Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962: An Oral History

by Zhou Xun

A powerful account of China’s Great Famine as told through the voices of those who survived it

In 1958, China’s revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s grand scheme—like so many other utopian dreams of the 20th century—proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China’s agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China.

 

In this remarkable oral history of modern China’s greatest tragedy, survivors of the cataclysm share their memories of the devastation and loss. The range of voices is city dwellers and peasants, scholars and factory workers, parents who lost children and children who were orphaned in the catastrophe all speak out. Powerful and deeply moving, this unique remembrance of an unnecessary and unhindered catastrophe illuminates a dark recent history that remains officially unacknowledged to this day by the Chinese government and opens a window on a society still feeling the impact of the terrible Great Famine.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

331 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2013

Reviews

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be very widely read. The author has travelled extensively in rural China (mainly) interviewing ordinary people who survived the Great Leap Forward, or, more accurately, Mao's Great Famine. It cannot have been easy to research, not only as the famine is something of a taboo subject, but because many of the stories are very sad, and sometimes harrowing.

Two things struck me in particular. Firstly, by interspersing the survivor accounts with observations about travelling in contemporary China, she makes clear that the peasants of rural China, having borne the brunt of the famine, today still live lives marred by poverty and some hardship. Secondly, at the end of the book when she deals with the question of responsibility (the book only lightly touches on the high politics behind the Great Leap), she makes clear that many of those affected do not blame Mao or the Communist Party for what happened to them. Indeed many of them still revere Mao, even though he was directly responsible for starving one quarter of humanity - one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. So, at the end of the book, one is left with a powerful sense of the injustice prevailing in China and the indifference of the Communist Party towards its own people.

[哲伦 周 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the work during Covid. Very important, and I feel that I should re-read it at some point.

[Mathilde · Rating 5 out of 5]

from oral history of the great leap forwards, Chen Xiansheng (originally from Guilin) 'Radical collectivization was as bad as religious fanaticism.' 29
" " 'In 1958, lies spread like the wind across China. The news and our [school]books were full of false claims - big, empty claims.' (30)