Kathryn Jean Edgerton-Tarpley. Environment and History. Volume 26, Issue 1, February 2020.
This article examines change and continuity in the selection, conceptualisation and state-sponsorship of ‘famine foods’ in late Qing, Nationalist and Maoist China. It employs as case studies the following severe famines that struck North China under three markedly different regimes: the North China Famine of 1876-79, the Henan Famine of 1942/43 and the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62. Continuities that cut across the three periods include the particular non-grain foods—beginning with tree bark and wild plants and extending to Bodhisattva earth (Guanyin tu)—consumed at the local level, and a tradition of elite involvement in identifying and endorsing items that could relieve starvation. The terms used to describe survival foods changed significantly, however, as did the rationale for promoting such foods. Moreover, as twentieth-century Chinese modernisers joined their Western counterparts in championing the use of science and technology to address food crises and other disasters, staterun health and scientific agencies played an increasingly active role in testing and promoting recipes for non-grain foods. This trend reached its zenith during the Great Leap Famine, when the government launched a ‘food substitute’ (daishipin) campaign that aimed to address food shortages without reducing grain quotas by encouraging the mass-production of food substitutes such as chlorella and artificial meat. This campaign can be understood as a sharp departure from Qing China’s grain-centred famine relief policies, a radical extension of rhetoric and priorities laid out during the Nationalist period, and a case of high modernism gone badly awry.
Introduction
In August 1960, as millions of people were starving to death during China’s Great Leap Famine of 1958-62, an inspection team in Sichuan’s Qu County reported that from late June onwards, the practice of digging so-called ‘Bodhisattva earth’ (Guanyin tu) out of mountainsides and consuming it had spread ‘faster than an epidemic’. By August people in eighteen communes in three different districts were eating ‘Bodhisattva earth’, which the report also calls white clay or mud (bai niba). The investigators described the scale of the phenomenon in some detail. In the four major clay-digging sites inspected by the team, approximately 10,000 people had dug out some 500,000 jin of clay. At the Puji Mountain site, there were too many people trying to dig clay out of too few holes, so people had to wait in line in the hot sun. Those from outside the locale would stay overnight at a mountainside school so that they could begin digging early the following morning, and some nights the school housed as many as 100 people. Elderly women burned incense and kowtowed at the clay digging sites, and some people assuaged their hunger by eating bits of clay as they dug. After digging up the clay, people soaked it in water, ground it up with wild plants and made the mixture into small cakes that they consumed or even sold. The practice was very widespread in some areas, the investigators noted. By 23 August, they reported, 755 people in the Qingfeng Production Brigade, or 82.6 per cent of the brigade, had eaten ‘Bodhisattva earth’ and 209 people were still eating it. The rash of earth-eating had spread so quickly, found the inspection team, in part due to superstitious rumours circulated by those who wished to harm the revolution. ‘When the masses were short of food’, wrote the investigators, ‘a small number of bad people exploited the situation by using religious superstition to start the destructive rumour that ‘white clay is the rice of the immortals—white is flour, yellow is corn’. Such rumours had hastened the spread of the practice by convincing many people that ‘Bodhisattva earth’ was safe to eat. In fact, argued the investigators, everyone who ate clay suffered from serious digestion problems and constipation, and at least thirteen people had died due to eating clay. ‘This is really an extremely serious matter’, stated the inspection team.
The Qu County report raises several issues key to the study of famine foods. First, given that references to consuming clay, stones or ‘Bodhisattva earth’ during famines are found in late imperial as well as twentieth-century sources, this Mao-era example underscores intriguing continuities in the kinds of items that Chinese people turned to at the local level during famine years. Moreover, the fact that starving people made eating clay more acceptable by calling the substance Guanyin tu, thus linking it to the bodhisattva Guanyin, or the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, demonstrates how preexisting cultural beliefs influence the selection and conceptualisation of famine foods. Finally, the quantification of earth-eating laid out in the report, as well as the Maoist state’s condemnation of the practice as a form of religious superstition, highlights shifting degrees of state involvement in the selection and dissemination of famine foods in late Qing, Nationalist and Mao-era China. I find that beginning in the Nationalist period, but becoming more pronounced during the Mao period, the Chinese state supplanted the traditional role of Heaven even when it came to providing famine food.
Part of a larger project that traces change over time in Chinese responses to famine in North China’s densely populated and drought-prone Henan Province, this article looks at famine foods and the role of the Chinese state in creating such foods during three major famines that struck China under regimes with markedly different ideological foundations—the North China Famine of 187679, the Henan Famine of 1942/43, and the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62. The North China Famine, which resulted from a prolonged and unusually severe drought that spread across the five northern provinces of Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Zhili, was the most lethal drought-induced famine in imperial China’s long history. The weakened late Qing state proved unable to provide sufficient relief during such a severe crisis, and between 9 and 13 million people died of starvation or famine-related diseases.
The fall of the Qing and the birth of China’s new Republican government in 1912 did not reduce the number, severity or impact of famines. The Nationalist Party (Guomindang) managed to reunify much of the county in 1928, but was beset by threats from internal and external foes, and failed to prevent large-scale famines. The Henan Famine of 1942/43, which occurred in the context of the Second World War in China, called into question the Nationalist state’s commitment to feeding the rural population during a time of intense crisis. Over the course of this wartime disaster as many as 1 to 2 million of Henan’s pre-famine population of 30 million people died of starvation and disease, while another 3 million people fled the densely populated and strategically important northern province. Drought was again the immediate catalyst for this famine, but the Japanese occupation of much of China as well as Nationalist government policy choices made the drought far more lethal. The Chinese Communist Party lambasted the Nationalists for their failure to conquer hunger, and came to power in 1949 promising that not one person would starve to death under their rule. Yet only a decade after taking control, the party presided over the worst famine in Chinese and world history in terms of the total number of deaths. The Great Leap Famine of 1958-62 was national in scope and stemmed more from utopian thinking and policy errors than drought. As with the earlier North China and Henan famines, Henan Province was again one of the most severely affected areas. There is considerable disagreement over the total number of deaths caused by the Mao-era famine, but many scholars estimate that it resulted in the death of approximately 30 million people. In all three of these famines, severe food shortages led people in the affected areas to search for and consume increasingly unpalatable ‘famine foods’.
