei since the revolution.Footnote 125 Indeed, it was still ‘touch and go’ for Tianjin grain supplies. Sometimes grain sold out during the year in the city. Tianjin did not automatically receive its share of imported grain either, and had to keep lobbying for it. During the August 1961 Central Committee work meeting at Lushan, a leading cadre from the city's light-industry sector attended the meeting as a Tianjin delegate in the Hebei group and bypassed his provincial level superiors by using the opportunity to talk about the city's supply problems directly with Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩来) and Finance Minister Li Xiannian, pleading for extra beans. Zhou expressed concern and asked questions, ‘solving the problem’ for the time being.Footnote 126 However, in November 1961, once again the city had grain reserves left for only three days’ consumption. City leaders reported the situation to the Party Centre and insistent lobbying finally paid off when two-thirds of the national grain reserves in Tianjin were transferred to city use. This finally ensured that Tianjin would not sell out of grain again.Footnote 127 Workers, cadres, and students were now given extra grain supplements in their rations.Footnote 128 From this time on, the acute food crisis can be said to have been over in the city.
Vegetable production was quicker to pick up. This was partly because growing vegetables on idle land was designated as the primary task for the population ejected from the city. The City Party Committee and Government established the Land Reclamation Headquarters to oversee the implementation of the campaign. It was to coordinate its efforts with the Government Urban Population Reduction Office which was also established now.Footnote 129 In June 1961, the City Party Committee acted on central instructions and decided to reduce the urban population by 300,000 over three years.Footnote 130 Tianjin leaders now called for a ‘double core’ policy—that is, putting an emphasis on grain production while reducing the urban population.Footnote 131
The same central directive called for inspecting cities for ‘black people’ (those without a proper hukou), and in Tianjin city leaders once again decided to inspect the urban population and food supplies, coined the ‘double check’.Footnote 132 A specific office was set up and assigned to verify residents and their grain rations. Completing their activities by November, work teams found 9,420 ‘black people’ and 3,303 people whose hukou should have been rescinded but had not been.Footnote 133 As late as May 1962, the reduction target for the population was expanded from 300,000 to 400,000.Footnote 134 In the end, a total of 222,064 people were sent home.Footnote 135
Connections between reducing the urban population and vegetable and grain growing campaigns became more systematic throughout 1961. In March 1961 it was decided that 95 per cent of the returned workforce in the villages must be allocated to vegetable growing. Quantity and speed was of the essence. Production was to emphasize ‘high yield, quick harvest and thick vegetables’. Urban vegetable supply level targets were put at 9 liang per capita per day.Footnote 136 In June the city government issued Trial Instructions on Land Reclamation to urban work units, according to which the land that communes and production brigades were not able to use should be given to other units to cultivate, and communes and brigades should not try to obstruct this. Communes were promised some compensation for the land for three years. When growing grain, harvest from the reclaimed lands would be free from state procurement, and their produce was not to be computed into units’ own grain quotas. Plots over 100 mu were to be allocated by the Land Reclamation headquarters and its district sub-offices in a unified manner, and whole plots smaller than 100 mu were to be allocated freely by communes, brigades or units.Footnote 137
In October these instructions were made final and it was further ordered that the land-reclamation policy must be carried out along with reducing the urban population and downsizing administrative personnel through establishing suburban ‘residential posts’ on newly reclaimed farmland. The policy was now defined rather ineloquently as to ‘change non-peasant people into peasants and consumers into producers in order to not only lighten the pressure on the city but also to solve partly the workforce needs of the land reclamation policy’.Footnote 138 The new residential posts were to be permanent settlements in the countryside for the downsized people. Part of the planned workforce was to be supplied by urban work units such as factories and schools on a rotating basis. Suburban state-run farms were now ordered to reclaim land in a ‘big way’,Footnote 139 and help urban work units in reclaiming land and feeding their staff members until they could become self-sufficient. Nevertheless, it was primarily the work units themselves that were responsible for supplying their sent-down staff members.Footnote 140 These were given an extra 0.3 jin of grain per day for the duration of their stay in the countryside.Footnote 141
In late 1961, it was decided that in 1962 urban units would be allowed to enjoy 100 per cent higher self-provision of vegetables from their own fields. The state provisions, which were 4–5 liang of vegetables a day in the winter of 1961–1962, would not be received in the months that they could support themselves with their own produce.Footnote 142 Under the vegetable growing campaign, the amount of cultivated land rose to 305,000 mu in 1961 and vegetable production increased by 27.3 per cent from 1960.Footnote 143 The Great Leap Forward was launched with the lofty goal of general industrialization. As it turned out, it rusticated Tianjin.
Conclusions: managing disasters at the mercy of the central government and at the expense of rural areas
The Tianjin experience during the Great Leap Forward famine shows a number of the limits and strengths of Maoist campaign-based disaster management practices. First, it shows how the famine was managed through a series of overlapping campaigns, where the central government's role was crucial, despite the fact that relying on local initiative and autarky was emphasized in the official rhetoric. The city needed central approval to fully use its own means and resources for disaster management. A metropolitan city could amass formidable resources, both physical and organizational, in the form of campaigns that could turn every resident into a disaster-fighter, but this was always a distraction from the city's regular activities, especially its production duties, which were also largely campaign-based during the Great Leap Forward. This led to the question of which campaigns to prioritize and, in the end, such decisions could only be made by the central government. It took until August 1960 for the Party Centre to allow the reallocation of substantial resources away from economic construction to mitigate the crisis. Before this the city could only engage in campaigns that did not interfere with production, such as grain-saving, restricting outflows of foodstuff and inflows of people, and short-term medical interventions in villages.
Secondly, the Tianjin case shows how local disaster management measures were taken at the expense of rural areas and geared towards serving the city. This can be seen, for example, in how the refugees were (mis-)handled, food flows to rural areas were restricted, and positive food production efforts all emphasized the priority of supplying city residents first. As long as the disaster was not recognized as such officially, a city could turn blind eye to its peasants and emphasize its role in serving the city first. Here it is good to note how, in comparison, in Maoist disaster management, official recognition of disaster conditions did also make the wheels turn in favour of the peasants, as the case of the 1963 Great Flood in Tianjin demonstrates.Footnote 144 This underlines the importance of the interplay of central and local decision-making in the outcome of the famine and the general nature of the famine policy of the Great Leap Forward disaster. The Maoist urban disaster management system had the required leadership, organization, and skills in place to deal with the natural triggering causes of disasters, but not the political autonomy to do so. Politics were also in command in Maoist disaster management.
