by Philip Short
III This was less far-fetched than it might sound. In 1955, an airliner that was to have taken Zhou Enlai to Indonesia was blown up in mid-air by a bomb which had been placed aboard by a nationalist agent in Hong Kong. Zhou changed his travel plans after Chinese intelligence got wind of the plot. Several other members of the Chinese delegation, who were allowed to go ahead with the trip, lost their lives when it crashed.
IV A few weeks after writing ‘The Immortals’, Mao invited Chen Yuying, the maidservant who had worked for Kaihui and himself in Changsha, to visit him in Beijing. They talked for two hours, and before she left, he told her: ‘Seeing you today, it seems as if I have seen Kaihui again.’
V Mao's more controversial – and contentious – statements during this period, notably his remarks in Shanghai in March 1959, which some recent writers have claimed as evidence that he was indifferent to the prospect of mass starvation, are discussed in the afterword of this book, Mao: Western Judgements.
VI Mao was replying here to an earlier remark of Peng's, in which the Marshal had referred to criticisms to which he had been subjected (apparently related to the Hundred Regiments Campaign) before the Seventh Congress in 1945. ‘You fucked my mother at Yan'an for forty days,’ Peng had said. ‘I've been fucking your mother in Lushan for only eighteen days and you've already come out to stop me!’
VII To mark the anniversary, a major building programme was undertaken in Beijing, including the enlargement of Tiananmen Square, the construction of the Great Hall of the People, the National History Museum, the Diaoyutai state guest house and seven other large complexes. Despite the onset of the famine, it was completed as scheduled. The following year, in Mao's birthplace, Shaoshan, where 30,000 people would die of starvation, a luxurious presidential guest house was built for him. While the famine was at its height, similar residences for the use of Politburo Standing Committee members were built in many other cities.
VIII The Welsh missionary, Timothy Richard, recorded in his diary while taking famine relief to Shanxi: ‘That people pull down their houses, sell their wives and daughters, eat roots and carrion, clay and leaves, is news which nobody wonders at … The sight of men and women lying helpless on the roadside, or if dead, torn by hungry dogs and magpies [and] of children being boiled and eaten up is so fearful as to make one shudder’ (cited in Thompson, Larry Clinton, William Scott Ament and the Boxer rebellion, McFarland, North Carolina, 2009, p. 21). Frank Dikötter, who relies mainly on official accounts in Chinese archives, concludes that there were few cases of peasants killing and eating family members and suggests that the issue has been sensationalised (Mao's Great Famine, pp. 320–3). Where cannibalism did occur, he says, it may have been encouraged by the spectacle of ‘state sponsored violence’. The prevalence of such practices in earlier famines gives the lie to that. Yang Jisheng, who treats the issue at much greater length, writes that both cannibalism and necrophagy were practised in every area where severe starvation occurred, and that in the worst-hit provinces, like Anhui, ‘there was not a single commune where cannibalism was not discovered’ (Tombstone, pp. 40–6, 141–4, 278–9, 289–90 and 302–4).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Musings on Immortality
It would take five years to restore even a semblance of normality after the haemorrhaging away of wealth and population that Mao's stupendous folly had caused.
The first year of recovery was taken up with a desperate scramble to find whatever stopgap measures might serve to keep the People's Republic from falling apart. In Sichuan, and in three other western provinces, as well as Tibet, the PLA had to be called out to suppress armed rebellions, launched by starving peasants.1 In Henan, the militia, which had been created to give the communes a means of self-defence, went on the rampage, committing armed robberies, rapes and murders. The peasants referred to the militiamen as ‘bandit kings’, ‘tiger bands’ and ‘beating-up gangs’. There and in Shandong, another of the provinces where the excesses of the Leap had been most stark, government authority in many districts disintegrated altogether.2 Liu Shaoqi warned that China was facing a descent into anarchy, similar to that which the Soviet Union had experienced during the civil war in the early 1920s.3
To reduce the pressure on urban food supplies, 28 million city-dwellers were forced to move to the countryside – a feat that Mao described admiringly as ‘equivalent to deporting the population of a medium-sized country like Belgium’ (his arithmetic was faulty: it was three times the population of Belgium). Even then, massive grain imports were needed to feed those who remained.I In 1961, nearly six million tons of wheat were purchased abroad, mostly from Australia and Canada, some even from the United States, its origin disguised as being from Europe.4 Imports would remain at that level into the 1970s.
