State Repression and Selective Expression: Communal Canteens and the “Collective” Memory of China’s Great Leap Famine

Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history. Drawing on a corpus of over 300 interviews with famine survivors, I apply a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of mass state repression on how such survivors speak about a repressive regime that remains in power. Exploiting variation in county-level mortality rates, I find that interviewees exposed to more intense state violence do not publicly voice more explicitly negative attitudes towards the state, but they do possess more latent negative sentiments. Furthermore, I use the establishment and subsequent dissolution of communal canteens – a key repressive institution through which the state functioned as the sole food distributor during a time of extreme scarcity – as an analytical lever to show that although some survivors may be unwilling to express grievances directly against an enduring regime that perpetrated mass violence, they readily express negativity towards a long-dead institution.