This paper revisits the causes and impacts of the deadliest famine in human history – the Great Chinese Famine – through a feminist lens. Mao Zedong and a male-dominated Communist Party led the nation into famine after a failed Great Leap Forward industrialization campaign in 1956. During the famine, his feminist slogans and state programs to promote gender equality were ineffective at best, and harmful to women at worst. We built the foundations of our analysis on primary sources, including oral histories from a broad demographic of civilians and cadres living throughout mainland China, and incorporated archival research of reports, speeches, and writings of Communist leaders. To bolster our understanding of gendered experiences during the Great Famine, we interviewed surviving civilians and Communist party members. We found that women during the famine bore new double burdens, saw their political interests marginalized, and witnessed their labor systematically devalued. In retrospect, China's patriarchal government, built off Chairman Mao's cult of personality, gained unchecked power over women during the famine and abused it.
Keywords: Communism, Maoist China, Great Chinese Famine, Great Leap Forward, Patriarchy, Gender equality, Food politics, Peasants, Urban-rural gap, Mao Zedong
I. INTRODUCTION
When Dr. Ding Lishui recalls her memories of the Great Chinese Famine as a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), she is conflicted. “I saw women, with their skin clinging tightly to their bones, walking down the streets of Qingdao in their prettiest dresses trying to find their family’s next meal in a tree. They filled their baskets with bark and flowers from the Huai tree to grind up to make into bread” [1]. Dr. Ding continued, “Mao Zedong promised all of us plentiful grain and the freedom of women in the Great Leap Forward, but what we got were women desperate to feed themselves with Guanyin Clay and inedible flowers, unable to have children because they stopped menstruating out of malnutrition. You know, when Chairman Mao said that women held up half the sky, he did not tell us that the sky would also be collapsing on us” [2].
Dr. Ding is my grandmother. She has been a devoted cadre all her life, even serving in the People’s Liberation Army in her youth. However, when she spoke of the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward (大跃进) and the ensuing Great Chinese Famine (三年大饥荒), I could always tell that the government propaganda did not blind her completely to the man-made tragedy of the time. The Great Famine has been a topic of great shame in China, and so the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has utilized propaganda to perpetuate a revisionist account of the famine; the event that caused the deaths of 45 million Chinese people was euphemized as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters” (三年自然灾害), overshadowing the tragedy's many political causes under the leadership of Mao Zedong [3]. 5% of the Chinese population perished, and death rates doubled from 12% to 25% in just 2 years after the start of the famine [4].
By viewing famine politics through a feminist lens, this study explains China’s oxymoronic blend of progressivism and conservatism when it came to gender equality. On the surface, the Chinese propaganda slogan of “women hold up half the sky” (妇女能顶半边天) coined by Mao Zedong in the earliest days of the revolution has permeated Chinese society to this day. In fact, its prominence has transcended national borders; Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had reportedly quoted the slogan as an “old Chinese proverb” by mistake in a fundraising speech in July of 2020 [5]. Supported by a vocal commitment to gender equality, the initial Chinese system held much promise. In her study of “woman-work,” or female labor ranging from domestic to agricultural to political, in China, Kimberley Ens Manning found significant progressivism in nationwide Women’s Federations (妇联) set up by the Communist government to address domestic violence complaints. Public canteens, daycares, and senior centers were set up to relieve women of their domestic household burdens so they could work alongside men in the fields and the factories [6]. This study details how this dream collapsed during the Great Famine.
Today, the word “feminism” is politically charged, and has taken a myriad of diverse definitions throughout history [7]. In fact, the word is no less controversial now than it was in the 1960s. Merriam-Webster named “feminism” as its Word of the Year in 2017, defined today in conventional and legal dictionaries as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” or the act of “organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests” [8]. This study adopts these two broad, international, contemporary definitions of feminism.
