On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back in time and examine the largest famine in human history, The Great Chinese Famine. Known to the Chinese government as “Three Years of Difficulties,” this famine is unique since it is blamed almost entirely on human governance, not on nature. How bad did it get? Estimates are that 45 million people died in only three years. Most of this was starvation, but much of it was people being killed to keep the famine a secret. This one gets ugly. People eating bark, people eating poisonous mud, parents eating kids, kids eating parents, some villages simply killing any travelers and eating them.

So what was the cause of this horrible disaster? People blame Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” Mao wanted to propel China forward to catch up with production levels of Britain and the US, so he shifted his focus from agriculture to the manufacture of steel and goods. He even went so far as to move people off of their farms and made almost everyone mine their own minerals and smelt them in ovens they built in the backyard. Never mind they had no idea what they were doing, and made crap metal that couldn’t be used for anything.

And never mind that they were no longer producing food. But that wasn’t all that caused the famine. There was a lack of accurate information coming from scared local government leaders. There was a flood of the Yellow River. There was a drought (which the Chinese say was the main factor, but virtually every scholar says this didn’t make a dent). There was a campaign to kill sparrows which led to massive swarms of insects. And there was a cover up.

Everyone who talked about the famine was disappeared by secret police. People who wrote letters to government were sent to labor camps or murdered after they were tracked down. In one instance, some teenage girls asked local governors for food, and they were dragged to a lonely mountain to die of starvation. A lot of the details of the Great Chinese Famine came to us recently from a very brave journalist named Yang Jisheng who secretly wrote the book Tombstone about this famine while working for the state news service. From government cover ups to cannibalism, dead sparrows to Communist leaders eating like kings while the peasants died by the millions, this one has it all.

 

 

Visit Our Sources

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojOmUWLDG18

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164732497/a-grim-chronicle-of-chinas-great-famine

https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/pyared/papers/famines.pdf

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/2014/9/cj34n3-2.pdf