What Did People Eat When Food Ran Out? Continuities
The desperate search for items that could fill the belly and prolong life during times of disaster is a key marker of famine across time and place. After a poor harvest, people first resort to cheaper, less palatable foods that would have been rejected in normal times. Many such foods are items consumed in normal times by poorer sections of a given society, notes Violetta Hionidou in her study of the Greek Famine of 1941-43. Famine conditions, she finds, oblige people to ‘slide down the ladder of preferred food’. In wartime Greece the poor descended from pulses, such as beans and lentils, to animal fodder such as carobs and acorns, while the more affluent ‘descended from meat, white bread and cultivated greens to pulses and “inferior” greens’. This phenomenon was seen in China as well. During famine years, husks normally used to fatten pigs, black beans usually fed to horses and cows and bran dust, a ‘by-product of rice polishing that was normally fed to animals’, all served as famine foods for humans. When in a particular famine severe shortages or sky-rocketing prices put even inferior foods out of reach, people were reduced to eating ‘famine foods’, defined by historian Cormac 6 Grada as, ‘leaves, shoots, pods, seeds, fruits, meats, or vegetables not usually consumed but acknowledged to be edible in times of severe food stress’. Other terms for such foods include ersatz foods, non-grain foods, non-staple foods and emergency foods.
In China there is a striking continuity in the historical record in terms of the broad types of famine foods people turned to during the late imperial, Nationalist and Maoist periods, and in what order they turned to such ‘foods’. During the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties in China, reports submitted by officials in famine-stricken areas tended to use a stock set of descriptions of the items consumed by famished people. Presumably these tropes both reflected reality and gave officials a shorthand way to highlight the severity of a given disaster. When widespread flooding led to serious famine conditions in north-eastern Henan in 1593/94, for instance, Yang Dongming, an official from Henan, submitted a report describing conditions in his home province. Yang stated that as famine conditions worsened, survivors were ‘reduced to eating the roots of wild grasses and the bark of trees mixed with certain kinds of soils’. Similar descriptions appear in official reports concerning an early-eighteenth-century famine in Shanxi, the 1743 famine in Zhili examined by Pierre-Etienne Will, and the North China Famine of 1876-79. Western observers of the 1870s famine described the famine foods they witnessed in more detail. David Hill, a Methodist missionary who distributed relief in Shanxi during the disaster, described villagers living on ‘the seeds of thorn bushes’ and on ‘wild herbs, which they grind up and mix with a little corn flour’ and ate in the form of black-coloured buns. Elm trees were particularly sought after for their nutritious inner bark.
Eating dirt: Bodhisattva earth and slate stone
While Chinese descriptions of famine foods almost always mention wild grasses and tree bark, some observers also reported that when even these items grew scarce, people turned to eating certain types of earth or ground-up stone. Both famine-era governors of Shanxi Province, the epicentre of the North China Famine of 1876-79, described this grim progression. In a report written in the spring of 1877 by Bao Yuanshen, Shanxi’s first famine-era governor, Bao informed the Qing court that once the tree bark had been used up and wild plants no longer grew due to the drought, famished people were ‘grinding stone into powder’ and mixing it with earth to make pellets (wan) to assuage their hunger. Zeng Guoquan, the official who replaced Bao as Shanxi’s governor, also reported that starving villagers were reduced to eating a type of earth. Like the Sichuan-based cadres writing almost a century later, Zeng used a version of the term ‘Bodhisattva earth’ in his report, and also highlighted the dangers of eating earth. When tree bark and grass roots were exhausted, wrote Zeng, ‘many dug up Guanyin white mud (Guanyin baini) and used it to allay hunger and prolong life’. Eating mud led to bloated abdomens and intestinal damage, he continued, which often resulted in death. A famine song recorded by a local-level observer of the 1870s catastrophe describes famished people eating white earth (baitu) as if it were white flour, all the while proclaiming that it was special earth sent down by Heaven.
The practice of eating clay during famines developed long before that of the Mao era, and can be traced back to the Ming dynasty if not before. The custom may be connected to medicinal uses of muds or clays. In his famous pharmacological compendium the Bencao Gangmu (1596), for instance, the sixteenth-century physician Li Shizhen listed pharmacological uses for 61 different clays, muds and other kinds of earth. Pierre-Etienne Will cites as a possible origin of the ‘Bodhisattva earth’ phrase an instance recorded in a Hubei provincial gazetteer during a famine that struck the region in 1578. According to the gazetteer author: ‘There was a landslide at the hill of the Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin shan) that exposed earth as white as rice flour. People rushed to eat it, and it kept a great many of them alive … Since then the name Guanyin powder (Guanyin fen) has been passed on’.
The attempt to forge a connection between eating earth and the bodhisattva Guanyin highlights David Arnold’s point that while famine conditions compel people to consume a wide array of non-food items, how such items are selected and conceived of continues to be shaped by preexisting cultural norms. The bodhisattva Guanyin, popularly known as the Goddess of Mercy, was an important deity in late imperial China. Guanyin originally entered China from India as a male bodhisattva, but became syncretised with Miao Shan, a local Chinese deity who was female. According to the Miao Shan legend, although her father had treated her cruelly, when he fell ill Miao Shan saved him from death by ‘replacing his withering, putrefied limbs with her own healthy ones and giving him her eyes as medicine’. She then visited hell, where she performed acts of deliverance for suffering souls. Through these acts of mercy and sacrifice Miao Shan was ultimately transformed into the bodhisattva Guanyin, whose birthdays were occasions for massive pilgrimages in Qing China. Given this context, it makes sense that famished people turned to the merciful Guanyin and ‘Guanyin earth’ for help during famine times.
