Famine Recovery: The Origins of Conflicts over Temporary Labour

In 1958, the PRC government launched the Great Leap Forward, aiming to industrialize China with unprecedented speed. The subsequent two years saw a massive expansion of the urban population and the workforce in the state-owned and collective industries. Despite the establishment of a nationwide household registration system, between 1957 and 1960 the population of China's cities and towns increased by over 30 million, and industrial enterprises continued to recruit labour power from the countryside to fulfil the ambitious targets of the Great Leap.14 This trend meant that a smaller number of agrarian producers had to feed a much larger urban population, even as government mismanagement and adverse weather conditions began to put the harvests under pressure.

As the Great Leap Famine began to bite in 1959, the countryside bore the brunt of the pain. State control of grain supplies under the "unified purchase and sale" (tonggou tongxiao) system meant that the authorities could continue to appropriate as much grain as they saw fit, even under starvation conditions. The central government chose to use this power to protect urban grain consumers at the expense of rural farmers. Remarkably, net grain procurement as a proportion of the harvest actually increased after 1956, rising from 14.9 percent to 28 percent in 1959, followed by a decrease to a still elevated 21.5 percent in 1960, at the peak of the rural famine.15 This supposedly surplus grain was used to feed the expanding urban population and rural labour power outside of agriculture, and some of it was also exported.

Even this increased procurement could only protect the cities for so long. In the winter of 1960, urban grain stocks began to run low, including in key cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Unwilling to countenance the prospect of a rural famine reaching the major urban centres, the government had little choice but to reverse many of the central policies of the Great Leap. In order to reduce the pressure on the supply system, programmes were launched to reduce the number of people entitled to welfare; that is, the urban population in general and the industrial workforce in particular.16