China during the Great Famine was no stranger to feminism. However, early Chinese feminism, before it was adopted by the Communists, was notably different from its Western counterpart. For example, historian Pauline C. Lee writes about the similarities and differences between 16th Century Ming Dynasty Neo-Confucian philosopher Li Zhi (李贽) and 19th Century feminist utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill [9]. Lee analyzes the seemingly paradoxical study of Confucian feminism, as Confucianism is known for its theory of filial piety (孝) in which wives and daughters are to submit to their husbands and fathers to “respect” them (孝顺）in order to fulfil their role in maintaining societal harmony. Li Zhi criticized the inner/outer (内/外) division between the roles of women and men. This idea may sound familiar to Western ears, as it is similar to liberal feminists’ criticisms of the division between the private and public spheres that women and men supposedly occupy.
In Western canonical philosophy, men often dismiss women’s abilities to reason at all. On the other hand, Confucians believe that women and men are able to reason in the same capacity, although women apply their reason to “shortsighted” (短见) issues pertaining to the household and domestic life, while men are more “farsighted,” or 远见 [10]. Li Zhi also took a Confucian approach to gender equality, advocating feminism through self-cultivation to surpass social, political, and economic barriers imposed by society. Li Zhi and Mill’s feminist theories now engage in a “chicken and egg” debate regarding which comes first in feminism––the equalization of opportunity (as advocated by Mill) to allow women to succeed, or the success of women themselves (termed self-cultivation by Li Zhi) to create an equal playing field on their own merits [11].
In short, Chinese feminism existed centuries before the Communists, yet feminists were silenced (the Ming Dynasty government executed Li Zhi in 1602 for being a confucian dissident) until the Communists gave them a political loudspeaker. Modern feminism in China may also seem self-contradictory to Western liberal feminists. For example, the Chinese stance on the widespread availability and destigmatization of abortion is seen by liberal feminists as quite progressive. However, looking into the reason for such a progressive stance on abortion reveals that many of those abortions are used to abort female infants in order to favor males, continuing a deep-rooted Chinese tradition of 重男轻女, bluntly translated as “men are weighed heavier than women” even before they are born. This study aims to look at feminism holistically to bridge the east-west gap of feminist philosophy.
The current body of academic scholarship on the interactions between Communism and feminism is dominated by the Marxist-feminist critique of capitalism. Beginning in the writings of Friedrich Engels, Marxists believed that unpaid domestic work and reproductive labor persisting in capitalist societies oppressed women [12]. Just as Engels believed that gender equality depended on Communism, Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai believed that the success of a revolution was predicated on the rise of the female proletariat to demand sexual and economic equality [13]. Alternatively, modern historian Jeffrey C. Goldfarb takes a more cynical approach. He argues that although Communist governments use the idea of equality to oppress their citizens, at least men and women are oppressed equally [14]. Finally, Judith Stacey opens her article on the Chinese Family Revolution with the phrase, “women's oppression starts at home” [15]. Socialists have claimed that the patriarchal structure of the nuclear family and the disparity between private property ownership by men and women in capitalist societies can be remedied by a socialist revolution freeing women of domestic duties and seizing all private property [16]. Overall, many scholars today believe that there would be no true liberation of women without socialism, and vice versa.
This paper offers an alternate approach to identify the successes and failures of the Chinese application of the pair of complementary ideologies through a post-mortem of one of the greatest human tragedies the world has ever faced. To contextualize, the famine caused 2.5x as many deaths as World War I, 45x as many deaths as the Irish Potato Famine, and 300x as many deaths as the nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima during WWII. First, we study the extent in which one man––Chairman Mao––created a famine. Second, we investigate the gendered impacts of the famine on women, including its effect on fertility, female infants, gynecological diseases, and marriage. Then, we examine the impacts of the failed Great Leap campaign against the institution of a “family” as a way for the state to economically exploit women, and the creation of a new double burden. Furthermore, we reveal the lack of female representation in politics, and how the CCP’s power structure allows leaders and cadres to sexually abuse and humiliate women. Finally, we reveal how the patriarchy persisted in China while the pursuit of radical equality led to disaster.
