by Philip Short
So it was that, three months later, when Peng next saw Mao in Beijing, and blurted out how ashamed he was at not having protected Anying better, Mao was brutally confronted with news for which he was totally unprepared – that his eldest son had died. He crumpled, Peng remembered, trembling so violently that he could not light his cigarette. For several minutes, they sat in complete silence. Then Mao lifted his head. ‘In revolutionary war,’ he said, ‘you always pay a price. Anying was one of thousands … You shouldn't take it as something special just because he was my son.’73
The revolution had already taken Mao's siblings: his adopted sister, Zejian, had been executed the year before Yang Kaihui; his youngest brother, Zetan, had died in Jiangxi, in a clash with nationalist troops in 1935; the second brother, Zemin, had been tortured and strangled on the orders of the Xinjiang warlord, Sheng Shicai, in 1943. His younger son, Anqing, who had been extremely close to Anying and already suffered from mental illness, was devastated by his brother's death and soon afterwards was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mao's daughters, Li Min and Li Na, were under Jiang Qing's influence, a connection he found increasingly distasteful.
Anying's relationship with his father had not been easy. Mao was a demanding man, who insisted that his children behave irreproachably and receive the same treatment as everyone else. His bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, remembered him telling them: ‘You're Mao Zedong's child, and that's hard luck for you!’74 Yet, since the young man's return to China, despite occasional flare-ups,III the two had grown close. When he died at the age of twenty-eight, the one remaining human bond capable of evoking in Mao a deep, personal loyalty, was severed.
The bloodshed that marked the birth of New China was not limited to the Korean War. The civilian death-toll in the political and economic movements that accompanied it was many times higher.
In the spring of 1950, Mao had begun to mobilise the Party for the immense effort necessary to install communist rule in the vast areas of central and southern China, with a population of more than 300 million, which the PLA had occupied in the course of the previous twelve months. The first step, he had decreed, was to ‘stabilise social order’. This required ‘resolutely eliminating bandits, spies, bullies and despots’, along with nationalist secret agents, who, he said, were spreading anti-communist rumours; sabotaging economic work; and murdering Party workers. There was a basis for these charges. That year, 3,000 officials had been killed in the countryside while trying to collect grain taxes.75 60,000 rebels were active in western Sichuan, and there and in adjoining provinces ‘large-scale armed rebellions’ had broken out. In Beijing, Tianjin and other cities, there had been incidents of arson and explosions attributed to nationalist sleeper networks.76
The original intention was to proceed cautiously. ‘Chief culprits’ were to be punished; others might be shown leniency.77
The Korean War changed all that.78 All over China, hundreds of thousands of people marched in anti-American demonstrations. A huge hoarding was erected in the centre of Beijing, showing Truman and MacArthur, green-faced and unshaven, reaching out towards China with claws dripping blood, being repulsed by a stalwart Chinese Volunteer.79 People were encouraged to send small gifts to the soldiers at the front, accompanied by inspirational messages, along the lines: ‘I saved this cake of soap for you so that you can clean off the enemy's blood, sprinkled on your clothes, and prepare for another battle.’ Workers gave part of their wages for the war effort; peasants pledged to increase production, and donate the extra harvest. To encourage activism, they were told that weapons bought in this way would be inscribed with the donors’ names.80
Foreigners played their part, too, but as negative examples. An Italian, long resident in China, was accused of plotting to assassinate Mao at the October 1st parade. He was convicted of heading a US espionage network, aided by his neighbour, a Japanese. After a summary trial, the two men were driven, standing on the back of an open jeep, across the city to an execution ground by the Temple of Heaven. There they were shot. Two other foreigners, an Italian bishop and a French bookshop owner, were imprisoned as alleged accomplices. That the plot was a fabrication was immaterial. Blazoned across several pages of the Party newspaper, Renmin ribao (People's Daily), it helped to justify the imposition of ever harsher social controls.81
Subsequent Chinese claims that the US was using germ warfare in Korea, and that the American military were shipping Chinese prisoners of war to Nevada to test the effect of nuclear weapons, piled on further pressure.82 In every corner of the country, Chinese seethed with indignation at imperialist atrocities. Those who did not seethe were suspected of being disloyal.
