When Food Became Scarce

When Food Became Scarce is about the Great Leap Famine of 1958-61. Yixin Chen adopts a grassroots level analysis to explore an existential question concerning hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants: why did some peasants perish while others from the same villages facing the same collective problems of food scarcity survive?

Viewing the famine as a persistent ordeal, Chen identifies environment and lineage as two pivotal factors that influenced the rural populace's destiny. When food quotas under the Maoist communal dining system plummeted below subsistence or came to a halt, most individual villagers in the mountainous regions of southern China turned to their environment for alternative sustenance, ensuring their survival. More remarkably, across the nation, more peasants united in self-preservation strategies, concealing grains to elude excessive state requisitions, orchestrating food and crop riots, and collectively combating desperation. Given that the majority of Chinese villages were historically established on the foundation of consanguine relationships, creating an obligation among villagers to support one another due to shared ancestry, lineage emerged as a microlevel social mechanism that activated diverse forms of collective resistance. In villages where peasants effectively upheld their lineage organizations and adopted self-protective measures, their survival rates exceeded those of villages where the enforcement of Maoist Great Leap initiatives disrupted the lineage structure, leaving the communities more vulnerable. When Food Became Scare reorients the famine narrative, unpacking its intricacies from the perspective of the survival side.

Yixin Chen is Associate Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina Wilmington.

In addition to a comprehensive introduction that provides a concise overview of existing scholarship and details the book's aim and content, When Food Became Scarce successfully provides a grassroots perspective to reconstruct the misery of the famine the campaign caused.... This is an incredibly useful book for anyone teaching the history of modern China.

Felix Wemheuer, University of Cologne:

Yixin Chen explains why lineage played an important role in Chinese villages to understand how peasants could survive the Great Leap Forward Famine. His book is a great contribution to understand resistance and survival strategies of peasantry in Maoist China.

Jeremy Brown, Simon Fraser University:

This is the book about the Great Leap Famine that scholars of the history of the People's Republic of China have been waiting for. Previous books and articles about the famine have clearly established the severity of the famine and have convincingly placed blame on various aspects of China's socialist system. But until now, none have adequately explained how and why the famine occurred in different ways in different places.