This article presents a detailed map of the impact of the Great Leap famine, based on a comparison of the age cohorts recorded in the 2000 population census. The map is interpreted with reference to three historical features of the economic geography of early Communist China: the national grain procurement and distribution system, established to support the industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan; the logic of administrative macroregions, which led to the emergence of designated "grain surplus" and "grain deficit" areas; and the efforts of logistics experts to maximize the amount of grain transported along China's limited modern transport infrastructure. It is suggested that the radicalization of local party leaders, often considered to be a key cause of spatial variation in famine severity, was strongly conditioned by factors of economic geography.
This article reviews two recent monographs on the history of the Great Leap famine. Yang Jisheng's Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi (Tombstone: A chronicle of the Great Famine in China in the 1960s) was published in Hong Kong in 2008, and an abridged English translation was released in 2012. A monograph on the famine by Frank Dikötter was published in 2010, and a collection of documents on the famine translated by Dikötter's longterm collaborator Zhou Xun was published in 2012. The monographs by Yang and Dikötter both present plausible accounts of the policies and institutional structures that gave rise to the famine, and provide many vivid descriptions of the suffering at the village level during the period of the famine. This review reflects critically on the nature of the sources cited and the methodologies deployed in the two books. Special attention is paid to the problem of the representativeness of evidence drawn from archival and other sources.
China’s leading Muslim writer, Zhang Chengzhi, published in 1991 an historical novel about a Sufi Islamic community, entitled The History of the Soul. The novel covers the two hundred years leading up to 1919, the year of the May Fourth Movement that is conventionally considered as the beginning of modern Chinese history. During this period, the Sufi community that is the subject of Zhang’s novels, called the Jahriyya, was involved in a series of violent clashes with the Qing imperial state. The author weaves through his historical narrative of a Chinese spiritual community the story of his own spiritual crisis, which he underwent in the 1980s and finally overcame through his encounter with the Jahriyya.
The Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front.
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