Combined with forced collectivization and a purge of anyone who seemed to have a clue about anything, the Great Leap Forward ended in catastrophe. Agricultural output (mostly grain) fell significantly, even though local officials grossly inflated their actual production numbers to curry favor with Mao. This imaginary surplus led to increases in government quotas, so that most of what was produced was immediately confiscated by the state and even exported. Meanwhile, the farmers starved, as did anyone else not living in a city. Farm animals were eaten, then pets, and finally the bodies of the dead, especially children. Foreign correspondent Jasper Becker (former Bureau Chief of the South China Morning Post), wrote: “Traveling around the region over thirty years later, every peasant that I met aged over 50 said he personally knew of a case of cannibalism in his production team. . . . Women would usually go out at night and cut flesh off the bodies, which lay under a thin layer of soil, and this would then be eaten in secrecy.”
Critics of Mao’s system were imprisoned or murdered, and thousands of farmers were accused of hoarding grain and were tortured to death in gruesome fashion. Fortunately, the Great Leap Forward, which was conceived as a five-year plan, was abandoned during year three. But although Chinese rulers looked the other way as starving populations consumed their dead, the cannibalism that took place during the Great Leap Forward was more of a necessity than a choice. These instances of survival cannibalism (albeit on a massive scale) do not, therefore, answer the question of whether or not something like the Western cannibalism taboo also existed in China.
It is under the banner of learned cannibalism that the Chinese appear to have exhibited attitudes toward cannibalism that differed significantly from the Western taboos. For a start, author Key Ray Chong provided a list of circumstances that might lead to an act of learned cannibalism. These were “hate, love, loyalty, filial piety, desire for human flesh as a delicacy, punishment, war, belief in the medical benefits of cannibalism, profit, insanity, coercion, religion, and superstition.” Some of these, Chong asserted, were uniquely Chinese.
As anyone who has ever visited China (or to a lesser extent, any big-city Chinatown) can attest, the Chinese consume a diverse range of creatures and their parts. Many of these, like scorpions and chicken testicles, fall outside the range of typical Western diets and, as writer Maggie Kilgore pointed out in 1998, some, like rats, snakes, shellfish, and things with paws, are specifically banned by Judeo-Christian law. Without our long list of forbidden foods, it’s not a surprise that the Chinese felt less strongly about consuming other humans.
Throughout their long history, body parts were such important ingredients in Chinese cuisine that Key Ray Chong devoted a 13-page chapter to “Methods of Cooking Human Flesh” with a subheading entitled “Baking, Roasting, Broiling, Smoke-drying, and Sun-drying.” And rather than an emergency ration consumed as a last resort, there are many reports of exotic human-based dishes prepared for royalty and upper-class citizens. T’ao Tsung-yi, a writer during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), wrote that “children’s meat was the best food of all in taste” followed by women and then men. In Shui Hu Chuan (The Tales of Water Margins), a novel written in the 12th century, there are numerous references to steamed dumplings stuffed with minced human flesh, as well as a rather nonchalant regard by merchants and customers over the sale of human meat.
Even if epicurean cannibalism isn’t limited to the Chinese, the extent to which it was set down in detail certainly was. Amidst information on “five regional cuisines” (Szechwan, Canton, Fukien, Shantung, and Honon), the San Kuo Yen Ki (Dramatic Epic of the Three Kingdoms), written in 1494, contained “many examples of steaming or boiling human meat.” Prisoners of war were preferred ingredients, but when they ran out (figuratively or literally), General Chu Ts’an’s soldiers seized women and children off the street, killed them, and then ate them. As recently as the 19th century, executioners reportedly ate the hearts and brains of the prisoners they executed, selling whatever cuts were left to the public.
Widespread epicurean cannibalism was still taking place in the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, although there was certainly an element of terror involved. Chinese dissident journalist Zheng Yi wrote the following in 2001:
Once victims had been subjected to criticism, they were cut open alive, and all their body parts—heart, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, elbows, feet, tendons, intestines—were boiled, barbecued, or stir-fried into a gourmet cuisine. On campuses, in hospitals, in the canteens of various governmental units at the brigade, township, district, and country levels, the smoke from cooking pots could be seen in the air. Feasts of human flesh, at which people celebrated by drinking and gambling, were a common sight.