But most cadres had bigger fish to fry, and petty trade was left to ordinary people. In Shanghai, a once freewheeling treaty port, trading habits died hard. Zhao Jianguo, a woman entrepreneur with little money, dealt mainly in small commodities such as light bulbs, but she also made a good profit on a prestigious Phoenix bicycle. Li Chuanying, also a petty trader, bought goods in Shanghai and sold them in Anhui province. Hu Yumei travelled to Huangyan, Zhejiang, to deal in straw hats, mats, dried fish and shrimps, often doubling her money. Ma Guiyou made about 100 yuan a month buying up jewellery and watches from wealthy families downtown and dealing in ration tickets in the countryside: ‘I am not a counter-revolutionary! I don’t steal and I don’t rob, and I don’t have a job, so who cares if I do a bit of business?’ The officials who compiled the report with the help of neighbourhood committees in August 1961 were taken aback not only by the range of goods on offer, but also by the quality of information about market conditions. Despite all the economic information gathered by the machinery of the central planners, petty traders were more in touch with popular demand than the party. The phenomenon was widespread, drawing participants from all social backgrounds, ranging from old rickshaw puller Chen Zhangwu, who sold fruit from the countryside to make ends meet, to influential managers who used official trips to distant places such as Inner Mongolia and Manchuria as a cover for private deals.23
Factory workers also traded goods. The Federation of Trade Unions was alarmed by workers keen to pursue a ‘capitalist lifestyle’ by spurning the principles of the planned economy and speculating on scarce commodities, carefully comparing prices in different shops and buying for profit. Some would join a queue wherever they spotted one, regardless of what was being sold. A few brought family members along to take turns. Li Lanying, a female factory worker, spent five yuan on carrot jam, hoping to resell it at a later date. A colleague acquired persimmons by the sackload. These were not exceptions but rather ‘a way of life’, as the report put it, because workers widely believed that ‘saving money is not as effective as saving goods’. Savings were eroded by several percentage points a month.24 In Shanghai fear of want prompted people to queue up and hoard any and all goods still available from the shops.25
When workers lacked the capital for speculation they resurrected a practice common before 1949, called dahui. Poor people would mutually borrow from a circle of trusted friends, each lending five to ten yuan a month to a different member every month, and each acting in turn as a banker about once a year. In the Dongcheng district in Beijing, some seventy such deals were struck every month among factory workers. Some splurged on luxury goods. Zhao Wenhua, a postal worker, treated herself to a watch, a bicycle, a fur coat and wedding gifts, all seen as durable objects that would keep their value. The practice spread on the understanding that, in times of dearth, goods were a safer bet than money.26 Even children traded. Roughly one out of ten primary school children in Jilin speculated in cakes, meat, eggs, vegetables or soap.27
A few rolled the dice. In Lantang commune, Guangdong, two cadres gambled away a thousand kilos of grain belonging to the village, as well as several hundred kilos of vegetables. A few kilometres away a woman who lost fifty yuan gambling sold sex to meet her debts.28 Gambling was an ingrained habit the authorities were unable to stamp out in Guangzhou, where factory workers played poker for food rather than for money. Some risked astronomical sums, up to 3,500 yuan.29 In Liuhe, just outside Nanjing, gambling occurred almost everywhere, involving groups of up to twenty people.30 Gambling was endemic during the famine, as people staked everything they had in sheer desperation. In the midst of the catastrophic winter of 1960–1, gambling was rife in Hunan too, with some players literally losing their trousers.31
As cash lost its purchasing power, ration coupons became a form of surrogate money. They were required for most essential goods, ranging from oil, grain, pork and cloth to thermos flasks, furniture and even building materials. Designed to ensure equitable distribution of basic commodities, they also tied the population into the household system, through which they were distributed. Each household was issued with a certificate or ration book on which all the family members were recorded, and this document in turn entitled the household to a monthly supply of ration coupons. Coupons were often valid for only one month. Their use was sometimes restricted to their place of issue, which could be a local canteen, a commune, a county, a city or occasionally an entire province. A rice coupon from one county had no validity in the next, forcing people to stay in their place of residence.32