II. ORAL HISTORY METHODOLOGY
I began this project by speaking to my grandmother about her famine experiences. From her memories, I found a point of tension between her insistence that men and women were absolutely equal in the Communist society, and the realities of gender discrimination that she faced throughout her life [17]. We believed in the power of bringing the voices of the past to inform and empower our present study, leading us to employ oral history interviews as a way to incorporate new primary sources into our research.
We conducted telephone interviews with survivors in mainland China using Mika Thornburg’s Oral History Guide as reference for the development of our interviewing, questioning, and documentation methods [18]. A sample outline of our interview questions can be found in Appendix 1. In total, we conducted six interviews. These interviewees lived throughout mainland China, held occupations ranging from civilian to cadre, and experienced both urban and rural aspects of the famine.
To preserve the neutrality of the interview questions, we took great care to make our questions apolitical and open-ended as to not influence the answers of the interviewees in favor or against feminism or the Chinese government, and to prevent hostility when discussing such a sensitive subject matter. Although our questions were benign, they were fashioned to elicit answers from interviewees that may reveal their innate biases, or allow them to rethink their views on the famine. Such reflections did occur, and some interviewees sounded confused and conflicted as their interviews progressed. Since the famine occurred around sixty years ago, we were not expecting complete factual accuracy in the recollections of the interviewees. Nonetheless, valuable information could be drawn from understanding which striking aspects of the famine stayed in their memories, and the effectiveness of post hoc propaganda in altering the “facts” of the time.
However, there were obstacles to procuring interviews. The political tenderness of the subject made five potential interviewees cite discomfort with the subject matter as reasons to turn down interviews. To supplement our interviews, we incorporated other published oral histories collected by previous historians into our study [19].
III. MAO ZEDONG AND THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
Regarding the causes of the famine itself, Mao’s pride and ambition led him to push China to industrialize at a breakneck speed, vowing to overtake Britain and the United States in just 15 years. In just two years, 99% of the Chinese peasant population had joined a commune, which was an integral part of Mao’s plan of collectivization [20]. Many government leaders tried to warn Chairman Mao of the impending failure of the Great Leap, including the Premier of the PRC, Zhou Enlai (周恩来). Instead of listening, Mao Zedong ordered Zhou Enlai to publicly self-chastise for raising concerns about the Great Leap, and apologize for being seduced by “right deviationist conservative thinking” [21].
After Mao ordered the humiliation of the second most powerful man in China for concerns regarding the Great Leap, others feared voicing opposition. These fears were affirmed repeatedly; when decorated revolutionary hero and CCP leader Peng Dehuai (彭德怀) wrote a private letter to Mao Zedong about how the Great Leap may be causing a famine, Mao destroyed Peng’s political career and purged his supporters from the Party [22]. Out of a similar fear and desire to please their superiors, local cadres falsified reports for grain harvests during the Great Leap to fill Mao’s impossible quotas, claiming grain surpluses 2x or 3x actual harvest volumes [23]. It was in this soil that the seeds of famine were sown, when Mao celebrated these “huge surpluses” by ordering more procurement of grain from rural peasants to the cities and significantly decreasing the next year’s sown average by nearly 10% [24]. Thus, an already male-dominated party, led by Mao and crippled by the smothering of dissent, leapt into famine.
Mao created a cult of personality around himself, and his private beliefs became the basis of a nation’s beliefs. In an exposé published by his own private doctor, Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao was described to be as misogynistic as a Chinese emperor in his decadent private life where “women were served to order like food” [25]. Mao had weekly ballroom dancing parties (despite it being prohibited after the Revolution as bourgeois), where ranking Party and military leaders invited women “of sterling proletariat background and excellent physical appearance” to entertain Mao in his opulent private bedroom [26]. At the time, Mao was still married to Jiang Qing, and his actions of “gathering young women around him like the most denigrate of the ancient emperors” disgusted his personal doctor, compelling him to write a book on Mao’s private life. Unsurprisingly, while Mao was infamous for leading a witch-hunt against possible conservative right-sympathetic cadres, he ignored conservatism when it was aimed at women [27]. Considering the monumental impact Mao’s personal beliefs had on the nation, it is difficult to dismiss Mao’s private life and its effect on his governments’ attitude on women.
