by Jung Chang
Mao’s answer to the peasants’ plight was pitiless. They should eat sweet potato leaves, which were traditionally used only to feed pigs. “Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel,” he instructed. “The State should try its hardest … to prevent peasants eating too much.”
One of Mao’s economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, later acknowledged that under the requisitioning policy, “Most of the food the peasants produced was taken away.” And “force,” he said, was commonplace; people were “driven to death.” This violence was specifically endorsed by Mao, who discussed the consequences of the requisitioning with its architect, Chen Yun, on 1 October 1953. Next day, Mao told the Politburo that they were “at war” with the whole population: “This is a war on food producers — as well as on food consumers,” meaning the urban population who were now subjected to unprecedentedly low rationing. To justify treating peasants as enemies, Mao’s fatuous rationale was that “Marx and Engels never said peasants were all good.” When, days later, Chen Yun conveyed Mao’s instructions to provincial leaders in charge of extracting food, he told them they must be prepared for deaths and riots in 100,000 villages — one-tenth of all the villages in China. But this would not jeopardize Communist rule, he assured them, making a comparison with Manchukuo, where the occupying Japanese had requisitioned large amounts of grain. “Manchukuo,” he said, “would not have fallen if the Soviet Red Army had not come.” In other words, brute force à la japonaise would guarantee that peasants could not endanger the regime, no matter how hard it was squeezing them.
BY EARLY 1955, requisitioning had brought utter misery. Numerous reports reached Mao about peasants having to eat tree bark, and abandoning their babies because they had no food. Mao had installed many channels for gathering feedback at the grassroots, as he needed to keep his ear to the ground to maintain control. One channel was his guards. When they went home for visits that year, he asked them to report back about their villages. The picture they painted was bleak. One wrote that 50 percent of households in his village were short of food, and had had to eat tree leaves that spring. Another reported that people were having to depend on wild herbs for food, and were dying of starvation.
From other channels Mao learned that people were saying things like “What’s so good about socialism? Even now when we’ve just begun we are not allowed cooking oil”; and “The Communist Party is driving people to death!” A then unknown official in Guangdong province called Zhao Zi-yang (who became Party chief in the post-Mao era) reported that cadres were searching houses, tying peasants up and beating them to force them to surrender food, and sealing the houses of those who said they had nothing left. He cited the case of an old woman who hanged herself after being imprisoned inside her house. In one not atypical county, Gaoyao, 110 people were driven to suicide. If this figure is extrapolated to China’s 2,000-plus counties, the number of suicides in rural areas in this short period would be approaching a quarter of a million.
Some courageous individuals petitioned Mao. One prominent fellow traveler wrote to Mao that he had received many letters saying that peasants did not have enough energy to work because they were left too little food. Mao summed up: “10,000 reports [‘10,000’ expresses hugeness] about deaths of humans, deaths of animals, about people raiding granaries: 10,000 reports of darkness …” But Mao was completely unmoved. He would punish the fellow traveler with what he disdainfully called “a good bit of persecution.” He was given to say airily that people were “not without food all the year round — only six … or four months” [sic]. Senior officials who invoked the traditional concept of conscience (liang-xin) to beg him to go easy found themselves being slapped down with remarks like: “You’d better have less conscience. Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means they are not so Marxist.” “On this matter,” Mao said, “we indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal.”
Mao turned the screw even tighter from mid-1955 by forcing the entire countryside into collective farms. This was to make it easier to enforce requisitioning. Previously, peasants could harvest their own crops and bring them home before handing over the state’s “share.” To Mao, this left a loophole: peasants could underreport the harvest and hide some of it, and checking nearly a hundred million households was not easy. With collectivization, however, the whole harvest went straight from the fields into the state’s hands, giving the regime complete control over how it was allocated. As one peasant said: “Once you join the collective, you only get food the government doles out to you.”
The other huge advantage of collectivization for Mao was that it made it much easier to keep the peasants under surveillance when they were working. With collectivization came slave-driving. Henceforth, the state dictated what hours peasants worked, and how hard. A People’s Daily editorial on New Year’s Day 1956 made it clear that the aim was to get peasants to double their working hours. Mao especially targeted women; those who used not to work in the fields would do so now.
To stifle resistance to both requisitioning and collectivization, Mao wielded his old panacea: terror. In May 1955 he talked about another “Five-Year Plan,” this time for suppression: “We must arrest 1.5 million counter-revolutionaries in five years … I am all for more arrests … Our emphasis is: arrest in a big way, a giant way …” Using the scatological language of which he was enamored, Mao added: “My farts [i.e., orders] are socialist farts, they have to be fragrant,” i.e., obeyed. Anyone resisting food confiscation or collectivization, and any official sympathetic to them, was termed a criminal, and notices announcing their sentences were plastered up across the country.
Collectivization of agriculture marked a big stride towards making China even more totalitarian. At the same time, Mao ordered the nationalization of industry and commerce in urban areas, to channel every single resource into the Superpower Program. However, businessmen were not persecuted like rural landlords, for pragmatic reasons. “The bourgeoisie,” Mao said, “are much more useful than … landlords. They have technical know-how and management skills.” Though he then proceeded to squander these managerial and technical talents spectacularly. In addition, China’s glorious handicrafts withered over the coming years. Repair and maintenance shops would dwindle in number, greatly increasing the misery of everyday life. “We started socialism, and everything disappears,” Liu Shao-chi remarked pithily.
