Cannibalism in China is documented across thousands of years of recorded history, appearing in contexts ranging from desperate famine survival to political violence to expressions of filial devotion. Chinese dynastic histories are remarkably frank in recording these episodes, and the sheer volume of documentation has sometimes led outside observers to treat cannibalism as somehow characteristic of Chinese civilization rather than as a recurring human response to extreme circumstances. The reality is more complicated and more disturbing than any single framing allows.
How Chinese Historical Records Treated Cannibalism
One of the most striking features of cannibalism in Chinese history is how openly it was recorded. The official dynastic histories, compiled by court historians over two millennia, contain hundreds of references to people consuming human flesh. These records typically appear in the context of famines, sieges, and social collapse, often as shorthand for the severity of a crisis. A phrase like “people ate each other” (人相食, rén xiāng shí) appears repeatedly in chronicles from the Han dynasty onward, functioning almost as a formulaic marker of catastrophe.
This candor sets Chinese historiography apart. Court historians included these details not to sensationalize but to document the failures of governance that allowed such conditions to develop. In Confucian political thought, a famine severe enough to drive people to cannibalism was a damning indictment of the ruling dynasty’s mandate. The records served as warnings and as evidence in the ongoing moral evaluation of emperors and their administrations.
The frequency of these references does not mean cannibalism was culturally accepted in China. Quite the opposite. Chinese literary and philosophical traditions consistently treated it with horror. What the records do show is that China’s long, continuous written tradition captured episodes that other civilizations experienced but left undocumented or recorded only in fragments.
Famine and Siege Cannibalism Across the Imperial Era
Most documented cases of cannibalism in Chinese history are tied to extreme food scarcity. China’s geography and climate made it vulnerable to devastating famines: droughts in the north, floods along major river systems, and locust plagues could wipe out harvests across entire provinces. When government grain reserves failed or relief was too slow, starvation could push communities past the point of social order within weeks.
Siege warfare produced some of the most harrowing accounts. During prolonged military encirclements, trapped populations exhausted all food supplies and turned to consuming the dead, and in the worst cases, to killing the living. These episodes appear throughout Chinese military history, from the Warring States period through the fall of various dynasties. The accounts follow a grim pattern: first animals, then leather and bark, then the dead, then the weakest among the living.
Several famines in the late imperial period were catastrophic in scale. The droughts and floods of the late Ming dynasty (early 1600s) coincided with political collapse, producing widespread starvation and documented cannibalism in multiple provinces. The transition between dynasties was frequently accompanied by such reports, because dynastic collapse and famine reinforced each other. A failing government could not manage flood control or grain distribution; the resulting starvation accelerated the government’s collapse.
The great North China Famine of 1876–1879, during the Qing dynasty, killed an estimated nine to thirteen million people across several northern provinces. Contemporary Chinese and foreign observers recorded instances of cannibalism in the worst-affected areas. By this period, foreign missionaries and diplomats were present in China and left their own accounts, which entered Western literature and shaped outside perceptions of the country.
The Great Leap Forward Famine
The famine that accompanied Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign from 1959 to 1961 was the deadliest in recorded history. Estimates of the death toll vary, but most historians place it between fifteen and forty-five million people. The famine was not caused by natural disaster alone but by disastrous agricultural policies: forced collectivization, the diversion of labor from farming to steel production, and the systematic exaggeration of grain yields by local officials, which led the central government to requisition far more grain than communities could spare.
Cannibalism during this famine has been documented by multiple scholars working from provincial archives, local gazetteers, and survivor testimony. The cases ranged from consumption of those who had already died of starvation to, in the most extreme accounts, killings. The practice was reported in provinces across China, though the severity varied by region. Provinces like Gansu, Anhui, and Sichuan, where grain requisitions were most extreme relative to actual harvests, appear most frequently in the documentary record.
For decades, discussion of both the famine and the cannibalism that accompanied it was suppressed within China. The government acknowledged the famine only in general terms, attributing it to natural disasters and the withdrawal of Soviet technical assistance. Scholars who attempted to investigate the full scale of the catastrophe, such as journalist Yang Jisheng, whose work drew on internal party documents, faced censorship and professional consequences. The topic remains sensitive in China today, and much of the detailed scholarship has been published outside the mainland.
Political Cannibalism During the Cultural Revolution
The most unusual and disturbing episode of cannibalism in modern Chinese history occurred not during a famine but during a period of political violence. In 1968, during the final violent phase of the Cultural Revolution, reports reached Beijing that people in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China were consuming the bodies of those killed as “class enemies.”1Comparative Studies in Society and History. Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968
The events in Guangxi, particularly in Wuxuan County, were not driven by hunger. Participants had access to food. Instead, the cannibalism was tied to the political frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, in which designated enemies of the revolution were publicly killed and, in some cases, their organs consumed in what scholars have described as ritualized acts of political commitment. Eating the flesh of a “counterrevolutionary” was framed as an ultimate expression of revolutionary fervor, a way of demonstrating one’s loyalty to Mao’s cause by literally consuming the enemy.
The scale of what happened in Guangxi became clearer only years later. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government conducted internal investigations into the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and the Guangxi findings were among the most shocking. Thousands of people were killed in the region during the factional violence of 1967–1968, and a significant number of the killings were accompanied by acts of cannibalism. The perpetrators included local officials, militia members, and ordinary citizens caught up in the political atmosphere of the time.
What makes the Guangxi episode so historically significant is that it cannot be explained by the usual framework of survival cannibalism. There was no starvation. The acts were public, communal, and ideologically motivated. They represent a category of cannibalism driven by political extremism, where consuming another person’s body became a form of performative violence. Scholars who have studied the events emphasize the role of mob psychology, the breakdown of legal and moral authority, and the way Maoist ideology dehumanized its targets to the point where consuming them became thinkable.