In addition to his personal misogynistic beliefs, the Communist party may have also marginalized gender equality as a political goal because of the pressure from conservative peasants who valued the traditional family hierarchy. Kimberley Ens Manning documents instances of CCP leadership reversing and downplaying discussions of gender equality due to fervent opposition from rural peasants [28]. Since the CCP was born out of a peasant revolution, feminism was often sacrificed to appease the Party’s socially conservative base. In the 1950s, the CCP was especially willing to compromise because peasant labor was crucial to accomplishing the Great Leap forward.
IV. PHYSICAL TOLL OF FAMINE ON WOMEN
The famine brought forth widespread gynecological diseases and infertility, impacting rural civilians more than urban civilians. Demographically, according to analyses of China’s meticulous 1982 and 1988 fertility surveys, Chinese women in 1957 had an average of 6.4 children, but the average fell to 3.3 children per woman in 1961 [29]. Thus, the famine led to a shortfall of 15 to 30 million births in three years [30]. However, not all infants suffered equally. Studies on infant mortality showed that a female toddler had a consistently higher likelihood of dying in comparison to a male toddler during the famine years [31]. This disparity shows the preferential treatment of sons during scarcity, and is corroborated by the observation that women with surviving sons had a high fertility reduction during the famine, while women with surviving daughters had a markedly lower fertility reduction [32]. This data shows a continuation of women valuing sons over daughters during the famine, and despite harsh circumstances, women who had not yet produced a male heir continued trying to produce one. A reason for infertility is the inability for women to menstruate due to severe malnutrition. Zhang Shengzhi recalls, “as the chair of the Women’s Federation [in Gushi County], I knew very well what women were suffering. At that time, 60% of the women stopped menstruating, and some 20% to 30% suffered uterine prolapse. There were no more births until 1961” [33].
Uterine prolapse is an excruciatingly painful type of gynecological disease caused by overworking and malnutrition where a woman’s womb, also known as her uterus, slips into her vagina and/or protrudes out of her body [34]. A Henan zealous Maoist admitted that men and women were treated like “beasts of burden… Girls and women pull ploughs and harrows, with their wombs hanging out” [35]. Surveys from the Jinma, Yongxing, and Yongquan communes found 50%, 60%, and 70% of the communes’ women stopped menstruating, respectively [36]. A case study of the Dashi production brigade witnessed 90% of its female members stop menstruating. The only two children born in that year of famine were to cadre families [37]. All of these statistics are from rural areas, illustrating that living in the city became a clear reproductive advantage as well as a socio-economic one.
One of the defining aspects of a patriarchy occurs when women depend on marriage to insure wealth, well-being, and reproductive success. During famine years, some married young rural women left their families in the villages, pretended that they were unmarried, and engaged in bigamy with urban men in order to survive [38]. Archives from Nanjing recorded children abandoned in city streets when rural women “remarried” men in the city and pretended that they did not have any previous children [39]. Weddings increased sharply in some rural villages in 1960, at the height of the famine, not because of a surge of romanticism, but because marriage became a pretense for women selling their bodies for food and clothing [40]. Many of those “marriages” ended in a matter of days.
V. ELIMINATION OF THE “FAMILY”
As survival became uncertain, the structure of the Chinese family started to crumble. Despite heavy stigmatization, divorce rates increased markedly during the famine [41]. Archives recorded desperate husbands selling their wives and children into slavery to save other family members, demonstrating how women were still being treated like property despite joining the labor force [42]. Meanwhile, families were torn apart by “revolutionary zeal.” Pan Zhenghui, a countryside woman recruited to be a “Great Leap Forward Worker” left her infant to die in order to go work at a factory, because “in those days, young people like me cared neither for elders or our children. We did everything we were told to do. We were full of revolutionary zeal. That’s how it was” [43].
