Remembering a conversation with his parents about the “Great Famine” that occurred between 1959 and 1961, the man found it hard to believe that at least 35 million people had starved to death at that time. Living in the major city of Changchun in northeastern China, they had experienced hunger but not to such a severe extent. In their understanding, the situation in China was similar elsewhere. Many Chinese, like them, were unaware of the painful history hidden by the Chinese Communist Party during that period.
Apart from knowing little about the tragic events before the Cultural Revolution, those living in Changchun were even more unaware of the tragedy of hundreds of thousands starving in the city, both tragedies being caused by the Chinese Communist Party.
After winning the War of Resistance against Japan, the Chinese Communist Party, disregarding the nation’s desire for peace, pretended to negotiate with the Nationalist government while igniting a civil war. With help from the Soviet Union, they seized the fruits of victory in the northeast.
In May 1948, the Nationalist 60th Army of 100,000 stationed in Changchun was completely surrounded by the Communist forces, leading to severe shortages of food and fuel for the defending troops. Choosing to besiege the city, the Communist forces, weaker than the Nationalist army, avoided direct attacks and gradually cut off the Nationalist army’s aerial supplies. Ultimately, after more than 150 days without external aid and running low on provisions, the Nationalist troops, having no choice, surrendered, and in October, the Communists took over Changchun.
However, the so-called victory of the Chinese Communist Party was built upon the foundation of starving numerous innocent civilians in a shameful battle, as described in the independent media outlet “Ta Kung Pao” at that time.
The shame of the Battle of Changchun lies in the inhumane tactics employed by the Communist forces, such as prohibiting any civilians from leaving the city during the siege and crossing the Communist blockades.
In fact, even before imposing the siege on Changchun, Mao Zedong approved Lin Biao’s proposal to strictly forbid the citizens from leaving the city, only allowing those carrying guns and military supplies to pass. On June 1, a telegram signed by Lin Biao included the following instructions: “Strictly forbid food and fuel from entering the enemy’s territory; strictly forbid civilians in the city from leaving… turning Changchun into a dead city.” At a siege council meeting on June 28, the siege command center adopted the slogan: “Do not give the enemy a grain of food, a blade of grass, starve the Jiang bandits in Changchun.”
The Communist Party’s intent was clear – to force the civilians to deplete the food within the city, leading to the exhaustion of the Nationalist troops’ provisions, making the local Changchun residents the Communist forces’ leverage against the Nationalist army.
At the time, the Nationalist commanders defending the city wanted to fight a drawn-out war, promoting slogans like “everyone farms, trains daily,” but even if the locals planted crops, they would have to wait until autumn for the harvest. By late July, the city had run out of food, becoming a heavy burden for the Nationalist troops and the 500,000 residents. By late July, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the evacuation of the civilians from Changchun to seek survival outside the city.
However, the civilians who left the city were hindered by the Communist forces. Starving people pleaded on their knees in front of Communist soldiers for passage, to no avail. Some had no choice but to abandon infants and children and flee, while others resorted to suicide in front of the soldiers. Witnessing the tragic scenes, some Communist soldiers knelt down in tears alongside the starving civilians, saying, “This is the order from our superiors, we have no choice.” Many civilians starved to death in the no-man’s land between the two armies.
On September 9, the Four Leaders “Lin Luo Liu Tan” wired Mao: “My main strategy is to block the passage and set up a sentry line every fifty meters on the front line, with barbed wire entrenchments, closely combined forces, eliminating gaps, and preventing refugees from leaving. This method was effective at the beginning, but as the severity of hunger increased, desperate people started to pour out, and after we drove them back, many gathered in the middle of the battlefield between our and enemy lines, resulting in many deaths by starvation. Just in the area of Bailibao in the eastern part of the city, about two thousand people died. After some people were released by us in August, more than twenty thousand were collected within three days, but immediately after the residents inside the city were evacuated, tens of thousands were evacuated again, filling up the vacuum zone. At that time, the price of sorghum in the city dropped from seven million to five hundred thousand after another blockade, then rose again and quickly rose to ten million.”
It is said that during the siege, in order to survive, people in Changchun resorted to eating bark, leaves, and even each other. Nationalist General Duan Kewen recalled in his memoirs that a shop in Changchun was selling cooked human meat. Communist Staff Officer Liu Ti, who was involved in the siege of Changchun, recalled seeing an old lady cook and eat the thigh of a starving old man. There were numerous such instances.
