‘We can exchange it for machinery,’ Zhang responded after a pause for thought.
‘But you are not the only one to have a surplus, others too have too much grain! Nobody will want your grain!’ Mao shot back with a benevolent smile.
‘We can make spirits out of taro,’ suggested another cadre.
‘But every county will make spirits! How many tonnes of spirits do we need?’ Mao mused. ‘With so much grain, in future you should plant less, work half time and spend the rest of your time on culture and leisurely pursuits, open schools and a university, don’t you think? . . . You should eat more. Even five meals a day is fine!’35
At long last, China had found a way out of grinding poverty, solving the problem of hunger and producing more food than the people could possibly eat. As reports came in from all over the country pointing at a bumper harvest twice the size of the previous year, other leaders joined in the chorus. Tan Zhenlin, in charge of agriculture, toured the provinces to galvanise the local leadership. He shared Mao’s vision of a communist cornucopia in which farmers dined on delicacies like swallows’ nests, wore silk, satin and fox furs, and lived in skyscrapers with piped water and television. Every county would have an airport.36 Tan even explained how China had managed to leave the Soviet Union in the dust: ‘Some comrades will wonder how we manage to be so fast, since the Soviet Union is still practising socialism instead of communism. The difference is that we have a “continuous revolution”. The Soviet Union doesn’t have one, or follows it loosely . . . Communisation is the communist revolution!’37 Chen Yi, on the other hand, opined that since enough grain could be stored over the next couple of years, farmers should then stop growing crops for two seasons and devote their time instead to building villas with all modern amenities.38 Local leaders were just as enthusiastic. In January 1959 the State Council had to put a stop to the deluge of people, letters and gifts sent by communes to Beijing to testify to new records set in agriculture. The Chairman was inundated.39
6
Let the Shelling Begin
The remains of Laika, the stray dog catapulted into orbit days before the celebration marking the October Revolution, were burned up as Sputnik II disintegrated on re-entering the atmosphere in April 1958. As the space coffin circled the earth, the world below it changed. Fired by the missile gap the Russians had exposed, President Eisenhower sent ballistic missiles to Great Britain, Italy and Turkey. Khrushchev responded with submarines carrying nuclear missiles. But, for his threat to be credible, a submarine base in the Pacific Ocean was needed, which in turn required a radio transmitter station. Moscow approached Beijing with a proposal to build long-wave radio stations on the Chinese coast, suggesting that they might serve a joint submarine fleet.
On 22 July Soviet ambassador Pavel Yudin sounded out the Chairman with a proposal. Mao flew into a rage. During a stormy meeting, he attacked the hapless ambassador, claiming, ‘You just don’t trust the Chinese, you only trust the Russians. Russians are superior beings, and the Chinese are inferior, careless people, that’s why you came up with this proposal. You want joint ownership, you want everything as joint ownership, our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture, education: how about it? Why don’t we hand over our thousands of kilometres of coastline to you, we will just maintain a guerrilla force. You have a few atomic bombs and now you want to control everything, you want to rent and lease. Why else would you come up with this proposal?’ Khrushchev, Mao continued, behaved towards China like a cat playing with a mouse.1
The outburst came like a bolt out of the blue to the Russians: seeing conspiracies everywhere, Mao was convinced that the proposal for a joint fleet was a manoeuvre by Khrushchev to renege on a promise made a year earlier to deliver an atom bomb, and no amount of explaining could allay Mao’s suspicions.2
On 31 July Khrushchev flew to Beijing to save the situation. But whereas lavish hospitality had welcomed Mao in Moscow seven months earlier, the Soviet leader was met with a cool reception at the airport. ‘No red carpet, no guards of honour, and no hugs,’ recalled interpreter Li Yueran, just a stony-faced team including Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.3 Khrushchev was relegated to lodgings without air-conditioning up in the hills far out of Beijing. Moving his bed to the terrace to escape the stifling heat, that night he was devoured by swarms of mosquitoes.4
Immediately after Khrushchev’s arrival a long and humiliating meeting was held at Zhongnanhai. The Soviet leader was forced to explain Yudin’s démarche at great length, and took pains to defuse a visibly irritated Mao. Impatient, Mao at one point jumped out of his chair to wave a finger in Khrushchev’s face: ‘I asked you what a common fleet is, you still didn’t answer me!’
