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Food availability, food entitlements, and radicalism during the Chinese great leap forward famine: an econometric panel data analysis

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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the socio-economic as well as the political, institutional, and ideological causes of the Chinese famine of 1959–1961. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the radical policies implemented as part of the Great Leap Forward resulted in agricultural output decline (i.e., availability issues), and in the implementation of an ineffective food distribution policy affecting rural populations (i.e., accessibility issues). An econometric analysis, based on provincial panel data from the 1954–1966 period, stresses the effect of ill-advised economic policies in handling the famine. This analysis also confirms that the increase in mortality rates during the famine was caused by the simultaneous collapse in food availability and food accessibility in rural areas.

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Notes

  1. See Table 4 in the appendix for data relating to national and provincial mortality rates. Meng et al. (2010) suggest that these official statistics probably understate mortality and are not consistent with the highest estimations of the excess of mortality associated with the famine.

  2. Riskin (1998) argues that the excess of mortality in 1958 cannot be accounted for by the famine since 1958 yielded a good harvest. Two alternative factors related to the Great Leap Forward may account for this sudden increase in mortality: (1) the degree of social disorganization affecting the healthcare system, sanitary installations and support for dependent individuals; and (2) an increase in work intensification and in working hours.

  3. This is the typology proposed by Mao in a book entitled How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas, published in 1933.

  4. This acreage is small insofar as it corresponds to less than one hectare for a five-person family.

  5. As pointed out by Grada (2009), there are some semi-exceptions to Sen’s observations, but only a very few: the Great Irish famine in the 1840s, the Maharashtra famine in India in 1972–1973 and the Niger famine in 2005 (a semi-democratic regime). The great majority of famines in the twentieth century occurred in authoritarian countries. See the classification provided by Devereux (2000).

  6. As explained by Acemoglu and Robinson (2000), Western countries extended this franchise during the nineteenth century, thus moving from oligarchic regimes managed by an elite to regimes governed by democratic rule. This process was motivated by the determination to reduce the risk of social unrest and revolution.

  7. The volume of production was revised in April 1959 to 250 million tonnes and, finally, to 200 million tonnes in 1961.

  8. The wildly optimistic forecasts for the 1958 harvest were also a contributing factor of food over-consumption in the context of the communal dining system (Yang and Su 1998).

  9. Other estimations of agricultural productivity corroborate this trend. See Lin (1990) for a synthesis.

  10. This kind of tacit agreement also existed at the work team level. As explained by Holmström (1982) and Dong (1998), in the absence of meaningful punishment mechanisms, a team-based work organization may create free-rider problems and thus produce disincentives to work.

  11. In the context of this article, while food availability decline (FAD) and food entitlements decline (FED) are presented as two distinct causes of the Great Leap Forward famine, the entitlements approach, as conceived by Sen, does not postulate any particular hypothesis. Rather, it is a global analytical framework. Even if this is not always made clear by Sen, the entitlements approach serves to integrate analyses in terms of FAD. Drèze and Sen (1989) show that a decrease in food availability is included in the entitlements approach in three ways. Firstly, food production generally constitutes the basic entitlement of farmers. For this particular category, a decline in food production is therefore equivalent to FED. Secondly, the price of food products, largely determined by food supply, is an essential component of exchange conditions. Thirdly, food production is a major source of employment, particularly in developing countries. A significant decrease in food production is consequently a cause of unemployment and/or of a decrease in income, resulting in FED.

  12. One of the main drawbacks of Sen’s approach lies in its somewhat narrow focus on entitlements. This specific focus leads to a restrictive socio-economic reading of famines and may result in minimizing the role of events such as natural disasters or conflicts. Another drawback concerns the definition of entitlements. By insisting on the legal means available, the entitlements approach does not consider the role of more radical ways of ensuring access to food (looting, brigandage, requisitions, etc.). See Osmani (1995) and Devereux (2001) for a discussion of this point.

  13. We use only two of all the available lags as instruments, because the proliferation of such instruments is liable to produce results that appear to be valid but are, in fact, invalid, and may weaken the power of the Sargan/Hansen instrument validity test (Roodman 2009).

  14. See Li and Yang (2005: 873–874) about this retrospective survey.

  15. The provinces concerned are: Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia. These are the provinces for which we have complete characteristics for the years of the famine.

  16. The Pearson correlation coefficient for the two variables is 0.787 and is statistically significant.

  17. The bivariate correlation coefficients between these three variables are below 0.2 in all cases and are not statistically different from 0.

  18. Li and Yang (2005) do not reject Lin’s hypothesis but attribute the non-significance of the dummy capturing the suspension of the right to withdraw from communes to measurement errors. The robustness of GMM estimations to measurement error could thereby explain why this variable was significant in our estimations.

  19. The available provincial observations measure gross procurements. It would have been preferable to use the net volume of procurements (i.e. minus the sales by the state to peasants specialized in productions other than grain), but these are not available at provincial level.

  20. There are some observations on the number of hospital beds in China’s Provincial Statistics, 1949–1989, but these are highly partial and are, for the most part, not available for the years of famine.

  21. The provinces in question include: Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Fujian, Shandong, Henan, Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Shanxi.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions which have been very helpful in improving this manuscript. I also would like to thank Professor Dennis Tao Yang (Department of Economics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) who generously provided data for some of the variables used in this article.

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  1. GREThA, UMR CNRS 5113, University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

    Matthieu Clément

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Correspondence to Matthieu Clément.

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This article is a contribution to a French collaborative research project called ASEMOD (socio-economic analysis of development models) funded by the Aquitaine region (France).

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 National and provincial mortality rates (‰), 1954–1966
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Clément, M. Food availability, food entitlements, and radicalism during the Chinese great leap forward famine: an econometric panel data analysis. Cliometrica 6, 89–114 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-011-0065-4

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