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Q: Why do you think the author describes Ming's experiences during the famine?

A: The author adds Ming's experience during the famine to demonstrate the hardship he's endured in Communist China (in contrast to his vision of Hong Kong), and explain his strong emotional bond with Fei.

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"He was leering down at Fei, whispering something that made her blush violently." (64)
"I still couldn't believe Ming hadn't spoken to the girl in six years -- six years. I'd asked Fei about it, and she had laughed, scarlet rising to her pretty face." (81)

It's ironic that while Ming thinks Fei is blushing at something Li said, in reality she is blushing at the thought of him.

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"your beautiful wet sand, like soft, supple skin." (88)

Here Ming uses simile to compare Hong Kong's shores to soft skin.

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"She was laughing with a boy whom I suddenly hated with every ounce of my being. Li. He was leering down at Fei, whispering something that made her blush violently." (64)

Here, Chim uses a common cliche, where a transfer student (or other newcomer) becomes romantically involved with the main character's romantic interest.

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"Most party members had gone through at least one self-criticism session, but I'd managed to avoid them so far ... My heart was racing, and my feet were a little unsteady as I staggered out of the building ... I knew I had avoided disaster, but I had a hunch that this would not be the last time." (163, 167)

Here, Li gets his first taste of the intense methods of the CCP. This acts as a prelude to his beating, and makes him want to leave more.

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"The boys began beating him. The crowd did nothing to stop them. One or two of the villagers stepped forward and began to yell obscenities. 'Confess your crimes!' a voice called out... Instead, Feng kicked me again, and I was in the dirt ... My face was wet and sticky with tears and mud." (188-189)

The beatings Chim describes are similar to those done against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang for the "crime" of having a different culture from the Han majority.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xinjiang-detective-torture-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

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torture inflicted on uyghurs in xinjiang revealed by chinese detective in exile - cnn

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Chinese detective in exile reveals torture inflicted on Uyghurs

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A Chinese policeman turned whistleblower has revealed rare details on what he described as a systematic campaign of torture against ethnic Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region's detention camps -- claims China has denied for years.

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"A few years ago, the entire village was talking about 'the Great Leap Forward,' delivering glory to China. Now the Cadre had a new term for the lack of food, the hunger, the starving, and finally the dying. Like everything else, the Part had a name for it. Three Years of Natural Disasters" (3)

This connects to the actual Great Leap Forward, where pseudoscientific farming practices and hasty industrialization caused mass famine, coupled with local officials overreporting (and thus over exporting) grain in order to gain favor. This even happened at a national level; China continued to export grain even as people were starving. Between 15 and 55 million starved or died of disease as a result of malnutrition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

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Forty years ago China was in the middle of the world's largest famine: between the spring of 1959 and the end of 1961 some 30 million Chinese starved to death and about the same number of births were lost or postponed. The famine had overwhelmingly ideological causes, rating alongside the two world wars as a prime example of what Richard Rhodes labelled public manmade death, perhaps the most overlooked cause of 20th century mortality.1 Two generations later China, which has been rapidly modernising since the early 1980s, is economically successful and producing adequate amounts of food. Yet it has still not undertaken an open, critical examination of this unprecedented tragedy.

Summary points

The largest famine in human history took place in China during 1959-61

Although drought was a contributory factor, this was largely a manmade catastrophe for which Mao Zedong bears the greatest responsibility

We will never know the precise number of casualties, but the best demographic reconstructions indicate about 30 million dead

Two generations later China is yet to openly examine the causes and consequences of the famine

Origins of famine

The origins of the famine can be traced to Mao Zedong's decision, supported by the leadership of China's communist party, to launch the Great Leap Forward. This mass mobilisation of the country's huge population was to achieve in just a few years economic advances that took other nations many decades to accomplish.2 Mao, beholden to Stalinist ideology that stressed the key role of heavy industry, made steel production the centrepiece of this deluded effort. Instead of working in the fields, tens of millions of peasants were ordered to mine local deposits of iron ore and limestone, to cut trees for charcoal, to build simple clay furnaces, and to smelt metal. This frenzied enterprise did not produce steel but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools. Peasants were forced to abandon all private food production, and newly formed agricultural communes planted less land to grain, which at that time was the source of more than 80% of China's food energy.3

At the same time, fabricated reports of record grain harvests were issued to demonstrate the superiority of communal farming. These gross exaggerations were then used to justify the expropriation of higher shares of grain for cities and the establishment of wasteful communal mess halls serving free meals.4 In reality, grain harvest plummeted (fig ​(fig1); 1 ); and since supply and demand of food before 1958 were almost equal, by the spring of 1959 there was famine in a third of China's provinces.

