In the history of famine in China, fleeing the famine (逃荒, taohuang) was the poor’s last means of saving themselves once every other road to survival was cut off. When there was nothing left to eat at home, people went to stay with relatives and friends, or followed the rivers, the post roads, and the railways toward wherever grain was to be had; they hired out their labor, begged, pawned and sold their clothing, even trekked hundreds of miles with their whole families. Whether in the Yellow River floods and droughts of the Ming and Qing dynasties or the north China famines of the Republican era, local society, however cold, still acknowledged one plain piece of common sense: people must be allowed to try to stay alive.
In 1942, the hardest year of the war against Japan, Henan suffered a great drought and a severe famine broke out. Masses of famine victims streamed outward along the Longhai and Pinghan railway lines. Even under the conditions of war, broken transport, and a straitened government treasury, the starving who left the disaster zone in search of food were still treated as people to be relieved and evacuated, not as a “social problem” to be stamped out. Chiang Kai-shek ordered that the railways were not to demand tickets from Henan’s famine refugees.
No papers, no registration; no registration, no grain
This changed after the CCP built its interlocking system of state monopoly purchase and marketing of grain (統購統銷), household registration, and rationed urban grain supply. In 1953 the Government Administration Council issued its Directive on Dissuading Peasants From Blindly Flowing Into the Cities; that same year, the planned purchase and planned supply of grain began tying urban residents’ rations to household registration and grain-purchase certificates. Between 1956 and 1957, the party center and the State Council issued a further string of documents restricting peasants from entering the cities. In January 1958, the Household Registration Regulations of the People’s Republic of China wrote it into law: for a peasant to move from the countryside to a city, he needed an employment certificate from a city labor department, a school admission certificate, or a permission-to-move certificate from the city’s household registration authorities before he could even file to leave his village. In other words, a peasant could not simply go to the city to look for a living.
People were not allowed to move their registration, and without registration there was no grain. Urban grain was supplied on the state plan and could not be freely bought; a person without a city household registration (戶口, hukou) and migration papers usually could not obtain rations at all. So once a peasant left the commune, even if he managed to reach a city, a mining district, or a railway junction, he could not necessarily trade his labor for food. The state locked identity, residence rights, employment, and grain supply into a single chain: the peasant was bound to the countryside and shut out of the cities’ rations.
Three million on the roads, and the state’s answer
The Great Leap Forward and the people’s communes pushed this system to its cruelest hour. After the spring famine of 1959 set in, the outflow of peasants swelled rapidly. According to incomplete local statistics cited in central documents of the time, roughly 3 million peasants had left their homes in Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, Liaoning, Jilin, Anhui, Zhejiang, Hubei, Hunan, and other provinces. These were not the idle drifters of the official label “blind flow” (盲流, mangliu); most had set out, carrying their old and leading their young, because the communal canteens had stopped cooking, rations had run short, and there was nothing left at home to eat. A 1961 self-criticism by Fengyang county cadres admitted that some peasants fled because “the canteens’ fires went out and there was no food,” and asked: “Who is willing to leave home? They fled only because there was no other way.”
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Yet faced with this tide of people trying to live, the regime’s first concern was not how to keep the starving alive. It was how to keep them out of the cities, the stations, and the transport lines; how to keep the scale of the famine from being seen by the outside world; and above all, how to keep the myth of the people’s communes and the Great Leap Forward from collapsing in a flood of refugees. On Feb. 4, 1959, the CCP Central Committee issued its Directive on Stopping the Flow of Rural Labor; on March 11, the Central Committee and the State Council followed with an Emergency Notice on Stopping the Blind Outflow of Rural Labor. The documents ordered that no government office, enterprise, or public institution was to hire peasants who had flowed into the cities; those already hired who did not meet the requirements were, as a rule, to be “mobilized” to return home. They required officials to talk people back at the main transport arteries in regions where the outflow was severe, and to set up improvised agencies to take in peasants who had entered the cities and mining districts without finding work, “hold and persuade” them, and repatriate them to their home villages as quickly as possible. And they repeated, over and over: no migration papers, no registration; no registration, no grain.
