China's Forgotten War: The Henan Famine

Описание: Wang Yanchun was a teenager who witnessed the disastrous Henan Famine first hand. His family sold their home to survive. They ate bark and leaves, and Wang even saw desperate parents selling their children to get food:

“If a man wanted a bride, if he could offer some rice or noodles to the family, the parents would give their daughter to him.“

Two to three million civilians died in the Henan famine – a disaster that was in some ways manmade, a consequence of war and military decisions as much as drought and crop failure.

By mid 1938 the Japanese advance through China seemed unstoppable – the Imperial army advanced through China’s flat agricultural province of Henan towards the Nationalist military HQ at Wuhan. Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek determined on a desperate tactic to stem the Japanese advance: he would deliberately smash the dykes that held back the giant Yellow River and flood the land.

Historian Liu Hai Yong records that Chiang agonised long and hard over this decision. He explains what happened next: “The Japanese had cavalry, soldiers, tanks and artillery – all of which were caught in the flood. Hundreds died on the spot. The ones who were trapped in the water were captured by the National Army.” Those who witnessed these apocalyptic events were permanently marked by what they saw. One Chinese officer involved in breaking the dykes wrote in his diary that the river looked like ten thousand galloping horses. He also noted that the sight made his heart ache. For, though it worked as a military tactic in the short run, the Yellow River was now rampaging across millions of square kilometres in three Chinese provinces – Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu.

The cost for the ordinary people who were living there was appalling. 800,000 died in the floods or soon after from starvation and disease. The Henan famine of 1942-3 was in part the result of the damage the floods had caused – compounded by drought, and the decision to requisition what grain there was for the army. More than four and a half million people, fleeing the results of the floods and warfare, became refugees in their own country.

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