As an essentially social catastrophe, the famine showed clear marks of omission, commission, and provision. These three attributes recur in all modern manmade famines.5 The greatest omission was the failure of China's rulers to acknowledge the famine and promptly to secure foreign food aid. Study of famines shows how easily they can be ended (or prevented) once the government decides to act-but the Chinese government took nearly three years to act. Taking away all means of private food production (in some places even cooking utensils), forcing peasants into mismanaged communes, and continuing food exports were the worst acts of commission. Preferential supply of food to cities and to the ruling elite was the deliberate act of selective provision.

These actions are perfect illustrations of Sen's thesis about the critical link between political alienation of the governors from the governed: "The direct penalties of a famine are borne by one group of people and political decisions are taken by another. The rulers never starve. But when a government is accountable to the local populace it too has good reasons to do its best to eradicate famines. Democracy, via electoral politics, passes on the price of famines to the rulers as well."6 There was no such link in Mao's China.

Weather only exacerbated the suffering. Official accounts still blame the natural catastrophes for the suffering-but China's own statistics belie this explanation.7 Undoubtedly, the drought of 1960-1 would have lowered grain supply in the worst affected provinces, but by itself it would have caused only a small fraction of the eventual nationwide death toll. During the 1990s the worst droughts and floods in China's modern history had only a marginal effect on the country's adequate food supply. Only a return to more rational economic policies after 1961, including imports of grain, ended the famine.

China's opening up to the world made a key difference. The first business deal signed after US President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972 was an order for 13 of the world's largest and most modern, American designed, nitrogen fertiliser plants. More purchases of such plants followed, and China became the world's largest producer of nitrogenous fertilisers. The first major change initiated by the reformist faction of the communist party in 1979, less than three years after Mao's death, was to dissolve agricultural communes and free farm prices. By 1984 all food rationing was lifted in the cities, and China's average per capita food supply rose to within 5% of Japan's comfortable mean.8

Extent of famine

The true extent of the famine was not revealed to the world until the publication of single year age distributions from the country's first highly reliable population census in 1982. These data made it possible to estimate the total number of excess deaths between 1959 and 1961, and the first calculations by American demographers put the toll at between 16.5 and 23 million.9 More detailed later studies came up with 23 to 30 million excess deaths, and unpublished Chinese materials hint at totals closer to 40 million.10⁻12 We will never know the actual toll because the official Chinese figures for the three famine years greatly underestimate both the fall in fertility and the rise in mortality and because we cannot accurately reconstruct these vital statistics (fig ​(fig2). 2 ).

The lack of accuracy is as expected. All death tolls cited for major famines have large margins of error. This is true even for events unfolding amid unprecedented publicity. An attempt to discern a coherent picture of morbidity, mortality, and nutritional status during the 1991-2 famine in Somalia, an effort based on 23 separate field studies, ended in failure.13 Similar controversies surround the recent estimates of the excess deaths in Iraq attributable to economic sanctions after the Gulf war.14

Need for open discussion

But no amount of additional information and no new and more sophisticated demographic analyses can change the fundamental conclusion: Mao's delusionary policies caused by far the largest famine in human history. Yet in contrast to other great famines of the 20th century (Ukraine 1932-3, Bengal 1943-4), the causes of the Chinese famine and an attribution of responsibility for its depth and duration have never been openly discussed in the afflicted nation. Beyond a narrow circle of China experts, the famine has also been virtually ignored by Western scholars and politicians. The need for moral examination and historical closure is obvious. Eventually the country will have to examine the causes and consequences of the tragedy whose magnitude surpasses the combined toll of all other famines China has experienced during the past two centuries.

How could this famine have lasted so long? How tenable is it to excuse the actions of so many people throughout the party and state bureaucracy by blaming solely their leader? Had they no other choice but to follow orders and to carry out, often against resistance, mindless collectivisation and reduced planting of grain, to falsify harvest statistics, and to forcibly take grain away from evidently starving peasants? Germany has spent two generations trying to understand the horrors of the Third Reich and to atone for its transgressions. Russia began to face its dark past soon after Stalin's death, when Khrushchev opened the gates of the Gulag and had the dictator's embalmed corpse removed from the Red Square mausoleum. China's turn is yet to come.