In June of 1958, Liu Shaoqi, the Vice Chairman of the PRC under Mao, spoke to Chinese Women’s Federation leaders to explain why “no family” was one of the three “No’s” of the Great Leap [44]. He unveiled a plan to eliminate the family construct in 60 years if marriages became shortened to one year for procreation only starting in 1958 [45]. Coupled with the party’s stance on female chastity, the one-year marriages would serve to constrain female sexuality within the confines of marriage. In his speech, Liu Shaoqi stated that “by eliminating families it would be possible to eliminate private property…if a wife and children were considered to be one’s personal property” [46]. To Liu Shaoqi and ranking members of the Party, women were just another piece of private property to be collectivized.
According to the Party, the family must be replaced by state daycares, canteens, and senior nursing homes. In reality, these state centers only created a new double burden for women, and entrenched gender stereotypes that women were responsible for domestic labor. Zhao Liwen told us in an interview that “in my family, my mother bought food, grandmother cooked it… a group of women usually worked at the canteens” [47]. As the Party also expected women to staff these centers, women were still responsible for these “domestic tasks,” but just in a way that benefited the state most economically. Liu Shaoqi justified the liberation of women in economic terms, because their liberation provided the CCP more laborers and saved resources if domestic tasks were collectivized. Mentions of female empowerment and the fundamental equality of women were limited and secondary to their need for female labor to carry out the Great Leap. Ironically, these same Maoists criticized capitalists of exploiting women in the home when they were doing the same at the state level. Finally, when the Great Leap became a Great Famine, women were then blamed for or not working hard enough at home. Many retrospective accounts of the famine accredited women with leaving 10% of crops to rot in the fields when their husbands and sons were off working in steel factories [48]. Two interviewees agreed with this assessment and told us that the famine happened in part because “all the young, strong men were working in factories, and only women were left for the harvest” [49]. First, by deeming women as less qualified laborers, the Party contradicted its promises for gender equality in labor. Next, although many do not fault women for causing the famine, this way of retelling their involvement perpetuates benevolent sexism by absolving them of blame because of their inherent inferiority as laborers.
Overall, the state’s attempt to eliminate the family failed in more ways than one. Public canteens and daycares were poorly run by widows and elderly women, overcrowded, and often left children underfed and unbathed, so women voluntarily assumed new double burdens to care for their children at home. Su Wanyi, a rural cadre’s wife in the Sichuan province, recalled her husband chasing after young women in their village who allowed his advances because he had power over who gets food. When Su Wanyi stayed home to try to look after her children, her work points were deducted and she got less food [50]. Women who tried to stay home at night in Macheng to care for their children were banned from canteens. In fact, daycares only absolved fathers of the responsibility to care for children, as mothers were predominantly the ones who wanted to remedy the inadequacies of state childcare and suffered the consequences. Women also starved after giving birth. Pan continued her interview about her third pregnancy in 1962, when “I was given forty days of maternity leave with a price to pay. I got no work points for those forty days. With no work points, I had nothing. No food” [51].
VI. WOMEN AND FAMINE POLITICS
Beyond the family, women could not claim to hold up half the sky when they could not break the political glass ceiling. Only four of the ninety-seven members (roughly 4%) of the 8th Central Committee of the CCP serving from 1956 to 1969 were women, and none of the 25 members of the powerful Politburo were female [52]. However, though these statistics seem unacceptable to any modern feminist, they must be contextualized during the time. Across both the Pacific Ocean and the ideological spectrum, America had even lower female representation in Congress; only 3% of congressional seats were held by women, and there was only one female Senator out of one hundred [53].
Additionally, the aforementioned Women’s Federations only held symbolic power, as they were tasked along with the militia, labor unions, and youth leagues to instill the will of the central government into the lives of the local civilians. When leaders of Women’s Federations attempted to advocate on the behalf of women suffering in the famine, they were punished and purged for being “rightist” all the same. For example, Li Lei, the chairwoman of the Gansu Province Women’s Federation, learned of cannibalism and consumption of tree bark during the famine. In her self-published memoir, she recalled being labeled as a right deviationist for reporting the starvation truthfully in 1959 [54]. These women’s federations were the Party’s way to protect women from domestic violence, though cadres perpetuated much violence against women, and the Party’s own man-made famine exacerbated the abuse.