Alongside these practical measures, Liu and his colleagues began to re-examine the false assumptions on which the Great Leap had rested.
The difficulty, as always, was Mao.
His retirement to the ‘second front’ had not meant relinquishing power, merely exercising it in a different manner. Whereas before, the Chairman had set the pace and everyone else had followed, now he expected the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee to take the lead – but only in ways that were consonant with his own thinking. Peng Dehuai had learned to his cost that Mao alone was permitted to question the policies he had framed. Now Liu and Deng Xiaoping, in their turn, discovered the perils of being on the ‘first front’. ‘Which emperor took this decision?’ Mao demanded in March 1961, after Deng had proposed (without first securing his agreement) that agricultural policy should be handled differently in the north and the south.5
The result was extreme caution. Rethinking the ‘newborn things’ of the Great Leap Forward – the communes, the collective kitchens, the system of free supply – was resolutely avoided until it became clear which way the Chairman's own mind was working. Thus, in March 1961, the Central Committee strongly reaffirmed the value of communal eating arrangements.6 But when, a month later, Mao endorsed a report stating that communal dining halls had become ‘an impediment to developing production and a cancer in relations between the Party and the masses’, his colleagues instantly changed course.7 Within days, the Chairman's new line was being echoed by Liu Shaoqi, then making an inspection tour of Hunan; by Zhou Enlai, visiting Hebei; followed in quick succession by Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen and Zhu De.8 The repercussions were even felt in the labour camps, where China's prison population was set to making aluminium kitchen utensils, to replace the iron ones smelted down in the backyard steel campaign, so that peasant households might once more have the means to cook for themselves now that collective catering was at an end.9
In May, the supply system was abandoned as well. The amount of land that could be allocated for private plots was increased. The principle of ‘more pay for more work’ was restored, along with the Leninist slogan, ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ – a grim warning indeed at a time of mass starvation. Rural fairs and markets, which had been banned during the Leap, were authorised again, and pedlars and street-traders reappeared. That month, at a Central Committee work conference, Liu charged for the first time that the problems had not been caused by natural disasters, as the government had been claiming, but by ‘deficiencies and errors’ by leaders at every level.10 He went on:
In feudal society, the landlord used to squeeze peasants out of their grain ration. Today it turns out that we, too, have been squeezing peasants out of their grain ration … The problem in the last few years was caused by unrealistic grain-collecting quotas, unrealistic estimates, unrealistic procurement figures and unrealistic workloads … In Hunan people say that three tenths was natural calamity and seven tenths man-made … I don't think we can use [the analogy of] one finger [out of ten] to describe our setbacks. We must be honest … The Central Committee must take the main responsibility.11
The reference to ‘one finger out of 10’ – a formula which Mao regularly used to dismiss setbacks as minor
– came dangerously close to a direct criticism of the Chairman. But Liu was careful to emphasize that the policies of the Great Leap had been ‘completely correct’ – the problem lay in the way they had been implemented ? and Mao let the charge pass, even acknowledging a measure of responsibility. His understanding of how to build socialism in China had not been profound enough, he said.
Finally, in September 1961, the Chairman made one last concession.
