First, Zhou Enlai was aware of the large number of deaths and lack of food for farmers everywhere
There were starvation deaths in the winter of 1958, and even more in the spring of 1959. In other words, in the spring of 1959, the Great Famine had already appeared in full scale. Faced with thousands of peasants struggling on the line of death, the rulers, instead of taking emergency relief measures in terms of food, continued to deprive food from the mouths of peasants and continued to export food.
On April 6, 1959, the Secretariat of the State Council sent a report on the shortage of food in five provinces, namely Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei and Anhui, and on April 9, it sent a statistical table on the spring famine in 15 provinces, saying that 25.17 million people had no food to eat.
As early as January and February 1959, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council received a large number of successive letters from the public reflecting the large number of floating patients and dead people in Xiali, Yongcheng, Yucheng, Zhecheng and Luyi counties in eastern Henan Province.
In February 1960, the provincial committee of Jiangsu Province reported to Zhou Enlai that there were more than 120,000 patients with floating diseases in the cities of the province alone. The situation in the countryside was more serious than in the cities.
In early 1960, Zhou Enlai received a letter from a CPPCC member in Anhui Province forwarded by the relevant departments, which reflected the situation of starvation and death in He and Wuwei counties in Anhui Province. Zhou Enlai wrote to Zeng Xisheng, secretary of the Anhui Provincial Party Committee, on March 29, asking for a reply after finding out the situation.
The full text of the letter is as follows.
Comrade Xisheng: Please read the above letter and send someone to the two counties to check, maybe it is true, maybe exaggerated, but this kind of individual phenomenon is found in all provinces, especially in the provinces affected by disasters last year, it is worth noting. The President has also highlighted this point in the document that he approved the meeting of the sixth-level cadres in Shandong Province. Please reply to my letter when you find out.
Salutations! Zhou Enlai
March 29, 1960
Zhou Enlai did not take this matter seriously, but merely stated that “maybe it is true, maybe it is exaggerated”. At the same time, this letter showed that Zhou Enlai knew that “such individual phenomena are found in all provinces”. Immediately in April and May, An Ziwen, vice minister of the Central Organization Department, and Wang Congwu, deputy secretary of the Central Supervisory Commission, wrote a written report on the Xinyang incident and reported it to Zhou Enlai. Zhou Enlai decided to set up a central working group to immediately go into the Xinyang area to further investigate the situation and make a detailed report to the central government. Afterwards, Zhou Enlai only said, “I am responsible for such a big thing that happened in Xinyang.” It is said that Zhou Enlai learned that many people were starved to death in the Xinyang incident, and the country’s grain depot is nearby, but none of the starving masses to rob the warehouse, was deeply shaken, he did not sleep the whole night. But the whole night did not close the eyes of Zhou Enlai and what effective measures to solve the problem? Did he open the barn to release the grain? No. On the contrary, Zhou Enlai also took effective measures to solve the problem. On the contrary, Zhou Enlai also took the opposite action and was responsible for the death of tens of millions of people.
In his book “Tombstone”, Mr. Yang Jijian tells such an episode: Due to the large number of unnatural deaths, on December 28, 1960, the CPC Hebei Provincial Party Committee sent a secret telegram to local and municipal party committees: “Emergency Notice on the Need to Detect and Stop the Problem of Dead People in Time”. On the one hand, the provincial party committee asked its subordinates to pay attention to solving the problem of dead people, while on the other hand, it vigorously urged its subordinates to complete the grain requisition. The former was only a verbal call, while the latter was a practical action to accelerate the death.
On September 15, 1961, the provincial party committee held a teleconference, requesting that “within the scope of the policy to purchase more, sell less”, “the province’s annual requisition task firmly completed 3.21 billion pounds”, and the target was distributed to the sub-regions. Cangzhou prefecture received 240 million pounds of requisitioning tasks, and then to the county distribution down, some counties the average level of farmers eating food only a little more than 2 taels per day. Hebei Province did so was also forced out by the central government.
