Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

  It was a gorgeous spring that year. One day Mao went for an outing to a park called the Thatched Cottage of Du Fu, the eighth century Tang poet. My mother's Eastern District office was responsible for the security of one area of the park, and she and her colleagues patrolled it, pretending to be tourists. Mao rarely kept to a schedule, or let people know his precise movements, so for hours and hours my mother sat sipping tea in the teahouse, trying to keep on the alert. She finally grew restless and told her colleagues she was going for a walk. She strayed into the security area of the Western District, whose staff did not know her, and was immediately followed. When the Party secretary of the Western District received reports about a 'suspicious woman' and came to see for himself, he laughed: "Why, this is old Comrade Xia from the Eastern District!" Afterward my mother was criticized by her boss, district chief Guo, for 'running around without discipline."

  Mao also visited a number of farms in the Chengdu Plain. Thus far, peasant cooperatives had been small. It was here that Mao ordered them all to be merged into bigger institutions, which were later called 'people's communes."

  That summer, all of China was organized into these new units, each containing between 2,000 and 20,000 households. One of the forerunners of this drive was an area called Xushui, in Hebei province in North China, to which Mao took a shine. In his eagerness to prove that they deserved Mao's attention, the local boss there claimed they were going to produce over ten times as much grain as before. Mao smiled broadly and responded: "What are you going to do with all that food? On second thought, it's not too bad to have too much food, really. The state doesn't want it. Everybody else has plenty of their own. But the farmers here can just eat and eat. You can eat five meals a day!" Mao was intoxicated, indulging in the eternal dream of the Chinese peasant- surplus food. After these remarks, the villagers further stoked the desires of their Great Leader by claiming that they were producing more than a million pounds of potatoes per mu (one mu is one-sixth of an acre), over 130,000 pounds of wheat per mu, and cabbages weighing 500 pounds each.

  It was a time when telling fantasies to oneself as well as others, and believing them, was practised to an incredible degree. Peasants moved crops from several plots of land to one plot to show Party officials that they had produced a miracle harvest. Similar "Potemkin fields' were shown off to gullible or self-blinded agricultural scientists, reporters, visitors from other regions, and foreigners.

  Although these crops generally died within a few days because of untimely transplantation and harmful density, the visitors did not know that, or did not want to know. A large part of the population was swept into this confused, crazy world.

  "Self-deception while deceiving others' (zi-qi-qi-ren) gripped the nation. Many people including agricultural scientists and senior Party leaders Said they saw the miracles themselves. Those who failed to match other people's fantastic claims began to doubt and blame themselves. Under a dictatorship like Mao's, where information was withheld and fabricated, it was very difficult for ordinary people to have confidence in their own experience or knowledge. Not to mention that they were now facing a nationwide tidal wave of fervor which promised to swamp any individual cool headedness It was easy to start ignoring reality and simply put one's faith in Mao. To go along with the frenzy was by far the easiest course. To pause and think and be circumspect meant trouble.

  An official cartoon portrayed a mouselike scientist whining "A stove like yours can only boil water to make tea." Next to him stood a giant worker, lifting a huge sluice gate releasing a flood of molten steel, who retorted, "How much can you drink?" Most who saw the absurdity of the situation were too frightened to speak their minds, particularly after the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Those who did voice doubts were immediately silenced, or sacked, which also meant discrimination against their family and a bleak prospect for their children.

  In many places, people who refused to boast of massive increases in output were beaten up until they gave in. In Yibin, some leaders of production units were trussed up with their arms behind their backs in the village square while questions were hurled at them:

  "How much wheat can you produce per mu?"

  "Four hundred fin' (about 450 pounds a realistic amount).

  Then, beating him: "How much wheat can you produce per mu?"

  "Eight hundred fin."

  Even this impossible figure was not enough. The unfortunate man would be beaten, or simply left hanging, until he finally said: "Ten thousand fin." Sometimes the man died hanging there because he refused to increase the figure, or simply before he could raise the figure high enough.

  Many grass-roots officials and peasants involved in scenes like this did not believe in the ridiculous boasting, but fear of being accused themselves drove them on. They were carrying out the orders of the Party, and they were safe as long as they followed Mao. The totalitarian system in which they had been immersed had sapped and warped their sense of responsibility. Even doctors would boast about miraculously healing incurable diseases.

  Trucks used to turn up at our compound carrying grinning peasants coming to report on some fantastic, record breaking achievement. One day it was a monster cucumber half as long as the truck. Another time it was a tomato carried with difficulty by two children. On another occasion there was a giant pig squeezed into a truck. The peasants claimed they had bred an actual pig this size. The pig was only made of papier-mâché, but as a child I imagined that it was real. Maybe I was confused by the adults around me, who behaved as though all this were true. People had learned to defy reason and to live with acting.

  The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people's real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.

