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A Quantitative Description of the Henan Famine of 1942*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2013

ANTHONY GARNAUT
ANTHONY GARNAUT*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford China Centre, Oxford OX46HP, United Kingdom Email: anthony.garnaut@gmail.com
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Abstract

The Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2013 , pp. 2007 - 2045
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The research for this paper forms part of a collaborative project on modern famines sponsored by the Australian Resarch Council, led by Stephen Wheatcroft of the University of Melbourne. An earlier version was presented to the Department of History, Melbourne University, in October 2009.

References

1 Morgan, Stephen (2009), The Henan Famine, 1942–43: Dearth and death in North-Central China during the World War Two, paper presented at the World Economic History Congress, Utrecht 2009Google Scholar.

2 Mingfang, Xia (1998), ‘1942–1943 nian de Zhongyuan da jihuang’ (The great famine of the Central Plains of 1942–1943), Zongheng 1998 (5): 43–45Google Scholar, 43.

3 The most quoted sources appear in the compilation of contemporary descriptive accounts of the Henan famine by Zhixin, Song (2005), 1942 nian Henan da jihuang (The Great Henan Famine of 1942) (Wuhan: Hunan Renmin)Google Scholar, which includes two passages by Theodore White and several articles published in the Chinese newspapers Da Gong Bao, Shen Bao and Qianfeng Bao.

4 Xia Mingfang cites the memoirs of a German woman who worked with the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s and of a Party official in the Shanxi border region government; the two leading national newspapers Da Gong Bao and Shen Bao; and elsewhere though not in this brief overview Xia Mingfang cites White, Theodore (1978), In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (London: Jonathan Cape)Google Scholar. The Chinese Communist Party report, reprinted in Zhonggong Ji Lu Yu bianqu dangshi gongzuo bangongshi, Zhonggong Henan Shengwei dangshi gongzuo weiyuanhui (1988), Zhonggong Ji Lu Yu bianqu dangshi ziliao xuanbian, di'er ji: wenxian bufen, xiace (Selection of materials on Chinese Communist Party Hebei-Shandong-Henan border region Party history, vol. 2: documentary section, part B) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin). See also Mingfang, Xia (2000), Minguo shiqi ziran zaihai yu xiangcun shehui (Natural disasters and rural society in Republican China) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju)Google Scholar.

5 Xia Mingfang (1998, p. 43) writes: The timing of the famine coincided with the most desperate hour of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance. If the roof leaks, then it will rain. As the battle for survival progressed to an unprecedented level of cruelty, and while class struggle was in effervescence below the surface, an extended extreme drought, in combination with locusts plagues, high winds, hail and other calamities swept across the central and lower reaches of the Yellow River, including the flooded zone. This resulted in a devastating famine, the likes of which had not been seen for decades, that affected a region extending to northern Hubei and northern Anhui in the south, Beijing and Tianjin in the north, the coast to the east and Shanxi in the west. Natural disasters and the calamities of war pressed down on the people in revolving succession, turning a battle field into a living hell on earth.

6 The Nationalist survey of the devastation caused by the famine, held in the archives of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, is cited in an online article by ‘zhz’ titled ‘1942 nian Henan dahanzai de zhenshi jizai’ (Veritable accounts of the great Henan drought of 1942) at http://www.danganj.net/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=20981&page=1&authorid=54 [accessed 31 January 2013]. For further eyewitness and other sources on the famine, see note 15 below.

7 The main sources of economic data used here is Daofu, Xu, ed. (1983), Zhongguo jindai nongye shengchan ji maoyi tongji ziliao (Statistical Materials on Early Modern Agricultural Production and Trade) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin)Google Scholar. This is supplemented by the collection of statistical materials of the Statistical Bureau of the Nationalist Government Planning Office recently published by Zhongguo di'er lishi dang'anguan (1995), Zhonghua minguo shi dang'an ziliao huibian, di wu ji: caizheng jingji, ba (Archival materials in Chinese Republican history, vol. 5: finance and economics, part 8) (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji), in particularly the 1944 issue of Quanguo tongji zongbaogao (National Comprehensive Statistical Report), and various issues of Tongji yuebao (Statistical Monthly). For sources of climate and population data, see the relevant sections below.

8 A simple calculation of excess mortality in Henan during 1959 and 1960, using official mortality data, produces a mortality figure of 4–6 per cent or 2–3 million, depending on what is used as the baseline for normal mortality levels. Cao Shuji's estimated excess mortality in Henan at 3.0 millions or 6.1 per cent of the 1958 population, based on a different set of population data obtained from county-level gazetteers. See Shuji, Cao 曹 树 基 (2005), ‘1959–1961 nian Zhongguo renkou siwang ji qi chengyin’ (Chinese mortality in the years 1959–1961 and its causes), Zhongguo renkou kexue, 2005 (1): 14–28Google Scholar.

9 Yang Jisheng opens his two-volume work on the Great Leap famine with a chapter on Henan, where he discusses at length the Chinese Communist Party report on the famine in Xinyang prefecture that figured prominently in high-level Party discussions in late 1960 on the causes of the famine. See Jisheng, Yang (2008) Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai dajihuang jishi (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu)Google Scholar.