In this superheated atmosphere, the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries burned white-hot. Over the next two years, more than 700,000 people, most of them linked in some way, however tenuous, with the departed Guomindang, were executed or driven to suicide.
At least a million-and-a-half more disappeared into the newly established ‘reform through labour’ camps, purpose-built to accommodate them.83
Mao himself fine-tuned the operation, issuing a steady stream of directives from the winter of 1950 until the following autumn. Thus, in January 1951, when the campaign was apparently flagging, he insisted that death sentences be carried out, arguing: ‘If we are weak and indecisive, and excessively indulgent … of evil people, it will bring disaster.’ Two months later, he applied the brakes. ‘Rashness presents the major danger,’ he now warned. ‘It doesn't make much difference if a counter-revolutionary is executed a few days sooner or a few days later. But … making wrong arrests and executions will produce very bad effects.’ The following month, April, he proposed that 0.1 per cent of the population should be targeted: ‘Execute half of this figure first, and then wait and see how the situation develops.’ In May, he suggested suspended death sentences, because otherwise ‘it will deprive us of a large pool of [prison] labour power’. A month later, the movement needed to be encouraged again. ‘Persons who … have to be executed to assuage the people's anger,’ Mao declared, ‘must be put to death for this purpose.’84
Land reform lurched violently to the left, too.
Mao laid down a new guideline of ‘not correcting excesses prematurely’. In almost every village, at least one and sometimes several landlords were dragged before mass meetings, organised by Party work teams, and either beaten to death on the spot by enraged peasants or reserved for public execution later. By the time the land reform was completed, at the end of 1952, upwards of a million landlords and members of their families had been killed. Even that figure is only a guess. The actual death-toll may have been two, possibly even three, times higher.85 Within three years of the founding of New China, the landlords as a cohesive class, which had dominated rural society since Han times, had simply ceased to exist.
In contrast to Soviet practice, Mao insisted that the major role in these movements be played not by the public security organs but by ordinary people. The rationale was the same as it had been in Hunan in 1927 and in the soviet base areas in the 1930s: peasants who killed with their bare hands the landlords who oppressed them were wedded to the new revolutionary order in a way that passive spectators could never be.
The Party faced a still greater challenge in trying to bring about a comparable social transformation in the cities – to cleanse our society’, as Mao put it, ‘of all the filth and poison left over from the old regime.’86
To that end, starting in the autumn of 1951, Mao launched in quick succession three more political campaigns: the ‘Three Antis’ (anti-corruption, anti-waste and anti-bureaucratism), the purpose of which, he explained, was to prevent ‘the corrosion of the cadres by the bourgeoisie’; the ‘Five Antis’ (anti-bribery, anti-tax evasion, anti-fraud, anti-embezzlement, anti-leakage of state secrets), aimed at the capitalist classes whose ‘sugar-coated bullets’ caused the corrosion in the first place; and a thought reform movement, modelled on the Yan'an Rectification Campaign, designed to remould urban intelle
ctuals, especially those trained in the West, so as to enforce conformity and eradicate bourgeois ideas.87
Again, the primary actors were not state or Party agencies but the men and women who were themselves the targets of each campaign and the ‘broad masses’ mobilised to judge them. In the ‘Three’ and ‘Five Antis’, workers denounced their bosses; cadres exposed each other; children were encouraged to inform on their parents; wives turned against their husbands. Activists set up ‘tiger-hunting teams’, to drag out actual and presumed offenders for humiliation before mass meetings.
A climate of raw terror developed. Minor offenders, Mao declared, should be criticised and reformed, or sent to labour camps, while ‘the worst among them should be shot’. For many, the psychological pressure became unbearable. The two campaigns together took several hundred thousand more lives, the great majority by suicide, while an estimated 2 billion US dollars, a staggering sum at that time, was collected from private companies in fines for illicit activities. Surviving cadres, private businessmen and the urban population as a whole, had received a memorable lesson in the limits of communist kindness.
