Section: Famine Culture: Corpses Eaten, Children Murdered

Generally, it seems that children and, to a lesser degree, women had the highest risk of falling victim to cannibalism. During a severe famine in 1647, “the strong killed hundreds of the young and weak” in order to eat or sell their flesh, notes the historian Key Ray Chong.27 That the “weak” were kidnapped and eaten in times of food scarcity is also mentioned in several of the official histories.28 Reports of the better documented large famines in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries indicate that a majority of those killed to be eaten were children, though kidnapped women and occasionally men were also among the victims.29 During the Great Leap famine, one police officer wrote: “After investigation, we have found that reports of humans eating corpses, as well as killing and consuming children, are all true.”30

Such acts were criminal, but it seems that the authorities often turned a blind eye when they took place in times of food scarcity. While the official histories never explicitly address the legality of eating or selling human flesh, they do not mention punishments for such acts occurring during times of hunger, with two halfhearted exceptions in the early thirteenth century. In the year 1223, those who had eaten human flesh during a severe famine were arrested; whether they were formally accused or convicted, is not said. About the same time, dismembering and cooking a man was pronounced “a crime against nature,” but punished with a fine only.31 No punishments for the sale of human flesh or of people destined for consumption are ever mentioned. Describing a famine in 1611, the Mingshi, the official history book later compiled about the era, writes apologetically: “People are selling their daughters and sons, and eating their wives and children. When driven towards dangers, what choices do they have?”32

The biologist and author Bill Schutt comments that the reactions of Chinese governments to famine cannibalism “varied from turning a blind eye to something close to official sanction.”33 Indeed, during another famine that occurred about ten years later, the army even officially took over the provisioning of the population with human flesh in several districts: “The troops of Yanfang and Yunqing openly butchered and sold people in a market where one jin of flesh could be exchanged for one liang of silver.”34 Army leaders also repeatedly relied on human flesh to feed their troops, as we will see later.

The ratio given in the previous quote allows comparing the prices charged during that famine with contemporary meat prices. Today silver can buy thirty-nine times its own mass (or weight) in beef,35 while during the mentioned famine it could buy sixteen times its own mass in human flesh.36 Assuming that silver is a reasonable baseline, human flesh was more expensive, but not as pricey as one might think.

Eyewitness accounts from the “Incredible Famine” indicate that, as in earlier famines, human flesh appeared on the markets, with the police seemingly doing little to stop or investigate such practices. Liu Xing writes that he saw with his “own eyes” not only how human flesh was eaten, but also how it was sold “at the market.” While not openly labeled as such, its sale was an open secret, and buyers sometimes found human fingernails in the meat they had purchased.37

The already mentioned philanthropic booklet reproduced a letter written by a man from one of the famine provinces who had seen “a butcher’s gate that displayed different kinds of human meat.” Next to the meat, he spotted “a young woman . . . about to be cooked.” Apparently not believing that the police would intervene in time, he instead “rushed home to get money with which to redeem her,” but when he returned, she had already been butchered.38 Such accounts were not exceptional: “The claim that human flesh was sold in shops and markets during the disaster appears in many famine texts” as well as in newspaper reports published during the famine.39

In 1912, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty (which had ruled since 1644) was forced to abdicate and China became a republic. But the times of hunger were not yet over. Several famines in the 1930s and 1940s led once again to cannibalism and the sale of human flesh not only in parts of the Republic of China,40 but apparently also in Hong Kong and Macau, which were European colonies at that time. During the last years of World War II, Macau was overrun with refugees and food became quite scare. Meat was available in the local markets only from time to time, and while it was generally labeled as “pork,” much of it was “suspected to be of human origin,” as city dwellers subsequently remembered. A Portuguese woman later recalled how shocked she was when, during her visit to a market, she spotted, “in the bottom of a split-bamboo basket, the deboned face of a Chinese child,” discreetly offered for sale “much like a pig face in any local wet market.”41

The deadliest famine of all times (likely not only in Chinese, but in world history) devastated large parts of the country in 1959–1961 in the wake of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” Estimates for its death toll range from twenty to forty million, considerably higher than even for the “Incredible Famine.”42

In Anhui, an eastern province which was hit particularly hard, an official report compiled in 1961 “identified nearly thirteen hundred” cases of cannibalism which had taken place in 1959 and 1960. A small percentage of these cases—thirty-six in all—“involved selling human flesh for profit,” while in most cases the flesh was eaten by those who had killed a person or dismembered a corpse. If human flesh was sold, it was commonly labeled as pork. In one case, “a fifty-seven-year-old peasant killed a thirteen-year-old boy named Lianchen. After cooking and eating part of the boy’s flesh, the man sold the remainder in the village as pork.” In another case, a worker “dug up a corpse, ate part of it, and sold a kilo as pork.”43 The sale of human flesh is also documented in other provinces, such as Gansu in the northwest of the country. In 1961, a peasant bought a large piece of meat at a railway station, which turned out to be “from a human head, with a nose and ears” still attached.44

According to Jasper Becker, who in the 1990s collected oral accounts of the famine period, the two mentioned cases from Anhui might have been fairly typical. He found few reports of adults killed for meat, but many of murdered children. Desperate parents killed one or more of their children, subsequently either eating them themselves or exchanging them with other families in the ancient practice that has already been described. In other cases, children were kidnapped and butchered. While adults were rarely kidnapped or killed, the corpses of those who had starved or died a natural death were often partially or wholly consumed.45

Becker too found various reports and witnesses stating that human flesh was not only eaten, but also sold. Officials interviewed by him confirmed that cannibalism “was nothing exceptional” and had occurred “in every county and most villages” in some regions.46 He also spoke with several people who “frankly admitted” having eaten human flesh during the famine. He observes that, “because there’s not such a specific moral or religious taboo about this, they don’t really feel particularly ashamed of it.”47