Eager to become the leader of international communist movement, the Chinese dictator Mao Ze Dong launched a fanatic and radical economic movement —Great Leap Forward—in that year.  Mao’s goal was to make China an industrial power by surpassing the United Kingdom and overtaking the United States.  Unfortunately, the supposedly Great Leap Forward turned out to be a “great fall backward” as Mao’s plan led to a complete break down of industrial and agricultural order.  The break down, in turns, caused the three year Famine.  Between 1959 and 1961,  about thirty million Chinese died of starvation.  To put it in perspective, thirty million equals 150% of the entire population of today’s Australia. In my home province Sichuanalone, 8 million people died of starvation. This is the highest number among all provinces in China . And in the most devastated provinces like Sichuan, Henan and Anhei, people resorted to cannibalism.

With a death toll of 30 millions, the Famine is undoubtedly the worst man-made disaster in peace time ever recorded in human history. It is also one of the least known tragedies in the world.
To add insults to injuries, the government has been trying to erase the Famine from people’s memory. In the official textbooks and other officially sanctioned books, newspapers and magazines, the word Great Famine does not exist. Instead, the government only mentioned the “Three Years of Natural Calamities,” even though no natural calamity was recorded during the period.  Later, the “Three Years of Natural Calamities” was further modified to become only the “Three Years of Hard times.” Besides mother nature, the Chinese government also blamed the Soviets. According to the official version, the Chinese government was forced to pay back the debts to the Soviet Union, and thus did not have enough food for the people. The official bottom line is: the Great Famine had nothing to do with Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Furthermore, the Chinese government never acknowledges the losing of a large portion of its population to starvation. It has kept the death toll of the famine as a top national secret. Only very recently did the Chinese government claim that the figures of natural disasters were declassified.  However, it still did not say if the figure of the so-called Three Years of Natural Calamities would also be declassified. Historians estimated the death toll to be 30 million or more by calculating the population statistics of that period published by the Chinese government. As a matter of fact, some Chinese leaders privately admitted that about 30 million died of starvation in the famine. In 1998, the retired minister of statistical department Li Chen Rui estimated the death toll be at least 2 million.  Another example was Liu Shao qi. Liu was the chairman of the PRC and the number two person of the Chinese Communist Party when the Famine began.  He reversed the policy of Great Leap Forward and saved many more Chinese from starving to death.  By doing so, however, Liu directly challenged Mao’s authority.  He was cruelly persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution. Before his death, Liu told the Soviet ambassador that he knew of 30 million Chinese died of starvation.

Because of censorship, many Chinese do not know about the terrible disaster their parents and grandparents once suffered. I once met a young student who fled China after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. He still called it the Three Years of Natural Calamities and was shocked when learned about the truth. In recent years, a wave of radical nationalism began to sweep through China. More and more radical young nationalists have been claiming that no one died of starvation during Great Leap Forward and that the Great Famine is a big lie concocted by overseas pro-democracy movement and that it is a vicious smear by the western anti-Chinese forces . Worse still, Mao, the man behind the Great Famine, still has his huge portrait hung high in the Tiananmen Gate.

Thus, the Chinese government was squarely responsible for causing the death of 30 million people, then covered up the story, and now still encourages the worship of the mastermind behind the tragedy.  The development is not only ironic, but patently unfair. It rests on the shoulders of the conscientious writers and journalists to find out the truth that has been hidden, ridiculed, and trampled on for more than 40 years, to record the pains and sufferings of the victims, and to identify the ones responsible for the tragedy.  Sadly, we as a group have not done enough.

To my knowledge, there are only two Chinese books about the Famine. One is The Stories in Jia Bian Valley by Yang Xian Hui,a Chinese writer from Tian Jin . It recounts the miserable lives of nearly 3,000 rightists–prisoners in the Jia Bian Valley Labor Reform Farm during the Great Famine. At the end of the Famine, only three or four hundred prisoners survived, the rest either died of starvation or hard labor. The other one is The Man-made Catastrophe by Ding Shu, an American-Chinese scholar.  The book was published in Hong Kong in 1991 and is perhaps the only Chinese book trying to reveal the whole truth of the Famine .

The Chinese government has always treated all disasters they caused as a taboo. Anyone trying to explore this forbidden area would surely face difficulties, even persecution. However, while the discussion of the other two man-made disasters caused by Mao, the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution, is scarce, that of the Famine is almost non-existent. Why? Are there any reasons behind it? The answer probably lies in the question of who has the power or ability to write history.

First, let us look at the victims of these three disasters.  The main victims of the Anti-Rightists Movement were the more than half million intellectuals. They have the ability to express themselves and so they did. The Cultural Revolution persecuted not only the intellectuals, but also the officials who were mostly rehabilitated and thus had the collective power to control the writing of history. However, the Famine was more severe in the rural areas. While the urban residents suffered a lot during the Famine, most survived because they had food rations. Thus, the large bulk of the Famine was borne by the largely illiterate peasants, who suffered quietly and died quietly. Their pain and suffering was so deeply buried that I did not learn of how terrible the tragedy was in the rural areas until ten years later. In 1969, as a high school student from the city, I was forced to go to one of the villages and receive so-called reeducation by peasants, another of Mao’s clever campaigns. I was stunned to learn that half of the population in that village starved to death during the Famine.

In China, the peasants had no power, no voice. So they lived powerlessly and died quietly. The orphans, widows and widowers have no way to tell their stories to the rest of the world. Eventually, the suffering is forgotten. The darkest page of Mao’s era is safely veiled behind layers of lies and cruel indifference. Hence, people nowadays can conveniently claim that no such things as 30 million people dying of starvation ever happened before.

So who should be blamed for this? The Chinese government? Sure, no doubt. Any one else? Chinese writers? Yes, partly. Chinese writers have the power of speech so they have inescapable responsibility to uncover the truth of history and speak for the speechless . Of course, we will face the pressure from the Chinese government when doing so. But that does not mean we can do nothing. The Guardian’s correspondent Jasper Becker published his survey report of China’s Great Famine in English Hungry Ghosts : Mao’s Secret Famine after visiting many Chinese provinces to gather information and interview the witnesses. Overseas critics generally agree that his book has successfully revealed the darkest page of the modern Chinese history. Chinese critics point out that the book has put Chinese writers to shame, because an English writer has just done what they should have done, but failed to do.

The Famine is not the only case that Chinese writers fail to fulfill their responsibilities. A famous Chinese dissident Hu Ping once questioned who will write for the history of landlords and well-off peasants in the early history of the PRC. In early 1950s, the Chinese communists started the bloody Land Reform that persecuted 2 million of the landlords and well-off peasants to death, and deprived the rights of the rest who, and whose sons and daughters, became untouchables in a new cast system that lasted 30 years until the death of Mao. Now, Mao is long dead, but the government and the society still owes them the long due justice. Until this day, not a single Chinese book is written about their stories.

There is a very ancient Chinese saying: when someone else is starving to death, you should feel the same kind of pain. That is, in a world where we live so close to each other, anyone’s sufferings are also our own sufferings.  So we cannot pretend to have not seen the injustice around us.  With our pens and ink, we Chinese writers should not only talk about our own sufferings but also have responsibilities to speak for the voiceless people. It is a long way for us Chinese writers to uncover the brutal facts of all the disasters caused by Mao and his cohorts, so that thevictims would not die for nothing.For that goal, Yang Xian Hui, Ding Shu and the rest of us are only beginning.