Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Mao’s victory in the civil war was enormously helped by Chiang’s very poor judgment about people — although it was also not easy to detect and root out the Communist moles. Mao’s own policy was not to take the slightest chance. The terror campaigns in Yenan and the other Red areas had exposed and severed virtually every connection individual Communists had with the Nationalists, and the Communists’ total destruction of privacy meant there was no way those under their rule could contact the Nationalists even if they wanted to.

  And Mao never let up. Each time he acquired more territory and personnel, he took relentless steps to enforce control, requiring each new Party enlistee to write down all his or her family and social relations — and this was just for starters. He never stopped seeking, never stopped plugging, every conceivable loophole. Very few agents, Nationalist or foreign, survived his attention, certainly none who reached any position of importance.

  CHIANG’S STRONG FEELINGS for his wife contributed heavily to him losing China. His first prime minister after the Sino-Japanese War was T.V. Soong, who was Mme Chiang’s brother. The Soongs and the family Mme Chiang’s elder sister had married into, the Kungs, grew fat on T.V.’s policies. After the Japanese surrender, T.V. set the exchange rate for the currency of the puppet government outside Manchuria at the absurd level of 1 to 200. This saw the family wealth swell, but impoverished the entire population in the former Japanese-occupied areas in China proper, which included the main cities like Shanghai and Nanjing, with the bulk of the nation’s middle class. Under T.V., takeover officials engaged in widespread extortion, shaking down the rich by designating them “collaborators.” Chiang himself acknowledged that his officials were “indulging in extreme extravagance, whoring wildly and gambling with no restraint … They brag, swagger and extort and stop at nothing …” “The Calamity of Victory” was how the influential Ta Kung Pao newspaper described the takeover.

  At the time of the Japanese surrender, Chiang seemed to be a glorious victor, yet within a very short time he was plunging into decline. Hyper-inflation, food crises, hoarding and panic buying became endemic in the cities. Under T.V., the government managed to squander not only its own reserves, but also the sizable holdings of gold and foreign currency that it inherited from the puppet government.

  The Soongs and the Kungs had access to China’s foreign currency reserves at preferential rates, which enabled them to sell US goods in China at a huge profit, causing the largest trade deficit in China’s history in 1946. This dumping bankrupted swaths of industry and commerce, and T.V. was forced to resign as prime minister on 1 March 1947, after being fiercely attacked in the National Assembly and the press. Chiang ordered an investigation, which concluded that Soong and Kung companies had illegally converted more than US$380 million.

  But all the Generalissimo did was demote T.V., which outraged and alienated many devoted, and uncorrupt, followers. Demoralization accelerated throughout the population, while many denounced the regime as “a bunch of robbers” and “bloodsuckers.” Chiang’s failure to clean up, and especially to come to grips with the malfeasance of his wife’s family, also lost him support in America.

  The report of the investigation into Chiang’s relatives was kept secret. Then the Nationalists’ own newspaper, the Central Daily, got hold of a copy and published it on 29 July, causing a sensation. Two days later, after irate phone calls from Mme Chiang to her husband, the paper had to carry a notice claiming it had got the decimal point wrong, and lowered the sum taken by the families from over US$300 million to US$3 million.

  Chiang consistently let personal feelings dictate his political and military actions. He lost China to a man who had none of his weak spots.

  This was partly on account of his close friendship with a man called Hu Kung-mien, who at the time was commonly assumed to be a secret Communist, and who has now been acknowledged by Peking as an agent. During the war against Japan, when Hu Tsung-nan was stationed south of Yenan, he made this man his representative to Mao.

  Mao’s radios had been maintaining regular communication with Communist agents in Hu’s army, “so their action was entirely under our control,” one of Mao’s radio men told us, adding that “some of the identities of the underground are not disclosed even today” (1999).

  30. CHINA CONQUERED (1946–49 AGE 52–55)

  MAO’S MOST FORMIDABLE weapon was pitilessness. In 1948, when he moved on Changchun, in Manchuria, and a direct assault failed to take it, an order was given to starve it into surrender. The actual words used on 30 May by Mao’s commander on the spot, Lin Biao, were: “Turn Changchun into a city of death.”

  The defending commander, General Cheng Tung-kuo, was a hero of the war against Japan, and refused to capitulate. As there was only enough food to see the 500,000 civilians through until the end of July, he tried to evacuate civilians.

  Lin Biao’s response, endorsed by Mao, was: “Strictly ban civilians from leaving the city.” The Communists let people go who had arms or ammunition, so as to encourage Nationalist soldiers to defect, but specifically blocked civilians. Mao’s calculation was that General Cheng was “a nice sort of guy,” as he described him to Lin Biao, and could be pressured into surrendering by massive civilian deaths. Though completely without pity himself, Mao knew how to manipulate it in others. As it happened, Cheng stuck it out to the end, although he was very torn.

  Three months after the city was sealed off, Lin Biao reported to Mao:

  The blockade … has produced remarkable results, and has caused grave famine in the city … The civilian inhabitants are mainly living on tree leaves and grass, and many have died of starvation …

  “Our main policy has been to forbid exit,” Lin wrote.