If, as is likely, such an accounting does not happen soon, the direct memories of survivors will be lost. Of course, the archives of the Chinese communist party and of its enormous secret police apparatus will eventually be opened and yield-much like the party and KGB archives in Russia since 1991-some of their long hidden secrets. Many facts we will never know. A leading Chinese demographer found that even casual surveys of villages in areas that experienced the worst starvation show an unusually high extent of mental impairment among adults born during the famine years (X Peng, personal communication). Given the importance of nutrition for the development of mental capacities during infancy and early childhood this was a predictable tragedy.15 We will never know how many millions of survivors throughout China have had their lives twisted in this terrible way.

Finally, what are we to make of the Western indifference to the great famine? Eyewitness stories of refugees who fled to Hong Kong were widely dismissed and rarely reported during the famine years. Two generations later a journalistic account is the only fairly comprehensive volume on the famine published in the West.16 Incredibly, the 1997 edition of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica does not even list the catastrophe in its tabulation of famines of the past 200 years.17 An in depth scholarly history of the famine has yet to be written.

Footnotes

Competing interest: None declared.

References

1. Rhodes R. Man-made death: a neglected mortality. JAMA. 1988;260:686-687. [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

2. Yang D. Catastrophe and reform in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1996. [ Google Scholar]

5. Macrae J, Zwi A. London: Zed Books; 1994. Famine, complex emergencies and international policy in Africa: an overview. In[: War and hunger; pp. 6-36. Google Scholar]

7. State Statistical Bureau. China statistical yearbook. Beijing: State Statistical Bureau; 1978-98. [ Google Scholar]

12. Banister J. China's changing population. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1987. [ Google Scholar]

13. Boss LP, Toole MJ, Yip R. Assessments of mortality, morbidity, and nutritional status in Somalia during the 1991-1992 famine. JAMA. 1994;272:371-376. [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

15. Pollitt E, editor. The relationship between undernutrition and behavioral development in children. J Nutrition. 1995;125(suppl 8):2211-284S. [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

16. Becker J. Hungry ghosts. New York: Free Press; 1996. [ Google Scholar]

17. Encyclopaedia Britannica. New encyclopaedia britannica micropedia. Vol. 4. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica; 1997. pp. 674-675. [ Google Scholar]

Articles from The BMJ are provided here courtesy of BMJ Publishing Group

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Forty years ago China was in the middle of the world's largest famine: between the spring of 1959 and the end of 1961 some 30 million Chinese starved to death and about the same number of births were lost or postponed.

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"I brought my head down so my lips were almost touching the water. 'Swim, my friend. Swim to freedom." I pulled my fingers apart, breaking the cage." (30)

Ming releasing the fish foreshadows his own swim to Hong Kong, where he escapes the "cage" of Communist China.

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"That was years ago, and I still hadn't spoken to her. Instead, I spent a lot of time spying on her." (57)

I can connect to this personally, as when I had a crush, I often didn't get to speak to her (different classes and extracurriculars), so I took a similar approach.

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"I shut my eyes and imagined that instead of being up above the waves, I was down below, naked and kicking. I could hear Li's strokes beside me as we swam ... " (233)

The author uses a flashback here to compare Ming's passage to the United States to his past swim to Hong Kong.

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I think the theme of the book is that you need to stand up for yourself, your morals, and your friends. Ming, the main character, refuses to give up on his values at any point in the book, despite extreme hardship. He still helps a stranger, even when starving (6-8); he even wants to help her with her abusive aunt (12-13). Later on, Li makes sure Ming isn't bullied by the group of new boys (36). Li even helps Ming with his letter to his crush Fei, even though he himself has an interest in her (they end up married, 235) (85-88). Finally, they resolve to escape to Hong Kong, where they can be free from the terror of the Communist Party (199-202).

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"She dug into her pants pocket and pulled out a cupped hand to show me. Nestled in the center of it was a tiny, precious sweet potato. ... 'We can share some when you get back," she said solemnly. I almost dropped the water jug. She was offering a gift I knew I could never repay." (8)

Fei gifting part of the small sweet potato to Ming is important for 2 reasons: 1, it demonstrates how scarce food was during the Great Leap Forward (or the Three Years of Natural Disasters, as it was retroactively named), which certainly contributed to Ming's later escape from China.

Secondly, it serves to provide an explanation as to why Ming is so enamored with Fei, which is important later when she's married off to a Party official, which finally breaks Ming, who resolves to escape with Li.

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"'Jau mou gaau co. What was that all about?' Tian cussed loudly."(25)

I think the Guangdong dialect of chinese is used here to provide more immersion into the setting, as it would be unrealistic for someone to use Standard Chinese when swearing, especially in the 60s in Guangdong.