The bourgeoisie, Mao explained in the summer of 1952, was no longer to be regarded as an ally of the proletariat. It was now the principal object of struggle waged by the working class.88
Intellectuals were treated differently. They were to be cleansed of bourgeois ideology, especially individualism, pro-Americanism, objectivism (indifference to politics) and ‘contempt for the toiling masses’. These issues were discussed in small groups whose participants would make repeated self-criticisms, until, layer after layer, anything resembling independent thought, incompatible with Maoist orthodoxy, had been stripped away.89
Sooner or later Mao would have moved to assert Party control over the urban population, whether or not war had broken out in Korea. The death-toll would not necessarily have been lower had he done so in peacetime. The power of the landlords would still have had to be broken; the functionaries, the capitalists and the intellectuals brought into line. The same pervasive system of compulsory registration with the police, of designated residence under the scrutiny of neighbourhood committees, of personnel dossiers held by security departments attached to every town-dweller's work unit, would have been enforced even without a foreign war.
None the less, for the Chinese communists, the Korean conflict did have a silver lining.90
It produced a sense of regeneration and national pride which forced grudging respect even among those who otherwise had little sympathy for the new regime. The perception of heroic sacrifice on the battlefield helped to explain extreme measures at home. The external threat from America fuelled internal transformation. Above all, it allowed Mao to go faster. By the autumn of 1953, four years and at least two to three million deaths after the proclamation of the People's Republic,91 the Maoist state was more securely entrenched than had seemed imaginable when he and Zhou Enlai had set off from their temporary headquarters near Shijiazhuang to enter newly conquered Beijing, feeling, as Mao put it, ‘like students in the old days, going to the capital to take the [imperial] examinations’.92 By his own lights, Mao had passed the first test handsomely. After so many years of revolution and war, the cost in human suffering had become irrelevant.
I Mao had started telling the Soviet leader: ‘I was criticised and pushed aside for a long period, and had nowhere to express my views … ’ He probably intended to go on to thank him for the Comintern's support during those difficult years (and, in the process, subtly to remind him of the indignities he had suffered at the hands of Moscow's Chinese protégés). However, at this point, Stalin interrupted.
II The Secretariat, in 1950, also served as the Politburo Standing Committee. Besides Mao himself, it comprised Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. The fifth member, Ren Bishi, had suffered a stroke and died later that autumn, being replaced by Chen Yun.
III The most spectacular of these occurred at Xibaipo in June 1948, when Anying reproached his father for the personality cult around him. He was made to write a self-criticism, in which he acknowledged that he had ‘undermined father's authority’ and was barred from visiting Mao without permission until the following February, shortly before the move to Beijing. By October, when he married Liu Songlin, the rift had been forgotten and the young couple were regular visitors to Mao's home at weekends.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Economics were not Mao's strong point.1
The surveys he had carried out in Jiangxi in the early 1930s had focused on class relations in the countryside, not the dynamics of rural trade. Even when his avowed aim was to describe the commercial life of a small market town, the result was an exhaustive listing of hundreds of obscure local products, meticulously compiled, but with painfully little understanding of what made the economy grow, generating employment and prosperity, or what, in bad times, made it falter.2
In Yan'an, a decade later, Mao's New Democracy platform, conditioned by the political needs of the united front and the war against Japan, envisaged a mixed economy with a strong capitalist component. The two substantial innovations which the communists made in the economic field in the early 1940s, the introduction of co-operatives and a movement for economic self-sufficiency in the Red Army, were likewise politically motivated – the one as a step away from individual peasant ownership towards a collectivised system, the other a means of lessening the burden the military imposed on the civilian population.3 Both continued in the People's Republic. When the PLA occupied Tibet, in the winter of 1951, Mao's prime concern was that the army produce enough food to meet its own needs. Otherwise, he warned, it would be impossible to win over the Tibetans and eventually they would rebel.4