On October 15, 1948, the “Xijing Daily” reported the grim situation of refugees in Changchun after the siege: “The people had to feed on wild grass, melon flowers, bean seedlings, bark to stave off hunger, selling off their hidden savings to exchange for rice, bean cakes, fermented grains, and other items for consumption. These items such as grains, bark were not meant for human consumption, leading to nutrition disorders and digestive problems, resulting in widespread eye diseases and gastroenteritis, physical weakening, withered hair, dirty faces, and eventually many collapsing in the lanes, dilapidated houses, and ravines.”
It is said that people were falling everywhere in Changchun during that time, and the Nationalist troops, reliant on airdropped provisions for survival, could only organize corpse collection teams, collecting bodies 24 hours a day on the streets, feeding them to dogs. Once the dogs became fat, the troops would eat the dogs. There were also instances of Nationalist officers exchanging food for women.
The consequences of the blockade were severe. After the food supply was cut off, Changchun truly became a dead city, a city of bleached bones. The most number of dead were in the Hongxi Street and Erdaohezi areas, with many households vacant. Everywhere, on beds, floors, doorways, and roadsides, there were white bone frameworks. In the middle of summer, flies and maggots infested the area. Even the Communist troops outside the city were “deeply affected,” saying they were afraid of the wind because when it blew, the stench traveled for miles, causing dizziness and nausea. It was said that there was not a single family in Changchun where no one had died.
In late October, after the Nationalist troops surrendered, the first thing the Communist forces did upon entering the city was “save the living and bury the dead.” “Saving the living” involved distributing food to the survivors, while “burying the dead” involved giving a proper burial to the deceased. The following spring, no grass grew where the dead were buried because the soil was too enriched.
So, how many people starved to death during the siege of Changchun? Data shows that not a single Nationalist soldier died of starvation, but the precise number of civilians who succumbed to hunger remains disputed. Mainland scholars estimate around 150,000, while Nationalist officer Duan Kewen’s estimation in his memoirs put the figure at 650,000. Japanese estimates are around 200,000, and Taiwanese writer Long Yingtai, in “Big River, Big Sea: 1949”, conservatively estimated at least 300,000 deaths, not lower than the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre.
The vast number of people starving in Changchun, while the Nationalist army had a responsibility, can be somewhat excused. However, the Chinese Communist Party’s prevention of civilians from crossing blockades to seek a way out for the sake of claiming victory is an extremely evil act. It is possibly due to the party’s shameful actions being hidden from light that the CCP hesitates to mention this part of history. Even a casual excuse of “the responsibility of not providing food for the citizens in the besieged city” cannot erase their crimes.
In order to surpass the UK and US, Mao Zedong launched the “Great Leap Forward,” which resulted in an artificially induced Great Famine. In rural areas, after farmers exhausted their limited food supplies, they resorted to eating grass roots, tree bark, and even other people.
Declassified documents within the CCP revealed that after the unsealing of archives from 1959 to 1962, it was discovered that over 37.558 million people nationwide had died of starvation! In 2007, overseas scholar Ding Shu, in the book “Conspiracy,” pointed out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in the severe consequences of 35 to 40 million people starving to death.
In late 2009, renowned rice expert Yuan Longping mentioned in an interview that around 40 to 50 million people had died of hunger during the Great Famine. In 2010, Dr. Frank Dikotter, a Dutch scholar researching modern Chinese history, in his book “Mao’s Great Famine: The Story of China’s Greatest Catastrophe,” argued that 45 million people died during the Great Famine.
The causes of the Great Famine were not due to unprecedented natural disasters as claimed by the CCP but stemmed from Mao and senior party officials’ fundamentally flawed policies. More importantly, the systemic issue within the CCP, where farmers were not free to relocate. As Frank Dikotter stated: “The one-party system in China eradicated all freedoms of society and the people, with no freedom of speech, movement, travel, information… the common people only followed orders, acting according to the party’s directives, with no way to correct mistakes. Even officials had no freedom, no way to act, the whole nation was like a military camp, the farmers had only one way, a dead end.”
A document issued by the CCP to prevent the populace from fleeing was called the “Upright Sword,” showing their intent. In March 1959, as widespread starvation began to occur, the CCP Central Committee and the State Council jointly issued an “Urgent Notice on Preventing Blind Outflow of Rural Labor Force,” labeling any rural farmers leaving their land without permission as “blind outflow.”
This document was rigorous, not only halting farmers from leaving but also instructing provinces and cities to house and repatriate rural farmers who had “blindly flowed” into cities and industrial mining areas. Local officials, afraid of disclosing the dire situations with starving populations, found assurance in the central document to staunchly prevent the fleeing of the hungry people.
