In total, Chong’s exhaustive research efforts yielded 153 and 177 incidents of war-related and natural disaster–related cannibalism, respectively. With no statistical difference in the numbers reported from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) to the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1912), incidents of cannibalism (in which varying numbers of people were consumed) seem to have been a fairly consistent occurrence throughout China’s long history—until recently, that is. But rather than the decrease in reports of cannibalism one might expect to find in modern times, the opposite turns out to be true. The greatest number of cannibalism-related deaths in China came as a direct result of Mao Zedong’s “The Great Leap Forward” (1958–1961), a disastrous attempt at utopian engineering.
This government program eventually morphed into what some consider the most far-reaching case of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of mankind. It also produced what may have been the worst famine in recorded history—a continent-spanning disaster in which at least 30 million, mostly rural, Chinese died of starvation. Those who wrote about the catastrophe often did so at their own peril, but what they uncovered was truly shocking. For example, in the 2008 book Mubei (Tombstone), Yang Jisheng wrote that famine-starved “people ate tree bark, weeds, bird droppings, and flesh that had been cut from dead bodies, sometimes of their own family members.” The author, who lost his father to starvation, also believes that 36 million deaths is a more accurate number, although some estimates run as high as 46 million. In brief, this is how it all came about.
In an effort to transform China’s primarily agrarian economy into a modern communist society based on industrialization and collectivization, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the People’s Republic, ordered nearly a billion farmers to move from private farms to massive agricultural collectives. More often than not, these communal farms were run by government officials who had no farming experience at all. Making matters even worse, Mao had them institute an anti-scientific agricultural program that had sprung from the brain of semi-literate Soviet peasant Trofim Lysenko in the late 1920s. Lysenkoism (as it came to be called) initially led to a deadly purge of Russian scientists and intellectuals. Eventually it set the Soviet Union’s agricultural system back at least 50 years and resulted in millions of starvation-related deaths.
Lysenko rejected an array of selective breeding techniques, especially those based on Mendelian genetics. Instead he proposed his own muddled version of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s early-18th-century claim that environmental factors produced needs or desires within an organism that led to new adaptations. Lamarck’s infamous giraffes, their necks stretching and lengthening in an effort to reach leaves in an ever-higher tree canopy, remain a common misconception of how variation in traits like color or size could be generated in any given population.
Lamarck, trained as a naturalist, believed that the giraffes willed these changes to occur—changes that would then be passed on to future generations. In Lysenko’s interpretation, the organisms exhibiting these needs and desires were crop plants like corn, wheat, and vegetables. In that regard, Lysenko boasted that he could grow citrus trees in Siberia by cold-storing the seeds the previous year. These sorts of preposterous claims went on for decades, with those who questioned Lysenko’s program either eliminated or afraid to make their voices heard. In the end, what Lysenkoism did prove was that reality does not yield to wishful thinking and truth cannot be established by a political party (or any other organization for that matter).
Not to be outdone by the Russians, Mao decided to install an “improved” version of Lysenko’s agricultural program in China, and his so-called advances might have been comical if their consequences hadn’t been so horrific. Instead of planting seedlings apart from each other, for example, Mao instructed that they be “close planted,” since rather than competing for resources like water and nutrients, the tightly packed plants would, like the farmers Mao had packed into enormous communal farms, help each other to grow. The seedlings invariably died, although farmers were coerced into pretending that mature plants were so densely compacted that children could stand on them. Photographs depicting this “miracle” were achieved by having the kids stand on a bench, hidden from view.32