“They ate the earth”. One of the most troubling lines from the documentary.
The GLF is devastating. In the beginning as the communes came into being, quotas were put on each commune that were quite high, but promised the peasants if the made them they would be doing such extraordinary things for China and the Revolution that they not only exhausted themselves and their supplies but they lied. If the quota was 100kg they would promise 120kg and claim they made it. So the Government would say, “fine, you raised 120kg of produce, give us 100 and keep the rest for yourselves”. The problem was there wasn’t a “rest” for themselves and they shipped away all their food.
Mao and others toured the countryside to see the incredible harvests for themselves. They were greeted by visions like the picture below;
carefully orchestrated and in no way reflective of reality. In one sad account in the film a farmer, newly introduced to petro-chemical fertilizer, digs a giant pit, pours in all the seeds he has, all the fertilizer he has… and grows nothing. They shipped away what they had. They ate roots, and bark, and ultimately even the earth. Death tolls range from 20 to, in the book at the top, 40 million persons.
In another tragedy of the day, steel production needs to be increased so the peasants are encouraged to build back yard steel furnaces;
as seen above. The unfortunate reality, as shown and testified to in the the film, is that they take all their bed frames, pots and pans, and everything useful made of metal, and melt it down into useless pot-metal. They didn’t have the sophistication to make real steel. Apparently for sometime these furnaces could be seen lighting up the countryside for miles around, and they were literally melting their future away.
I’ll leave it to you to google the grissly images of the famine. I couldn’t bring myself to reproduce one here. Needless to say the GLF appears to have been the height of human suffering, and like some other famines, as in the Ukraine, or Ireland, a result of government policy, more than any natural circumstance.
The Sino-Soviet split has traces going back to the 1920s. Here you simply get a fine tuning of the point near the center of the circle and the mysteries of the cultural revolutiopn and death of Lin Biao are explored further.
Happy New year!
Remember to get your Rough Drafts in!
What I found quite sad was that the life expecting rate during the GLF went down to 9.7 years. As Spence states it: “The Great Leap Forward, launched in the name of strengthening the nation by summoning all the people’s energies, had turned back on itself and ended by devouring its young” (583).
Yeah, as I was reading the chapter, I thought back tothe film and how terrible everything in reality was even though Mao made it seem as if they were truly going to prosper. Also the quote that Haley used above basically summed up the Great Leap Forward, something inevitable because since the beginning everything just started out wrong. In addition, I thought the sini-soviet split was definitely interesting, Khrushchev was a different personality that Mao did not welcome.
Well this chapter was full of akward, horrifying, miserable, and yet it is so educating and eye opening. There are so many campaigns movements that it is confusing on the other side it was interesting to see what role the leader wife’s had in all of this. Humiliating grew normal and was in incouraged around china, ties with te Soviet Union broke and morale completely mixed.
The PLA and Mao were both being questioned so Mao had to make changes to his right hand men. When ever a man was dismissed another Mao follower showed his loyalty by speaking harshly about them and their choices. Overall the entire Great Leap made te Chinese sacrifice whether they were willing to or not for the betterment of their future economic standings.
I had a hard grasping the small details of the Great Leap Forward famine but I think I have the overall idea. Conditions were completely awful for the peasants in the communes. One point that completely grossed me out was that the peasants couldn’t feed their pigs (for they could hardly feed themselves) and so the pigs were led to eat from the latrines. The latrines showed evidence of the malnutrition of the peasants. As Haley mentioned above, I also found that the life expectancy rate was as low as 9.7 years. Those children stood no chance at surviving. It saddens me to think that children would have died unhappy lives before even becoming teenagers. They had no bright future and overall the Great Leap seems to have been a great leap backward instead of forward.