On other moral fronts the Party leadership moved with comparable energy: brothels were forced to register, prior to their phased closures, and the prostitutes were sent to special training schools for “reeducation”; drug addicts were also ordered to register with the state authorities and to undergo phased rehabilitation programs under state and family supervision, while opium poppy-growing was checked and distributors of drugs were imprisoned or executed. In terms of the preservation of the old China, Mao made one fateful decision. In late 1948, on the eve of the attack on Beijing, Communist artillery commanders had asked for—and obtained—lists of national treasures in the city, so that, if possible, they would not be destroyed by artillery fire. This seemed a good omen to preservationists and art historians, one of whom presented to the Communist leadership a master plan to create the world’s most beautiful system of parks, to run along the tops of the immense and beautiful systems of old walls that encircled the city of Beijing. These parks would be combined with the designation of old Beijing as an industry-free zone, the construction of a new industrial quarter farther out in the countryside, and the building of an entirely new administrative city to house the personnel of the swiftly growing Communist bureaucracy. Mao vetoed the plan, suggesting with a sweep of his arms across the old city that he would rather see it lined from end to end with smokestacks as a symbol of China’s economic rejuvenation. So, over the following years, with the single exception of the Forbidden City palace itself, Beijing’s entire system of magnificent walls and gates was destroyed to create ring roads for the city; industry grew rapidly within the city itself; and the area south of the Forbidden City—which remained, as it had been under the Republic, a museum for the people—was leveled to make a colossal square in which a million people could assemble for political rallies, and which was bordered by the huge block-like assembly halls and bureaus of the new government.
Mao, along with the other senior Communist Party leaders, moved into the old walled complex of buildings adjacent to the southwest corner of the Forbidden City, nestled around the ornamental South Lake and bordering on the North Lake park where he had courted Yang Kaihui thirty years before. In this sheltered and closely guarded area, known as Zhongnanhai, he and Jiang Qing made their home, establishing the first general semblance of a conventional family life that Mao had known since perhaps 1923. Here he had a chance to swim once again—a covered pool was soon built, so he could pursue his favorite form of exercise—and to read with his two daughters, Li Min and Li Na, who were enrolled at a nearby school. His elder son, Anying, was married and working in a Beijing machinery plant, though he and his wife had not yet had children. The younger son, Anqing, who had never been fully well since his dark days in Shanghai, was sometimes hospitalized for treatment, and had not yet married. Once a week, in the evening, there was dancing, to the nostalgic sounds of old Western fox-trots and waltzes, along with occasional film shows. Mao got his books together in one place and read widely.
With so many things of such importance to be done, it is almost inconceivable to imagine that Mao wanted the Korean War. He had specifically asked Stalin about the chances for long-range peace at their December 1949 meetings, and at the January meeting he urged Stalin to always have “consultation regarding international concerns” with China. In retrospect, we can see that Stalin lied to Mao, for Stalin was already secretly discussing the plans for an invasion of the South with North Korea’s leader, Kim Il Sung. And yet, we know that by March 1950 Mao was alerted to the possibility of a North Korean attack on the South, and that he told the North Korean ambassador in Beijing that he encouraged such an attack, and that the Chinese might even intervene to help North Korea. Mao’s estimate of the military situation was colored by his own experiences of people’s war, and the effectiveness of his lightly trained and equipped guerrilla peasant forces against the Japanese. Mao, who had already declared the atomic bomb a paper tiger, had at first told the Koreans that he was sure the Americans would not intervene. When they did so, in late June, right after the North Korean attack, Mao shared with many of the Communist commanders a sense that the Americans were not politically motivated and were too tightly bound by their military codes and regulations, so that “their tactics are dull and mechanical.” Americans were also “afraid of dying” and were over-reliant on firepower. By contrast, Chinese troops were tactically flexible and politically conscious, needed little equipment, “and are good at close combat, night battles, mountainous assaults, and bayonet charges.”
Although contingency plans were made to send in large numbers of Chinese troops under the guise of volunteers, all through the summer and fall the Chinese troops did not enter Korea. Mao was locked in an intense debate with his senior colleagues and military commanders over which was the best course to follow. His colleagues wanted guarantees of Soviet air support and supplies of Soviet vehicles, weapons, and ammunition; some of them also pointed out that the war would wipe out China’s economic reconstruction, and the Chinese people would grow disaffected. They also pointed to the gross disparities in industrial potential. The previous year China had produced 610,000 tons of iron and steel; the United States produced 87.7 million tons in the same period. Lin Biao, the victorious coordinating commander of the Manchurian campaigns two years before, pointed out that the narrow Korean peninsula was particularly bad ground for the Chinese to choose, since they had neither air- nor seapower. Mao’s argument that China had to intervene, to secure its own borders as well as to save its neighboring Communist ally, reinforced by his own optimism concerning the Chinese soldiers’ potential, finally triumphed over his advisers’ misgivings. After further delays—this time by Stalin, who agreed to use Soviet planes only to protect China’s coastal defenses, not in Korean combat, and who hesitated over the amount of supplies to be made available—the Chinese “volunteers” finally began to enter Korea on the night of October 19, under the command of the veteran Communist general Peng Dehuai, maintaining total radio silence, using no lights on their vehicles, and with advance units dressed in the uniforms of North Korean troops.
