In one of the worst atrocities of the communist period, a million people died of starvation between October 1959 and April 1960 in 15 counties in southern Henan , because their food was taken by the local government and they were forcibly prevented from escaping.
The 'Xinyang incident' is named after the Xinyang district in which it occurred; it is one of the earliest cases of mass starvation during the Great Leap Forward (1959-1961), during which 35-40 million died. As president, Liu Shaoqi blamed the deaths 30 per cent on nature and 70 per cent on man.
Today the government considers the Great Leap Forward a major economic disaster and blames it on the cult of personality of Mao Zedong . But it does not allow accounts of the famine to be published, because it is too horrific.
Some news is leaking out, though. This year biographies have appeared of Liu Jianxun , whom Mao appointed as Communist Party chief of Henan in June 1961 to deal with the aftermath of the famine. One of them is by his son Liu Liqiang , who described his father having three favourite books after his posting to Zhengzhou , capital of Henan. One was a pre-1949 volume which described disasters in ancient China, including epidemics, starvation and cannibalism. The young man read the book in disbelief and asked his father if the accounts were true.
'He had a very grave expression; he did not speak but nodded his head.' During his early days in Zhengzhou, his father could not sleep because of anxiety, went to a pavilion in a nearby park and sat there until the early morning. The young man did not understand what had happened until he joined the People's Liberation Army in 1968, at the age of 17, and started to repair aircraft. One of his colleagues was a native of Xinyang.
'In the beginning, he did not talk to me very much, because my father was a leading cadre of Henan. Later we became friendly and he told me the meaning of the Xinyang Incident and how many people in his village had starved to death. He did not dare to speak of this to other people. Initially, I did not believe it. I felt completely shaken.'