While traditional shops were low and open with the living quarters above, new department stores were towers of commerce, monuments of trade standing tall above the surrounding buildings. They could be found in every large city, illuminated at night with rows of electric lights, offering local and imported goods ranging from American canned sardines to child-size motor cars. The striking contrast between the elaborate department stores and traditional single-storey shops, often only next door, was typical of the diversity that ran through the whole structure of everyday life in the republican era.15
Most of this busy, bustling world vanished after 1949. Free trade was replaced by a planned economy. Markets were closed down. Spontaneous gatherings were forbidden. Hawkers and pedlars were taken off the streets, often forced into collective enterprises controlled by the state. The itinerant trader and the once ubiquitous blacksmith became relics of the past. Department stores were nationalised, their steady supply of goods from all over the world drying up and being replaced by state-mandated goods produced in state-owned enterprises to be sold at state-mandated prices. The owners of small shops were forced to become government employees. Mikhail Klochko remembered going to an obscure little store with hardly any goods at all in Beijing. He bought a pencil box out of pity for the wan shopkeeper and his two sickly children.16 The only prosperous shops were near the tourist hotels in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, offering furs, enamelware, watches, jewellery, embroidered silk pictures of landscapes and portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. Called Friendship Stores, they were reserved for foreign visitors and elite party members.
For ordinary people the choice was dire. Take the example of Nanjing, a once flourishing city on the south bank of the Yangzi which had served as the capital of the republic. Although the government clamped down on the free market, there were still well over 700 shops on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, selling their wares directly to the public. By 1961 a mere 130 had survived. Where a sophisticated network of manufacturers, traders and retailers had linked the city with some seventy counties and over forty cities across the country, the advent of rigid collectivisation led to a turning inward, as a mere six counties and three cities contributed to the local handicraft industry. As the plan replaced the market, the range of handicraft products halved to about 1,200. Even well-known heritage brands, from Golden Chicken hairpins to Yangzi River spring locks, buckled under the weight of the state. Variety in design suffered. Whereas some 120 different locks had been available before 1958, by 1961 only a dozen survived. Most were so similar that one key could open several padlocks. But prices for all products were higher, generally by about a third, in some cases double.17 The same could be said of foodstuffs. Since the launch of the Great Leap Forward some 2,000 food pedlars had been forced to change jobs in Nanjing. Previously individual hawkers had an intimate knowledge of complex market conditions and efficiently transported the vegetables to key delivery points in the city, but now a clumsy and rigid command economy only compounded the problems caused by famine in the countryside.18
The trade in surplus goods and waste material, thriving before 1949, also disintegrated. Lauding the widespread practice of recycling every conceivable object, Dyer Ball observed before the fall of the empire that poverty encouraged care to be given to the most insignificant trifle, turning everybody into a merchant.19 But the exact opposite happened during the famine: obsession with a master plan produced mountains of waste on the ground, since few people were given any incentives to recycle. In Guangzhou some 170 tonnes of waste material – from iron oxide to graphite powder – was heaped about the city in the summer of 1959. Before the Great Leap Forward, every scrap of metal or shred of cloth would have been recycled by a small army of independent pedlars, who made sure that rags, cans, plastic, paper and tyres reached a potential buyer. Many abandoned the trade after they had been forced to enrol in a large and unresponsive collective.20
While the rubbish accumulated, shortages of the most basic necessities became endemic. In Nanjing everything was scarce by the summer of 1959, even ordinary objects such as shoes and pots.21 Queues – the hallmark of socialism – were part of everyday life. As famine set in, they grew longer. In Jinan some factory workers took two days off work to wait in line to buy grain. Li Shujun queued for three days but failed even to get a ticket, which had to be exchanged for a number, which in turn had to be exchanged for grain – all in different queues.22 In Shanghai too working men and women had to queue for the few goods which reached the shops. The ritual started before daybreak, as everybody knew that the shops would be empty by the afternoon.23 Patience could wear thin. Fights broke out when some people used bricks to mark their place in a queue and these were then kicked over by others.24 In Wuhan, where up to 200 people had to wait in a single queue all night to buy rice towards the end of 1960, tempers flared and scuffles erupted.25