To scare state employees into conforming, Mao launched a purge campaign in which no fewer than 14.3 million men and women on the state payroll were put through terrifying vetting that involved “confessions and informing,” frequent public denunciation meetings, and physical abuse. Offices and residential buildings were turned into detention centers, as were sports halls and university dormitories. Mao decreed that “Counter-revolutionaries … make up … around 5 percent” of those vetted, which would mean that 715,000 people were condemned and received various punishments, including execution. In fact, Mao indicated that more people than this could be done in, as one of his instructions reads: “Whenever this figure [5 percent] is exceeded, authorization should be obtained.”
This campaign was accompanied by a clampdown on literature and the arts. With his characteristic thoroughness, Mao had begun to strangle culture from the moment he took power. The cinema industry was almost shut down. In 1950, 39 feature films were produced; in 1952 the figure was 5. In 1954 he had started a drive to eradicate the influence of the great non-Communist writers, historians and scholars, some of whom had fled abroad, or to Taiwan. Now he turned to those who had stayed and who showed some independence. Mao picked on a well-known writer called Hu Feng, who had called for a more liberal artistic environment, and had a following. In May 1955, Hu was publicly denounced and thrown into prison, from which he only emerged, his mind destroyed, after Mao died more than two decades later.
The Hu Feng case was headlined in the press. And it served another purpose — to scare people out of writing to each other about their views. Letters that Hu a
nd his followers had exchanged were published, revealing thoughts critical of the regime, and these were presented as evidence against them. As a result, people became wary of putting any thoughts on paper. Not being able to write one’s thoughts down, on top of not being able to voice them, or having to censor them all the time, undermined people’s ability to form their own independent judgment.
Terror worked. At the beginning of 1956, Mao told the top echelon:
The first half of 1955 was simply foul … with black clouds all over the sky … There were curses against us everywhere. People said we were no good. All because [we took] a few bits of grain. In the latter half of the year, the curses disappeared. Some happy events emerged. A good harvest and collectivisation were two big happy events, and then there was the purge of counter-revolutionaries, another happy event.
Another “happy” event, which Mao kept quiet about, was in many ways the most significant of all. He had acquired the single thing dearest to his heart: the start-up technology to make the atomic bomb.
In 1953, Mao had failed to get the Bomb out of Moscow through the device of trying to prolong the Korean War. But he soon found another way — by starting another war, this one concerning Taiwan. In July 1954, Peking gave the appearance of seriously preparing to go to war over Taiwan. Chou En-lai went to Moscow and gave Mao’s message to the Kremlin: he must have a war to “liberate Taiwan.”
In fact, China’s military chiefs had told Mao there was little chance of a sea crossing succeeding, and he had actually decided not to make a move on Taiwan until he was ready. The point of this hullabaloo about attacking Taiwan was really to push the situation to the brink of nuclear confrontation with America, which would face Russia with the possibility of having to retaliate on China’s behalf unless it let Mao have the Bomb.
On 3 September, Mainland artillery opened fire on the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy, which lies only a few kilometers off the coast, and was considered the jumping-off point for any move on Taiwan. This detonated what became known as the “first Taiwan Strait crisis.” Washington perceived the crisis to be between itself and Peking, but in fact it was a ploy by Mao to exert pressure on Moscow.
Soon afterwards, Nikita Khrushchev, who had just established himself as No. 1 in the Kremlin, arrived in Peking for the fifth anniversary of the Communist regime on 1 October 1954, accompanied by an array of senior colleagues, something unimaginable under Stalin. Khrushchev came determined to establish the best possible relations. He wiped much of Stalin’s slate clean, offering to scrap the secret annexes in the 1950 treaty which infringed on China’s interests. He also agreed to supply more equipment for the 141 arms factories already under way, and to sell Mao another 15 enterprises, and extend a new loan of 520m rubles.
Mao immediately seized the initiative and requested help to build his own Bomb to deter the Americans. Asked by Khrushchev what might prompt a US attack, he cited the Taiwan crisis. Khrushchev attempted to talk him out of making his own Bomb by promising shelter under Russia’s nuclear umbrella, and guaranteeing to retaliate if China was attacked. Khrushchev also adduced the economic argument that making the Bomb was too expensive for China. Mao acted as though his national pride was offended. Though this irritated Khrushchev, the Soviet leader reluctantly promised to consider helping China build a nuclear reactor.
Soon after Khrushchev left, Mao escalated the crisis by bombing and strafing more Nationalist-held islands. US President Eisenhower responded by agreeing to sign a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. Mao pressed on, apparently intent on taking the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu — and more. His calculation was to nudge America into threatening to use nuclear weapons. In March 1955 the US said it would use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances. Eisenhower very deliberately told a press conference on the 16th that he could see no reason why they should not be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Mao had what he had aimed for — a situation in which China seemed to be in real danger of a US nuclear strike.
Not wishing to be drawn into a nuclear confrontation with America, Khrushchev took the momentous decision to provide China with the technical assistance to make the Bomb.
At this time, substantial uranium deposits had just been confirmed in Guangxi province. Mao was extremely excited, and immediately ordered a demonstration on 14 January. Geology chief Liu Jie recalled:
I put the uranium ore on the table, and … waved a Geiger counter across it. The Geiger counter went “ga-ga-ga …” Chairman Mao looked so intrigued. He laughed like a child, and picked up the Geiger counter himself, waving it across the ore, listening to the “ga-ga” sounds again … When I said goodbye … Mao held my hand and said: “Liu Jie — ah! I want you to know that what you are doing is the thing that decides our destiny!”
Afterwards, there was a banquet. Mao’s toast was straight to the point: “Bottoms up … to having our own atom bombs as quickly as possible!”
In April, the Russians agreed to build China the two key items needed to make a Bomb: a cyclotron and a nuclear reactor. Mao was en route to becoming a nuclear power. Large groups of Chinese scientists set off to be trained in Russia. In December, news came that the Russians had committed to help build a comprehensive nuclear industry in China. