This is a topic which has frequently attracted fake misuses of statistics, and so I was prepared for that when I ordered this book. If the author were a US writer then the book would not be worth looking at. This author is Chinese and represents that sector of the current capitalist class which seeks to more broadly disown the revolution. As such, the author has an agenda but is still worth looking at critically.
OK, so what happened and what does this book attempt to do? The general outline is rather clear, despite gaps in the data. The first major gap which we're faced with is that no system of regular population counts, with registry of births and deaths, had really existed in pre-revolutionary China. All of the existing reports from the earlier era support something like what John Finley summarized in the Foreword to the 1926 publication of the American Geographical Society by Walter Mallory, China: Land of Famine:
"It is a shocking fact that with all of the labor expended and virtues practiced, nearly a fourth of the people of the globe live in a land of famine--not of general famine at any one time nor of continuous famine in any one place, but of famine in one or another province or locality all the time."
That is not a substitute for real hard statistics, but it gives an idea of what China in peaceful years was like. One can also gain some useful information by looking at the known statistics for the provinces of Czarist Russia that remained in the USSR after 1917, as given in Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union:
Year_____Deaths per thousand among the population
1899_____33.4
1900_____32.3
1901_____33.6
1902_____33.1
1903_____31.1
1904_____31.1
1905_____33.2
1906_____31.6
1907_____30.2
1908_____30.2
1909_____31.6
1910_____33.3
1911_____29.2
1912_____28.7
1913_____30.9
You can find some books which give the number 30.2 for 1913 instead of Lorimer's 30.9. That has to do with the 11 other provinces of Czarist Russia which broke away from the USSR after 1917. Mortality was actually higher in the main Russian part of the Czarist Empire than in Finland, Poland or the Baltic.
For another comparison, some select years of the United States can be placed alongside this:
Year_____Deaths per thousand among the population
1913_____13.8
1915_____13.2
1940_____10.8
1950_____9.6
1951_____9.7
1952_____9.6
1953_____9.6
1954_____9.2
1955_____9.3
1956_____9.4
1957_____9.6
These offer some useful guides on what is realistic to think of as likely death rates in China. It is beyond question that any serious guess of mortality rates under the most peaceful conditions in pre-revolutionary China would have to be notably higher than all of the rates listed for Czarist Russia. It also makes sense to assume that mortality rates in China for the first decade after the revolution of 1949 would have been notably higher than the death rates listed above for the United States. Unfortunately, the very flawed statistics published by the Statistical Yearbook of China 1986 are obviously way off and do not meet these criteria:
Year_____Deaths per thousand among the population
1949_____20.00
1950_____18.00
1951_____17.80
1952_____17.00
1953_____14.00
1954_____13.18
1955_____12.28
1856_____11.40
1957_____10.80
1958_____11.98
1959_____14.59
1960_____25.43
1961_____14.24
1962_____10.02
1963_____10.04
These are comical underestimates. There is no way that Chinese mortality could have been as low as 20/1000 in 1949 or 10.8/1000 in 1957. At the same time the official Chinese data is instructive on general patterns. What this table asserts is that mortality for China in 1958, 1959 and 1961 (11.98, 14.59. 14.24) was well below anything that had ever existed in pre-revolutionary China. 1960 was a year of famine which these numbers imply caused about 3.36 million deaths over and above the rate of 1949 (25.43 - 20 = 5.43, multiplied by the approximate size of the population). At the same time, if one were to compute from the official data the numbers who died in 1958-61 above the 1957 death rate of 10.8, then the result would be 15.1 million. That says something about the general pattern, but the numbers are obviously all wrong.
Judith Banister constructed a different table, in response to official statistics, and Banister's numbers are a bit more realistic:
Year_____Deaths per thousand among the population
1949_____38
1950_____35
1951_____32
1952_____29
1953_____25.77
1954_____24.20
1955_____22.33
1956_____20.11
1957_____18.12
1958_____20.65
1959_____22.06
1960_____44.60
1961_____23.01
1962_____14.02
1963_____13.81
Banister's numbers are more realistic, while conforming to the same general pattern as the official statistics. Banister's assigned numbers for the years 1958, 1959, and 1961 (20.65, 22.06, 23.01) are all visibly lower than all of the death rates recorded for Czarist Russia, and far lower than anything which had ever occurred in pre-revolutionary China. Banister's numners imply that about 4.35 million deaths occurred in 1960 above the death rate of 1949 (44.6 - 38 = 6.6, multiplied by the approximate size of the population). At the same time they indicate about 25.4 million dying in 1958-61 above the rate of 18.12 which Banister assigns to 1957.
Banister's numbers may suffer from inaccuracies with inflated birth rates in several years. For 1957-63, Banister assigns fertility rates per thousand of 43.25, 37.76, 28.53, 26.76, 22.43, 41.02, and 49.79. These numbers imply that fertility surpassed mortality by a large margin in all years but 1960-1, and only in 1960 did mortality exceed fertility by a wide margin. That is not very likely. Even such an author as Jasper Becker, who is also part of the same bandwagon in support of capitalist restoration, maintains:
"Very few women were able to have children during the famine. A large proportion stopped menstruating because of the lack of protein in their diet. Some students sent down to the countrtside said that they stopped menstruating for as long as five years."
-- Hungry Ghosts, p. 210.