A starving peasant could not get enough food at home; fleeing to the city, he could not register, could not buy grain, could not take a job; in the end he was to be rounded up and sent back to the very place where he had been starving. “Repatriation to the place of origin” meant returning people to villages where the rations had long since run out and the communal canteens had long since had no rice.
By 1960 the outflow had grown, and the controls escalated with it. Railway stations, docks, highways, and ferry crossings became the front line for intercepting the starving. In some places the militia set up checkpoints, sealed off village exits, and combed the crossings to stop peasants from leaving. To get through, the starving took to side paths and night marches, even clinging to freight cars. In 1961 the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security went further, proposing to restrict the free movement of the population with the railways as the hub: strict checks of tickets and grain coupons to stop ticketless riding and train-hopping, with armed police reinforcements and, when necessary, the help of garrison troops. The CCP was using the machinery of the state to wall off the roads of escape.
Custody stations: one more gate of death
The “custody and repatriation” (收容遣送) of those years was not yet the formal nationwide regulation created in 1982 by the Measures for the Custody and Repatriation of Urban Vagrants and Beggars. But in 1960 and 1961, custody-and-repatriation stations, receiving stations, and transfer stations spread rapidly through the cities to take in, transfer, and send back the outflowing population. A Work Plan for Urban Custody and Repatriation Stations of January 1961 even laid out a three-tier network of the three kinds of stations. In Jiangsu alone, 11 stations handled the “floating population” more than 520,000 times between 1960 and January 1961, taking people into custody in more than 240,000 of those cases. Behind the figures were countless starving peasants processed as a “population flow problem.”
Conditions in the stations were far from the “temporary food and lodging” promised in official documents. People who passed through them described the Jiujiang station as a broken-down temple: inmates locked in, no bed boards, sleeping on damp earth, a waste bucket in the corner. The Nanchang station was a leaking thatched shed, short of eating utensils and foul with filth. Other materials show grave abuses at the Zhengzhou repatriation station in 1960: a Ministry of Internal Affairs document recorded lawlessness among large numbers of the staff and stated that from January to September of that year, 246 people were tortured to death there, five of them beaten to death outright. For people already at the edge of starvation and disease, the custody station was no relief post. It was one more gate of death.
In Henan’s Xinyang region, once the Great Famine there came to light, the local authorities immediately treated the “outflow of persons” as a political problem to be eliminated. According to compilations of the historical record, the Xinyang prefectural committee demanded that the outflow be “wiped out within a set deadline.” Village cadres and militia blocked the crossroads and ferry landings; offices and factories in the towns were forbidden to take in anyone from the countryside; detention centers and jails were set up. Those who fled had their belongings confiscated and were beaten, arrested, and in some cases starved to death in custody. “Eliminating the outflow” became a political target at the grassroots.
The moment the starving appeared at a railway station, on a city street, or on a highway in another province, they “spoiled” the propaganda of the Great Leap harvest, the superiority of the people’s communes, and the happiness of socialist life. So the starving were named the “blind flow”; fleeing famine was described as “not settling down to agricultural production”; trying to survive was suspected of disrupting order; and appealing to the outside world for help could be politicized into “counter-revolution.”
At a 1961 meeting to criticize the former county party secretary, Wang Jialai, a peasant of Fengyang county in Anhui, said something that laid the system’s cruelty bare: “Our brigade had more than 5,000 people. Now it has only 3,200. Even when the Japanese devils came, we did not die in such numbers. Back then we could still run. In 1960 there was nowhere we could run. My family was six; four of them died…” In wartime, the common people could still flee. In peacetime, under a regime that claimed to represent the peasants, they were pinned in place to starve by household registration, grain coupons, militia checkpoints, custody stations, and repatriation.
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