  This was entrenched by the further regimentation of society. When he first set up the communes, Mao said their main advantage was that 'they are easy to control," because the peasants would now be in an organized system rather than being, to a certain extent, left alone. They were given detailed orders from the very top about how to fill their land. Mao summed up the whole of agriculture in eight characters: 'soil, fertilizer, water, seeds, dense planting, protection, tending, technology." The Party Central Committee in Peking was handing out two-page instructions on how peasants all over China should improve their fields, another page on how to use fertilizers, another on planting crops densely. Their incredibly simplistic instructions had to be strictly followed: the peasants were ordered to replant their crops more densely in one mini-campaign after another.

  Another means of regimentation, setting up canteens in the communes, was an obsession with Mao at the time. In his airy way, he defined communism as 'public canteens with free meals." The fact that the canteens themselves did not produce food did not concern him. In 1958 the regime effectively banned eating at home. Every peasant had to eat in the commune canteen. Kitchen utensils like woks and, in some places, money were outlawed. Everybody was going to be looked after by the commune and the state.

  The peasants filed into the canteens every day after work and ate to their hearts' content, which they had never been able to do before, even in the best years and in the most fertile areas. They consumed and wasted the entire lbod reserve in the countryside. They filed into the fields, too.

  But how much work was done did not matter, because the produce now belonged to the state, and was completely unrelated to the peasants' lives. Mao put forward the prediction that China was reaching a society of communism, which in Chinese means 'sharing material goods," and the peasants took this to mean that they would get a share anyway, regardless of how much work they did. With no incentive to work, they just went to the fields and had a good snooze.

  Agriculture was also neglected because of the priority given to steel. Many of the peasants were exhausted from having to spend long hours finding fuel, scrap iron, and iron ore and keeping the furnaces going. The fields were ofte
n left to the women and children, who had to do everything by hand, as the animals were busy making their contribution to steel production. When harvest time came in autumn 1958, few people were in the fields.

  The failure to get in the harvest in 1958 flashed a warning that a food shortage was on its way, even though official statistics showed a double-digit increase in agricultural output. It was officially announced that in 1958 China 's wheat output had overtaken that of the United States. The Party newspaper, the People's Daily, started a discussion on the topic "How do we cope with the problem of producing too much food?"

  My father's department was in charge of the press in Sichuan, which printed outlandish claims, as did every publication in China. The press was the voice of the Party, and when it came to Party policies, neither my father nor anyone else in the media had any say. They were part of a huge conveyor belt. My father watched the turn of events with alarm. His only option was to appeal to the top leaders.

  At the end of 1958 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee in Peking stating that producing steel like this was pointless and a waste of resources; the peasants were exhausted, their labor was being squandered, and there was a food shortage. He appealed for urgent action.

  He gave the letter to the governor to pass on. The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the number-two man in the province. He had given my father his first job when he had come to Chengdu from Yibin, and treated him like a friend.

  Governor Lee told my father he was not going to forward the letter. Nothing in it was new, he said.

  "The Party knows everything. Have faith in it." Mao had said that under no circumstances must the people's morale be dampened.

  The Great Leap Forward had changed the psychological attitude of the Chinese from passivity to a can-do, get-up and-go spirit, he said, which must not be imperiled.

  Governor Lee also told my father that he had been given the dangerous nickname "Opposition' among the provincial leaders, to whom he had voiced disagreements. It was only because of his other qualities, his absolute loyalty to the Party and his stern sense of discipline, that my father was still all right.

  "The good thing," the governor said, 'is that you only voiced your doubts to the Party, and not to the public." He warned my father he could get into serious trouble if he insisted on raising these concerns, as could his family and 'others," clearly meaning himself, my father's friend. My father did not insist. He was half convinced by the argument, and the stakes were too high. He had reached a stage where he was not insusceptible to compromise.

  But my father and the people working in the departments of Public Affairs collected a great number of complaints, as part of their jobs, and forwarded them to Peking.

  There was general discontent among the people and officials alike. In fact, the Great Leap Forward triggered off the most serious split in the leadership since the Communists had taken power a decade before. Mao had to step down from the less important of his two main posts, president of the state, in favor of Liu Shaoqi. Liu became the number-two man in China, but his prestige was only a fraction of that of Mao, who kept his key post as chairman of the Party.

  The voices of dissent grew so strong that the Party had to convene a special conference, which was held at the end of June 1959 in the mountain resort of Lushan, in central China. At the conference the defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehual, wrote a letter to Mao criticizing what had happened in the Great Leap Forward and recommending a realistic approach to the economy. The letter was actually rather restrained, and ended on the obligatory note of optimism (in this case, catching up with Britain in four years).

  But although Peng was one of Mao's oldest comrades, and one of the people closest to him, Mao could not take even this slight criticism, particularly at a time when he was on the defensive, because he knew he was wrong. Using the aggrieved language of which he was enamored, Mao called the letter 'a bombardment intended to level Lushan." He dug in his heels and dragged the conference out for over a month, fiercely attacking Marshal Peng. Peng and the few who openly supported him were branded 'rightist opportunists." Peng was dismissed as defense minister, placed under house arrest, and later sent into premature retirement in Sichuan, where he was assigued a lowly post.