Filial Cannibalism and Medicinal Practices
Not all cannibalism in Chinese history was associated with crisis or violence. A distinct tradition, known as gegu (割股), involved cutting flesh from one’s own body to feed or make medicine for a seriously ill parent or elder relative. This practice was rooted in Confucian ideals of filial piety, the paramount virtue of devotion to one’s parents. Historical records from the Tang dynasty onward contain accounts of children, particularly daughters-in-law, slicing flesh from their own thighs or arms to prepare a broth believed to have curative properties.
The practice occupied an ambiguous position in Chinese culture. On one hand, Confucian orthodoxy held that one’s body was a gift from one’s parents and should not be mutilated. On the other hand, the willingness to sacrifice one’s own flesh for a parent’s health was seen as the ultimate proof of filial devotion. Some gegu practitioners were officially commended by local authorities and even celebrated in local gazetteers as moral exemplars. Others were criticized by Confucian scholars who saw the practice as excessive and contrary to proper ritual behavior.
Gegu was distinct from both survival cannibalism and the violent political cannibalism of the Cultural Revolution. It was voluntary, self-directed, and framed within a moral system that valued self-sacrifice for family. Its existence complicates any simple narrative about cannibalism in Chinese history, because it shows that the consumption of human flesh could be embedded in a framework of virtue rather than desperation or cruelty. The practice declined over the centuries and had largely disappeared by the twentieth century, though it remained a well-known cultural reference.
Separately, traditional Chinese medicine historically included some preparations derived from human body parts, though these were marginal and controversial even within the medical tradition. Dried human placenta (ziheche) appeared in some pharmacopeias as a tonic, and various folk remedies involved human blood or bone. These practices were never mainstream and are not endorsed by modern traditional Chinese medicine, but their historical existence adds another dimension to the broader topic.
How Western Narratives Distorted the Picture
Any discussion of cannibalism in China has to reckon with the way the topic was handled by Western writers, particularly during the era of European colonialism. From the sixteenth century onward, European travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators wrote accounts of Chinese cannibalism that served to reinforce a view of China as barbaric and in need of Western civilizing influence. These accounts were often exaggerated, taken out of context, or presented in ways that implied cannibalism was a routine feature of Chinese life rather than an extreme response to extreme circumstances.
The problem was not that the Western accounts were entirely fabricated. Famine cannibalism did occur, and the Chinese historical record confirms it. The distortion lay in framing. European writers frequently presented cannibalism as evidence of Chinese cultural inferiority, ignoring the fact that Europe’s own history included well-documented episodes of famine cannibalism, siege cannibalism, and even judicial cannibalism in which the bodies of executed criminals were consumed for supposed medicinal benefit. The double standard was striking: European cannibalism was treated as an aberration, while Chinese cannibalism was presented as a cultural characteristic.
This orientalist framing had lasting consequences. It fed into the broader narrative of Chinese “otherness” that justified colonial intervention and unequal treaties in the nineteenth century. And it created a legacy of sensitivity around the topic that persists today. Chinese scholars and officials are understandably wary of discussions that seem to single out China for a phenomenon that has occurred in virtually every civilization under sufficient pressure. The challenge for honest historical inquiry is to document what happened without feeding into dehumanizing narratives.
Cannibalism as a Universal Human Extreme
What the Chinese historical record ultimately demonstrates is not that China was uniquely prone to cannibalism, but that China kept unusually thorough records. Survival cannibalism has been documented on every inhabited continent. European famines, including the Ukrainian Holodomor of the 1930s, the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, and various medieval famines, produced their own episodes. The Donner Party in American history and numerous maritime disasters involved survival cannibalism among Europeans and Americans. Ritual and medicinal cannibalism existed in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, in parts of Oceania, and in early modern European folk medicine, where human fat, blood, and bone were used in remedies well into the eighteenth century.
China’s distinction is one of documentation, not of practice. The continuous written tradition spanning over two thousand years captured events that other societies experienced but left unrecorded, or recorded only in the accounts of outsiders. When European observers arrived in China and encountered both the reality of famine cannibalism and the Chinese historical record of it, they had a more complete picture than they had of their own history, and they mistook completeness of record for frequency of occurrence.
Memory, Silence, and Ongoing Sensitivity
Within China, the topic of historical cannibalism remains deeply sensitive, particularly regarding twentieth-century events. The Great Leap Forward famine and the Cultural Revolution are both subjects where open discussion is constrained by political considerations. Survivors of the famine years are aging, and their firsthand testimony is gradually being lost. The Guangxi events of the Cultural Revolution have been the subject of internal government investigations, but the findings have not been made widely available to the Chinese public.
For scholars, both Chinese and foreign, working on these topics presents practical challenges. Archival access in China can be restricted, particularly for materials related to politically sensitive periods. Researchers who publish on these subjects sometimes face professional or personal consequences. The result is that much of the most detailed scholarship has been produced by diaspora Chinese scholars or by researchers working outside China, which in turn feeds the perception within China that the topic is being exploited for anti-Chinese purposes.
There is a generational dimension as well. Younger Chinese citizens often have limited knowledge of the Great Leap Forward famine or the specifics of Cultural Revolution violence, because these events receive minimal coverage in official education. When the topic surfaces online, it is frequently censored. The tension between the desire to come to terms with historical trauma and the political imperative to control narratives about the Communist Party’s past shows no sign of resolving soon. For the communities directly affected, particularly in provinces like Guangxi where living memory of the events still exists, the silence itself is a form of ongoing harm.