Fourth Blog Post

Dear Readers,

Chaos has erupted, blood has spilled, and China’s predicament is perilous. Since my last dispatch reporting on Land Reform, the Communist Party has successfully rooted out dissenters and intellectuals through the anti-rightest campaign. I am writing to you with a pen name with the hope of not being caught for the ‘rightest’ leanings. Chairman Mao jumpstarted the largest, most disastrous campaign yet, The Great Leap Forward, to fully realize the Party’s ambitions to industrialize and create a communist utopia within China. The Chairman’s efforts have failed miserably, resulting in one of the largest famines in history, and with more deaths than the combined total in the war against Japan and the Guomindang.

Chairman Mao and the high leadership have directed the Party to get back on the horse. Aggressive policies have revolutionized the countryside by establishing work communes, and by devoting resources towards large industrial projects to grow China’s economy larger than Britain’s in less than fifteen years. Consequently, a rat race has ensued throughout the countryside attempting to accomplish everything all at once. Zhang Langlang said “Each commune promised a higher amount until the last school gave their highest figure. Then we dug a hole the size of a swimming pool and put all the fertilizer and seeds in it.” Since the Party squashed decent through the anti-rightest campaign no one has spoken out against these farcical farming practices that have robbed so many of their food. In a speech to high-level party members, the great Peng Duhai, one of the great generals of our revolution, was removed from power for suggesting the Party was moving too quickly. Now, farmers have stopped working their fields building backyard furnaces to forge homemade steel. Subsequently, rural people have given up essential and scarce consumer products that they needed to survive including their pots and pans, tools, and bedframes. Li Maoxiu told me in an interview that “their steel-making methods were primitive, and that people were unhappy and didn’t dare say anything against the party. The result was that everything made of iron and steel was taken from every family and was made useless.”  The party has continued to pressure communes for higher production numbers from the fields and from new industrial projects. Through unrealistic goals, they cultivated a culture of increased competition, and they stripped workers of the vital tools necessary to accomplish the collective task ahead. It was under this backdrop, where dissent was crushed, where unrealistic agriculture and industrial practices were implemented, and where a culture of violence in the countryside that festered finally exploded.

Irrational agriculture practices have led our great China into one of the worst manmade famines in history. Lacking the necessary tools and implementing close planting has completely ruined the harvest over the past few years. Rural folk now find themselves searching for food substitutes and wandering throughout the countryside, desperate to find sustenance for survival. One report from Jingian indicates that some have wandered ten miles away from their villages in search of food. Additionally, Party officials are suspicious that food is being concealed by the peasants during this despot time. One notable example is the report of Wu Xing who led a raid of peasant homes in his quest to find hidden grain and his establishment of extrajudicial prisons that tortured the suspected farmers. We should not blame Wu or others who have raided and pillaged, we should blame the high leadership for cultivating a culture where discussion is silenced. We must ask ourselves how can the peasants be hiding food when they are eating dirt?

Women and children have been brutally affected by the Great Leap. Malnourished women have stopped menstruating, producing breastmilk for their children, and have been exploited sexually to keep morale high. A report from Wugang County explains women were forced to take their tops off in the fields to boost male morale among agricultural workers. Du Laojiu and Zhao Laochun felt that “what happened was more humiliating than having an affair.” China’s future, our children, are now burdened with rickets, a developmental disorder of the bones. How can peasants expect future prosperity when children cannot walk straight, and women can no longer have babies? Additionally, they are suffering the fate of being broken up from their families as they have watched their parents die or they have been sold off into an uncertain future. Orphaned children can be found digging roots and eating dirt. Wang Jiarong was unable to feed the children in her orphanage, and after they left to “rummage for food,” she physically beat the children as a form of punishment. This Great Leap has certainly landed China in a pit of misery and death and what remains to be answered is how the Party will remain credible moving forward in the face of this misery.