The Great Leap Famine and China's Rural Politics

• In Event: 50664 - Theorizing Crisis (Co-sponsored by Theory Section)

Abstract

The Great Famine of China from 1959 to 1961 took no less than 30 million lives. The party’s policy implementation process behind the Great Famine has been widely discussed and debated, yet the receiving side of the policy, the countryside, has rarely been discussed as the focal point of the Famine. In this paper I will argue that the surface level failures of collectivization tell a much deeper story about the transformation of the Chinese countryside and rural politics. I will first give an overview of the evolution of rural governance in China since antiquity and its real and philosophical legacies. The new model of governance brought about by the Chinese Communist Party is then juxtaposed with the traditional political structure, the key being the dismantling of traditional village self-governance by the local gentry, and their replacement by cadres and activists who are loyal to the party. This rapid modernizing project shattered the moral economy of the countryside and disrupted the balance to the peasants’ subsistence. On the one hand, with village self-governance gone, peasants had little resistance to central advances, while on the other, the ability of the new state to extract successfully and unyieldingly, which was unprecedented yet seldom discussed, ensures the gravity to these advances. Lastly, I return to the peasants and discuss how the structural change and the new techniques of government had disabled the peasants’ traditional outlets to famine and state extraction, i.e. migration and revolt, completing the structural story of the Great Famine.

Author

• Fei Han, University of Massachusetts-Amherst