The consumption of earth or ground-up stone during the 1876-79 famine appears in the reports of Western as well as Chinese observers. ‘We saw abundant proofs of men eating clay or stones’, wrote Baptist missionary Timothy Richard from Shanxi in February 1878. ‘I bought three stone-cakes. The stone is the same as our soft stone pencils. This is pounded to dust and mixed with millet husks, in greater or less proportions, according to the poverty of the people. It does not look bad, but tastes like what it is—dust’. Walter Hillier of the British consular service, who visited famine-stricken Henan and Shanxi in February 1879, reported that in the Taihang mountain border area between the two provinces, ‘the great majority’ of villagers had to ‘eke out their scanty stock of grain with a large admixture of dust’. Hillier surmised that people mixed it with their grain in order to ‘delude themselves into the belief that they had had a full meal when they had loaded themselves with as much as they could swallow’.
Reports of famine victims eating earth or stone mixed with other items were common during twentieth-century famines as well. During the serious North China drought and famine of 1920/21, foreign relief workers listed ‘stone ground up into flour’ and ‘fuller’s earth’, or a porous clay substance rich in calcium montmorillonite, in their list of common non-staple foods. Two decades later, the American photojournalist Harrison Forman described in his diary the non-grain foods that he observed as he travelled through faminestricken Henan with the Time correspondent Theodore White. People ate millet chaff, ground elm leaves, sweet-potato vines, cotton-seed meal, mulberry bark, weeds, seeds and straw in an attempt to survive the 1942 famine, he wrote, and ‘used soap-stone ground up to add body to preparations’. Such ‘foods’, noted Forman, led to numerous digestive disorders, including intestinal fever, bloating and constipation. Chinese journalists also reported earth-eating during the1942/43 disaster. The editor of the Henan-based Qianfeng bao described how famine victims ate large amounts of white clay, and then waited for their digestive systems to expel it. A larger provincial newspaper, the Henan Minguo ribao, reported that people ‘lived on chaff, bark, grass roots, and sometimes even earth’. That progression was reported as well by the Communist-run Jiefang ribao newspaper.
There are several continuities between these late imperial, Republican and Mao-era reports of famished people eating earth or ground stone. Not only did observers generally agree that people resorted to eating earth only after wild plants and tree bark were exhausted, but those who commented in more detail warned that the practice entailed serious risks. Elite observers, ranging from Shanxi governor Zeng Guoquan in 1877 and Harrison Forman in 1943 to the Sichuan investigation team in 1960, argued that it resulted in constipation, abdominal problems and sometimes death. Why, then, was this practice found over such a long time span and in a wide variety of locations?
In fact, eating certain kinds of dirt or clay is not unique to China, nor is the practice necessarily as dangerous as elite observers assumed. Scholars who research geophagy, or the deliberate consumption of earth, find that the practice ‘has a worldwide distribution and cuts across ethnic, social, and economic lines’. Although geophagy occurs on all six inhabited continents, it is most common in tropical climates, and among pregnant women and young children. A significant amount of research has been conducted on geophagy in West Africa and the American South. Donald Vermeer, a geographer and foundational scholar of geophagy, found copious evidence of the practice in Nigeria, ‘in the pouches of edible clays that women wore around their waists; [and] in the marketplaces where clay was sold and sometimes consumed in public’. These clays, like most edible earth, were not surface dirt, but were instead ‘taken from the band of clay-enriched soil ten to thirty inches below the surface’. They were generally dried or baked before consumption, making them less likely to be contaminated with bacteria or parasites. In the United States, eating dirt has long been associated with rural African Americans in the South, but also with poor southern whites. Southern plantation owners, like elite Chinese observers, believed that eating clay led to ‘digestive disturbances’ and discouraged it among their slaves. By the early nineteenth century, ‘the term “dirt eater” had become a pejorative one for whites as well as blacks’. Yet the practice has persisted in the American South regardless of the stigma. In the 1970s 50 per cent of the black women surveyed admitted to eating clay, ‘about four times the frequency among White women’.
Scholars of geophagy propose several possible reasons why people choose to eat certain types of earth. The long history of geophagy ‘makes it seem likely to be of overall benefit in group survival’, posit Aufreiter et al. Some researchers argue that people eat dirt to meet a nutritional deficiency. After studying the mineral content of the white clay eaten in Ghana and Togo, for instance, researchers found that it provided ‘a substantial amount of iron’, a nutrient often deficient in pregnant women, as well as other minerals; thus pregnant women and other undernourished people may eat clay in ‘an attempt to replenish mineral nutrients’.
With regard to China, a team of researchers who conducted geochemical analysis of three similar soil samples from Hunan Province that had been eaten during the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62 found a significant amount of iron in the samples, and smaller amounts of calcium, vanadium, magnesium, manganese and potassium. The consumption of such clays, they argue, ‘could be a substantial source of mineral nutrients at times of starvation’. Moreover, the presence in these soil samples of smectite clay, which has a tendency to hold water and swell, may have meant that eating it ‘produced a feeling of fullness, giving some physical comfort to the consumers’. At the same time, while all three soil samples from Hunan looked quite similar in terms of texture and colour, local information provided with soil sample A called it ‘Guanyin soil’ and described it as ‘edible’, while consumption of samples B and and C ‘reportedly was followed by gastric complaints’. Given these findings, it appears that some soils in China could be consumed without causing ill effects, while others that looked similar caused intestinal problems when eaten.
