Resistance during the Chinese Famine, 1959–61

There was a terrible famine in China between 1959 and 1961. Anywhere from 16 to 40 million people starved to death. Most of them were peasants. The causes of the famine were many. Perhaps the biggest cause was the diversion of resources—especially labor—from agriculture to industry as part of Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Some observers contend that the people put up no resistance. Rather than breaking the law by, say, stealing grain from government granaries, nearly everyone chose to suffer and die. Obedience and trust in party leaders were more important than saving one's life.

Others take a different view and cite evidence showing that peasants did, in fact, resist. A former deputy head of the Public Security Bureau of Anhui Province, for instance, claimed in 2011 that 1,300 cases of grain grabbing occurred in the province from 1955 to 1961, with more than twenty participants in each case.

A recent paper in Politics & Society by Yongshun Cai supports the second view. A professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Cai argues that there were indeed peasants who resisted by stealing grain from granaries, rail cars, and other places, as well as hiding grain from the authorities. To be sure, the number who resisted was comparatively small. Nevertheless, there was resistance, and it is important to make sure that that part of the story is established.

But how did resistance happen? Why did some peasants rob granaries while others did not? As Cai points out, local leadership was key. The Chinese government had organized peasants into rural collectives, leaving local cadres to do the actual work of organizing. Some local cadres, along with some rural elites, were sympathetic to the suffering of the starving peasants and made resistance possible. Still, the Chinese government exerted enough control over the cadres to keep resistance to a minimum.

It is impossible to say just how many peasants resisted. Cai estimates that there were at least around 2,000 incidents involving grain theft and the like, and perhaps as many as 500,000 peasants staged acts of rebellion—this at a time when the population of China was around 667 million.

Cai's paper, titled "Community Elites and Collective Action: The State and the Starved during the Chinese Famine (1959–61)," appears in the March 2020 issue of the journal.