On the evening of October 5, 1961, Premier Zhou Enlai convened a national conference on grain issues, and he stressed that: all provinces must hurry to carry out the requisition. On October 16, Governor Liu Zihou, who attended the meeting, made an urgent phone call to provincial leaders Yan Dakai, Li Yannong, and Wan Xiaotang, proposing that “the first thing to do is to make sure that the requisition is done (not strive, but firmly) to complete 3.3 billion pounds. ” “We must carry out in-depth ideological work to cadres at all levels to help them raise awareness, correct their thinking, understand the greater good, and take into account the overall situation. To understand that in the current situation, there is a little less to eat and a little more to take. Mobilize, do a good job with the masses, and resolutely complete the task of requisitioning and purchasing this year.” In order to complete the task of requisitioning, a large number of cadres were sent to the rural areas in each region. In Handan alone, 3,638 cadres were sent to the countryside, divided into sections to grasp the grain storage campaign.
How many atrocities are there in this “grain storage campaign”? How much blood and tears? This is conceivable. Song Renmin recalls: in October 1960 Zhou Enlai asked to continue to allocate grain from Heilongjiang and Jilin, and asked the province of Heilongjiang, food is not to be nervous? And said, in the past to ensure that no one starved to death, now look at it, really makes people’s hearts uneasy. But the uneasiness in his heart did not affect Zhou Enlai’s determination to continue to collect food. Song Ren poor also recalled that at that time he sent a large number of local cadres and military cadres to investigate the situation in Heilongjiang Province, wrote a number of reports. Zhou Enlai read 19 of them. But that didn’t stop Zhou Enlai from continuing to collect large amounts of grain from Heilongjiang in 1962. Yang Yichen, then secretary of the Heilongjiang Provincial Party Committee, recalled: In 1962, the central government gave Heilongjiang province the task of transferring 2.8 billion jins of grain. Although Heilongjiang is an important national food production base, slightly better than some provinces, but the economic situation at that time has also been very difficult, food is very tight. People eat horse material, horses die on behalf of people, many people are swollen, suffering from hepatitis is quite common. In March 1962, the Prime Minister went to Liaoning and called a meeting with the leading comrades of the three northeastern provinces, and the issue of food transfer was a major issue. Heilongjiang Province was attended by Ouyang Qin and me. At the meeting, the Premier proposed to me to allocate another 200 million jins of grain to Heilongjiang Province. I implemented the central plan to transfer grain, find ways to do a good job in all aspects of the work, and the people of the province together to complete the task of transferring 3 billion jin of grain. The result was that more than 190,000 people died of starvation in Heilongjiang!
Did you really take out grain to help other provinces? Or exported? This issue Mr. Yang Jijian in the book “Tombstone” for the grain to go to a very thorough analysis, here, I only cite the then inventory of grain to illustrate the problem. For the grain situation at that time (1960-1962), Zhou Enlai was well aware of the situation. From June 1960 to September 1962 alone, according to incomplete statistics, Zhou Enlai talked about grain issues 115 times, and in the 32 statements that the Premier’s Office returned to the General Office of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, which are still preserved, Zhou Enlai’s handwriting is found in 994 places. But it is clear from these talks and handwriting that Zhou Enlai’s concern was mainly about urban food supply, yet the deaths were nearly all in the countryside! Obviously Zhou Enlai was thinking about the political impact rather than human lives, and if people in the cities, especially in several large cities like Beijing, died of starvation, the political impact would be incalculable once it spread. But even if people died of starvation in the countryside, because of its remote location, it was difficult to spread the news as easily as in the big cities under the communist blockade system at that time.
From August 23 to September 16, 1961, the CPC Central Committee held a working conference in Lushan. Zhou Enlai made a report on the grain issue at the meeting, involving a number of topics such as estimation of production, requisition, sales, allocation, import and centralized transportation, but there was no mention or even suggestion: open the grain! How much grain was in stock at that time? Tens of millions of people were guarding tens of billions of pounds of grain stock to starve to death! Zhou Enlai does not need to say anything big, just order the opening of the warehouse to release the grain on it! And in individual places, it is true that local officials have opened bins and released grain resulting in a much lower death toll in the county than in neighboring counties! Even Xinyang, where the death toll was so severe, did not even ship in grain! Later it was Xinyang’s own library of grain to solve the problem! And as one of the culprits Wu Zhipu died in 67 due to illness, Zhou Enlai even offered to hold a memorial service for him! It is evident that the officials and the people are not the same in Zhou Enlai’s mind. To transfer grain to the central government, to export, to other, but not to save people’s lives, Zhou Enlai lied all the way!