Khrushchev became flushed and strained to stay calm.5 ‘Do you really think that we are red imperialists?’ he asked in exasperation, to which Mao retorted that ‘there was a man who went by the name of Stalin’ who had turned Xinjiang and Manchuria into semi-colonies. After more squabbling about real or perceived slights, the idea of a joint fleet was finally abandoned.6
More humiliation followed next day, as Mao, clad only in a bathrobe and slippers, received Khrushchev by the side of his swimming pool in Zhongnanhai. Mao realised that Khrushchev did not know how to swim, and put the Soviet leader on the defensive. After spluttering about with a bulky lifebelt in the shallow end, Khrushchev ended up crawling out of the pool and floundered on the edge, clumsily dangling his legs in the water while Mao swam back and forth, showing off different strokes to his guest before turning on to his back and floating comfortably in the water.7 All the while, interpreters scurried about at the side of the pool trying to catch the meaning of the Chairman’s political musings. Later Mao explained to his doctor that this had been his way of ‘sticking a needle up Khrushchev’s arse’.8
Mao had started a bidding war with Khrushchev in Moscow half a year earlier. Now, treading water as his host sat defeated by the side of the pool, the Chairman talked about the success of the Great Leap Forward. ‘We have so much rice that we no longer know what to do with it,’ he bragged, echoing what Liu Shaoqi had told Khrushchev a few days earlier at the airport when reviewing the country’s economy: ‘What we worry about now is not so much lack of food, but rather what to do with the grain surplus.’9 A baffled Khrushchev diplomatically replied that he was unable to help Mao with his predicament. ‘We all work hard yet never manage to build up a good reserve,’ Khrushchev thought. ‘China is hungry but now he tells me there is too much rice!’10
Over the years Mao had taken the measure of Khrushchev. Now he bossed him around, dismissing the need for a submarine base and brushing aside a request for a radio station. The Soviet delegation went home empty-handed. But this was not the end of it, as Mao was determined to take the initiative in world affairs. A few weeks later, on 23 August, without advance warning to Moscow, Mao gave the order to start shelling the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait, controlled by Chiang Kai-shek, triggering an international crisis. The United States responded by reinforcing its naval units and arming a hundred jet fighters in Taiwan with air-to-air missiles. On 8 September Moscow was forced to take sides by throwing its weight behind Beijing, proclaiming that an attack on the People’s Republic of China would be considered an attack on the Soviet Union.11 Mao was jubilant. He had forced Khrushchev to extend the protective mantle of nuclear power to China while at the same time wrecking Moscow’s bid to reduce tensions with Washington. As he put it to his doctor, ‘The islands are two batons that keep Khrushchev and Eisenhower dancing, scurrying this way and that. Don’t you see how wonderful they are?’12
But the real reason for the bombing of the islands had nothing to do with international relations. Mao wanted to create a heightened sense of tension to promote collectivisation: ‘A tense situation helps to mobilise people, in particular those who are backward, those middle-of-the-roaders . . . The people’s communes should organise militias. Everyone in our country is a soldier.�
��13 The Taiwan Strait crisis provided the final rationale for the entire militarisation of the country. An East German studying in China at the time called it ‘Kasernenkommunismus’, or communism of the barracks, and it found its expression in the people’s communes.14
7
The People’s Communes
A day after the meeting with Khrushchev by the swimming pool, Li Zhisui was summoned by Mao. At three o’clock in the morning, the Chairman wanted an English lesson from the doctor. Later, over breakfast, a relaxed Mao handed him a report about the creation of a people’s commune in his model province, Henan. ‘This is an extraordinary event,’ Mao said excitedly about the fusion of smaller agricultural co-operatives into a giant collective. ‘This term “people’s commune” is great.’1 Could this be the bridge to communism that Stalin had never found?
Soon after the water-conservancy campaign had kicked off in the autumn of 1957, collective farms had started to merge into much larger entities, in particular in regions where large inputs of manpower were required. One of the largest collectives appeared in Chayashan, Henan, where some 9,400 households were fused into a giant administrative unit. But the inspiration behind the people’s communes can be traced back to Xushui county.