Although the actions of the few do not represent the majority, the accounts of rape, humiliation, and objectification of women by party cadres during the famine are especially alarming. In 1960, two party secretaries in the Wengcheng commune raped 34 women [55]. In Hebei, three party secretaries and a deputy county head sexually abused women “routinely” [56]. After investigation, it was revealed that the secretary of the Guijiaying village raped 27 women, and had made advances on almost every unmarried woman in the village [57]. On a broader scale, one in eight militia guards running detainment stations said they raped a woman in custody [58]. These party secretaries were supposedly the most zealous advocates for gender equality.
In 1958, 300 women were forced to work naked in a factory in the Hunan Province [59]. Women would compete for cash prizes worth a month’s salary to see who was the most eager to strip naked in front of male factory administrators. Hunan was one of the provinces most devastated by the famine, where modern Bayesian analysis finds that 100% of the 380,470 excess deaths during the famine were caused by governmental errors rather than natural disasters [60]. When the Party gave absolute power to local cadres, they turned a blind eye to cadres lording over peasants with control over food and money. Even when Beijing launched an inquiry against the factory administrators after women became sick in the winter while working naked, the factory leaders justified their abuse by claiming that they were liberating women from “feudal taboos” by “encouraging” them to take off their clothes [61]. Additionally, women accused of stealing food out of desperation during the famine were paraded naked around the village as punishment in Suichang County, and many committed suicide from shame [62].
These grotesque punishments point to the deep-rooted misogyny of both non-Party and Party leaders, who combined feudal views of women as property with revolutionary zeal, punishing women with the worst of both views. Although these practices were reported at the time of the famine, they are not anomalies in mid-twentieth century society. However, the famine exacerbated these abuses as cadres gained more power by holding the fate of peasants within their hands. We can not say that all, or even a majority of cadres were corrupt, but the system was designed without checks on the powers of cadres with misogynistic personal beliefs and allowed them to act with impunity.
Although some women committed suicide to preserve their honor, or in an attempt to win back their dignity, there were women who sold their morality for survival. In cities, desperation-induced prostitution resurfaced during the Great Famine. In Chongqing, the capital of Chengdu, prostitution flourished during the years of the famine despite it being nearly eradicated before the famine [63]. A jail in Chengdu kept more than a hundred prostitutes, some of which worked with male thieves and travelled the country to sell their bodies for food [64]. There were also reports of young rural women traveling to cities and performing sexual favors in public parks for as little as a ration coupon worth ten cents [65].
The urban-rural divide was more than geographical; rural prostitutes were denounced by urban civilians who used their desperate actions to reaffirm their superiority over villagers. In many ways, the city-dwellers became the new upper class with food capital and grain tickets. As a whole, Zhang Shiyang and Liu Xinqi both recalled in their interviews that villagers were desperate to go to the cities to secure more food and ration coupons [66]. Additionally, sex traffickers preyed on women—young, married, or widowed—from famine-striken areas such as Gansu and Shandong, resulting in the sale of 45 women to 6 different villages by one trafficker [67].
Women suffered violence inside the home as well. Frustration and extreme circumstances out of men’s control during the famine escalated incidents of domestic violence. In Nanjing, there were two murders between family members reported every month during the famine, most of which were violence committed by men against women and children when they had become a “burden” to the family [68]. When women came home hungry from the canteens, husbands blamed it on them. Chen Gu, a woman who lived in the rural Sichuan Province, said that “my father beat my mother up because she didn’t get her portion of the food” [69].
