Community Elites and Collective Action: The State and the Starved during the Chinese Famine (1959–61)

• Published date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329219893798
• Author: Yongshun Cai
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329219893798

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(1) 99 –130

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329219893798

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Article

Community Elites and

Collective Action: The State

and the Starved during the

Chinese Famine (1959–61)

Yongshun Cai

Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Abstract

Tens of millions of peasants died during the Great Famine in China from 1959 to

1961. Numerous Chinese peasants remained silent during the famine while others

staged resistance. This article explores how peasant resistance was possible in a

communist regime and how the government contained such resistance. It finds that

resistance was considerably affected by the availability of protest leaders. Chinese

peasants were organized into rural collectives controlled by the party-state through

local cadres. Sympathetic rural cadres played crucial roles in facilitating peasant

resistance. However, government control generally deprived rural communities of

protest leaders. When collective resistance did occur, the government contained its

influence through accommodation and repression. Effective control rendered the

government insensitive to the famine suffered by the vast rural population of the

country.

Keywords

China, famine, peasant resistance, protest leaders

Corresponding Author:

Yongshun Cai, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Email: socai@ust.hk

893798PASXXX10.1177/0032329219893798Politics & SocietyCai

research-article2019

100 Politics & Society 48(1)

The Great Famine in China from 1959 to 1961 claimed the lives of anywhere from 16

to 40 million people, most of whom were peasants.1 Henan was among the provinces

with the largest death toll;2 and among all the municipal districts in the province,

Xinyang may have witnessed the most deaths.3 Zhang Shufan, a vice-secretary of the

Communist Party and head of the prefecture government of Xinyang, recalled in 1993

that the masses were “simply too nice”; countless people starved to death, but not

because of a shortage of grain.

Large and small granaries [in the prefecture] were full of grain. But the masses were

willing to face starvation rather than loot a single granary [italics added]. Their choice

indicates their incredible obedience, rule observance, and trust in the party. Some of our

leaders are truly guilty for the way they treated the people.4

However, the conclusion that Chinese peasants remained silent during the famine is

inaccurate. Some peasants did stage resistance, taking contentious action by grabbing

grain from their rural collectives, neighboring communities, state granaries, railway

stations, or grain-carrying trains.5 According to a former deputy head of the Public

Security Bureau of Anhui Province, 1,300 cases of grain grabbing occurred in the

province from 1955 to 1961, with more than twenty participants in each case. Thus, he

believed, “the claim that ‘Chinese peasants would rather starve to death than steal or

grab grain’ is a complete myth.”6

The mixed picture of Chinese peasants’ reaction to the famine raises two questions.

The first is why some peasants were able to stage collective action, and the second is

how the government prevented peasant resistance from threatening the social and

political order of the country. This article finds that frequent peasant resistance was

possible often because rural elites, specifically, village cadres, played crucial roles in

facilitating peasant resistance. The collective farming system made peasants depen-

dent on the rural collective for their livelihood, and the party’s cadres assumed a domi-

nant influence in the rural collective. The Chinese government contained peasant

resistance by creating a repressive environment that deterred mobilization. Political

repression not only subdued the old rural elites from the traditional society but also

deterred the emergence of other elites, including village cadres. Moreover, the govern-

ment limited the effect of peasant resistance, when it occurred, through accommoda-

tion and repression.

This article contributes to the understanding of authoritarian control over situations

in which a vast number of people face economic difficulties. The former Soviet Union

likewise experienced a famine from 1931 to 1933, when the government attempted to

extract grain from peasants by force. As peasant resistance made it difficult to collect

grain, the central government responded with direct repression. Stalin personally

drafted a new law on August 7, 1932, that stated that thieves of Socialist property,

including grain stocks, would be executed. A total of 200,000 people were sent to labor

camps and 11,000 were executed between 1932 and 1933 under the new law.7 The

central government sent central leaders and cadres from Moscow as well as the mili-

tary to peasant households to punish those deemed disobedient.8

Cai 101

By contrast, security forces were not commonly used to deal with peasants during

the Chinese famine. The Chinese government occasionally mobilized the military or

the police to protect state granaries or to prevent peasants from leaving their villages.9

Security forces were also used to crack down on “counterrevolutionary riots.”10 Some

local governments sent cadres to villages to collect grain, but soldiers were generally

not dispatched to repress peasants who resisted the grain collection. The Chinese cen-

tral government was less directly involved than its counterpart in the Soviet Union in

extracting grain. Despite the lack of direct threats of military repression and central

intervention, peasant resistance was not influential. There were belligerent actions, but

they were sporadic, short-lived, and very few in number. That limited resistance can

be attributed to the government’s control over the rural collective and rural elites.

However, effective control rendered the government insensitive to popular demands,

which resulted in the worst man-made famine in history.

Famine and Authoritarian Control

Autocratic governments live in the shadow of mass political unrest.11 Famines

threaten authoritarian regimes not only because they shake people’s belief in the

legitimacy of the regime but also because the starved may act together to challenge it.

The imperial regime in China feared that roving bands of desperate people might stir

up the local population when famines occurred.12 “Political upheaval could easily be

fomented by those who made calls to arms with slogans demanding the sharing, or

rather equalizing, of wealth—after all . . . the majority of anti-dynastic rebellions had

started this way.”13 Thus authoritarian governments need to ensure social stability

during times of economic difficulty.

Governments can accommodate or repress the aggrieved if their challenging actions

cannot be ignored.14 However, accommodation and repression have limitations.

Concession requires economic resources that the government often lacks during a fam-

ine, whereas repression damages a regime’s legitimacy and does not always decrease

collective action.15 Repression may strengthen people’s collective identity and sense of

belonging to a group by sustaining the group’s shared circumstance against authorities.

Repression can also enflame public emotions, intensify popular hatred for the regime,

and further radicalize the population.16

Given the limitations of repression, Charles Tilly contends that the most effective

way to reduce popular resistance is to increase the difficulty of mobilizing on the part

of prospective protestors. “From a government’s point of view, raising the costs of

mobilization is a more reliable repressive strategy than raising the costs of collective

action alone.”17 The issue for authoritarian governments becomes one of how to make

it harder for rebellious citizens to mobilize. I argue that the state can reduce resistance

by creating an environment that is not conducive to such mobilization.

Social Control in Communist Regimes

Communist states commonly rely on organizational control to demobilize popular

resistance. Organizational control is based on citizens’ dependence on their workplace,