10 See, for example, Domenach, Jean-Luc, (1995), The origins of the great leap forward: the case of one Chinese province, trans. A. M. Berrett (Boulder: Westview Press)Google Scholar, and Yang Jisheng (2008), Chapter 1.

11 For a classic account of the Bengal famine of 1943, see Sen, Amartya (1981), Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press)Google Scholar. Some of Sen's central claims about the Bengal famine have been brought into question recently by Gráda, Cormac Ó (2009), Famine: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press)Google Scholar, Chapter 6.

12 Bose, Sugata (1990) ‘Starvation amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942–45,’ Modern Asian Studies 24 (4): 699–727CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 On the background to Zhang Gaofeng's report, see Song Zhixin (2005).

14 White describes the effect that Zhang Gaofeng's article had on the foreign journalists based in Chongqing in Theodore White and Jacoby, Annalee (1946), Thunder out of China (New York: William Sloane Associates), p. 159Google Scholar.

15 Amongst the many sources on the Henan famine are articles in both local and national newspapers, reflections on the famine published in Henan cultural history journals (Ch. wenshi ziliao) and, most importantly, official surveys of the devastation caused by the famine conducted by the Nationalist government. Some of the more influential newspaper articles and memoirs have been anthologized by Song Zhixin (2005). Xinliu, Su (2004), Minguo shiqi Henan shuihan zaihai yu xiangcun shehui (Flood, drought and rural societ in Henan during the Republican period) (Zhengzhou: Huanghe shuili)Google Scholar, includes an extensive bibliography of material relating to the famine found in the Second National Archives in Nanjing, in the Shanghai archives and in local archives in Henan.

16 Zhang Gaofeng, ‘A factual account of the Henan disaster’, Song Zhixin (2005), p. 45.

17 Central Bureau of Meteorology (1981), Zhongguo jin wubai nian hanlao fenbu tuji (Maps of the distribution of dry and wet conditions over the past 500 years) (Beijing: Ditu chubanshe)Google Scholar.

18 The data was published by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center of the American Department of Energy in 1997, available at http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp039/ndp039.html [accessed 31 January 2013]. Another important source of meteorological data for the war-time period is the 1944 edition of the National Comprehensive Statistical Report which includes meteorological data from 57 stations, none of which are in Henan. See Zhongguo di'er lishi dang'anguan (1995).

19 The geographic administrative unit for indices are compiled as the Qing-dynasty prefecture (fu), which typically contained a dozen counties, and correspond to the early People's Republic of China special district (zhuanqu) or the contemporary city (shi). The data was compiled for the territorial area claimed by the Republic, and so includes data on Taiwan but not on any prefectures in Mongolia.

20 The verbal descriptions of annual agricultural conditions were painstakingly collected from local gazetteers and other semi-official sources in a national project carried out by the Bureau of Meteorology in the 1970s. Some of the original data used to compile the index was published separately—the National Library of China holds publications for Sichuan, Guangxi and a combine volume for North and Northeast China. The series has been continued past 1949, but for the Republic period it is purportedly based on instrumental records of summer rainfall, and so the data for this later period are not directly comparable with the earlier period. The explanatory notes in Central Bureau of Meteorology (1981) elaborate on further principles behind the selection of grades: in cases where both flood and drought damage were evident, precedent was given to the dominant trend shown in the majority of counties; flood-damage brought by rivers with their catchment outsidethe prefecture were discounted; for most locations a bumper harvest was given grade 3 except in the drought-prone Northwest, were an ideal harvest corresponds to grade 2 denoting wetter than average conditions. The Explanatory Notes also state that an attempt was made to produce a normal distribution of grades overall (without insisting on such a distribution for each of the individual stations), such that extreme wet conditions (grade 1) and extreme dry conditions (grade 5) each represented about one eighth of the annual results, with a quarter of the results falling within each of the intermediary grades. In fact the compilers were slightly more lenient in attributing extreme conditions and more generous in allocating bumper conditions; of the nearly 38,000 index data points of the 120 prefectures, approximately 10 per cent were given an extreme grade of 1 or 5, slightly over a third were given the median grade 3, and slightly less than a quarter were given the remaining grades 2 or 4:

21 This can be done with the help of the province-level compilations of information on weather conditions published by the Bureau of Meteorology, on which the wetness and dryness indices were based, mentioned in note 18 above.

22 Su Liumin (2004), p. 26.

23 The highest monthly mean temperatures for the entire period covered by the data set were recorded in Beijing and Ji'nan in June 1942.

24 The Japanese authorities also conducted agricultural surveys for the areas under their control, though these are not available to this author.

25 Eastman, Lloyd (1984), Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (Stanford: Stanford Univerity Press), p. 68Google Scholar.

26 Bose (1990, p. 702) writes: The assertion by Lloyd Eastman that the spring and summer harvests of 1942 in Honan were 25% below normal is not supported by available statistics and could be open to question. If the official crop data of the National Agricultural Research Bureau are to be believed, there was little, if any, shortfall in aggregate crop production, especially wheat, in 1942.