  Mao had had to scheme hard to preserve his power.

  In this he was a supreme master. His favorite reading, which he recommended to other Party leaders, was a classic multi-volume collection about court power and intrigues. In fact, Mao's rule was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects. He was also a maestro at 'divide and rule," and at manipulating men's inclination to throw others to the wolves. In the end, few top officials stood up for Marshal Peng, in spite of their private disenchantment with Mao's policies. The only one who avoided having to show his hand was the general secretary of the Party, Deng Xiaoping, who had broken his leg. Deng's stepmother had been grumbling at home, "I was a farmer all my life and I have never heard of such a nonsensical way of farming? When Mao heard how Deng had broken his leg playing billiards he commented, "How very convenient."

  Commissar Li, the Sichuan first secretary, returned to Chengdu from the conference with a document containing the remarks Peng had made at Lushan. This was distributed to officials of Grade 17 and above; they were asked to state formally whether they agreed with it.

  My father had heard something about the Lushan dispute from the governor of Sichuan. At his "exam' meeting my father made some vague remarks about Pengs letter.

  Then he did something he had never done before: he warned my mother that it was a trap. She was greatly moved. This was the first time he had ever put her interests before the rules of the Party.

  She was surprised to see that a lot of other people seemed to have been tipped off as well. At her collective "exam," half of her colleagues showed flaming indignation against Peng's letter, and claimed the criticisms in it were "totally untrue." Others looked as though they had lost their ability to speak, and mumbled something evasive. One man managed to straddle the fence, saying, "I am not in a position to agree or disagree because I do not know whether the evidence given by Marshal Peng is factual or not. If it is, I would support him. Of course, I would not if it were not true."

  The chief of the grain bureau for Chengdu and the chief of the Chengdu post office were Red Army veterans who had fought under Marshal Peng. They both said they agreed with what their old and much-revered commander had said, adding their own experiences in the countryside to back up Peng's observations. My mother wondered whether these old soldiers knew about the trap. If so, the way they spoke their minds was heroic.

  She wished she had their courage. But she thought of her children what would happen to them? She was no longer the free spirit she had been as a student. When her turn came she said, "The views in the letter are not in keeping with the policies of the Party over the last couple of years."

  She was told by her boss, Mr. Guo, that her remarks were thoroughly unsatisfactory because she had failed to state her attitude. For days she lived in a state of acute anxiety. The Red Army veterans who had supported Peng were denounced as 'rightist opportunists," sacked, and sent to do manual labor. My mother was called to a meeting to have her 'right-wing tendencies' criticized. At the meeting, Mr. Guo described another of her 'serious errors." In 1959 a sort of black market had sprung up in Chengdu selling chickens and eggs. Because the communes had taken over chickens from individual peasants, and were incapable of raising them, chickens and eggs had disappeared from the shops, which were state owned. A few peasants had somehow managed to keep one or two chickens at home under their beds, and were now surreptitiously selling them and their eggs in the back alleys at about twenty times their previous price. Officials were sent out every day to try to catch the peasants. Once, when my mother was asked by Mr. Guo to go on one of these raids, she said, "What's wrong with supplying things people need? If there is demand, there should be supply." Because of this rem
ark, my mother was given a warning about her 'right-wing tendencies."

  The purge of 'rightist opportunists' rocked the Party once again, as a great many officials agreed with Peng. The lesson was that Mao's authority was un challengeable even though he was clearly in the wrong. Officials could see that no matter how high up you were Peng, after all, was the defense minister and no matter what your standing – Peng had reputedly been Mao's favorite if you offended Mao you would fall into disgrace. They also knew that you could not speak your mind and resign, or even resign quietly: resignation was seen as an unacceptable protest. There was no opting out. The mouths of the Party as well as the people were now tightly sealed. After this, the Great Leap Forward went into further, madder excesses. More impossible economic goals were imposed from on high.

  More peasants were mobilized to make steel. And more arbitrary orders rained down, causing chaos in the countryside.

  At the end of 1958, at the height of the Great Leap Forward, a massive construction project was begun: ten great buildings in the capital, Peking, to be completed in ten months to mark the tenth anniversary, x October 1959, of the founding of the People's Republic.

  One of the ten buildings was the Great Hall of the People, a Soviet-style columned edifice on the west side of Tiananmen Square. Its marbled front was a good quarter of a mile long, and its chandeliered main banqueting hall could seat several thousand people. This was where important meetings were to be held and the leaders were to receive foreign visitors. The rooms, all to be on a grand scale, were named after the provinces of China. My father was put in charge of the decoration of the Sichuan Room, and when the work was completed he invited Party leaders who had been connected with Sichuan to inspect it. Deng Xiaoping, who was from Sichuan, came, as did Marshal Ho Lung, a famous Robin Hood figure who had been one of the founders of the Red Army, and was a close friend of Deng's.