In rural areas, women’s labor was separated from men’s labor––and systematically devalued. In communes, according to Frank Dikötter, women were paid less than men in a work-point system that favored men [70]. The patriarchal system systematically gave women less work points, and by extension, less food. Another example of Communist hypocrisy lies within menstruation. Communists criticized the old feudal society for its backwards menstrual taboos that vilified a natural part of female existence. However, when cadres were in power in local communes, they went too far radically on the other end to humiliate women if they asked for sick leave due to severe menstrual pain. In the Chengdong People’s Commune, party secretary Xu Yingjie demanded that women who requested sick leave needed to drop their pants in public to undergo a humiliating “cursory inspection” by male party leaders [71]. Again, Communists applied equality too absolutely and radically when they compelled pregnant women to work in the fields until their bodies gave up on them and miscarried. In an interview, Liu Xinqi told me how local cadres made both men and women work in the fields, and did not give additional food or time off work to pregnant or nursing mothers [72]. In one Sichuan district, 24 pregnant women miscarried because of field labor during late stages of pregnancy [73]. Pregnant women who refused to work in the Hunan commune were made to undress in the middle of the winter and forced to break ice, the logic being that they would keep working in order to avoid freezing to death [74]. The Communist government only gave vague guidelines of treating women and men “equally,” but humanity was lost in translation during implementation.
VII. CONCLUSION
When it came to promises of gender equality, Mao Zedong did not hold up his end of the bargain. During the Great Famine, the CCP “liberated women” from homes to work in fields because they wanted to take advantage of the female labor force for the Great Leap Forward, rather than to truly empower women to become social and cultural equals. A political tragedy of this magnitude and complexity warrants much more scholarship than it currently has. In the future, it would be valuable to conduct an extensive literature review of Chinese peer-reviewed academic scholarship to reveal tensions or biases of both Chinese and Western studies on the famine. We also plan to study the evolution of the urban-rural gulf in China, and how geographic and economic disparities correlate with ideological differences in regards to gender equality. The Chinese Marxist-feminist experiment proved to be a failure during the Great Famine, but analysis of its failure allows the women of tomorrow to push past today’s glass ceilings to finally hold up their half of the sky.
[1] Ding Lishui, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020; all names of interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.
[2] Ibid.
[3] James Kai‐sing Kung and Justin Yifu Lin, “The Causes of China’s Great Leap Famine, 1959–1961,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 52, no. 1 (2003): 67.
[4] Ibid., 51.
[5] Joseph A. Wulfsohn, "Biden Uses Quote Notably Uttered by Mao Zedong during Big-Money Fundraiser: Reports," Fox News, July 14, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-reportedly-uses-quote-notably-uttered-by-mao-zedong-during-fundraiser.
[6] Hannah Leffingwell, "Toward a Feminist Definition of Feminism: A Historical Exploration of the Word, 'Feminism,'" Public Seminar, January 16, 2018.
[7] Kimberley Ens Manning, "The Gendered Politics of Woman-Work: Rethinking Radicalism in the Great Leap Forward," Modern China 32, no. 3 (July 2006), 354.
[8] "Merriam-Webster's 2017 Words of the Year," in Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year-2017-feminism.
[9] Pauline C. Lee, "Li Zhi and John Stuart Mill: A Confucian Feminist Critique of Liberal Feminism," in The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender, ed. Chenyang Li (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 113-132.
[10] Ibid. 127.
[11] Ibid. 128.
[12] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2010), 199.
[13] Alexandra M. Kollontai, "International Socialist Conferences of Women Workers," in Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Articles and Speeches (New York: Internat. Publ., 1984).
[14] Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, "Why Is There No Feminism after Communism?," Social Research 64, no. 2 (1997): 236.
[15] Judith Stacey, "When Patriarchy Kowtows: The Significance of the Chinese Family Revolution for Feminist Theory," Feminist Studies 2, no. 2/3 (1975): 64, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177771.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ding Lishui, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020.
[18] Mika Thornburg, "Oral History Guide" (unpublished manuscript, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, n.d.).
[19] Yang et al., Tombstone: The Great; Zhou, Forgotten Voices; Ens Manning and Wemheuer, Eating Bitterness; Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (New York: Walker et, 2011).
[20] Xun Zhou, Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962: An Oral History (London, UK: Yale University Press, 2013), 16.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 66.