The state rather than the market determined the price of goods. This was supposed to stabilise prices and enhance the purchasing power of the people. But farmers bought manufactured goods at inflated prices, although they were forced to sell grain and other foodstuffs to the state at rock-bottom prices – often so low that they made a loss, as we have seen. A colossal transfer of wealth took place from the countryside to the cities. A sense of the scale of this was indicated by Lan Ling, an official with the inspectorate in Qingdao. By compiling and adjusting the prices paid for food and goods since 1949, he found that the price for coal had increased by 18.5 per cent, soap by 21.4 per cent, shoes by up to 53 per cent, rope by 55 per cent, household goods by up to 157 per cent and ordinary tools by up to 225 per cent. In contrast the price paid by the state for grain had actually decreased, ranging from 4.5 per cent for wheat to 10.5 per cent for maize.26
Prices fixed by the state were rarely respected, if only because all sorts of additional charges could be made. A detailed investigation by the People’s Congress in Guangzhou found that there could be up to forty different transfer prices for the exact same type of metal bar. In the steel and iron industry many of the prices actually charged were 50 per cent higher than those mandated by the state. In some cases the price rocketed by a factor of ten, contributing to a slump in industrial production as company managers had a hard time adjusting a rigid budget to the violent fluctuations in the supply costs. The price of coal, too, was fixed, but private deals struck between different enterprises led to relentless upward pressure. The actual cost of production thus soared, forcing the state to subsidise industries even further by trying to keep the prices of finished goods down. This too failed, as just about everything became more expensive yet increasingly shoddy, from glass bottles and mothballs to hairpins and wooden clogs.27 In Wuhan, as everywhere else, the cost of a water bucket, an iron kettle or a small fruit knife had doubled in a year or so since the launch of the Great Leap Forward. In the smelting capital of the new China, an iron pot cost twenty-two yuan when five yuan would have sufficed in 1957.28 As Li Fuchun acknowledged in the summer of 1961, annual inflation was at least 10 per cent for everything from food and commodities to services, but it reached 40 to 50 per cent in some places. Some 12.5 billion yuan was squandered on goods worth only 7 billion.29
Other side effects of the planned economy appeared, because the profit motive rather than selfless dedication to the people’s needs always lurked just under the surface of the paper plan. In the midst of humanity’s greatest famine, a whole range of deluxe products were sold at a premium, from vegetables, cinema tickets and tea leaves to simple pails. State-owned enterprises used widespread shortages to upgrade some of their goods and boost profits.30 When the People’s Congress of Beijing decided to have a close look at the Beijing Department Store, the Stalinist flagship on Wangfujing, it found out how enterprises responded to inflationary pressure rather than to consumer demand. In 1958 around 10 per cent of all underwear in the store was in the higher price bracket. The bulk, 60 per cent, consisted of mid-range products accessible to most city dwellers. In 1961 more t
han half were luxury items, with a mere third carrying a mid-range price tag. This structural change came on top of inflation, which was estimated at 2.7 per cent each month.31
As state-owned behemoths replaced small shops, the responsibility for defective goods shifted away from the street towards remote and impenetrable bureaucracies.32 The plan, of course, had an answer to this problem, setting up ‘service stations’ (fuwuzu) for the benefit of the great masses. But they were few and far between, unable to cope with a deluge of shoddy goods and, most of all, utterly uninterested in serving the people. So in a poor country the cost of fixing an object often exceeded the cost of replacing it. In Wuhan the expense of having shoes resoled, pots repaired or keys cut was double the state-mandated prices, as service stations effectively enjoyed a monopoly over repair work. In Xiangtan, Hunan, it cost eight yuan to repair a fire pot but only nine yuan to buy a new one, while in many regions the cost of having socks darned was about the same as buying a new pair.33 Over the winter of 1960–1, as everybody was shivering from fuel shortages and inadequate clothing, repair centres in the capital were buried beneath heaps of defective goods. Apathetic employees merely pushed the stuff around, lacking the incentives, the tools and the supplies to tackle their jobs. Even simple nails to resole a pair of shoes were unavailable. In the Qianmen commune, in the heart of the capital, some sixty stoves lay about rotting. Broken furniture was strewn about the place, which was short of saws, planes and chisels.34
