Chinese Economic Development

130 Chinese Economic DevelopmentHowever, closer analysis suggests that this provincial pattern reflects correlationbut not causality. In fact, interesting though many of these arguments about canteensare, they are not particularly convincing. The Chang–Wen overconsumption argumentis implausible because the numbers simply do not add up. Sichuan’s mortalitycrisis actually began in 1958; the crude death rate in 1957 was 12.2 per thousandbut climbed to 26 per thousand in 1958 (SCTJNJ 1990: 58). However, canteenswere not set up until the autumn of that year. Given that the main harvest wasnot even collected until the early autumn (and therefore was not available to beeaten), it is hard to see how overconsumption could have caused so many deathsin 1958. The depletion of grain stock in Sichuan may help to explain mortality in1959 (though even then the decline in output is a far more plausible and logicalexplanation), but not in 1958.Nor is Lin’s argument about exit rights very convincing. Its main weakness isthat membership of a farming collective became compulsory for the vast majorityof farmers in 1955/6. 14 However, the collapse in output did not occur until 1959.In other words, the timing of Lin’s argument is wrong; if he is correct, the outputdecline ought to have occurred in 1956 and 1957. In fact, output increased in bothyears and the 1958 harvest was a record. Furthermore, the right to withdraw fromthe commune was not restored even after 1960. Yet output and productivity recoveredand there was no other significant famine in the Maoist period. In fact, thevery notion that incentive failure explains the famine is flatly contradicted by allthe evidence pointing to a rise in yields in 1958, the very year in which communeswere introduced. Even in 1959, grain yields were no lower than they had beenin 1957. As Kueh (1995: 212) concludes: ‘there is no evidence of a consistentdecline in grain yield across the various crops to suggest that peasants’ incentiveswere drastically impaired by the rural upheaval of 1958.’ All this suggest that theexit right argument is a red herring. We therefore probably need to look beyondcanteens to explain the mortality crisis.A far more plausible argument is that the emphasis on iron and steel productionin the countryside was critical because it led to the wholesale diversion oflabour from farming to industry, thus bringing about a collapse in productionbecause of labour shortages. 15 The extent of this diversion of resources emergesvery clear in the data (Table 4.4). Grain sown area was cut in 1958, and againin 1959, and this translated directly into lower output despite high yields. Moreremarkable, however, is the employment trend. Primary-sector employment fellby almost 40 million workers in 1959, almost a fifth of the agricultural workforce,because farmers were moved into rural industry. The exceptionally volatile ruralnon-agricultural employment data show extremely clearly the scale of the ruralindustrialization undertaken. The total quadrupled between 1957 and 1958 as ironand steel production commenced. It then collapsed after 1960 as the extent ofthe famine became increasingly apparent; by then, all available labour was beingtransferred into farming in a desperate attempt to mitigate the famine conditions.This diversion of labour led directly to a fall in food output after 1958, as is veryclear from the data in Table 4.4.The impact of the fall in food production was compounded by Chinese trade