The numbers given for fertility by both Banister and the official yearbook do not reflect such tendencies of loss in fertility. That may probably mean that Banister has overestimated the death rate in 1960. But regardless, the general pattern given is clear and makes sense. China experienced a dramatic unprecedented drop in mortality rates during the years following the revolution. Revolutionary leaders became overambitious and attempted a Great Leap Forward, which proved to be a failure in 1958-9. That resulted in some increase in mortality in those years, without actually reaching what had been the normal annual death rates in pre-revolutionary China, or even Czarist Russia. By the year 1960 the main effort of the Great Leap Forward had been called off, but this also proved to be a year of severe weather catastrophe. Even Roderick MacFarquhar has documented this fact:
"Not surprisingly in view of the drought, most of the flooding had been due to the typhoons, more of which had hit the Chinese mainland than in any of the previous 50 years, 11 between June and October; and each typhoon had lasted longer than usual, averaging ten hours, the longest stretching to 20. Moreover, nature had played an additional trick. The typhoon did not strike north-westwards as usual, but northwards. This added to their impact because it meant that there were no high mountains to ward them off, and that less rain reached the rest of the country. In the aftermath of the drought and floods came insect pests and plant diseases."
-- The Great Leap Forward 1958-1960, Volume 2 of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, p. 322.
Against the background of these natural disasters, further compounded by the lack of comprehension within the Party apparatus, which led to even more errors, the mortality rate in China in 1960 rose to a level that was fairly common in many previous famines which used to occur quite regularly in pre-revolutionary China, perhaps approaching 44.6 per thousand for the country as a whole. That brought an end to the age when China was regarded as "the land of famine" and by 1963 China's mortality rate had fallen as low as 13.81 per thousand and continued to fall thereafter steadily during the years before Deng Xiao-ping began the capitalist counter-revolution. That what the real data shows.
Not surprisingly, many proponents of capitalist restoration in China have sought to promote the most wildly inflated estimates of famine deaths in these years in an effort to justify counter-revolution. The more honest books will simply quote plausible numbers for the years 1957-63, but without telling the reader anything about what real mortality patterns in China historically looked like. But there is another even more dishonest approach favored among some proponents of capitalism which actually requires deliberately faking statistics by citing numbers from the official statistics where it is politically convenient, yet citing higher numbers from other sources for other years.
It is analogous to if someone found two census agencies which regularly offer an annual estimate of the black population in the USA, but which use a different criterion so that there is always a disparity of one million in the numbers for each year. Now suppose that someone looked up such numbers from such sources and quoted them for two consecutive years in a way which implied that white racists had murdered one million black people. That is the type of hoax which Yang Jisheng tries playing in this book.
It's easy to cite specific illustrations of this from the text. On p. 394 he says:
"The mortality rate in Sichuan from 1958 to 1962 was 1.517 percent, 4.69 percent, 5.39 percent, 2.942 percent, and 1.482 percent."
Comparing these numbers with the numbers given by both Judith Banister and the Statistical Yearbook, it's clear that the number "1.517 percent" which he gives for 1958 is meant to read as a little bit higher than the number "11.98 per thousand" which the Statistical Yearbook gives. Yet this number is significantly lower than the number "18.12 per thousand" which Banister gives for 1957, and the gap is even larger when compared with the "20.65 per thousand" which Banister assigns to 1958 itself.
This isn't just a fluke accident. On pp. 408-9 the author lists alleged death rates which clearly come from the Statistical Yearbook and he uses to compute what he declares to be a "normal mortality rate" of 1.047 percent. This is obviously a very steep underestimate of what real mortality rates in China up to 1957 had been like. Banister's guess of 18.12 per thousand may even be too low, as it assumes a dramatic heretofore unprecedented drop in Chinese mortality over the years 1949-57. If Chinese mortality in 1957 had only been as low as 25 per thousand then that would still represent a dramatic gain over the preformances of Czarist Russia and pre-1949 China, while still being larger than each of the mortality rates which Banister assigns to 1958, 1959 and 1961.
Obviously the reason why Yang Jusheng uses the number of 1.047 percent as an estimate drawn from the Statistical Yearbook is because when such a steep underestimate of real mortality in China is cited, then followed by more realistic estimates for the later years, it allows one to dramatically raise the numbers of deaths occurring over an alleged "normal mortality rate." This is a very dishonest cut-and-paste method of generating false statistical results. Because of this all of the more special assertions made in this book which do not already have a general corroboration need to be treated with high skepticism. This book was put together with an agenda, and that shows.
Although this book can not and will not stand with sustained authority over the long haul, it may still be worth examining with a very critical eye. Probably the most notable thing about this book was that the author does confirm that an incredible decline in annual mortality was indeed brought about by the Chinese Revolution. He obviously doesn't mean to state it that way. But it would be unnecessary for him to assert that mortality in Sichuan was as low in 1958 as 1.517 percent if that were not the case. I can actually believe that death rates in Sichuan in 1958 may have really been higher than the national rate of 20.65 which Banister assigns to the year 1958. But again, even that number is far lower than the normal death rates of Czarist Russia and pre-1949 China.
There is undoubtedly a need for some methodical critique of the whole era which takes everything into account. Although the weather of 1960 definitely did play an important role in raising the death rate for 1960 above those of 1958-9, and although one does need to appreciate the real progress that was accomplished in the first decade after 1949 in order to see how the Chinese government became overambitious, but it was still acknowledged even within the Party that the whole thing had been badly handled. That much is undoubtedly true even when the distortions of capitalist restorationist propaganda are taken into account. But this book is just another distorting piece of propaganda.
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![Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 by [Yang Jisheng, Edward Friedman, Stacy Mosher, Jian Guo, Edward Friedman ; Roderick MacFarquhar ;]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41bFqP-91EL._SY346_.jpg)
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Top reviews from other countries
Ms Tung Chu
A must read book for people who want to know the truth of the " natural disaster" in 1960th in China
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 24, 2016Jan Fox
A great account of a dreadful famine.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 14, 2013Jacky
This is grim reading but a must
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 2, 2014F G HOB
An interesting book of survival
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 29, 2014