[23] Kung and Lin, "The Causes," 54.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Zhisui Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician, ed. Anne F. Thurston (New York: Random House, 1996), ix.
[26] Ibid., 94.
[27] Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer, eds., Eating Bitterness (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 15.
[28] Ens Manning, "The Gendered,” 355.
[29] Zhao and Reimondos, "The Demography," 282-83.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid., 295.
[32] Ibid., 292.
[33] Interview of Zhang Shengzhi, in Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, edited by Yang Jisheng, Edward Friedman, Jian Guo, and Stacy Mosher, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
[34] Mayo Clinic Staff, "Uterine Prolapse," Mayo Clinic, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/uterine-prolapse/symptoms-causes/syc-20353458.
[35] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 39.
[36] Yang et al., Tombstone: The Great, 283.
[37] Ibid., 245.
[38] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 256.
[39] Ibid., 247.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Zhongwei Zhao and Anna Reimondos, "The Demography of China's 1958-61 Famine: A Closer Examination," Population (English Edition, 2002-) 67, no. 2 (2012): 283.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Interview of Pan Zhenghui, in Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962: An Oral History conducted by Zhou Xun (London, UK: Yale University Press, 2013).
[44] Yang et al., Tombstone, 13.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid., 14.
[47] Zhao Liwen, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020.
[48] Ibid., 277-293.
[49] Zhao Liwen, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020; Zhang Shiyang, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020.
[50] Interview of Su Wanyi, in Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962: An Oral History conducted by Zhou Xun (London, UK: Yale University Press, 2013).
[51] Zhou, Forgotten Voices, 232.
[52] News of the Communist Party of China (China). http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64162/139962/8437279.html.
[53] Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics, "History of Women in the U.S. Congress," Center for American Women and Politics, https://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/history-women-us-congress.
[54] Li Lei, Long Years, self-published, October 1999, 149.
[55] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 253.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid., 236.
[59] Ibid., 254.
[60] Daniel Houser, Barbara Sands, and Erte Xiao, "Three Parts Natural, Seven Parts Man-made: Bayesian Analysis of China's Great Leap Forward Demographic Disaster," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 69, no. 2 (February 2009), ScienceDirect.
[61] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 254.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Zhou, Forgotten Voices, 200.
[64] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 255.
[65] Ibid., 233.
[66] Zhang Shiyang, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020; Liu Xinqi, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020.
[67] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 247.
[68] Ibid., 245.
[69] Zhou, Forgotten Voices, 250.
[70] Dikötter, Mao’s Great, 251.
[71] Ibid., 242.
[72] Liu Xinqi, in a telephone interview with the author, July 2020.
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid.
APPENDIX
1. Outline of Interview Questions
What is your name?
When were you born?
Which province/city did you live in China between the years 1958-1961?
Was this a rural or urban area?
Were you ever a member of the Communist party?
If so, please describe your position.
Who else lived with you? Siblings, parents, extended family?
What was your occupation during the time?
Do you remember what specific natural disasters occurred during the time?
How did you get news during the “3 years of natural disasters?”
Were there newspapers or radios where you lived?
How did newspapers report the famine?
Did your family have enough food during the famine?
Could you tell me about what types of food you ate during the famine?
How many meals did you eat per day?
Were there rations or meal tickets where you lived?
Was there food sold in stores? What kind of food, and could your family afford it?
Was food expensive? How expensive (in relation to your monthly salary)?
Was there a type of food that was a staple during the “3 years of natural disasters?”
Were there new recipes or types of foods invented during the time?
What food did you miss the most during the “3 years of natural disasters?”
Where did you buy food?
Who usually shops for food in the family?
Who cooks in your family?
Did you eat at a communal dining hall?
If yes, what food was served at the dining hall?
Did you ever work, or know someone who worked, in a communal dining hall?
How were wedding, birth, birthday celebrations during the time?
What was the food like at these celebrations?
What were most women wearing during the time? Could men and women afford clothes?
Do you recall any organizations in society especially for women?
Were any of those women’s organizations political ones?