The Loss of Heaven: Changing Responses to Famine from Late Imperial to Maoist China

FAIN: HB-272955-21

Kathryn Jean Edgerton-Tarpley
San Diego State University (San Diego, CA 92182-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on state responses to famine in China, 1800-1976.

My book project maps changing Chinese responses to calamity by employing case studies of three major famines that struck North China under governments with very different ideological foundations. Because the prospect of fellow humans starving to death is so disturbing, famines generate intense discussion of a given culture’s ultimate values. Yet conceptions of what ethical responses to famine entail are neither static nor universal. China experienced radical change between the late-Qing (1800-1912), Republican (1912-49) and Maoist (1949-76) periods. I examine how such change impacted state and societal responses to the North China Famine of 1876-79, the Henan Famine of 1942-43, and the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62. I find that in twentieth-century China, the rejection of long-held cosmological interpretations of famine made it easier for the state to engineer disasters in the name of a supposedly greater good, and harder for leaders to accept blame for and relieve calamities.

Associated Products

From Food Substitutes to Women's Illnesses: Icons of Starvation for a Socialist Society "Without Famine" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: From Food Substitutes to Women's Illnesses: Icons of Starvation for a Socialist Society "Without Famine"
Author: Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
Abstract: This paper examines the Chinese Communist Party’s construction, during the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62, of a new vocabulary of disaster fitting for a socialist society in which famine could not exist. Because famines played an important role in China’s long history, conquering hunger became a key legitimizing principle for the Chinese Communists, who came to power in 1949 promising that “not one person would starve to death” under their rule. Given this context, when famine conditions began to spread across China in 1959 due to policies connected to the Great Leap Forward, it became increasingly dangerous for observers on any level to admit that a major famine was in fact occurring. Instead, jettisoning both time-honored famine relief strategies and traditional icons of starvation, the Party developed a new lexicon that sought to end the massive famine without ever acknowledging its existence. This paper explores the use of four key phrases -- “produce to provide relief for yourself” (生产救灾), “food substitutes” (代食品), “swelling disease” (浮肿病) and “women’s illnesses” (妇女病) -- that are ubiquitous in archival documents from the Great Leap Famine. The first two phrases, I argue, introduced new “relief” strategies that aimed to increase the amount of food available in rural China without reducing high grain quotas, while the last two demonstrate how cadres medicalized starvation to explain soaring death rates and plummeting birth rates without acknowledging famine conditions.
Date: 8/6/2021
Primary URL: http://hstcconline.org/conferences/2021-hstcc-mini-conference/
Primary URL Description: 2021 HSTCC Mini-Conference – August 6, 2021
Conference Name: The Historical Society for Twentieth Century China conference on the theme of “Building a Socialist Society"

From Motherwort to Progesterone Injections: Fighting Famine with Chinese and Western Medicine, 1958-1962 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: From Motherwort to Progesterone Injections: Fighting Famine with Chinese and Western Medicine, 1958-1962
Author: Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
Abstract: This paper examines the wide array of remedies used to treat malnutrition-related gynecological ailments during the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62, as well as the important role that prominent female physicians and young female health workers played in identifying or employing such treatments. Because both acknowledging famine conditions and reducing high grain quotas were politically dangerous during the Great Leap disaster, cadres at all levels engaged in a pronounced “medicalization of starvation.” Rising mortality rates were attributed to “fuzhongbing” (edema), and plummeting birthrates were blamed on “funübing” (women’s diseases), in particular amenorrhea and uterine prolapse. Finding it politically untenable to provide relief grain, between 1959 and 1961 officials at the provincial and county levels instead sent large teams of medical personnel to rural areas to treat the starving with a combination of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and biomedicine. This paper focuses on how the 1950s campaign to unify Chinese and Western medicines shaped the top-down and bottom-up development of an eclectic mix of treatments for amenorrhea (the cessation of menstruation in women of child-bearing age) and uterine prolapse during the famine. I also examine how, by whom, and to what effect these therapies were used to treat famished women in severely-affected counties in Anhui and Henan. I find that while medical interventions did little to address the root cause – starvation and overwork -- of these “women’s diseases,” the exhaustive search for cures provides a vivid snapshot of Mao-era medical theory, gender ideals, and state responses to public health crises.
Date: 3/27/2022
Primary URL: https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/AAS-AC-2022-Conference-Booklet-Web-FINAL-R1.pdf
Primary URL Description: AAS conference program.
Conference Name: Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference

Spinning Cotton into Grain: Gender and Work Relief in the Henan Famine of 1942-43 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Spinning Cotton into Grain: Gender and Work Relief in the Henan Famine of 1942-43
Author: Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
Abstract: This paper examines gendered experiences of famine and famine relief campaigns during China's Henan Famine of 1942-43. The wartime Henan Famine, which killed between 1 and 3 million people, occurred in the context of both a severe drought in North China’s strategically important Henan Province, and a brutal tri-polar struggle between the invading Japanese army, China’s Nationalist government, and Chinese Communist forces. During the famine, Nationalist government officials in unoccupied parts of Henan and its neighboring provinces, as well as their Communist rivals located in base areas behind Japanese lines, promoted gendered work relief campaigns that aimed to feed starving women by arranging for them to earn grain by spinning and weaving cloth. Missionary relief workers and other foreigners active in wartime China launched similar endeavors. These campaigns had patriotic, economic and social goals, including supporting China’s wartime resistance by engaging famine refugees in textile production that could address serious wartime shortages, and curtailing the widespread practice of selling famished girls and women as child brides or prostitutes. In the case of the spinning and weaving movement organized by the Communists in their Taihang Base area in 1942, women’s spinning co-operatives also aimed to “liberate” women and change production relations within the family. This paper compares and contrasts the gendered famine relief efforts conducted by the Nationalist state and its Communist rivals during the wartime Henan Famine, and evaluates the aims and impact of these campaigns.
Date: 7/26/2022
Primary URL: https://www.wehc2022.org/program-details/feeding-civilians-food-crises-in-wartime
Primary URL Description: World Economic History Congress program.
Conference Name: World Economic History Congress, Paris, France

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