Finding the ‘other’ from within: how the CCP survived the legitimacy crisis after China’s Great Leap Famine

Abstract

Much of the literature echoes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s official explanation of the Great Leap Famine (1959–1961) to argue that the Party survived the legitimacy crisis posed by the famine by blaming the weather. While several have suggested that the CCP held the local cadres responsible for generating the famine, little evidence had been gathered to show how this was done. This article reconciles the above arguments by asserting that the CCP, by exploiting the urban–rural informational asymmetry, employed a dual propaganda approach that combined an urban explanation that blamed the weather with a more important rural strategy that admitted the famine’s man-made nature but shifted the blame onto local leaders, to direct the responsibility away from the Party centre. By leveraging local government archives in Henan Province’s Nanyang Prefecture, this study analyses how the Party propagated the rural explanation through the Rural Party Rectification Movement (1960–1961) to placate immediate peasantry discontent and reconstruct long-run famine memories. Interviews conducted in 2021 show that the re-engineering of the famine narrative contributed to the peasants’ distrust of local cadres. This perception persisted over time, at least partially affecting the peasants’ willingness to cooperate with local policies in the 1990s.

Keywords:

• Authoritarianism
• propaganda
• regime legitimacy
• blame avoidance
• famine
• contemporary China

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors of this special issue, Camilla Orjuela and Swati Parashar, the editors of Third World Quarterly, and the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments. I also thank Gregg Huff, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Jennifer Altehenger, Zheng Hao Qiu, Zaiyuan Fang, Hanzhi Deng and Lucas Jonathan Wang Zheng for their helpful suggestions and their support in bringing this article to the finishing line. Finally, I also thank the History Faculty at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for archival source support. Responsibility for any errors remains my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Examples of famines that exerted pressure on state regimes include the Russian famine of 1981–1992, the Ethiopian Famine of 1983–1985 and the Bengal famine of 1943–1944.

2 For examples of studies that cited ‘three years of natural disaster’ as the official explanation for the famine, see Chen and Yang (2015), Wemheuer (2010) and Li and Yang (2005).

3 On 1 January 1960, the official newspaper, the People’s Daily, first claimed to the public the occurrence of natural disaster of an enormous scale that was ‘seen once every few decades’. In 1961, the official paper issued by the Ninth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee went further in declaring the disaster to be a ‘once in a century’ event.

4 Author’s own calculation based on archival statistics.

5 See, for example, Yang (2008), Yuren (n.d.) and Wang (2013).

6 The People’s Communes were agricultural collectives established after 1958 that were equivalent to townships. The production teams were production units within the People’s Communes that were equivalent to villages.

7 Also known as the Nationalist Party.

8 The critical importance of the utilisation of class struggles was emphasised by Mao in the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee (1962). For further scholarly discussion, see, for example, Zhou (2017).

9 For studies that view China’s hierarchical political trust as a natural outcome of the country’s hierarchical administrative structure and Confucian values formed from imperial rule, see Li (2004, 2016).

10 The village excess death rates are derived from the interviewees’ descriptions and verified by archival statistics where available.

11 While most considered the blames to be traceable up to the township or county level, two peasants believed that cadres up to the provincial level knew about the situation and should also take blame.

12 The exception is interviewee No. 16.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jingyang Rui

Jingyang Rui is a PhD student studying political science at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. She obtained her MPhil in Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford and her BSc in Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests concern using local-level historical evidence to study the interaction between the state, local officials and governed population in non-democratic regimes, with a focus on China. She is also interested in explaining variances in historical economic development from a local governance perspective.