Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

through him. It turned out that what Liao meant was that there was a
Sichuan province document that recorded that there were a total 62.36
million people in Sichuan in 1960. Liao then explained that the death
toll must be 10 million since the total 1957 population as shown by the
annual state statistics was 72.157 million. Li Xuanyuan (2007) then asks
three questions: 1) how do the 72.157 million figures come about? 2)
Can one arrive at a 10-million famine death toll by just taking away
one year’s figures from those of another? 3) Why did Liao wait until
2004 when both Hu Yaobang and Yang Shangkun were safely dead to
reveal such important meetings?
Li then provides two instances of demographic movement from his
personal experience (Li is also from Sichuan province) that may explain
some of the demographic change. These instances of demographic
movements have hardly been noticed or studied by scholars of the issue.
One instance is a personal move that was not accounted for in official
statistics. Because of starvation the husband of Li’s older sister left his
village in 1959 and moved to Tianchi coal mine to work as a miner.
Because he left without permission, his village cancelled his household
registration. He registered as a rural person when he came back to the
village in 1963. This is an example of one person missing during the
famine years but one person more on the official records afterwards.
Another instance is that there were officially sanctioned movements.
When the Great Leap Forward started there was great
expansion of local enterprises and industrial decentralization. In the
process millions of rural people were enrolled into the industrial
sector. When the famine began to take effect the Chinese authorities, at
Chen Yun’s suggestion, repatriated those workers. This movement
created a situation in which some people appeared to have disappeared
from rural areas during the Great Leap Forward but then
reappeared as rural residents. Furthermore, this sudden movement
and then a sudden repatriation in a matter of three or four years of so
many millions of people inevitably created problems for records even
if there had been a good statistics collection system. But, as everyone
in and outside China agrees, there was no such system. Li, again,
provides a personal experience of this demographic change. In Gao
Village where the total population was not more than 200 at that time
there was an inflow of a family of four repatriated from Jingdezhen
(Gao 1999a).
Food shortage and a metaphor
THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
The main argument presented by Lao Tian (2006a) and others about the
rationing of food highlights the difference between the strategy of
national consumption and that of national accumulation. A metaphorical
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