Located a hundred kilometres south of Beijing in the dry and dusty countryside of North China, marked by harsh winters, spring floods and an alkaline soil that hardly yielded enough grain for villagers to survive on, Xushui, a small county of some 300,000 people, quickly came to the attention of the Chairman. Its local leader Zhang Guozhong approached the irrigation projects like a field campaign. Conscripting a workforce of 100,000 men, he divided farmers along military lines into battalions, companies and platoons. He cut off links with the villages and had the troops live in the open, sleeping in makeshift barracks and eating in collective canteens.
Zhang’s approach was highly effective and attracted the attention of the leadership in Beijing in September 1957.2 Tan Zhenlin, for one, was bowled over: ‘Xushui county’, he exclaimed in February 1958, ‘has created a new experience in water conservancy!’ By collectivising the villagers into disciplined units responding to the call with military precision, Zhang had simultaneously solved the problem of labour and that of capital. Where other counties faced labour shortages as the men abandoned the fields to work on irrigation schemes, he deployed his troops in a continuous revolution, tackling one project after another, one wave coming in as another crested. The key terms were ‘militarisation’ (junshihua), ‘combatisation’ (zhandouhua) and ‘disciplinisation’ (jilühua). Each brigade was handed responsibility for seven hectares from which an annual yield of fifty tonnes was mandated. ‘Two or three years of hard work will transform our natural environment,’ explained Zhang. ‘A mere two seasons and a Great Leap Forward appears!’ enthused Tan.3 Mao read the reports and added his comment: ‘the experience of Xushui should be widely promoted’.4
A few weeks later the People’s Daily hailed Xushui, identifying the militarisation of the workforce as the key to success.5 Then, in a short article in Red Flag published on 1 July 1958, Chen Boda, the Chairman’s ghost-writer, envisaged farmers armed as militia, all welded into giant communes: ‘a nation in arms is absolutely vital’.6 In a spurt of publicity, Mao toured the country, visiting Hebei, Shandong and Henan, praising the way in which farmers were regimented into battalions and platoons, and lauding the canteens, nurseries and retirement homes which freed women from domestic burdens to propel them to the front line. ‘The people’s commune is great!’ he proclaimed. China was on a mobilisation footing, as local cadres throughout the country scrambled over the summer to fuse collective farms into people’s communes, bringing together up to 20,000 households into basic administrative units. By the end of 1958 the whole of the countryside was collectivised into some 26,000 communes.
At the leadership’s annual retreat by the beach resort of Beidaihe, where large, luxurious bungalows overlooked the Bohai Sea, Mao believed he stood on the verge of a millennial breakthrough. On 23 August 1958, as the heavy bombardment of Quemoy was about to start, he poured scorn on the rigid system of material incentives devised by Stalin. ‘With a surplus of grain we can implement the supply system . . . The socialism we are building right now nurtures the sprouts of communism.’ The people’s commune was the golden bridge to communism, bringing free food to all: ‘If we can provide food without cost, that would be a great transformation. I guess that in about ten years’ time commodities will be abundant, moral standards will be high. We can start communism with food, clothes and housing. Collective canteens, free food, that’s communism!’7
Zhang Guozhong, lionised over the summer at party conferences in Beijing, responded to Mao’s prompting, and confidently predicted the arrival of communism by 1963.8 On 1 September the People’s Daily declared that in the not too distant future Xushui Commune would carry its members into a paradise where each could take according to his needs.9 In the midst of a nationwide euphoria, Liu Shaoqi visited the commune a week later. He had promised communism earlier than anybody else, telling workers at an electricity plant in July that ‘China will soon enter communism; it won’t take long, many of you can already see it.’ Overtaking Britain, he added, was no longer a matter of a decade: two or three years would suffice.10 Now, having seen the communes, he pushed for a supply system in which meals, clothes, shelter, medical care and all other essential aspects of everyday life were provided without pay by the commune.11 By the end of the month Fanxian county, Shandong, at a giant meeting of thousands of party activists, solemnly pledged to pass the bridge to communism by 1960. Mao was ecstatic. ‘This document is really good, it is a poem, and it looks as if it can be done!’12