Eating clay also appears to help undernourished people tolerate the ingestion of toxic or hard-to-digest wild plants. Sera Young, who examined a range of medicinal, religious and physiological contexts for geophagy, found that the ‘best supported explanation’ of eating earth is that ‘it functions to protect and detoxify’. Geophagy has served as ‘a kind of buffer, or protective device, for quelling gastrointestinal stress induced by barely tolerable wild plants or pangs of hunger’, concurs Timothy Johns, and the practice can also counter the effects of gastrointestinal parasites. Researchers also note a human preference for the ingestion of kaolin, also known as ‘white dirt, chalk, or white clay’. The kaolinitic composition of clays, find Vermeer and Ferrell, is ‘strikingly similar to that of the clays in the pharmaceutical Kaopectate’, which is used to counteract diarrhoea and irritated intestines. Among the three Chinese soil samples from Hunan, sample A, the one called Guanyin soil, contained kaolinite, ‘whereas less or no kaolinite was found in the other two samples’. Given these examples, it seems likely that some Guanyin tu was a type of kaolinitic clay. If that is the case, starving Chinese villagers may have mixed clay with wild plants and other food substitutes not only to create the feeling of fullness, but also because they had learned over time that ingesting edible clays both replenished mineral nutrients and helped them digest the wide array of bark and wild plants consumed during famine times.
Elite and State Involvement in Selecting and Producing Famine Foods
Late imperial China: Famine relief herbals
While the type of non-grain foods consumed at the local level during major famines shows a striking degree of continuity from late imperial through to Maoist times, the degree of state sponsorship of particular non-grain foods, as well as the terminology and methods used to describe and disseminate such foods, changed significantly between the Qing, Nationalist and Maoist periods. China has a long tradition of elite involvement in identifying plants that can be used as famine foods. A foundational example is the Jiuhuang bencao (Famine relief herbals), a Ming dynasty encyclopaedia compiled by Zhu Su (1360-1424), the Hongwu emperor’s fifth son. Zhu Su, who was enfeoffed in Kaifeng, Henan in 1381 and named the prince of Zhou, responded to successive years of famine conditions in his fief by collecting and studying a wide array of plants in the Kaifeng area of Henan. His work identifies 414 species of plants—138 of them drawn from earlier works on materia medica, and 276 newly identified species—which could be consumed during a famine. Zhu Su organised these items into the following five classes: 245 kinds of herbs or grasses, such as ragwort, safflower and wild basil; 80 types of trees ranging from elm to dogwood; 20 cereals such as buckwheat and wild millet; 23 fruits including jujube and wild cherries; and 46 vegetables ranging from celery to alfalfa. He also grouped items based on the part of the plant that could be eaten—such as the leaf, stem, root, bark, fruit, flower or seed. Each species of plant was accompanied by a detailed woodblock illustration, and the volume included ways to process toxic plants so that they could be consumed.
A particularly famous compilation on pharmacology and natural history, the Bencao gangmu (1596), was authored by Li Shizhen (1518-1593), the above-mentioned late Ming physician and naturalist lauded by many as ‘a precursor of modern science’. Li’s masterpiece drew in part on Zhu Su’s Jiuhuang bencao to discuss medicinal uses of famine relief plants. Li, like the authors of medical texts from as early as the Song period, also tested or examined prescriptions for himself when possible. Many bencao texts ‘suggested trying things for oneself as the best way of distinguishing the true (zhen or zheng) from the fake (wei or jia) when sorting through drugs, valuable natural objects, and foodstuffs in the market’, explains Carla Nappi. ‘At several points in the Bencao gangmu, Li claimed to have personally consumed a remedy to check on particularly questionable qualities attributed to plants and animals’. Perhaps because experiencing the efficacy of a remedy firsthand ‘was one important way for an author to establish credibility’, both late Qing and Nationalist-era officials also reported testing famine relief foods on themselves.
Although a wide array of edible plants that could be used as survival foods during famine times were included in Ming and Qing materia medica compilations, identifying and distributing non-grain foods was not in fact a key aspect of official or elite-run famine relief efforts in late imperial China. Instead, during the eighteenth-century ‘golden age of late imperial famine administration’, the high-Qing state aimed to prevent natural disasters from resulting in famines in the first place by selling state grain at below-market prices (pingtiao) in stricken areas in order to stabilise food prices, and by reducing or cancelling taxes for those areas. When famine conditions did ensue, officials tried to avert social unrest by providing the starving with grain. Relief officials classified households in affected areas according to their degree of disaster, worked with local elites to open soup kitchens and shelters, and, most crucially, distributed large allotments of grain from massive state-run granaries to famished households free of charge. By the 1870s the Qing granary system was a shambles, so the late Qing state increasingly provided relief in cash rather than grain. Still, the focus of state relief campaigns continued to be providing starving people with grain, or with cash that could be used to purchase grain. When Shanxi governors Bao Yuanshen and Zeng Guoquan described famished people relying on grasses, tree bark or Bodhisattva earth, they did so to highlight the severity of the 1870s disaster, not to encourage the consumption of such items. In sum, while famished people certainly sought out non-grain foods on their own during disaster years, mobilising people to collect or produce emergency foods during a dearth was not a significant part of the Qing state’s grain-centred famine relief repertoire.
Similarly, when Chinese philanthropists from Shanghai, Suzhou and other parts of the wealthy Jiangnan region travelled north to distribute relief to their starving compatriots during the 1870s famine, their primary focus was raising relief funds, distributing grain, cash or clothing, burying the corpses of the starved and redeeming women and children who had been sold by their starving families. Identifying or distributing non-grain foods generally was not part of their agenda. I have found one example of an elite attempt to create and test an ‘anti-starvation pellet’ (buji wan). In a letter that Jiangnan philanthropist Ling Gan sent to his fellow philanthropists in Suzhou in the spring of 1878, he notes that he had brought the ‘anti-starvation pellet’ to Henan as requested, and a Mr Wu Futang had tested the pellet by eating one. However, Wu soon experienced such fullness and flatulence that he became ill, and had only recently recovered. Showing a pragmatic willingness to change course in the face of evidence, Ling counselled that such pellets should not be distributed to the starving. ‘As for those who suffer hunger for a long time’, he wrote, ‘their intestines and stomach are vulnerable. This pellet is absolutely not suitable for them. They should not try it again’. Such pragmatism would be sorely missing from Mao-era attempts to rely on ‘food substitutes’ in place of grain.
