Finding the ‘other’ from within: how the CCP survived the legitimacy crisis after China’s Great Leap Famine

Much of the literature echoes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s official explanation of the Great Leap Famine (1959–1961) to argue that the Party survived the legitimacy crisis posed by the famine by blaming the weather. While several have suggested that the CCP held the local cadres responsible for generating the famine, little evidence had been gathered to show how this was done. This article reconciles the above arguments by asserting that the CCP, by exploiting the urban–rural informational asymmetry, employed a dual propaganda approach that combined an urban explanation that blamed the weather with a more important rural strategy that admitted the famine’s man-made nature but shifted the blame onto local leaders, to direct the responsibility away from the Party centre. By leveraging local government archives in Henan Province’s Nanyang Prefecture, this study analyses how the Party propagated the rural explanation through the Rural Party Rectification Movement (1960–1961) to placate immediate peasantry discontent and reconstruct long-run famine memories. Interviews conducted in 2021 show that the re-engineering of the famine narrative contributed to the peasants’ distrust of local cadres. This perception persisted over time, at least partially affecting the peasants’ willingness to cooperate with local policies in the 1990s.