Serious Callers Only

The largest famine in human history was a timetable of a government improving on nature, and every line of it was announced as progress. 1958, January: Mao issues eight rules for farming. Two of them come from the Soviet biologist Lysenko, who taught that plants of one species do not compete, so seedlings can be sown ten times closer. Nobody in the room has farmed. 1958, spring: The Four Pests campaign. Every sparrow in China is drummed out of the sky, close to two billion birds, and the insects that fed their chicks are left alone with the wheat. 1958, spring: Deep ploughing is ordered. A metre down, in places three. A thousand years of topsoil is buried under subsoil that will not grow a weed. 1958, summer: Close planting. Seedlings packed so tight the lower leaves rot in the dark, and the fields are ventilated with electric fans and lit at night with lamps. 1958, August: Half a billion peasants are moved into communes. The private plot, the family pig and the family goat are taken into common ownership, and the pigs start dying first. 1958, autumn: Backyard furnaces. Ninety million peasants are pulled off the fields at harvest to melt their pots and tools into worthless iron, and the forests come down to fire them. 1958, winter: With the real harvest rotting unpicked in the fields, the provinces report the biggest crop in history to Beijing, 375 million tonnes, nearly double the truth. 1959: The grain quota is set on the fiction. The state takes its share of a harvest that does not exist, and ships 4 million tonnes abroad to pay for machinery. 1959, summer: The locusts arrive, then the borers, on fields with no sparrows. The counties that lost the most birds lose the most grain. 1959, July: Marshal Peng Dehuai tells Mao the countryside is starving. He is purged, and every official in China learns what honesty costs. 1960: The pig herd has halved. The oxen are eaten. In Anhui and Sichuan whole villages have nobody left strong enough to bury the dead. 1960: Beijing quietly buys a quarter of a million sparrows from Moscow, in crates, in hard currency. 1962, January: Liu Shaoqi stands up in front of seven thousand officials and calls the disaster three parts nature and seven parts man. 1962: The private plots are handed back. The family pig returns. The famine ends within the year. Three years of ploughing, planting, slaughtering and drumming against nature, and the dead run from fifteen million at the lowest count to forty-five million at the highest, in a country at peace, with a generation behind them never born. Every animal on that timeline was removed as a cost. The sparrow, the pig, the goat, the ox. The grain was the plan, and the grain was never enough. The famine ended on the day a family was allowed to keep a pig again.