Even when service stations undertook to launder clothes, what should have been a relatively straightforward matter became caught in a hopeless quagmire. A cumbersome bureaucracy involved a whole series of separate steps, from registering the items and issuing a receipt to handing out the washed clothes, all these operations being performed by different people, involving a third of the workforce. Those who actually did the washing rarely managed more than ten items a day. Everything was run at a loss and charged to the state, despite the high prices. On Shantou Road, Shanghai, a small laundry paid 140 yuan in salaries each month, although it made only about 100 yuan a month in income, not counting numerous lost items of clothing that had to be compensated for.35 Of course most ordinary people would have preferred to repair their clothes, shoes and furniture themselves, but their tools had been taken away during the iron and steel campaign. Lao Tian remembered that in Xushui – one of the country’s model communes – for several years his mother had to queue up to borrow the only needle that had not been confiscated in the neighbourhood.36
20
Housing
Every dictator needs a square. Military parades are at the heart of state rituals in communist regimes: power is evinced by a show of military might, with leaders gathering on the rostrum to greet the cadenced tread of thousands of marching soldiers and model workers, while jet fighters scream and whine overhead. Stalin had the Resurrection Gate on Red Square bulldozed and Kazan Cathedral demolished in order to make room for heavy tanks to clatter past Lenin’s tomb. Mao was Khrushchev’s guest of honour at the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, celebrated in Red Square in 1957, but he had no intention of lagging behind his rival. Tiananmen Square had to be bigger, he decided: was China not the most populous nation on earth?1 The square was expanded to hold 400,000 people in 1959, as a maze of medieval walls, gates and roads were levelled to create a vast concrete area the size of sixty football fields.2
The expansion of Tiananmen Square was one of ten gigantic achievements designed to overawe Khrushchev at the tenth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, to be celebrated in October 1959 in the presence of hundreds of foreign guests – one edifice for each year of liberation. A brand-new railway station, capable of handling 200,000 passengers a day, was built in a matter of months. A Great Hall of the People appeared on the western side of Tiananmen Square, a Museum of Chinese History on the eastern side. The Zhonghua Gate was erased to make room for the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a granite obelisk some thirty-seven metres high at the centre of the square.
The leadership bragged to the foreign press eagerly anticipating the anniversary that sufficient new buildings had been erected to give the capital a total of thirty-seven square kilometres of new floor space – more than fourteen times that of all the office buildings put up in Manhattan since the Second World War.3 It was an empty boast, as Beijing was turned into a giant Potemkin village designed to fool foreign visitors. But there was no denying that the party was spellbound by a vision in which soaring skyscrapers of steepled glass and concrete would transform Beijing overnight, relegating to oblivion the shameful mud huts and grey brick houses clustered along narrow lanes. Plans were drawn up for the systematic destruction of the entire city within ten years. At one point even the Imperial Palace was threatened by the wrecking ball.4 Tens of thousands of houses, offices and factories were pulled down, as the capital became a giant building site permanently covered in dust. Foreign embassy staff were taken aback by the rate of demolition, as some of the buildings that were pulverised had only recently been completed. ‘The general picture is one of chaos,’ commented an observer. All work was concentrated in Tiananmen Square, while elsewhere long-established building sites were deserted.5 More often than not pillars and beams went up for the first and second floor, and were then abandoned because of shortages of materials, leaving skeletal frames to stand forlorn as so many monuments to delusion.6
While most of the prestige buildings were ready in time for the October 1959 celebrations, they came at considerable cost. The planners were effective at creating an illusion of order on paper, but chaos reigned on the ground. In a fitting tribute to the folly of the Great Leap Forward, defective steel was incorporated into the party’s new nerve centre. Close to 1,700 tonnes of the steel beams used for the Great Hall of the People were either bent out of shape or insufficiently thick. Threaded steel produced in Tianjin was so weak that it had to be discarded. Across the square thousands of bags of cement were wasted, while a third of the equipment used on the building site was routinely out of order. And even at the heart of power, the party could not get more than three-quarters of the workforce to arrive on time in the morning. When they finally got to their posts, many slacked and skimped. A team of twenty carpenters called in from Wenzhou took three days to install fifteen window casements. Only one actually fitted.7