Republican-era shifts: The primacy of science and the state
After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and the establishment of a new republican form of government, the Chinese state began to play a more active role in encouraging the use of non-grain foods during famines. The ascendance of modern state authorities and revolutionary ideologies did little to reduce the number or severity of famines, but it did give rise to new ideas about how to interpret and respond to disaster. Republican-era modernisers from a broad array of political persuasions rejected the long-held Confucian view that disasters were Heaven’s way of warning the ruler that he had offended Heaven and should change course or risk losing the mandate to rule, and joined many nineteenth-century European elites in interpreting famines as ‘technical problems that modern social and natural science will eventually resolve’. As militarism and civil war intensified in the 1920s, the China International Famine Relief Commission, a joint Sino-foreign organisation that maintained a one-man majority of foreign executives, came to dominate famine prevention and relief efforts. Many foreign observers identified famine and malnutrition as among China’s worst problems, ‘and attributed them to China’s lack of scientific mind’. The assumption that modern science was the best guard against food shortages reflected as well an increasing interest in Europe in the promise of ‘artificial foods’ that could be produced in laboratories via chemical synthesis.
The Nationalist Party (Guomindang), which under Chiang Kai-shek defeated warlord armies and managed to reunify much of China in 1928, was deeply committed to finding scientific solutions to China’s chronic food shortages. Many Chinese nutritionists who had earned higher degrees overseas returned to China in the 1920s and 1930s, bringing with them ideas about minimising food waste while improving nutritional intake. By the early 1930s China’s food problem ‘had become more urgent than anything else’, writes Seung-joon Lee. To Nationalist leaders, ‘the devising and pursuing of scientific solutions to the food problem … would be the very first step to end China’s history of thousands of years of natural disasters that mainly caused famines’, as well as ‘a stepping stone for China’s leap forward to a new scientific era that would permit it to vie with technologically advanced Western countries’. Guomindang technocrats embraced statistics, documentation, quantification, macroeconomics and Western agricultural and nutrition science as the best methods of preventing or relieving famine.
The Japanese invasion of China in July 1937, which marked the beginning of the Second World War in China, sharply reduced the Nationalist state’s ability to fight famine and malnutrition. The Japanese conquest of the entire lower Yangzi region by the spring of 1938 ‘accounted for a 45 per cent decrease in the amount of revenue over which the Nationalists had control’. Yet the beleaguered wartime state did not abandon its interest in nutrition science. In an effort to meet the dual demand of feeding both soldiers and civilians, the government launched dietary reform campaigns that aimed to reduce the overall consumption of rice by encouraging patriotic citizens to eat other miscellaneous grains as well as ‘the nutritious parts of foodstuffs customarily considered non-edible, such as brans, peels, and sprouts’.
One of the greatest disasters of the Second World War in China was the Henan Famine of 1942/43, which was initiated by drought but greatly exacerbated by Henan’s position as an important battle theatre throughout the war. By the time the drought began in the spring of 1942, the Japanese had occupied 43 of Henan’s 111 counties, while the Nationalists controlled 68 counties in southern and western Henan, and the Chinese Communists were active in their bases behind Japanese lines in northern and eastern Henan. Both the Nationalists and their Communist rivals actively promoted the use of non-grain foods during the Henan Famine. A pronounced focus on identifying, testing and disseminating such foods reflected the modernist drive to find scientific solutions to famine. In February 1943, for instance, the Henan Minguo ribao, a major newspaper in the stricken province, reported that because many people in Henan were starving to death on the roads, a government staff person named Liu Daoquan had followed an ancient prescription to prepare three kinds of ‘famine relief foods’ (jiuhuang shipin). Liu, like his Ming and Qing forbears, tested the three famine relief foods on himself before moving forward, and found the results favourable. The head of the Henan provincial hospital then examined Liu, and found him to be in good health. The provincial disaster relief committee thus decided to allocate 100,000 yuan in order to prepare and distribute large quantities of Liu’s famine relief foods to Henan’s famine victims.
After introducing these ‘famine relief foods’ to its readers, the Henan Minguo ribao printed the formula for each of the three ‘special foods’. The first recipe asked users to soak five dou (pecks) of soybeans and three dou of sesame seeds in water for hours, remove the peel, and dry the beans and seeds in the sun until they became a powder. Then the powder was to be boiled in water and left to dry in the sun again three times, kneaded into dough and then used to make steamed bread. ‘Eating it once can prevent hunger for seven days’, claimed the article, and encouraged people to make digesting the mixture easier by drinking tea made from sesame or sunflower seeds. The second and third recipes were simpler, and eating one liang (an ounce) of them per day could keep famine victims feeling full for a whole day. The second recipe entailed collecting, peeling, chopping, frying, mixing together, drying and grinding into powder one jin of red dates, persimmons and chestnuts respectively, and two jin of soybeans. The third recipe called for frying seven sheng of soybeans and three dou of sesame seeds together and then grinding them into a powder.
The 328-page official report on the Henan Famine that was compiled by the Henan provincial government and submitted to the central government in December 1943 highlights the degree of institutional support for selecting and disseminating Liu’s famine relief foods. The section of the report titled ‘Assembling famine relief foods’ (peizhuang jiuhuang shipin) introduces Liu Daoquan as a staff member of the provincial government’s finance department, and explains that after Liu tested his three famine relief foods on himself, they were tested and found effective by multiple institutions—the Department of Health, the provincial hospital, the management office, and other organs. At that point the Henan provincial relief committee allocated 100,000 yuan for making and distributing large quantities of these foods to Henan’s faminestricken refugees. Moreover, according to the report, the Henan provincial government ordered all counties under its control to use these recipes to make famine relief food, and staff members in departments ranging from finance to education donated funds and materials so that local authorities could make more of these relief foods. County officials who prepared the foods reported that the third recipe was the most popular. ‘The results were outstanding’, judged the report, and went on to provide detailed instructions for making the relief foods. The ingredients used in these famine foods—ranging from soybeans to persimmons—were also present in Ming and Qing ‘famine foods’, and would have been familiar to local people. The methods of preparation, such as boiling, drying and grinding ingredients, also echo practices found in late imperial China. The precise measurements and step-by-step instructions published by the Henan Minguo ribao and the official report, however, highlight a twentieth-century attention to quantification, documentation and nutritional requirements. Moreover, the provincial government’s decision to have state institutions as well as individuals test the famine foods, and its subsequent attempt to mass-produce and distribute them at the provincial and county level, showcase a new level of state interest in non-grain foods.