During the summer, with the leadership's approval, many communes had been subdivided to about a half, or a third, of their original size, in an attempt to make them less unwieldy. Now Mao informed his colleagues that he had decided that the basic management unit, which assigned each household its labour and shared out the fruits of the harvest, should also be made smaller, reverting from the ‘brigade’, grouping several villages, to the ‘production team’, equivalent to the original one-village co-operatives set up five or six years before. The aim was to restore the peasants’ motivation by linking their rewards directly to their own efforts and those of their neighbours, rather than making them pool their resources with families from other communities.12
It was a far cry from the principles Mao had set out in 1958. Then he had proclaimed that the superiority of the communes was that they were ‘first, big; and second, publicly owned’. Now the best he could hope for was that the concept of the commune might be preserved against the onslaughts of famine and nationwide demoralisation.
Once again, however, the Chairman's pre-emptive retreat turned out not to go far enough.
Part of the problem was that there had been so many twists and turns in the recent past that local cadres were reluctant to change course, even if the Politburo ordered them to, lest the wind shift yet again and they find themselves being denounced as Rightists.
Others – not only at the local level but including Politburo radicals like Kang Sheng; Ke Qingshi in Shanghai; and the Sichuan leader, Li Jingquan – were so closely identified with Leftist policies that any overt repudiation of the Great Leap would leave them politically exposed. Accordingly, they dragged their feet – Li Jingquan even to the point of defending communal eating after Mao himself had condemned it.
Both groups, moreover, noted that the Chairman remained deeply ambivalent about the change in direction that events had imposed. Not only did he refuse to admit that the previous policies had been mistaken – the furthest he would go was to say that no one was immune from error – but the plans which were worked out that year to revive commerce and industry, and to encourage new efforts in science, education, literature and the arts, all contained inherent ambiguities (and had to, in order to obtain Mao's approval), allowing them to be given either a radical or a moderate interpretation, depending on the prevailing political wind. Zhou Enlai summed up the unstable compromise on which the new policies were based by urging officials ‘on the one hand to wage class struggle, on the other to consolidate the united front’ – a squaring of the ideological circle which he knew quite well was impossible.13
In these circumstances, Mao's colleagues continued to adhere rigorously to the parameters the Chairman had laid down.
The steel and coal targets were cut back to levels which, for the first time since 1957, had some connection with reality. Industrial workers were permitted bonuses again, and factory managers given back their old powers. Deng, Liu and the Foreign Minister, Chen Yi (though not the ever-prudent Zhou Enlai) all elaborated on Mao's tacit admission that mistakes had been made – with both Deng and Liu quoting the peasants in areas they had visited as saying the famine was due ‘30 per cent to natural calamities, 70 per cent to human failings’.14 But no one said what the mistakes were, and still less who had made them.
The impasse, therefore, continued.
For the rest of the autumn, Mao, as befitted his new role on the ‘second front’, remained silent. His colleagues urged greater realism, but in such equivocal terms that no one was convinced. Lower-level officials held their fire, awaiting clearer signals.
The result was that, by December, there was still no sign of the economy bottoming out. In Anhui and other hard-hit provinces, cadres began experimenting with so-called ‘household responsibility systems’, under which land was contracted out to families to farm individually.15 Zhu De, on a visit to his native Sichuan, found cases of peasants abandoning the communes to grow crops on their own, and asked whether, in the current extremity, such expedients should not be officially approved, since ‘even if you don't write it in, it will happen anyway’.16
To Mao, that raised the spectre of collectivisation in the countryside unravelling altogether.
Accordingly, in January 1962, he summoned a Central Committee work conference in Beijing, to be attended not just by the two or three hundred senior officials normally present at such meetings, but by more than 7,000 cadres, drawn from county and commune Party committees all over China.
The idea behind this exceptional gathering was that it should mark a turning-point. But where Mao wanted the conference to call a halt to the erosion of socialist values, Liu Shaoqi and the other ‘first front’ leaders saw it as a moment of truth, when, at long last, lessons could be drawn from past errors and the Party would make a fresh start on the basis of consensus policies which the local cadres in attendance would convey directly and convincingly to the grass roots.