The people’s communes satisfied a growing demand on the part of local cadres for labour, as they strained to accomplish ever more onerous tasks in the Great Leap Forward. On the ground, however, villagers were less enthusiastic. As everyday life came to be organised along military lines, villagers were ‘footsoldiers’ who had to ‘fight battles’ on the ‘front line’ in ‘battalions’ and ‘platoons’, while ‘shock brigades’ might ‘stage a march’ in ‘mobile warfare’. A revolutionary’s appointed position in society was a ‘sentry post’, while a group of people working on a large project was a ‘great army’.13
Martial terms were matched by military organisation. ‘Everyone a soldier,’ Mao had proclaimed, and the formation of popular militias helped to regiment the rest of society into people’s communes: ‘In the past in our army there was no such thing as a salary, or a Sunday, or eight hours of work a day. Rank and file, we were all the same. A real spirit of communism comes when you raise a giant people’s army . . . We need to revive military traditions.’ He explained: ‘Military communism in the Soviet Union was based on grain procurements; we have twenty-two years of military traditions, and the supply system is behind our military communism.’14
‘Ballistic missiles and atom bombs will never scare the Chinese people,’ bellowed the People’s Daily as shells hit Quemoy, the nation rising as one man, ready to do battle against the forces of imperialism: 250 million men and women were to be transformed into a sea of soldiers.15 By October 30 million militiamen in Sichuan spent two hours in military training in the evening. In Shandong 25 million fighting men were the ‘main army’ on the ‘front line’ of steel and grain production. In Yingnan county alone, 70,000 of these drilled men took charge of half a million villagers in the battle to deep-plough. In Heilongjiang, out in northern Manchuria, there were 6 million militiamen, as martial habits were instilled into nine out of ten young men.16 Tan Zhenlin raved about the militia, prescribing that each adult should learn how to use a gun and fire thirty bullets a year.17 In reality few carried guns. Many merely went through the motions, training half-heartedly by the fields with a few old-fashioned rifles after work. But a small proportion practised with live ammunition and were trained as shock troops.18 They would turn out to be crucial in enforcing discipline, not only during the fre
nzy to establish communes, but throughout the years of famine that lay ahead.
The militia movement and a small corps of trained fighters brought military organisation to every commune. All over China farmers were roused from sleep at dawn at the sound of the bugle and filed into the canteen for a quick bowl of watery rice gruel. Whistles were blown to gather the workforce, which moved in military step to the fields, carrying banners and flags to the sound of marching songs. Loudspeakers sometimes blasted exhortations to work harder, or occasionally played revolutionary music. Party activists, local cadres and the militia enforced discipline, sometimes punishing underachievers with beatings. At the end of the day, villagers returned to their living quarters, assigned according to each person’s work shift. Meetings followed in the evening to evaluate each worker’s performance and review the local tactics.
Labour was appropriated by the communes, men and women being at the command of team leaders, more often than not without adequate compensation. Explained party secretary Zhang Xianli in Macheng: ‘Now that we have communes, with the exception of a chamber pot, everything is collective, even human beings.’ This was understood by poor farmer Lin Shengqi to mean: ‘You do whatever you are told to do by a cadre.’19 Wages, as a consequence, were virtually abolished. Members of a production team, working under the supervision of a squad leader, were credited with points instead, calculated according to a complex system based on the average performance of the team as a whole, the job carried out and the age and gender of each worker. At the end of the year, the net income of each team was distributed among members ‘according to need’, and the surplus was in principle divided according to the work points that each had accumulated. In practice a surplus hardly ever existed, as the state came in and took the lot. Work points, moreover, devalued rapidly during the Great Leap Forward. In Jiangning county, just outside Nanjing, one work day was equivalent to 1.05 yuan in 1957. A year later it was worth no more than 28 cents. By 1959, its value had declined to a mere 16 cents. Locals referred to the point system as ‘beating a drum with a cucumber’: the harder you beat the less you heard, as all incentives to work had been removed.20
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