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"There hadn't been a vehicle in Dingzhai for months, and we all dropped our tools to watch as they approached the work hall. ... 'Hey! Get back to work!' The team leader had caught us shirking, which meant point deductions for sure."(31-32)

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Unknown Words or Phrases - laan fan zyu 

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Unknown Words or Phrases - laan fan zyu 

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"'Morning, laan fan zyu,' Tian chimed in ... Fend and the others had already left, so after a quick breakfast of cold buns ..." (69)

I infer this means Tian is calling him lazy, since "laan" can mean lazy in chinese, so the whole phrase probably means that. Also, he seems late, which makes it seem more likely.

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Unknown Words or Phrases - big-character poster

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Unknown Words or Phrases - big-character poster

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"The poster read, ANNIHILATE ALL THE MONSTERS AND DEMONS COMPLETELY, THOROUGHLY, AND ENTIRELY. 'That was the start of the big-character poster movement,' Li observed." (45)

I think a big-character poster is a large political poster, with big Chinese characters (big-character). This is also supported by the fact that the text on the poster is represented in an all-caps English translation.

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"'We should do the swim, Ming. You and me, we should go to Hong Kong.'" [Li] (199)

"'I've made up my mind already. I'm not staying to be beaten every night.' He opened his mouth to protest, but the words never came. I already knew what he was thinking. Fei was gone... It was over. There was nothing left for Ming here." [Li] (202)

"'Okay,' he [Ming] finally said. 'I'm in.' A tiny flutter of excitement twisted in my stomach, and I momentarily forgot our sorrows. We were going to Hong Kong." (202)

Here, Li and Ming finally agree to try and swim to Hong Kong. Fei's abduction earlier comes into play here, as Ming now had nothing left for him in Longgang.

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"The next week dragged on. Out in the fields, my mouth was full of the bitter taste of sickness. I managed to keep going, knowing Fei would be waiting for me at the end of the week" (193)

"My dear friend Ming,

I shouldn't be writing to you-my husband, Lo, would be very angry with me if he discovered me exchanging letters with a man... I don't want you to worry about me, Ming. I miss the village very much, but I know that there is no point in holding on to the past. You showed me taht. Instead, I will try to build new memories.
Take care of yourself, Ming. I hope with all my heart that you can one day be free.
May your heart be forever true,

Fei

There was no return address. I read the letter once, twice, and then crumpled up the page and flung it into the grass. Fei was gone." (197-198)

Late in the book, Ming's love of Fei is the last strand holding him in Longgang. Her disappearance moves Ming to agree to leave with Li.

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"'So, where are the rest of the villagers?' [Li] 'They eat at home,' Tian said with his mouth full. "I thought the villagers would all eat together. Communal dining in the true spirit of Communism." [Ah-jun] 'That was stopped ages ago,' I muttered into my bowl. 'Surely a village like this is the perfect place for Communism, the commune, to thrive?' Feng said." (41)

The above quote is only one example of the irony of the Communist former Red Guard (from the city) assuming what would be best for villagers, and chanting slogans to "help" the villagers, while the actual people who they are "helping" don't follow the policies out of practicality.

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"'That's beautiful." I didn't fully comprehend the intentions behind the words, but I knew they were true. There was something else. 'It's not about Fei, is it?' ... 'It's about Hong Kong.'" (88)

This is the first time Ming mentions how he adores Hong Kong to Li, a city-slicker Communist who would've reported his disloyal thoughts immediately earlier in the book. Li's character begins to change from the other city boys here.

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"'The only way to stay the true course is to study Mao's teachings and to recite his work daily. I've memorized the whole Red Book, but I still recite passages every day so I can be certain I am thinking with a Communist mind and that my thoughts and actions are in the best interests of the Party.' 'Wah, I can't imagine knowing a whole book,' ... 'It would take me a whole week just to read a page.'" (44)

Feng, a city boy who has been transferred to a small village in order to learn to be a farmer, speaks first. He shows his strong ideology and learned background (being that he's memorized an entire book of Mao quotes). In contrast, Tian can barely read. This contrasts the city-boys (ideological and optimistic) and the locals (practical and less communist), and forewarns the conflict between the two later in the book.

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"Ma is gone. I fought back tears, griping hte handle of the wheelbarrow tighter so her body wouldnt tip out too soon. I was taking her to the river to join the other villagers who had passed." (Pg.1, Prologue)

The author begins in a shocking setting which hooks the reader, with the main character dumping his mother's body in a river. She had starved along with many other villagers. This would be common during the setting of the Great Leap Forward, where millions starved.

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I chose this book (Freedom Swimmer - Wai Chim) because it tells an interesting new perspective on peasant life during the Cultural Revolution, under the Communist Party. In addition, the reviews were very good.