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This article examines the organization of social welfare production work (shehui fuli shengchan gongzuo) in China's southwest Sichuan province from 1956 to 1965, with a focus on the marginalized experience of disabled workers during and after the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–62). Utilizing unexamined state archives, local gazetteers, and newspaper publications, the study traces how disabled workers were incorporated into or excluded from the campaign and their survival strategies after its derailment. During the Great Leap Forward, a campaign that aimed to rapidly industrialize China and accelerate developmental timelines, disabled workers were mobilized into collective production for the first time in the People's Republic of China. When the industrial labor force needed to shrink, however, these once-mobilized disabled workers were marginalized and excluded from the state production system and instead resorted to heterodox forms of labor not officially recognized by the Communist state. The article argues that the tension between disabled workers and the Chinese Communist state, intensified by poor economic conditions, stemmed from the marginalization of disabled individuals with limited productivity in the state's idealized vision of productive labor. By uncovering the interplay between disability, labor mobilization, and state ideology, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the social and economic dynamics during the Great Leap Forward era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Famine is a social and economic crisis that is commonly accompanied by widespread of malnu-trition, starvation, epidemic disease, and increased mortality. This paper focuses on the period of the Great Leap Famine in China between 1958 and 1962. Based on newly-collected oral inter-views and archival evidence, it gives voices to ordinary villagers from different parts of China-- from various counties in one of China's biggest and most populated Sichuan province in the southwest to Shandong in the east and Hunan in central China and examines their experiences and their survival strategies in times of hunger, illness, and death. It shows that an integral part of everyday famine culture, particularly in rural China, which was worst hit, concerns the kitchen knowledge and practice of healing and nutrition. Many traditional recipes that were used in previous times were rediscovered and used as everyday hunger-coping techniques. Some are dated back to the Ming dynasty--a few were recorded in Materia Medica for Famine Relief (Qiuhtiang bencao ..., c. 1406). Using the methodology of oral history set against the historical background of traditional materia medica, this paper elicits how ordinary people in rural China devised complex and plural strategies to cope with fundamental biological crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]