ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way the Tianjin city authorities used propaganda to manage popular sentiments and thereby handle the Great Leap Forward dearth and famine. As argued in the chapter, the propaganda used three major frames. First, the shortages were explained as the result of people and work units acting selfishly against the common good and policy. Second, propaganda developed a frame called “relative shortages”, which was an attempt to explain shortages as a positive sign of growing demand in the economy, and therefore development. Third, natural disasters were used to explain the dearth only in the last phase of the famine, but this frame stuck as the major explanation afterwards. The chapter further argues that the contemporary denialist Chinese historiography on the famine shares a lot of its basic features with the propaganda during the Leap. Moreover, the growing Western research on the era shows signs of even more polarization to researchers who see the famine as caused by the totalitarian Maoist system itself and to a more mainstream research that tries to find more technical or local explanations for the events.