Calls to practice self-reliance by planting and eating non-grain foods was another noteworthy emphasis during the 1942/43 famine. Editorials printed in the Qianfengbao, for instance, a small private newspaper based in a Nationalist-controlled area of Henan, prodded county officials to foster self-reliance rather than waiting for government grain. This could be done by encouraging people to plant drought-resistant vegetables and preserve wild herbs so that famine refugees could collect them.
Relief cadres operating in Communist-controlled areas located behind Japanese lines in northern Henan echoed such calls, and also began a new practice of calling for the use of ‘food substitutes’ (dai shipin) in the context famine relief. In August 1943, the Communist-run Jiefang ribao (Liberation daily) reported that the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu border region government had instructed people in the drought-stricken Taihang area to ‘struggle against nature’ by growing vegetables such as radishes and turnips that could substitute for scarce grain, and to fight starvation by storing food substitutes (dai shipin) and non-staple foods (fu shipin) such as wild herbs or unripe fruit which fell to the ground. A second article from August 1943 praised soldiers in the Taihang region who had collected over 1,900 jin of edible wild herbs to help relieve famine conditions and ease people’s burden. As we have seen, rural families had a long history of seeking out wild plants and other non-grain foods on their own during famine times. To some degree, then, the Communist drive to mobilise the masses during the 1943 famine could be viewed as a way of both validating and taking control of a time-honoured local survival strategy. Calling on soldiers and cadres to take part in collecting food substitutes was also a way for the Communist Party to forge connections with rural people during a time of intense suffering.
In sum, during the Henan Famine of 1942/43, both the Nationalist government and its Communist rivals played a more active role in promoting the use of non-grain foods than had the late imperial state. The items used in these famine relief foods were quite traditional, however, as were the methods of preparation. Spurred by wartime and postwar food science research conducted in Europe, the United States and Japan, as well as by famine conditions, in China the transition from ‘famine relief foods’ to ‘food substitutes’ accelerated in the 1950s. By 1960, scientifically produced food substitutes were championed as a way to prevent hunger without lowering unrealistically high grain procurement quotas.
Wartime and postwar global experiments with food substitutes
When faced with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62, the Chinese state encouraged villagers to collect non-staple foods, but also launched a full-scale campaign to manufacture scientific food substitutes. Many of the food substitutes described in literature from the Mao period, such as chlorella (an alga ‘familiar as the cause of much of the green scum that forms on cattle ponds’), leaf protein or ‘man-made meat essence’, sound like bizarre and unpalatable stand-ins for food. It was not just Maoist utopianism that gave rise to such questionable ‘foods’, however; some Western and Japanese scientists in the decades before, during and after the Second World War were equally optimistic about their potential. On the eve of the First World War, for instance, a Belgian scientist, M. Effront, managed to use ‘a remarkable process for industrial preparation of nitrogenous foods’ that ‘resemble ordinary meat in a striking degree’. Effront extracted a food albumen from by-products of brewing and distilling. This ‘material is first washed, then pressed and treated by sulphuric acid and afterward by lime’, explained Scientific American. The result was ‘a pastry extract which has a very pronounced taste of meat and has three times the food value of the latter’. Similarly, when Germany faced serious food shortages during the First World War, German chemists responded by striving to produce new foodstuffs. One of Germany’s wartime food substitutes that garnered considerable attention was a protein-rich ‘yeast powder’ that could be added to the human diet. According to an enthusiastic overview in Scientific American, mineral yeast grown in a mixture of water, molasses and ammonium sulphate had a nourishing power ‘twice as large as that of beef’, and was less expensive to obtain. The yeast had been added to German soups and other dishes ‘without in the least altering the taste of these dishes’. The method, continued the magazine, was ‘valuable not only for present use in Germany, but for general adoption everywhere at any time, even after the war’. German, British, and US researchers continued their efforts to produce alternative sources of food ‘by new scientific or technical processes’ during the interwar and Second World War periods. During the Great Leap Famine, Chinese food scientists would repeatedly cite Western experiments with food substitutes in their own attempts to produce ‘man-made meat essence’ and other artificial foods.
European, American and Japanese research into chlorella, another food substitute heralded by Chinese scientists during the 1958-62 disaster, started in the immediate postwar period in response to the global food crisis. With half of the world’s people facing hunger on a regular basis in the late 1940s and global population on the rise, scientists felt the need to develop ‘radically unorthodox food sources to feed an increasingly crowded world’. Chlorella pyrenoidosa, ‘a high protein algae that grows rapidly using inexhaustible sunlight and carbon dioxide’, was viewed as an especially promising high-tech solution to the world food crisis. From the late 1940s through the 1950s major research institutions including the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Tokugawa Institute for Biological Research in Tokyo in cooperation with the Carnegie Institute, sponsored pilot projects on chlorella, and reputable periodicals reported many positive early results. ‘Each chlorella cell is completely edible. Each is crammed with such dietary essentials as protein, amino acids, fats and vitamins’, wrote the author of a glowing report on the alga published in 1955. ‘Here, scientists believe, may be an answer to the great question facing future generations: how to feed hundreds of millions of more human beings as the population of the world soars’. During the 1950s researchers experimented with producing chlorella in controlled environments that provided sunlight, water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. In some studies the protein-rich end product, ‘a bright green vegetable paste’, was dried and used in powdered form to enrich foods such as French bread, noodles, Japanese-style green tea, and ice cream. The chlorella powder was said to give these foods an ‘agreeable’ light green colour, and some of the Japanese and American adults who sampled the foods pronounced them ‘tasty’.