Mao's stress on self-sufficiency was a product of the peasant economy in which he had been reared, reinforced by his experience in Red base areas that were under constant threat of enemy blockade. Economic autarky, both at the provincial and the national level, was an article of faith. China's historical experience had taught that foreign countries were exploitative, and should be kept at arm's length. For most of the Maoist period, foreign trade was held to a minimum, and the balance of payments was kept firmly in the black. China accepted foreign loans only from the Soviet Union, and then, apart from military supplies during the Korean War, only in limited amounts. When, in 1949, the Russians offered a five-year credit totalling 300 million dollars, even at that time a very modest sum, it was widely attributed to Stalin's niggardliness. Mao himself was privately relieved that China's borrowings would remain small.5
Shortly before nationwide victory, Mao spoke publicly of his concerns about the economic tasks ahead. ‘We shall have to master what we do not know,’ he warned. ‘We must learn to do economic work from all who know how, no matter who they are … We must acknowledge our ignorance, and not pretend to know what we do not know.’6
Three years later, when he and his colleagues were confronted with the task of drawing up a comprehensive development strategy for their vast, newly pacified country, they did precisely that – and called in Russian experts to help. A Five-Year Plan was worked out, modelled on Soviet practice, with more than a hundred large Soviet-built heavy industrial plants at its core.7
Mao would afterwards complain that ‘dogmatism’ had taken hold at that time. ‘Since we didn't understand these things and had absolutely no experience,’ he grumbled, ‘all we could do in our ignorance was to import foreign methods … It didn't matter whether a [Russian] article was correct or not, the Chinese listened all the same and respectfully obeyed.’8 But in 1953 Russian guidance was exactly what Mao wanted. That spring he personally urged officials to ‘whip up a high tide of learning from the Soviet Union throughout the whole country’.9
Only in two major respects did China stray from the Soviet path. In place of a Stalinist programme of forced collectivisation, Mao laid down a voluntary, step-by-step approach. Villagers were first encouraged to form Mutual Aid Teams, in wh
ich a handful of families joined together to pool draught animals, tools and labour power; then came lower-level Agricultural Producers’ Co-operatives (APCs), whose members were remunerated in proportion to the amount of land and labour they contributed; and, finally, higher-level APCs, where the land and equipment of a whole village became collective property and members were paid on the basis of labour alone.10 Similarly, in commerce and industry, the ‘general line for the transition to socialism’, which Mao put forward in the summer of 1953, retained substantial elements of the New Democracy platform.11 To build a socialist economy, he declared, would take ‘fifteen years or a little longer’ in the cities, and eighteen years in the countryside. In the meantime, China's private businessmen (whose spirit had by then been crushed by the violence of the ‘Five Antis’ campaign) were to transform their enterprises into partnerships with the state, from which they would be permitted to continue drawing a quarter of the profits.12
It all sounded eminently reasonable. Too reasonable, no doubt, for a country of festering class hatreds, led by a group of revolutionaries devoted to radical change. In any event, it turned out to be too reasonable to last.
Already in 1951, a dispute had developed over the pace of the transformation they were trying to accomplish. That year, the Finance Minister, Bo Yibo, supported by Liu Shaoqi, had spoken out forcefully against pushing rural collectivisation too fast. Twelve months later, with Mao's approval, Gao Gang, now a senior Politburo member and Party chief of Manchuria, presented the opposite view. Rapid collectivisation was imperative, he said, because if the ‘spontaneous tendency of the peasants towards capitalism’ went unchecked, China would have a capitalist, rather than a socialist, future. Afterwards, the two men clashed again, this time over tax policy. Bo proposed equal treatment for state and private firms. Gao charged that he was advocating ‘class peace’. Again, Mao supported Gao. Bo, he said, had been struck by a ‘spiritual sugar-coated bullet’ which had caused him to succumb to the influence of bourgeois ideas. If the Party's cause were to triumph, such ‘right-opportunist deviations’ must be corrected and ‘the question of the socialist road versus the capitalist road must be clarified’.13