how does china change its starvation situation
Answers
Answer:
Only a return to more rational economic policies after 1961, including imports of grain, ended the famine. China's opening up to the world made a key difference. ... By 1984 all food rationing was lifted in the cities, and China's average per capita food supply rose to within 5% of Japan's comfortable mean.
Answer:
Forty years ago China was in the middle of the world's largest famine: between the spring of 1959 and the end of 1961 some 30 million Chinese starved to death and about the same number of births were lost or postponed. The famine had overwhelmingly ideological causes, rating alongside the two world wars as a prime example of what Richard Rhodes labelled public manmade death, perhaps the most overlooked cause of 20th century mortality.1 Two generations later China, which has been rapidly modernising since the early 1980s, is economically successful and producing adequate amounts of food. Yet it has still not undertaken an open, critical examination of this unprecedented tragedy.
Summary points
The largest famine in human history took place in China during 1959-61
Although drought was a contributory factor, this was largely a manmade catastrophe for which Mao Zedong bears the greatest responsibility
We will never know the precise number of casualties, but the best demographic reconstructions indicate about 30 million dead
Two generations later China is yet to openly examine the causes and consequences of the famine
Origins of famine
The origins of the famine can be traced to Mao Zedong's decision, supported by the leadership of China's communist party, to launch the Great Leap Forward. This mass mobilisation of the country's huge population was to achieve in just a few years economic advances that took other nations many decades to accomplish.2 Mao, beholden to Stalinist ideology that stressed the key role of heavy industry, made steel production the centrepiece of this deluded effort. Instead of working in the fields, tens of millions of peasants were ordered to mine local deposits of iron ore and limestone, to cut trees for charcoal, to build simple clay furnaces, and to smelt metal. This frenzied enterprise did not produce steel but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools. Peasants were forced to abandon all private food production, and newly formed agricultural communes planted less land to grain, which at that time was the source of more than 80% of China's food energy.3
At the same time, fabricated reports of record grain harvests were issued to demonstrate the superiority of communal farming. These gross exaggerations were then used to justify the expropriation of higher shares of grain for cities and the establishment of wasteful communal mess halls serving free meals.4 In reality, grain harvest plummeted (fig (fig1);1); and since supply and demand of food before 1958 were almost equal, by the spring of 1959 there was famine in a third of China's provinces.
Total and per capita grain production in China, 1950-70
As an essentially social catastrophe, the famine showed clear marks of omission, commission, and provision. These three attributes recur in all modern manmade famines.5 The greatest omission was the failure of China's rulers to acknowledge the famine and promptly to secure foreign food aid. Study of famines shows how easily they can be ended (or prevented) once the government decides to act—but the Chinese government took nearly three years to act. Taking away all means of private food production (in some places even cooking utensils), forcing peasants into mismanaged communes, and continuing food exports were the worst acts of commission. Preferential supply of food to cities and to the ruling elite was the deliberate act of selective provision.
These actions are perfect illustrations of Sen's thesis about the critical link between political alienation of the governors from the governed: “The direct penalties of a famine are borne by one group of people and political decisions are taken by another. The rulers never starve. But when a government is accountable to the local populace it too has good reasons to do its best to eradicate famines. Democracy, via electoral politics, passes on the price of famines to the rulers as well.”6 There was no such link in Mao's China.
Extent of famine:-
The true extent of the famine was not revealed to the world until the publication of single year age distributions from the country's first highly reliable population census in 1982. These data made it possible to estimate the total number of excess deaths between 1959 and 1961, and the first calculations by American demographers put the toll at between 16.5 and 23 million.9 More detailed later studies came up with 23 to 30 million excess deaths, and unpublished Chinese materials hint at totals closer to 40 million.10–12 We will never know the actual toll because the official Chinese figures for the three famine years greatly underestimate both the fall in fertility and the rise in mortality and because we cannot accurately reconstruct these vital sstatistics.