Across the country vast amounts of money were lavished on prestige buildings. Stadiums, museums, hotels and auditoria were built specifically to mark the tenth anniversary of liberation in 1959. In Harbin 5 million yuan was spent on a National Day Hotel, more than the total cost of the Beijing Hotel. A further 7 million was thrown at a National Day Stadium. In Tianjin, too, a National Day Stadium was planned, with seats to hold 80,000 spectators. Stadiums went up in Taiyuan and Shenyang, among other cities. Jiangsu decided to allocate 20 million yuan to National Day projects.8
Every local dictator, it seemed, wanted to have his ten pet projects in slavish imitation of the capital. The accoutrements of power in Beijing were widely duplicated at lower levels, as many leaders aspired to become a smaller version of Mao Zedong. Another reason was that officials were accountable to their bosses higher up in Beijing, not to the people below them. Big, tangible structures and flashy projects were a sure way to foster the illusion of effective governance. In Lanzhou, the capital of impoverished Gansu, provincial boss Zhang Zhongliang pushed for ten big edifices, although this rapidly spiralled up to sixteen schemes, including a People’s Hall designed to be exactly half the size of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, a People’s Square, an East Railway Station, a Culture Palace for Workers, a Culture Palace for Minorities, a stadium, a library and a luxury hotel, as well as new buildings for the provincial committee, the provincial People’s Congress, a Television Tower and a central park. The cost was set at 160 million yuan. Thousands of houses were destroyed, leaving many of the inhabitants homeless in the middle of the winter. Very little was achieved. After construction work was stopped in the
wake of Zhang Zhongliang’s fall from power in December 1960, nothing but rubble remained in the centre of the city.9 Dozens of other prestige buildings were also started without any sort of approved plan. One example was a brand-new Friendship Hotel for foreign experts. The number of guests was misjudged by a factor of three, so that in the end the 170 foreigners were given an average of sixty square metres of luxurious accommodation while villagers were dying of cold and hunger just outside Lanzhou. After the recall of Soviet experts the building was eerily quiet.10
A step further down the ladder of power was the commune, and there was no shortage of radical leaders willing to transform them into models of communist utopia. In Huaminglou, where Liu Shaoqi was born, party secretary Hu Renqin initiated his own ten construction projects. These included a ‘pig city’, a giant pig shed stretching for ten kilometres along the main road. Many hundreds of houses set back from the street were destroyed to make room for the project. Stopping here on an inspection tour in April 1961, as we have seen, Liu Shaoqi found nothing but a few dozen scrawny animals. A water pavilion was built on the lake, as well as a large reception hall for visiting officials. In the meantime, half a million kilos of grain rotted in the fields. The death rate in some teams was as high as 9 per cent in 1960.11 All over the country similar monuments to party extravagance appeared. In Diaofang commune, Guangdong, where thousands starved to death, some eighty houses were ripped up for timber and bricks, all of which were earmarked for a People’s Hall spacious enough to convene a gathering of 1,500 people.12
In the three years up to September 1961, a total of 99.6 billion yuan was spent on capital construction, to which had to be added a further 9.2 billion in housing projects ostensibly earmarked for ordinary people. Most of the money ended up being invested in prestige buildings and offices with no tangible benefit for anyone but party members.13 But that did not take into account all sorts of accounting tricks used to fund even more construction. In Guizhou the Zunyi region appropriated some 4 million yuan of state funds, including financial assistance for the poor, to indulge in a building spree, sprucing up leading cities with new buildings, dancing halls, photo studios, private toilets and elevators. In Tongzi county funding reserved for six middle schools was embezzled to set up a brand-new theatre.14 Li Fuchun, on reviewing the many billions spent on prestige projects without state approval, felt sheer despair: ‘People cannot eat their fill and we are still building skyscrapers – how can we communists have the heart to do that! Does it still look like communism? Is it not empty talk when we go on all day long about the interests of the masses?’15
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 Page 19