For example, in Henan’s Xinyang, one of the areas with the most deaths, when officials of the CCP Xinyang Committee were informed, the post office seized over 12,000 letters seeking help from the outside. To prevent the starving from escaping and leaking information, county committee secretaries were assigned areas of responsibility, closely guarded city gates with armed personnel, set up posts on key roads, patrolled the county’s border areas, stationed police at bus stations, and demanded party members drive long-distance buses. People’s militia set up checkpoints at village entrances following the county’s requirements, detaining those attempting to leave, stripping them of belongings, and even their clothing, resorting to torture.
After the CCP Xinyang Committee issued the order to “eliminate outflows,” the Zhumaendian Town executed the command, forcibly containing fleeing peasants, withholding food from those captured, leading to a tragic case of over 350 deaths. Huangchuan County Public Security Bureau Chief Ma Zhenxing ordered detained “fleeing individuals” to be put into prisons, resulting in over 200 deaths by starvation.
Xinyang City established several containment stations, intercepting 190,000 fleeing individuals, with many deaths in these stations, with only the bus station containment camp accounting for 1,500 deaths. Huangchuan County set up 67 containment sites, where escapees were subjected to a three-tier process: interrogation, search, corporal punishment, followed by forced labor without food. These 67 sites detained over 9,300 escapees, out of whom 2,195 succumbed to fatal beatings in the confines.
The publication “Yan Huang Chun Qiu” published an article by Yin Shusheng titled “How Zeng Xisheng Covered Up a Severe Famine,” detailing that in 1960, top CCP officials like Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen, Dong Biwu, Zhu De, and Chen Yun visited Anhui but failed to see the extreme difficulties the province faced at that time: people were starving and dying every day; numerous hungry refugees were fleeing to urban areas and highways, stranded midway and dying en route, with the countryside presenting a scene of “a thousand villages graves, with ghosts singing in ten thousand households.”
Zeng Xisheng and the Anhui Provincial Committee took measures to block news of the hardships. Based on a summary from the Anhui Public Security Bureau’s report on defense work in Anhui’s archives, specific precautions included the establishment of a special office led by the heads of the Provincial Public Security Bureau, People’s Procuratorate, People’s Court, and the Provincial United Front Department. The Public Security Bureau dispatched personnel to investigate and secure safety along the transit routes, monitor troublemakers, designated every five to six kilometers a County Committee member, and every one to two kilometers an Area or Township Party Committee member to oversee the situation. Cities and counties took over various sections, ensuring function-specific responsibilities for defense.
For locations to be visited by central leaders in Hefei, Huainan, Bengbu, and Ma’anshan, 16 fixed units, the provincial committee selected 1,500 active members to welcome and receive central leaders, with other workers strictly barred from the inspection sites. Everything obstructing the visit of leaders on their routes needed to be cleared before their arrival.
Under such strict lockdown, what the top CCP leaders saw was just what Zeng Xisheng wanted them to see.
With a tradition of famine escape in Fengyang County, Anhui Province, in January 1961, a five-level cadres meeting was called, during which representative Wang Jialai from Kaocheng Dazhai of Wudian Commune wept as he spoke: “Our commune had 5,000 people, now we only have 3,200. Even when the Japanese devils came, we didn’t have this many deaths. When the Japanese came, we could still run; this year, we can’t run anywhere. There are dissuasion stations everywhere, even if we manage to escape, without food vouchers, we have nowhere to eat, we can only wait for death at home.”
Even the fate of those who heard they could survive in the Northeast and tried to escape there was grim. According to a report from Jilin Provincial Committee on February 10, 1961, within the Changchun jurisdiction of Shenyang Railway Bureau, 38 out of fleeing passengers died in just over a month from January 1 to February 8. At the time, containment and processing stations were established in areas with high transient populations. Some of these stations behaved unlawfully, abusing and physically punishing refugees.
By the end of October that year, the Jilin Provincial Public Security Bureau and Civil Affairs Bureau jointly wrote a report to the provincial committee titled “Opinions on Resolutely Stopping Free-flowing Population,” stating that around 230,000 people had flowed into Jilin Province that year, with over 48,700 having been processed through containment and dispatch after entering cities and rural or mining areas. How many of them were people who couldn’t survive and fled to the northeast seeking a way to survive?
In conclusion, from preventing civilians in Changchun from crossing the blockade, to stopping people from leaving their homes and seeking a livelihood during the three-year Great Famine, and now the CCP sealing cities, communities, and buildings during the ongoing pandemic, the CCP’s actions under the guise of “serving the people’s interests” have been far from beneficial to the people. Undoubtedly, the CCP is an evil party that uses people’s names while actually prioritizing its own interests. If such a party continues to exist, how many more innocent people will fall victim to its atrocities?