  On the front line, we have placed one sentry every 50 metres, plus wire and ditches, and blocked all the gaps … Those who got out, we persuaded [sic] to return … When starvation got worse and worse, hungry people … flocked out; after we drove them back, they were pressed into No Man’s Land … Many died of starvation there. In [one place] alone, there were about 2,000 deaths …

  This policy was so brutal that the troops balked at enforcing it. Lin told Mao:

  The starving people knelt in front of our soldiers en masse, begging to be allowed to go. Some put their babies down in front of the troops and turned back themselves, some hanged themselves in the sentry posts. The sentries could not bear the sight of the misery. Some knelt with the starving people and wept with them … others secretly released refugees. After we corrected this, we discovered another tendency. Soldiers beat up, abused and tied up refugees [to push them back] and went as far as opening fire on refugees, causing deaths.

  Even the hard-hearted Lin recommended letting the refugees go. There was no reply from Mao. Lin, familiar with Mao’s tactic of veto by silence, then took it upon himself to issue an order on 11 September: “Release Changchun refugees … at once.” But the order was not carried out, which can only mean that Mao rescinded it. The only people allowed to leave were those with something useful to the Reds, which usually meant they were relatively rich. One survivor remembered that Communist soldiers “walked up and down announcing: ‘Anyone who has a gun, ammunition, a camera — hand it over and we’ll fill out a pass for you to leave.’ ” Nationalist deserters and their families were given preferential treatment. This survivor’s family got out on 16 September, thanks to the fact that her husband was a doctor, and useful to the Reds.

  After mid-September, Changchun’s mayor recorded a massive rise in deaths, when tree leaves, the last food, were falling. By the end of the five-month siege the civilian population had dropped from half a million to 170,000. The death toll was higher than the highest estimate for the Japanese massacre at Nanjing in 1937.

  A Red veteran in the besieging army described how he and his comrades felt:

  When we heard outside the city that so many people had died of hunger, we weren’t too shocked. We had been in and out of piles of corpses, and our hearts had been har
dened. We were blasé. But when we entered the city and saw what it was like, we were devastated. Many of us wept. A lot of us said: We’re supposed to be fighting for the poor, but of all these dead here, how many are the rich? Which of them are Nationalists? Aren’t they all poor people?

  News of this mammoth atrocity was suppressed. The few inhabitants who were let out had four “refugee rules” stamped on their passes, one of which was “no spreading rumors”—i.e., don’t talk. The Changchun model, based on starving civilians to death in order to force the defending troops to surrender was used in “quite a few cities,” according to the Communist general Su Yu, who was understandably unspecific.

  CIVILIANS IN THE communist-held territories were also ruthlessly exploited. Most men of working age were either drafted into the Reds’ expanding army, or into hard, often dangerous labor at the front. The latter involved particularly large numbers. In Manchuria the Reds conscripted 1.6 million laborers, roughly two to each fighter. In the Peking — Tianjin campaign the figure was 1.5 million, and in the Huai — Hai Campaign, 5.43 million. This gigantic corvée performed numerous frontline tasks for which the Nationalists used regular troops, such as dismantling fortifications and transporting ammunition and wounded.

  Women were left to do most of the farm work, along with children and men unfit for the front. They also had to care for the wounded, mend uniforms, make countless shoes for the army, and cook for the giant army of troops and laborers. Every household had to hand over a designated amount of food — which came to a staggering 225 million kg of grain alone in the Huai — Hai Campaign. In addition to feeding Red soldiers, food was also used in psychological warfare to entice Nationalist troops to defect.

  The Nationalists were constantly short of food, as they relied heavily on supplies brought in by railway, and sporadic airlifts. One Nationalist veteran recalled how hundreds of thousands of men sat for a month in one pocket, starving and freezing in a temperature of –10 °C. Soldiers fought — and sometimes killed — each other to get to air-dropped food. Later on, tree bark “was a good meal,” and soldiers turned to eating their leather belts and shoe soles. The veteran remembered digging up a dead rat: “Delicious! It was meat.” At the end, he said, there was no need for the Reds even to shell them: “In an area no bigger than your bum, all you’d have to do was just throw stones at the 300,000 starving ghosts and they would have had it.” Some went over to the Communists as a result of being bombarded by loudspeakers shouting: “Hey, Chiang Kai-shek, we’ve got pancakes here, come on over and eat.” “No amount of politics was as good as food,” the vet remarked. “Everyone knew that stewed pork was better than shoe soles.”

  Apart from enduring Red requisitioning and being drafted, many peasants also lost their houses, pulled down to provide fuel for cooking and materials for building bridges. The whole of Communist-held territory was turned into a giant war machine encompassing every aspect of every person’s life. The entire population was made to live and work flat out, night and day, for the war, and very often in the thick of it. Mao called this “People’s War.”

