Today I discovered the talented Xujun Eberlein and her Inside Out China Blog.  Currently Xujun is researching her family history in Sichuan, and this has led to her researching the period of time between 1959 and 1962, when some 20 million Chinese peasants are thought to have died due to disastrous farming policies instituted by Chairman Mao.  Sichuan was among the places hit worst by the famine.

She has written a two part piece called Why Didn’t Chinese Riot During China’s Three Year Famine.  Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

In Part 1 Xuyun interview her parents and their contemporaries about life during the famine years.  The interview is a poignant reminder of how easy it is for people to deny the severity of a situation, and Xuyun presents it in such a way that I could feel the trembling of the voice as the interviewees struggled to voice their memories.

Part 2 explores how peasant loyalty to the Party resulted in the ‘quiet death’ of some 20 million people.  Contrary to popular conception of the period, the police presence in rural areas was minor.  Even if there was a police presence, if sentiment had been highly negative there is little that the police could have done.  Xuyun posits that the reason for the social calm which characterized the famine is the people’s belief in the system, and the attribution of the famine to natural disaster.  It would only be much later, during the Cultural Revolution, that the administrative crimes of local and province officials responsible for much of the rural people’s plight would be exposed.