Coupons were traded, just as goods were bartered. In some communes, for instance in Jinghai county, Hebei, coupons became a substitute for salaries, as money was all but phased out. A huge variety of coupons for goods and services from pumpkin seeds to haircuts was issued in lieu of payment, ranging in value from one fen to five yuan.33
One of the purposes of coupons was to preclude hoarding. But as the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress discovered in February 1961, over a third of all coupons, distributed since September 1959, had not been exchanged, meaning that paper worth some 20,000 tonnes of grain was circulating as surrogate money.34
Forging coupons, which were often hastily printed on poor-quality paper, was much easier than counterfeiting money. In the East China Hydraulic Institute a dozen forgeries circulated in the canteens.35 The phenomenon must have been common. A police raid in Shantou brought to light some 200 separate cases involving pirated coupons. As a report to the provincial People’s Congress indicated, more than a third of social infractions were related to ration coupons; the security forces even blamed ‘enemy speculators’ for releasing a flood of fakes in Qingyuan in the autumn of 1960.36
Where buyers and sellers met, a black market emerged. As trade moved from the shop on to the street, markets appeared on street corners, outside department stores, by railway stations, near the factory gates. The black market ebbed and flowed in a legal twilight zone, receding with each crackdown only to reappear as soon as the pressure abated. Sellers would furtively accost buyers and pull goods from paper bags or coat pockets, while others sat on kerbs, spreading out their wares on the ground, from foodstuffs and second-hand bric-a-brac to stolen goods. The public security services would conduct regular sweeps, chasing away the black-marketeers. But they kept returning. And when the local authorities turned a blind eye, makeshift bazaars emerged, with people gathering at an agreed time to barter goods, until the whole affair grew into a more permanent market with buyers and sellers flocking in from the neighbouring villages.
In Beijing black markets appeared in Tianqiao, Xizhimenwai and Dongzhimenwai, where hundreds of traders offered goods that could fetch up to fifteen times the price fixed by the state. This did not deter an enthusiastic throng of housewives, workers and even cadres from shopping around. As bemused agents from the Public Security Bureau noted, people actually liked black markets.37 They were tolerated but not allowed to flourish in the capital, unlike in Guangzhou, where buyers came from all over the region. In the southern city hundreds of buyers from Hunan province alone could be found specifically buying sweet potatoes in the summer of 1961, many of them having been sent directly by their home units.38 Trade was openly conducted, and many of the sellers were children, including some who were only six or seven years old, and older ones who smoked and haggled with prospective buyers.39
In Tianjin local officials uncovered around 8,000 cases of black-market activity in the first weeks of January 1961. On some occasions more than 800 people were selling goods in one market alone, surrounded by thousands of customers examining the goods and generally blocking the traffic. ‘There is nothing that the black market does not have,’ according to one investigator.40 The police who patrolled the streets were fighting a losing battle, and in July 1962 the authorities finally decided to legalise dozens of markets they had never quite managed to eradicate. By the end of the year half of the fruit and a quarter of all the pork sold in Tianjin came from more than 7,000 pedlars
. They made almost double the money a state worker earned.41 Thousands of people travelled to Tianjin from Beijing each day, such was the reputation of its market.42
As the famine gained ground and hunger gradually eroded the social fabric of everyday life, people turned inward. Everything was on sale. Nothing escaped the realm of trade, as bricks, clothes and fuel were bartered for food. In Hubei a third of the workers in big factories survived on loans. Some were so deeply in debt that they sold their blood to survive.43 In a unit in Chongqing, Sichuan, one in twenty workers sold their blood. The percentage was even higher in Chengdu, as working men and women exchanged their blood for a morsel to feed their families. Construction worker Wang Yuting was known in all the hospitals, having sold several litres over a period of seven months.44
