The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959-1961∗

This paper studies the causes of the largest famine in history, where approximately 30 million individuals died in rural China. We are motivated by the observation that average rural food retention during the famine seems too high to generate a famine without rural inequality in food availability. We document two novel facts. First, there is significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions. Second, these rural mortality rates are positively correlated with per capita food production, a surprising pattern that is unique to the famine years. This suggests that government redistributive policy contributed to the spatial variation in famine. To explain these results, we document that the historical grain procurement policy was inflexible – i.e., Chinese central planners had difficulty aggregating and responding to new information. We then argue that the inflexibility of the grain procurement policy together with the drop in production in 1959 can explain the observed variation in famine severity across rural areas.