Liu set the tone with a report which lavished fulsome praise on Mao's correct guidance ‘at every critical moment’ and then repeated essentially the same charges, in somewhat watered-down form, that he had made the previous May. However, in the interval, the political mood had changed. As it had become increasingly obvious that the Leap had been a disaster, lower and mid-level cadres wanted to see the blame pinned where it belonged, on the national leaders who had caused it. It was one thing for Liu to criticise the conduct of the movement before an elite audience of Central Committee members and senior officials, quite another to voice the same complaints before thousands of cadres from the provinces. This time, when he declared, as he had in May, that ‘the primary responsibility for the shortcomings and errors in our work in these past few years lies with the Party centre’, there were immediate demands from the floor that he name the leaders responsible. Neither Liu, nor anyone else, was prepared to commit himself in open session.17 But a few days later, in committee, the north China leader, Peng Zhen, was more forthright. The Party Centre, he said, included Mao, Liu Shaoqi and the rest of the Politburo Standing Committee. To the extent that they were responsible, they should share the blame. Mao himself, Peng went on, was not immune from mistakes. It was he who had spoken of making the transition to communism in ‘three or five years’, and who had been behind the setting-up of the now abandoned communal kitchens. Even if he had been ‘only one-thousandth part mistaken’, failing to criticise him would ‘leave a bad influence on our Party … From Chairman Mao to every branch secretary, each bears a share of responsibility.’18
Ten days later, Mao gave his response:
Any mistakes that the Centre has made ought to be my direct responsibility, and I also have an indirect share of the blame because I am the Chairman of the Central Committee. I don't want other people to shirk their responsibility. There are some other comrades who also bear responsibility, but the person primarily responsible should be me.19
As a ‘self-criticism’, this was perfunctory in the extreme. Not only did Mao fail to acknowledge any personal errors of judgement, but there was no hint of an apology, no expression of remorse for the millions who had died, no admission of the true extent of the calamity that his policies had brought about. Instead, he sought to minimise his role, insisting that at all levels of the leadership ‘everyone has his share of responsibility’, and urging others to face their mistakes, too.
Those of you who … are afraid of taking responsibility, who do not allow people to speak, who think you are tigers, and that nobody will dare to touch your arse – whoever has this attitude, 10 out of 10 of you will fail. People wi
ll talk anyway. You think that nobody will really dare to touch the arses of tigers like you? They damn well will!
Minimal though it was, Mao's acknowledgement of liability electrified the meeting. He did not need to say more: in a Party which had learned to regard him as infallible, it was extraordinary enough for him to admit to any failings at all.
For the next week, tiger after tiger, from Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping down, ritually flagellated themselves with detailed confessions of error.20 When the meeting ended, on February 7, there was a new sense, in the Politburo and among the regional delegations, that a page had been turned, and that it would at last be possible to give effect to the moderate, pragmatic policies that had evolved over the previous year.
For Mao, the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’, as it was afterwards known, had been a thoroughly disagreeable experience. He had not enjoyed criticising himself (while recognising that it was essential in order to draw a line under the past). He had been dismayed by the hostility shown by grass-roots delegates to Great Leap Forward policies, and by demands from the hall for an explanation of why the disaster had occurred. ‘They complain all day long and watch plays at night, they eat three full meals a day – and fart; that's what Marxism-Leninism means to them,’ he grumbled.21 He had relished even less the strictures of Peng Zhen – though the changed circumstances resulting from three years of famine and economic ruin meant that he could no longer respond as he had in the case of Peng Dehuai. The meeting had produced, too, a worrying undertow of support for the disgraced marshal's rehabilitation, now that his critique of the Leap had proved so well justified. Liu Shaoqi, who knew his own position would be at risk if Peng were vindicated, had vigorously squashed any suggestion that he be allowed to return, but in such a way as to let the audience understand that Peng's criticisms had been correct – his errors had been ‘colluding with Russia’ and ‘plotting against the Party leadership’.22