But the situation was infinitely worse in the countryside. From a single district in Huangpi, Hubei, 3,000 families took their spare clothes to sell in Wuchang, where they also begged for food.45 In Cangxian county, Hebei, a third of villagers sold all their furniture, some even the roofs over their heads.46 People bartered all they had in Changshou county, Sichuan, including the clothes from their backs.47
Before they died they sold their offspring, more often than not to couples who could not have children of their own. In Shandong, Yan Xizhi gave away his three daughters, and sold his five-year-old son for fifteen yuan to a man in a neighbouring village. His youngest son, a ten-month-old toddler, was sold to a cadre for a pittance. Wu Jingxi got five yuan for his nine-year-old son from a stranger, a sum which covered the cost of a bowl of rice and two kilos of peanuts. His heartbroken wife, an inquiry discovered, cried so much that her swollen eyes were losing their vision. Wang Weitong, mother of two, sold one of her sons for 1.5 yuan and four steamed dough buns. But many, of course, never found a buyer for their children.48
24
On the Sly
Under the cloak of collectivisation, backed up by the naked power of the militia, party officials proceeded to strip people of every conceivable possession – in particular in the countryside, where farmers were more often than not defenceless in the face of rapacious cadres. It was a war of attrition waged against the people, as every new wave of plunder nipped in the bud even a faint hope of actually owning something private. In Xiangtan, Hunan, local people remembered six ‘winds of communism’ blowing over the villages. The first came in the winter of 1957–8, as money, china, silver and other valuable objects had to be handed over for ‘capital accumulation’. The second took place in the summer of 1958 with the advent of the communes. A third ‘wind’ blew away pots, pans and iron utensils as the steel campaign gripped the county. Then, in March 1959, all savings in state banks were frozen. By the autumn of that year large irrigation projects were launched again, and tools and timber were commandeered. Finally, in the spring of 1960, a project for a giant pigsty was hatched by a local leader, who seized pigs and building materials.1
Most people had little recourse against open pillage. But they were not passive victims, and many devised a whole range of strategies of survival. The most common one was to slack at work, allowing natural inertia to take over. Loudspeakers might be blaring exhortations to work, propaganda posters might extol the model worker who overfulfilled the plan, but apathy more often than not governed the factory floor. In a typical workshop of forty workers in Beijing, half a dozen would habitually crouch around the stove to warm up in winter, while others would leave the factory in daytime to queue for goods or watch a movie. Cadres simply did not have the means to control every worker and punish every disciplinary breach.2 A more comprehensive study by the Propaganda Department showed that in Shanghai up to half of all workers failed to pay much heed to work discipline. Some would arrive several hours late, others spent time chatting with each other. A few loafers failed to do any work at all, simply waiting for the next meal. Many disappeared well before the end of the day.3
The deeper the country sank into famine, the greater the shirking became. By 1961 each worker in Shanghai was contributing 40 per cent less value than in 1959, as more workers managed to produce fewer goods. Slacking, of course, was only one of several reasons why productivity plummeted, as we have seen in Chapter 18, but by 1961 factory workers had become masters of time theft.4
In the countryside, by 1959, many villagers had to work all day without eating. Apathy at work, besides being a result of malnutrition, was essential for survival, as every bit of energy had to be saved to get through the day. Farmers would till the fields under the watchful eye of a passing cadre, but as soon as he was out of sight they would drop their tools and sit by the road, waiting for the end of their shift. In parts of the countryside people slept all afternoon, placing their own sentries at key intersections along the fields.5 Where cadres were lenient, up to half the local population managed to avoid work.6 In some villages under a tolerant leadership, entire families would huddle together and sleep for days on end, literally hibernating through the winter months.7
Some historians have interpreted black-marketeering, obstruction, slacking and theft as acts of ‘resistance’, or ‘weapons of the weak’ pitting ‘peasants’ against ‘the state’. But these survival techniques pervaded the social spectrum, so much so that if these were acts of ‘resistance’ the party would already have collapsed. In the conditions of starvation created by the regime, many people had little choice but to ignore customary moral standards and steal as much as they could.
Theft was endemic, its frequency determined by need and opportunity. Transportation workers were in the best position to pilfer state property, as millions of tons of goods passed through their hands. In the Wuhan Harbour Number Six Dock over 280 of the 1,200 employees systematically stripped freight trains while pretending to carry out maintenance and repair work.8 In Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, half of the 864 porters at the railway station stole goods.9 Mail theft was common, and was often organised by party members. In the Guangzhou Post Office a team of four was responsible for opening more than 10,000 overseas parcels, taking watches, pens, ginseng, milk powder, dried abalone and other gifts. Many of the stolen wares were then sold at auction to postal workers. The entire leadership at the post office, or more than a hundred cadres, had a hand in the operation.10
Students stole from the canteen, fifty cases a month being brought to light in Nanjing University in 1960.11 In Hushu Middle School in Jiangning county, just outside Nanjing, petty theft was the norm among students, a way of life that started with a simple carrot pilfered from the kitchen.12 In state shops and department stores clerks at the counter subtly doctored receipts or even produced counterfeits, while in the back assistants rummaged through the storage rooms. Xu Jishu, a sales assistant at the Friendship Store in Shanghai, tampered with receipts, adding small sums of money that amounted, over time, to around 300 yuan. Li Shandi, employed in a pharmacy, confessed to putting away one yuan each day over several years, almost doubling her salary.13
Opportunity was greatest in the city, but need ruled the countryside, where many farmers had to survive famine by living on their wits. At every stage of the production cycle, villagers tried to keep back some of the grain from the demands of the state. This started in the field, even before the wheat or maize was fully ripened. Harking back to a traditional practice called chiqing, or ‘eating green’, villagers quietly clipped off spikes of grain straight from the field, husked and ground it in their hands and ate the raw, green kernels when out of sight of the militia. Eating the crop before it reached maturity was more common in the north, as it was easier to hide among dense rows of maize or in a field thick with wheat than in a rice paddy. Maize was also a more durable crop, standing in the fields for a longer period of time, and thus allowing for a greater number of thefts to take place.14
The autumn harvest in 1960 almost vanished in some communes as a result of crop eating. In Guangrao, Shandong province, several brigades took up to 80 per cent of the maize before it ripened, while crops of millet and green beans vanished a
ltogether. In Jiaoxian county, also in Shandong, up to 90 per cent of all grains disappeared. Thousands of similar incidents rocked the province, as many of those discovered eating from the fields were beaten to death by the local militia.15 In Xuancheng, Anhui, entire fields were eaten clean, as if a swarm of locusts had passed over them.16 Recollecting the years of hunger, farmer Zeng Mu captured the importance of theft: ‘Those who could not steal died. Those who managed to steal some food did not die.’17
Once the grain had been threshed and bagged, it was bulked up with water and sold to the state – with or without the complicity of local inspectors. As we have already seen, in Guangdong alone almost a third of 1.5 million tonnes of state grain suffered from a high water content, although poor storage conditions no doubt contributed to the rot in the subtropical south.18 Once sold to the state, grain on the move was exposed to a plethora of thieving hands. In Xinxing county, Guangdong, close to 900 incidents of theft were reported in 1960. Lin Si, a boatman from Xinhe, took about half a tonne of grain on dozens of occasions. Others were more prudent, replacing stolen foodstuffs with sand and stones. In Guangzhou shippers would extract the grain with a bamboo tube and pour sand back into the bags.19 In Gaoyao, Jiangsu, just about every boatman helped himself to the grain, each taking an average of 300 kilos a year.20
Guards in charge of state granaries stole. In Zhangjiakou, bordering Hebei and Inner Mongolia, a fifth of all watchmen were dishonest, sometimes stealing with the complicity of party members. Half of all cadres in charge of collection points in Qiuxian county were corrupt.21 In the end, with the grain passing through so many grasping hands, one wonders how much actually reached the canteen table. In Suzhou local investigators estimated that out of a kilo of rice only about half made it to its final destination. It was pilfered from the granaries, taken during transportation, pocketed by accountants, confiscated by cadres and finally filched by cooks before a bowl of rice was ever served in a canteen.22
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 Page 24