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I've probably mentioned this before because it was one of those conversations that illuminated my thought changing it forever and I always bring it up when China is mentioned...

When I was living in Shanghai, pre-Olympics, I once met a woman just a few years older than me, Pekinese, daughter not only of Party members, but of a high ranking PLA officer. Back when she was a child, late 70's, early 80's, she explained, her father was already an officer, but not so high rank, so they didn't have access to "so many things" (as high ranking officers and Party members). One winter they had to resort to eating paper and carton porridge, boiled shoe and belt leather, and mud cakes.

I repeat: in Beijing, PLA officer, Party members, late 70's or early 80's. Imagine the peasants in the provinces. And this is not even recorded as a remarkable event, because it just was their "normal", compared to the Great Famine and other catastrophes.

I also had a professor in college who was a communist and was there with his wife, teaching in a university in Beijing in the 80's. He explained something similar, not so extreme though because, he recognized, as a foreign communist "intellectual" in the 80's in China, he did have "access".

The access consisted of a restricted quantity of coal to burn for heating and cooking, which was so low quality that they would too often have to leave the windows open anyway, and a certain quantity of rice that often was so full of dust, dirt and stones that would barely produce one full weekly ration. Forget about any meaningful form of animal protein.

His son was actually born there and all -- and that's when his communism was cured and he decided to go back to Europe.