In the West, enthusiasm for chlorella as a solution to global hunger ebbed in the late 1950s due to increasingly serious doubts about ‘the economic viability of a mass-marketed chlorella cuisine’. The large-scale processing of chlorella, cautioned one author, ‘involves the handling of enormous quantities of water, and this entails expensive equipment and power’. Due to the necessity of maintaining sterile conditions and the cost of constructing and operating the culture system, he concluded, ‘the capital investment in a plant for the production of Chlorella would be very large as compared with that required for the production of the usual agricultural crops’. In short, when the difficulty and expense of mass-producing chlorella became clear, support for the endeavour evaporated in the United States and Europe. In late 1950s China, on the contrary, the chlorella craze was just beginning.
From famine relief foods to food substitutes: The Great Leap Famine
The 1958-62 famine occurred in the context of the Great Leap Forward, a utopian campaign that aimed to accelerate China’s industrialisation to such a degree that China would surpass Great Britain in industrial output within fifteen years by unleashing the productive energies of China’s mobilised masses. Part of the problem occurred when local cadres submitted increasingly exaggerated estimates of their grain yields in order to avoid being branded as rightists. The Chinese state, which based its procurement requirements on these wildly inflated estimates, then requisitioned dangerous amounts of grain in its effort to provision the cities and fund rapid industrialisation in 1958, 1959 and 1960. The state also rejected international aid, and even exported grain abroad in order to earn foreign exchange currency. China’s net grain exports rose from 1.88 million tons in 1957 to 4.74 million tons in 1959. Drought and adverse weather exacerbated the situation. The harvest of 1959 was a miserable failure. Short of food, the communal mess halls depended on by most rural Chinese during the Great Leap era repeatedly cut rations and in some cases completely ran out of grain. Families attempted to hide grain in their homes, but officials desperate to meet procurement targets used violence to ferret out and forward to the state as much grain as possible. Over the winter and spring of 1959/60, widespread starvation ensued in multiple provinces across China. Some 89 per cent of the excess deaths occurred in rural areas.
A key issue that laid the groundwork for the food substitutes movement during the Great Leap Famine was the fact that as famine conditions grew more severe, it became increasingly dangerous for cadres at all levels to admit that a famine was occurring. As late as 1957, finds Felix Wemheuer, letters complaining about hunger could still be published in the People’s Daily newspaper. When peasants and rural cadres made increasingly sharp critiques of rural-urban disparities in food, however, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders grew alarmed that hunger was being used as a way to undermine Great Leap policies, and the state-run media began attacking such critiques as wrong and false. By early 1959, statements such as ‘the peasants do not have enough to eat’ or ‘grain quotas are too high’ could no longer appear in newspaper reports, though such topics continued to be covered in the Neibu Cankao, or the internal news reports for high-ranking cadres. The situation became even more restrictive after the Lushan Conference in July 1959, when ‘famine as a topic became taboo not just for the media, but also within the internal information system of the party’. At that point the only acceptable narrative concerning food shortages was that ‘quotas were not being fulfilled because peasants were underreporting production and hiding grain’. This narrative gave rise to the violent campaigns against supposed concealment of grain. In the late summer and fall of 1959, the only way to discuss the crisis occurring in the countryside was to attribute it to locusts and severe drought, and to champion rural efforts to conduct a ‘war against nature’ and obtain a bumper harvest in spite of drought conditions.
After the state procured much of the already poor harvest of 1959, famine conditions in Henan and many other provinces worsened rapidly—for many the most deadly period of the famine was between October 1959 and January 1960. In Henan as many as 1 million people died in Xinyang Prefecture, the most infamous site of state-sponsored violence and terror during the Great Leap disaster. As Yang Jisheng explains, grain supplies dwindled only a month or so after the harvest, and ‘most communal kitchens had shut down by October and November 1959’. When grain ran out in many counties in Xinyang, commune members, like their late Qing and Nationalist-era counterparts, tried to survive by eating elm bark, wild herbs, rats, roots and eventually human flesh. Not a hint of this appeared in Henan’s major newspaper, though. Instead, in late 1959 the Henan ribao carried numerous triumphalist articles heralding the movement to breed more pigs, both to increase the amount of manure collected and to provide people with meat.
In late 1959 and early 1960, the CCP, still unable to admit that famine was occurring, spearheaded a campaign aimed at using new cooking processes to increase the amount of food available without actually reducing the grain quota. In January 1960, cadres in Henan gave this effort a scientific name, the ‘food augmentation method’ (liangshi zengliang fa). According to a Neibu Cankao report, communes in Henan employed three augmentation methods, all of which entailed washing and cooking grain, grinding it into a paste or powder, adding yeast and making steamed buns out of it. The report claimed that with traditional methods, one jin of flour made only one or two jin of steamed buns, but with the new augmentation method ‘one jin of grain can make 5 jin of steamed buns, 3 at the least’. With this method in place, it continued, ‘there is no limit to the amount of food people can eat’. By March 1960, notes Gao Hua, ‘All over China various augmentation methods were being invented’. The food augmentation movement marked a transition point between the traditional practice of mixing together natural ingredients such as soybeans or dates to make ‘famine relief foods’, and a concerted attempt to use scientific processes to produce man-made or artificial ‘food substitutes’.
In May 1960 leaders in Beijing finally began to acknowledge the extent of the food problem in rural China. In June articles about the urgent need to overcome disaster appeared in the Henan ribao, though disaster conditions were always blamed on flood or drought. Once CCP leaders began to admit that a problem existed, their response was two-fold. They joined mid-twentieth-century Western researchers in turning to science for a solution to the food crisis, but also made the search for food substitutes into a mass campaign, thus employing one of the CCP’s most cherished methods. In summer 1960, 22 different departments at the Chinese Academy of Sciences began to conduct research on producing food substitutes. Examining foreign research on artificial foods was part of the endeavour. Researchers in Shanghai, for instance, compiled an overview of nearly two dozen Japanese publications on food substitutes. In August, Mao Zedong delivered a speech encouraging the collection of more food substitutes, and in September the Central Committee of the CCP issued instructions on ‘lowering rural and urban grain quotas’. At this point, both Neibu Cankao reports and the state-run media began to publish more frequent coverage of disaster conditions and the importance of food substitutes. In October 1960, preliminary results of the Academy of Sciences’ research on food substitutes were published in the Neibu Cankao. Of the dozens of possibilities explored since June, stated the academy, eight food substitutes appeared to have great potential. Chief among them were an edible yeast called ‘man-made meat essence’, leaf protein, chlorella, powder made from wheat or corn root, and acorns. Just as carobs and other items that were normally used as animal food became human fare during the Greek Famine of the early 1940s, so chlorella, though with far more state involvement than was present in wartime Greece, ‘instantly went from being a food supplement for pigs to a food source for people’ during the Great Leap Famine.
