198 Poverty and Hunger
while the death rate climbed to 25 per 1000, leading to a decline in China’s popu-
lation for one year. (See Figure 8.5.)^27
The drop was so steep that it markedly affected the number of people added
to world population. (See Figure 8.6.) Between 1950 and 1957, that number was
increasing steadily, climbing from 39 million to 57 million. It then began to drop,
reaching a low of 41 million in 1960. As China recovered from the famine, the
annual addition climbed sharply to 70 million in 1962, recovering the trend that
had existed before the famine.^28
The Great Famine of 1959–1961 left an indelible imprint on China’s national
psyche. John Bermingham, president of the Colorado Population Coalition,
observes that ‘just as an American generation was seared by the Great Depression
and a German generation by runaway inflation, the Chinese have had a generation
seared by famine’. These analogies help us understand the effect of the Chinese
famine, but the latter was more traumatic simply because it was life-threatening
for such a vast number of people.^29
Like many governments, China was slow to recognize the population threat.
Socialist ideology made it easy to dismiss the problem. As demographer Michael
Teitelbaum notes, ‘For Marx, the fact that people were producers as well as con-
sumers meant that the resource limits emphasized by the classical economists could
arise under capitalism, but not under socialism.’^30
A quarter-century after the communist takeover in 1949, the government
began to recognize population growth as a matter of concern. This occurred as part
of the post-Mao reassessment in which projections of China’s population growth
were made. Much to the dismay of officials, based on an assumption of two chil-
dren per couple, China could expect to add the better part of 1 billion people,
adding the equivalent of an India to its existing population.^31
Source: See endnote 28.
Figure 8.6 Annual addition to world population, 1950–1994