Did people in China resort to cannibalism during the reign of Mao?

Yang Jisheng, a Mainland Chinese journalist claims it happened during the Great Leap Forward and references Mainland Chinese sources in the copious footnotes.

"Cannibalism was no longer exceptional. Ancient annals report cases of families exchanging children to consume during severe famines, but during the Great Famine, some families resorted to eating their own children. I met people who had eaten human flesh, and heard them describe its taste. Reliable evidence indicates there were thousands of cases of cannibalism throughout China at that time.23 Some are described in the chapters that follow. It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics."

Jisheng, Yang. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (p. 14). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. "

Footnote 23 referenced above reads,

"23. In the first seven printings of the Chinese edition of this book, I used Li Rui’s estimate, which put the number of cannibalism cases throughout China in excess of 1,000. In July 2009 the former deputy commissioner of the Anhui provincial public security bureau, Yin Shusheng, provided me with the following information: In 1961 the Anhui provincial public security bureau reported to the provincial party committee that there had been 1,289 cases of cannibalism in the province. There were more than 300 cases of cannibalism reported in Xining City and Huangzhong County in Qinghai Province. Added to the figures reported for Sichuan, Shandong, Henan, and other places in China, an estimated total of several thousand is no exaggeration."

Jisheng, Yang. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (p. 524). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

From Amazon Author's biography:

Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. He is now a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. He is the author of the book Tombstone.

[Goodreads][1] [Amazon][2]) [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13538825-tombstone [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Great-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962/dp/0374533997

The evidence is very strong that cases of cannibalism happened, especially during the Great Leap Famine (1958-1961), but also during the Cultural Revolution.

The other answers offer some good references from journalistic sources and general survey histories. This has also received more detailed attention in the historical scholarship and from Chinese Communist Party sources:

Zheng, Yi, and T. P. Sym. Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1996 (Google Books Link).

• This is a translation of research done on the Chinese side in the 1980s and has incredible extensive details on a slew of cases in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution.

An even better source is the important collection of archival documents put together by Zhou Xun (which historian Frank Dikötter has also put to good use) from an earlier period, during the Great Leap Famine:

Zhou, Xun, ed. Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History. New Haven, [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2012 (Google Books Link).

• The Documents in Chapter Four, which include Communist party reports etc., have a lot of detailed examples. These are government documents coming straight out of provincial level archives in many cases.

Having said this: I would not be surprised if rumors of cannibalism were spread and vastly exaggerated even when referring to this period. It has a long history as a literary and political trope in China, at least since the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun uses cannibalism to represent a total failed society (See Tears from Iron by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley and What Remains by Tobie Meyer-Fong discussion of this). Perhaps the most extensive discussion of the border between fact and fiction when it comes to the history of cannibalism in China I have seen is in

Yue, Gang. The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China. Duke University Press, 1999.

Jung Chang -author of bestseller Wild Swans (Harper Collins, London 1992) together with her husband, British sinologist, Jon Halliday, in their biography, Mao,The Unknown Story (Cape, London 2005) assert that it happened.

During the famine, some resorted to cannibalism. One post-Mao study (promptly suppressed), of Fengyang county in Anhui province, recorded sixty-three cases of cannibalism in the spring of 1960 alone,including that of a couple who strangled and ate their eight-year-old son. And Fengyang was probably not the worst. In one county in Gansu where one-third of the population died, cannibalism was rife. One village cadre, whose wife, sister and children all died then, later told journalists: 'So many people in the village have eaten human flesh...See those people squatting outside the commune office sunning themselves? Some of them ate human flesh...People were just driven crazy by hunger.' (p 456)

In the general atmosphere of fostered cruelty, cannibalism broke out in many parts of the province, the best-known being the county of Wuxuan, where a post-Mao official investigation (in 1983 promptly halted and its findings suppressed) produced a list of 76 names of victims. The practice of cannibalism usually started with the Maoist staple, 'denunciation rallies'. Victims were slaughtered immediately afterwards, and choice parts of their bodies - hearts, livers, and sometimes penises - were excised, often before the victims were dead, and cooked on the spot to be eaten in what were called at the time 'human flesh banquets'. (p.566)

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a 'barefoot doctor', a steelworker and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1982 - the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a doctorate at a British university. Her award-winning book, 'Wild Swans' was published in 1991.

Jon Halliday is a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, University of London. He has written or edited eight previous books (Extracts from dust cover).