An early casualty of the war was Mao’s recently married oldest son, Mao Anying, age twenty-eight. Unlike most of the Chinese combat troops, he was indeed a “volunteer,” whose service in Korea Mao had agreed to. Anying had requested an infantry command position, but fearing for the young man’s safety, General Peng Dehaui assigned him to headquarters, as staff officer and Russian interpreter. Mao Anying’s position was hit by a U.S./U.N. incendiary bomb during an attack on November 24, 1950, and he was killed. At first no one dared to tell his father, and his body was buried in North Korea like any other Chinese casualty. When Mao was finally told of his son’s death by Peng Dehuai in person, he agreed to let the body remain in Korean soil, as an example of duty to the Chinese people. His two recorded public pronouncements on his loss were brief: “In war there must be sacrifice. Without sacrifice there will be no victory. There are no parents in the world who do not treasure their children.” And again, “We understand the hows and whys of these things. There are so many common folk whose children have shed their blood and were sacrificed for the sake of the revolution.”
For the whole early part of the war, while the fighting was heaviest, Mao followed the campaigns with meticulous attention, intervening countless times with his own orders or tactical suggestions. But at the same time, with his acute sense of effective propaganda, he saw the advantages of the war as a political rallying cry inside China itself. Aware for so many years of the intense emotional and political fervor that could be generated among workers, students, or peasants by skillfully orchestrated campaigns, Mao and the Chinese propaganda organs spread the word through massive “Aid Korea, Resist America” campaigns. The Chinese people were called upon to sacrifice more, to impose greater vigilance on themselves and their communities, to pledge themselves in deeper loyalty to the Communist Party. As the Korean War entered a protracted stalemate period that lasted until 1953, the domestic campaig
ns were extended to include all-out hunts for domestic counterrevolutionaries and foreign spies, and they began to target capitalists or corrupt bureaucrats. Mao himself, as instigator and manipulator of the war on Korean soil, slowly began to assume the same total roles in his supervision of the Chinese people. Though such campaigns were focused on individuals, they also had an abstracted quality, a certain tokenism and quota-meeting aspect that promised harmony for the majority if the correct percentage of victims could be found. In such an aura of fear, it was hard to keep one’s sense of moral balance. Mao was still surrounded by powerful, intelligent, and experienced revolutionary colleagues, but it was becoming ever harder for them to cut through the protective coating with which he was encasing his inner, visionary worlds.
9
The Ultimate Vision
As SOON AS the Korean War ended with the Treaty of 1953—which left the dividing lines between the two halves of the country close to where they had been before the war began—China embarked on an ambitious program of coordinated national reconstruction. The Communist leaders modeled their scenario along the lines of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans, with the goal of giving maximum growth to industrial development, especially steel production and mining, with secondary growth planned for consumer goods and the agricultural sector. Compulsory purchases of grain from peasants at below market price would help fuel the industrial growth, and at the same time enable the government to subsidize the food prices in the larger cities to prevent major unrest there. Workers in state-controlled industries had what was termed an “iron rice bowl”: they were almost never fired, not even for poor performance or tardiness, and the state provided a massive safety net for them through cheap subsidized housing, free medical care, and access to schools. Thus, though incomes were low, the standard of living was adequate for most workers, and their “work unit” became the source of their social and economic identity.
Mao knew the countryside better than he knew the cities, and hence it is not surprising that peasants had a more varied range of economic options than urban workers, depending on their wealth before 1949 and on the amount of land they might have received through land redistribution. Ever since the Jiangxi Soviet days, but especially since the mass-mobilization periods of World War II, Maoist ideology had made “class la beling” a central factor in peasants’ lives. To be labeled a rich peasant or landlord was to face the risk of losing everything, including all one’s savings and even one’s life. To be labeled a middle peasant was of marginal danger, and might well subject one to mass criticism and partial confiscation of property. To be classified as a poor peasant or landless laborer was the safest. The exact way that these labels were applied, and the precise amount of land or other property, tools, and draft animals that each individual or family controlled, were drawn up in exhaustive investigations, a prototype of which had been the kinds of investigations carried out by Mao in Hunan during 1926, in Jinggangshan in 1928, and in Xunwu in 1930. Facing such investigations, wealthy peasants often sought to “lower” their class status by killing off livestock or destroying stored grain, and by selling off cheaply, or even giving away, surplus land. There was much settling of old scores in this process, along with great social violence, often exacerbated by struggles between formerly married couples once the Communists’ liberal divorce laws became effective in 1950.