In November 1960, party members from the Academy of Sciences submitted a lengthy overview of their recommendations concerning food substitutes. This document provides a fascinating window on the academy’s attempt to draw on local experience and indigenous methods, as well as scientific experiments and trials conducted abroad. Rural people possessed rich experience in using wild plants as substitutes, acknowledged the report, but there were many items they had previously been unable to eat due to their toxicity or bitter taste. Researchers were identifying ways of extracting harmful elements from certain plants, thus rendering them both edible and nutritious. Acorns, for instance, were rich in starch, but because acorn starch contains tannic acid, it was too bitter to swallow and led to constipation. Researchers from the Academy of Sciences, however, had found a simple way to extract the tannins from the acorns by removing the shell, smashing the nut into small pieces and soaking it in a sodium carbonate solution for one to two days. This process leached out the tannins, making acorns a good non-grain food. Similarly, many leaves were rich in protein but could not be eaten directly due to the chlorophyll or toxic substances they contained. Scientists had found a way to extract the protein from leaves so that it could be consumed. British scientists had been researching the production of leaf protein for some time, continued the report, but they used expensive machinery to extract it. In contrast, the Academy’s method was simple and could be used in communes and factories.
The report also championed the production of man-made meat essence (renzao roujing), or a food substitute made from edible yeast. Again the authors contrasted the costly and mechanised processes Western countries used to create food substitutes with the methods pioneered in China. Man-made meat essence had been developed in wartime Germany to address wartime shortages, stated the report, but German scientists had used chemical and microbiological methods to produce it. The Academy of Sciences had developed a method that used boiled rotten fruit, vegetable roots, non-toxic leaves, wild grasses or stalks and husks to create a liquid culture, added strains of Geotrichum candidum (a fungus) to it and kept it warm until it dissolved into a sticky liquid cooked at a high temperature. Once this ‘man-made meat essence’ dried, it could be turned into a powder that was easy to transport and use. ‘The Western method of making man-made meat essence is proper for industrial production’, stated the report, but Chinese scientists had found a simple method that could be employed in the communal kitchens attached to communes, schools and other institutions. ‘There are diverse edible resources in nature’, claimed the report. ‘We are sure that after extraction, purification and fermentation, inedible and unpalatable wild plants, subsidiary agricultural and forestry products, and aquatic organisms can be turned into edible and tasty food’. Drawing on the Academy of Sciences report, on 14 November the Central Committee issued ‘Emergency instructions on immediately developing a large-scale campaign for the gathering and manufacturing of food substitutes’. This document, which was drafted by Zhou Enlai, gave rise to a nationwide food substitutes campaign in late 1960 and 1961. In December 1960 and May 1961, respectively, the Neibu Cankao published two special issues, each sixteen pages in length, on the campaign. These reports, complete with photographs, included detailed and scientific-sounding discussions of the production of man-made meat essence, chlorella, artificial milk and starches, and other food substitutes in different parts of the country.
When communal kitchens, schools, factories and other units throughout the country were ordered to collect and produce food substitutes, however, a rash of poisonings quickly ensued. An emergency directive was sent to all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities on 23 December 1960, only a month into the food substitutes campaign, reporting that food poisoning incidents had occurred in several locales. In Fujian alone, it continued, 6,591 persons had been poisoned by late November, and 294 of them had died. Most of the poisonings had occurred when people ate cassava, but others had been poisoned due to eating starch made from the hemp flower, and still others had died due to eating starch made from stalks that had been sprayed with pesticide. The State Council ordered all local governments to refrain from relaxing the food substitutes campaign, but to avoid such accidents by enhancing the oversight and testing of substitute foods. In spite of the directive, the food poisoning problem continued. During a two-day period in January 1961, for instance, 463 people suffered nitrate poisoning after eating in three different communal kitchens in Henan’s Nanyang Prefecture. Some 66 of the cases were severe, and another 24 were relatively serious.
Conclusion
During the Great Leap Famine many Chinese villagers followed their late Qing predecessors by seeking to survive the disaster by consuming grass roots, tree bark, wild herbs and even Bodhisattva earth. The Maoist state’s headlong rush to replace requisitioned grain with ‘scientific’ food substitutes during the Great Leap disaster, on the other hand, demonstrates that CCP leaders shared with both their Nationalist predecessors and many mid-twentieth-century Western researchers an ‘extravagant faith in technologies that appeared to transcend known boundaries’. Unfortunately for those involved, the CCP proved to be even more ‘unscientifically optimistic’ than its counterparts when evaluating how quickly and to what degree scientific solutions could solve China’s problems, and it was both more willing and more able than the Nationalists had been to use coercive state power to bring about sweeping change. In sum, the Mao-era food substitutes campaign can be understood as not only a sharp departure from Qing China’s grain-centred famine relief policies and a radical extension of rhetoric and priorities laid out in the Nationalist period, but also as a classic case of ‘”high modernism” gone wild’.
By the end of 1960, Bodhisattva earth, which some villagers believed to be ‘rice sent from the immortals’, had been largely replaced by man-made food substitutes produced and disseminated by organs of the Chinese state. Ironically, consuming the supposedly ‘pure’ and ‘scientific’ food substitutes recommended by the Chinese Academy of Sciences may in the end have proved more dangerous than eating time-tested Bodhisattva earth.