Second, Zhou Enlai still decided to sell grain for gold
It should be said that many of the decisions at the time were made by Mao Zedong or the system at the time, and Zhou Enlai did not have much initiative. For example, one of the reasons for the great famine that caused so many deaths was that the people were not allowed to flee the famine! According to Mr. Yang Jijian’s book “Tombstone”, local officials stopped the people from fleeing the famine according to the “Emergency Notice on Stopping the Blind Exodus of Rural Labor” issued in March 1959, and openly trapped the peasants in their homes and starved them to death! And this document was rewritten and formulated by Zhou Enlai himself based on the spirit of the Zhengzhou Conference! Obviously this was issued in response to the increasing severity of famine at that time and the sharp increase in the number of people fleeing from famine. It would be unfair to blame Zhou Enlai entirely for this. But it does not mean that Zhou Enlai had no card to play!
Zhou Enlai decided to exchange food for gold when people were starving to death everywhere, and he did so in 1960, the year of the worst death. The parties recalled: 1960, China’s fiscal deficit has been as high as 8 billion yuan, but to ensure a minimum of the needs of the people’s livelihood of the country, but also must import a large amount of wheat from abroad. In the face of a serious crisis, if our country in the international market to sell gold, to solve the problem of foreign exchange shortage, it is not impossible, but Premier Zhou did not agree to do so. He said, gold can not be sold! We have to use gold as a backing. He stressed that in the use of foreign exchange, we spend a dollar have to seriously consider! Under Premier Zhou’s direct supervision, we not only did not sell gold, but also took advantage of the cheaper gold price to buy hundreds of thousands of taels of gold every year. Year after year, we bought until 1970. All this gold was shipped back to China by special plane. One tael is 1.613 ounces, when the price of gold is an ounce of about 40 U.S. dollars, the exchange rate at the time for a dollar to 2.4618 yuan, grain prices rice is about 0.2 yuan per kilogram, 100,000 taels of gold will need nearly 100 million kilograms of rice! And not to mention the specific amount of food, but the decision itself is extremely absurd beyond compare! In 1961, Chen Guodong, Zhou Bo Ping and Jia Qiyun of the National Bureau of Statistics were instructed to have the provinces fill out a statistical table on food and population changes, and after the summary, the country’s population dropped by tens of millions! This material was reported only to Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. Zhou Enlai saw it and informed Zhou Poping: destroy it immediately and do not pass it on. Zhou Bo-ping and three others supervised the destruction of the material and printing plates. Afterwards, Zhou Enlai also called Zhou Poping to ask him if they had been destroyed. Zhou Bo Ping replied that the destruction, Zhou Enlai was relieved.
For Zhou Enlai, who is personally involved in everything, it is understandable that the central policy cannot be violated by not opening warehouses and releasing grain, and the central policy cannot be violated by formulating central documents to stop the blind exodus of rural labor, but selling grain for gold is Zhou Enlai’s decision! Is money important? Foreign exchange is important? Or is human life important? How ironic that the Premier of a great country is so insensitive to the death of his people and so sensitive to the evidence of those deaths!
From the central to the local level, from Mao Zedong to Zhou Enlai, to the local officials, after the Lushan Conference, from official documents, leaders’ speeches and the news media, the “natural disasters” were unanimously propagated, no longer as in 1959, when a large number of people died of starvation as a plague epidemic. At an enlarged meeting of the Central Politburo, Zhou Enlai said: “Such a big disaster is unprecedented in the 11 years since the founding of our country, and people of our age have not heard of it since we can remember the 20th century.
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