Sometimes the inequities were patent, as with the case of poor peasants who had joined in various types of cooperative organizations at the urging of the Party during the civil war period, and had done well enough out of the new socialist organization to be later classified as middle peasants. In the early 1950s, great areas of the countryside were still desperately poor, and private ownership of land, even after redistribution, was still the norm. The preferred form of socialism was through low-level producers’ cooperatives, in which some labor, land, and draft animals would be pooled, and peasants would withdraw in income amounts commensurate with their original input. An effective registration system tied peasants to the area where they worked the land, transposing the former rural village organizations into “work units.” In an attempt to prevent a flood of migrant laborers from the poorer areas of countryside into the cities, the Communist Party only in exceptional circumstances granted permission to travel away from the work unit. Under this system many hardworking peasants indubitably got richer, while others were pushed to the margins of subsistence.
As the recognized leader of the new China, presiding over close to 600 million people and an immense stratified bureaucracy, Mao was forced to spend much of his energies on national planning. Yet at the same time, from the preserved files of Mao’s correspondence in the early 1950s it is possible to see how news reached him across space and decades from three groups of people that he had known at a much more intimate level: the family of his previous wife, Yang Kaihui; the residents of his native village of Shaoshan or the adjacent market town of Xiangtan; and those who taught Mao or studied with him in Changsha. These letters gave him an intimate view of how the revolution was affecting individuals he knew well, and enabled him to place the larger national criteria in a smaller-scale series of contexts.
The Yang family were quickest off the mark. The first of their letters reached Mao just a week after he formally announced, from his rostrum atop Tiananmen, the formation of the People’s Republic of China. It came from Yang Kaihui’s brother, Yang Kaizhi. Kaizhi asked permission to come to the capital with some of his relatives. His mother—Mao’s previous mother-in-law—was not well, and she needed assistance. Kaizhi also wanted a job. In a frank but courteous reply, Mao told his brother-in-law not to come to the capital and not to put Mao “on the spot” by requesting special favors. Let the Hunan provincial committee of the Communist Party find him appropriate employment.
But the mere fact that Mao replied at all gave the Yang family recipients prestige and a major lift in their communities. By the following April, Yang Kaizhi could report that he was working for the provincial government of Hunan. An uncle of Yang Kaihui’s also wrote to Mao and received a courteous if guarded reply. Mao was more forthcoming when he got a letter from Li Shuyi, Yang Kaihui’s closest girlhood friend in the Fu xiang girls’ school of Changsha. Li Shuyi’s husband, a close boyhood friend of Mao‘s, had been shot by the same warlord who killed Yang Kaihui, giving the two surviving spouses an unusual kind of bond from the old days, which they relived by sharing poems. Li Shuyi desired to come to Beijing so that she could “study Marxism-Leninism with greater seriousness.” Mao dissuaded her from coming, but she later wrote again, asking Mao to help her get a job at the Beijing Literature and History Museum. Mao demurred, but offered to help her with some of the money he made from his publishing income. Presumably he was being well paid for his “Selected Works.”
A different voice from the intimate past was that of the nanny, Chen Yuying, whom Mao and Yang Kaihui had hired to look after their three children in the late 1920s. Writing on December 18, 1951, she reminded Mao of her loyalty to his children and requested permission to come and visit him. He gently deflected her, using “thrift” as his reason. She should stay in Changsha and work there, but if she needed assistance, Mao would try to see that she received it. Other letters show that Mao was sending, through his personal secretary, two payments every year to the Yang family as a “subsidy.” The payments were large, each one being at least ten times more than a well-off peasant’s annual income at that time. Mao also arranged for visits to the Yang family graves, and for special celebrations in honor of Yang Kaihui’s mother, who was still alive in the early 1950s.
Other correspondents, evoking Mao’s past, had stranger tales to tell. One classmate of Mao’s from the Changsha normal school had gone on to become an assemblyman under the Beijing militarists and later a member of the Guomindang. Now he was in financial straits. Mao arranged for him to be given some help. Another schoolmate of Mao’s from an even earlier time, when they attended the Xiangxiang primary school, reported that his
two sons had been shot as counterrevolutionaries during the land reform of 1952. Because of his children’s crimes, the father was put under surveillance for a year and forbidden membership in the local peasant association. His only crime was to have worked for the Guomindang for five months in 1928. He now claimed poor-peasant status. Mao suggested he continue to reform and “listen to the cadres.”
Pushing Mao’s memories back to the fall of the Qing dynasty, two of Mao’s Changsha normal-school teachers wrote, one a former principal and the other a history instructor. Now in their seventies, both were in dire financial need. They also reported that Mao’s revered classical literature teacher, “Yuan the Beard,” had died, leaving his seventy-year-old widow starving. Mao suggested a small subsidy from local Party funds for all three. The daughter-in-law of Mao’s math teacher from the same school (he had hated mathematics) wrote, trying to get three (of her eight) children into a school for Communist cadre relatives. Mao was not sure it would be possible, but he gave her some names to try and said she could use his reply letter to vouch for her. A spate of other letters came from army men he knew in 1911, Shaoshan and Xiangtan residents, staff of the 1919 magazine New Hunan, and members of the New People’s Study Society, of which Mao had been the diligent secretary in 1920. Some of these pointed out grave local abuses in the way the Party was now operating, especially in grain requisitioning and bandit suppression.
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