University of British Columbia Press
Eating Bitterness
New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine
Distributed for University of British Columbia Press
Eating Bitterness
New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine
When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong declared that “not even one person shall die of hunger.” Yet some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion during the Great Leap Forward. Eating Bitterness reveals how men and women in rural and urban settings, from the provincial level to the grassroots, experienced the changes brought on by the party leaders’ attempts to modernize China. This landmark volume lifts the curtain of party propaganda to expose the suffering of citizens and the deeply contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China.
Table of Contents
Introduction / Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer
1 Re-Imagining the Chinese Peasant: The Historiography on the Great Leap Forward / Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
2 Romancing the Leap: Euphoria in the Moment before Disaster / Richard King
3 The Gendered Politics of Woman-Work: Rethinking Radicalism in the Great Leap Forward / Kimberley Ens Manning
4 “The Grain Problem Is an Ideological Problem”: Discourses of Hunger in the 1957 Socialist Education Campaign / Felix Wemheuer
5 On the Distribution System of Large-Scale People’s Communes / Xin Yi
6 An Introduction to the ABCs of Communization: A Case Study of Macheng County / Wang Yanni
7 Food Augmentation Methods and Food Substitutes during the Great Famine / Gao Hua
8 Under the Same Maoist Sky: Accounting for Death Rate Discrepancies in Anhui and Jiangxi / Chen Yixin
9 Great Leap City: Surviving the Famine in Tianjin / Jeremy Brown
10 How the Great Leap Forward Famine Ended in Rural China: “Administrative Intervention” versus Peasant Resistance / Ralph A. Thaxton Jr.
11 A Study of Chinese Peasant “Counter-Action” / Gao Wangling
Bibliography
Index