27 Xu Daofu (1983), Table 4.

28 See Song Zhixin (2005), p. 50. Theodore White in his memoir (White 1978, p. 32) provides data from his own survey of the grain tax paid by a single farmer in one of the counties that he visited, which amounted to 13 pounds per mu of grain, in a year when the total harvest was 15 pounds per mu yield. Assuming the grain levy was fixed, this would amount to a levy of around 8 per cent of total production in a normal year, or several times that of the official grain tax receipts booked by the central government.

29 Song Zhixin (2005), p. 47.

30 Nationalist Bureau of Statistics (1944), Quanguo tongji zongbaogao, Table 76.

31 Ibid., Table 77.

32 See Young, Arthur (1965), China's Wartime Finance and Inflation 1937–1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), pp. 24–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Nationalist Bureau of Statistics (1944), Tables 78, 105, 107.

34 The grain allocation is given in dollars; I have assumed that this is the cash value given to the total sum of grain raised through levies, procurements and borrowings (Nationalist Bureau of Statistics 1944, Tables 106 to 108).

35 Young (1965), pp. 348, 351.

36 Xu Daofu (1983).

37 I have assumed the population density per unit sown area remained constant at the level of the 1936 census. This appears a more reliable assumption than dividing the reported grain production data by the annual population figures reported by Nationalist government, which are based on household population registers and according to one report underestimates the actual population tally by an average of 20 per cent; the main flaw in my method is that it makes no allowance for population change due to internal migration.

38 Lippit, Victor (1974), Land reform and economic development in China (White plains, New York: International Arts and Sciences Press)Google Scholar, Chapter 2.

39 The data for the wartime period assumes that the population density per unit sown area in the 72 counties that were nominally under Nationalist control (the territory reflected in the grain production data) was the same as that of the province as a whole.

40 Huang, Philip (1985), The peasant economy and social change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 299Google Scholar.

41 Song Zhixin (2005), p. 47.

42 The standard collection of Nationalist price data does not cover Henan during the war years.

43 Theodore White, ‘Until the harvest is reaped,’ Time Magazine, 22 March 1943 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,796097–2,00.htm [accessed 31 January 2013]).

44 American Department of State 893.48/3053, Division of Oriental Affair Correspondence November 10 1942.

45 See Shuji, Cao, (2002), Zhongguo renkou shi, di liu juan 中 国 人 口 史, 第 六 卷 (Population history of China, volume six) (Shanghai: Fudan University Press)Google Scholar. See also note 5 above.

46 See, for example, Xizhe, Peng (1987), ‘Demographic consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's provinces’, Population and Development Review 13 (4): 639–670Google Scholar.

47 Henan sheng renkou pucha bangongshi (Office of the Henan province population census) (1985) Henan sheng di 3 ci renkou pucha ziliao huibian, (Collection of materials on the 3rd population census, Henan province) (Zhengzhou: Henan sheng renkou pucha bangongshi).

48 For a discussion of this method of measuring famine impact from age cohort data, see Feeney, Griffith & Kiyoshi, Hamano (1990), ‘Rice price fluctuations and fertility in late Tokugawa Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies 16 (1): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A harvest failure in 1942 would result in famine conditions peaking in the spring of 1943, and fertility reaching its lowest level ten months later. This is why cohort loss for those born in 1943–1944 is greater than that of those born in 1942–1943.

49 Song Zhixin (2005), p. 44.

50 The provincial tabulations of the 1982 fertility survey in Coale, Ansley and Chensheng, Li (1987), Basic data on fertility in the provinces of China, 1940–82 (Honolulu: East-West Population Institute), pp. 286–291Google Scholar, show that fertility levels in rural Henan were significantly lower in each of the calendar years 1959–1961 than in 1943–1944, whilst in urban areas the opposite was the case.

51 The large-scale rural-to-urban migration that took place between the 1982 and 2000 censuses compromises the data for urban areas, but outward migration from rural areas only affects the cohort loss measure where the proportion of migrants born in the famine birth cohorts is markedly different to the proportion born during the reference years.

52 Sen (1981), p. 56; Ó Gráda (2009), p. 3.

53 Zhang Gaofeng 2005.

54 White and Jacoby 1946, p. 176;

55 See the reconsideration of Sen's thesis by Cormac Ó Gráda (2010), ‘“Sufficiency And Sufficiency And Sufficiency”: Revisiting the Bengal Famine of 1943–44.’ Paper presented at the International Workshop on Modern Famines, Melbourne 2010.

56 A considerable number of reports on the famine by the Nationalist government and various non-government agencies involved in famine relief operations are held at the Number Two Historical Archives in Nanjing, and have been catalogued by Su Liumin (2004). County-level population data for 1935 and 1946 is included in Henan Sheng Tongji Xuehui (1986–1987), Minguo shiqi Henan Sheng tongji ziliao (Henan provincial statistical materials of the Republican period) (Zhengzhou: Henan Sheng tongji ju); fertility rates in Henan for the period of the famine can be found in Coale (1987).