In Anhui, about 10 million peasants died between 1959-1961. In the village I was born, over a hundred died of hunger. It was a village of about 300 people, about 1/3 of the population died out. The people died are mostly elderly and children, the youth (20-40yrs) were organized into some "professional groups" and had better access to food. Our village was not the worst, but about the average. There was a village, about 1 kilometers away, about 60 people in size. Everybody died. So the village no longer exists today.
Anhui has about 45 million people at that time, almost nobody died in the city (~10-15 million in population). For the rest 30-35 million people living in the countryside, about 1/3 died during the period. People has done statistics on this, and it was about 9 million people in total. This number of 9 million is not that far from my estimate.
After a person died, he/she was buried by his/her fellow villages. One of my uncles was in charge of this, together with another person in the same village. For every dead person they buried, he was paid 0.5 kilogram of rice. Bury a dead body was a very demanding task to him, as his body was weak as well, and a big hole had to be dug on the ground. Every village has traditional bury ground. Most of the graves can be identified for each dead person. Chinese, like other races, have buried their billions of ancestors this way. There is no mass graves to be identified. However, the living relatives, like me, can point you to the individual graves of their dead relatives.
The guy who wrote this article has no knowledge of country side. He is blind by his personal believes. He should read some of the literatures here, written by serious investigators in the field.
|