The passions of the Great Leap famine and their transformation

12 February 2007
Leiden, the Netherlands

CNWS/IIAS Lecture by Prof. Stephan Feuchtwang (Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics)

I think the Great Leap Forward campaign should be conceived not just as a leftist error, which is the way it was criticised in 1959 and then again in 1960 and 1961, and how it is still described. The leftist error is often officially specified as the blowing of a Communist wind: the promise of abundance, to be realised soon. There is much to support this description. But I think it is useful to think of it in a longer historical perspective as an instance of state organised self-strengthening, driven by China's own kind of Communism, namely that of Maoist mobilisation of enthusiasm. This was a novel politics and in addition, what was unique, rather than continuous with previous versions of Chinese self-strengthening, was the singular organisation of all life into the great Me of the political and domestic body. The nature of the leadership of this single body produced what I shall call aggravated indifference to the subjects that leadership claimed to represent. The language for this indifference was that of self-sacrifice. In the politicised language of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao, the language of sacrifice was widely used to describe the relationship between the Party and the People for whom it acted. The People owe loyalty to the Party whose cadre and armed forces had made great sacrifices (xisheng) for the People. The People can enjoy the benefits for which these sacrifices have been made and they must reciprocate - particularly when those benefits are in the future - by sacrificing themselves. Qin qunzhong, closeness to the masses, is the kind side of Party leadership, stressed when the mistake of use of force, which is the other side, is being criticised as ‘commandism' - qiangpo mingling feng. Indeed this was precisely the vocabulary used during the Great Leap Forward. Switches between the two occurred during the GLF.

I shall present results of fieldwork in the Quanzhou region collected by my colleague Wang Ming-ming and me in 2004 on the transmission of the Great Leap famine, including testimonies of those who were cadres at the time, and will compare them with ethnographies about the famine from elsewhere. I shall also present documentation and interviews on how the famine is known and has non-verbal effects now.

Venue: PJ Veth building, Room 329
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden

Time: 15.15 - 17.00

Marloes Rozing
International Institute for Asian Studies
P.O. Box 9515,
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
T +31-71-527 3317
m.rozing@let.leidenuniv.nl