  But “the People” did not volunteer this all-consuming type of support, much less with the zeal that Communist mythology proclaims. Only intense terrorization coerced them into providing services for the war “for a long time without getting tired,” as Mao put it. The process went under the misnomer “land reform.”

  DURING THE WAR against Japan the Communists had suspended their policy of confiscating and redistributing land and replaced it with one of reducing land rent. When the war against Chiang started in earnest, they reverted to their earlier radical approach. But land redistribution was not the main aspect of Mao’s land reform. The part that really mattered was a practice called dou di-zhu, “struggle against the landlords,” which in reality meant violence against the relatively better-off. (In China, unlike pre-Communist Russia, there were very few large landowners.) When people recall the land reform, it is this practice that dominates their memories.

  The violence typically took place at rallies, which all villagers had to attend. Those designated as targets were made to stand facing large crowds, and people were psyched up and organized to come forward and pour out their grievances against them. The crowds would be led to shout slogans while brandishing fists and farm tools. Village militants and thugs would then inflict physical abuse, which could range from making the victims kneel on broken tiles on their bare knees, to hanging them up by their wrists or feet, or to beating them, sometimes to death, often with farm implements. And there was often torture of even more ghastly kinds.

  The Party’s orders to its cadres were not to try to stop the violence, the line being that these were legitimate acts of revenge by the downtrodden. Cadres were told they must “let the people do what they want” to those who had oppressed and exploited them. In fact, the Party wanted to encourage violence, and where there was no violence, local cadres were accused of obstructing the land reform movement, and promptly replaced.

  A model was created between March and June 1947 by Mao’s terror expert, Kang Sheng. Cadres in all other Red areas were instructed to copy his methods. The fact that land reform was entrusted to a man who was an expert not in agrarian reform, but in terror (and who knew nothing about land issues), makes clear the nature of the program. Kang went to a village in northwest Shanxi called Haojiapo. After the first rally, he berated the local cadres and activists for being “far too polite.” “There must be abuse,” he said. “Educate the peasants to … have no mercy … There will be deaths. But let’s not be afraid of deaths.”

  Kang told the cadres and activists to treat whole families as targets, even children. He stood by smiling when village children beat up “little landlords,” as children from the wrong families were called. These could be almost anybody, as Kang extended the criteria for condemning people far beyond the original “landlords” and “kulaks,” in order to create victims where there were no landed rich. (This was especially the case in areas that had been occupied by the Reds for years, where the relatively wealthy had been impoverished.) Kang invented a new — and very vague — yardstick: “how they are liked by the masses.” This meant that anyone could be turned into a target, so those who had incurred feelings of indignation or jealousy on the part of their fellow villagers, for behavior like having “illicit affairs,” became prime victims.

  Appalling physical abuse swept the Red areas. One woman official described to us a rally where “four people were hanging in a row by their wrists from four ropes,” watched by “every man, woman, the old, young, even children” of the village. There was a “female landlord” at the end of one of the ropes. “It is very painful thinking about it,” the eyewitness told us.

  As a matter of fact, she hadn’t got much land; she had only been short of labour and had hired a farmhand … They asked her where she had hidden the grain … I knew she did not have the grain. But they insisted she did and beat her … Her blouse was stripped off. She had just had a baby and her milk was dripping. The baby was crying and crawling on the ground, trying to lick up the milk. People lowered their heads and couldn’t bear to look … Many loathed all this, but they were forced to watch. If they objected, they would come to disaster, too. Some village cadres were really thugs. True honest peasants did not dare to offend them.

  Public displays like these brought shivers for decades to people who witnessed them. In many places people were obliged to watch even more gruesome sights. In one place, one elderly member of the gentry whose surname was Niu, which means Ox, had a wire run through his nose and his son was forced to pull him through the village by the wire, like an ox, with blood streaming down his face. Elsewhere, “entire families from the youngest to the oldest were killed. Babies still on milk, grabbed and torn apart at the limbs or just thrown into a well.” Some grisly scenes took place right under Mao’s nose in Jiaxian county in the Yenan region, where he was staying from 16 August to 21 November 1947, doing quite a bit of sightseeing. Re
ports to Mao about this county included descriptions of how one person was drowned in a vat of salt water, and another was killed by having boiling oil poured over his head. One place actually had a rule that “anyone not active in denouncing landlords will be stoned to death.”

  Mao saw violent scenes with his own eyes. His bodyguards described him going, in disguise, to watch a rally in the village where he was staying in late 1947, Yangjiagou, where dreadful things happened. Afterwards, he talked to the guards about the various forms of torture, and the fact that children had been severely beaten up.

  The upshot was, as reports to Mao made clear: “Everyone is terrified.” Mao had achieved his goal.

  BY THE BEGINNING of 1948 the Reds controlled some 160 million people. Peasants constituted the overwhelming majority, and they were all terrorized in traumatic ways. The Party dictated that 10 percent of the population qualified as families of “landlords” and “kulaks.” This means that in these categories alone (and more were created by Kang Sheng’s new criteria) at least some 16 million people were on the receiving end of some degree of physical abuse and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million, were killed or driven to suicide.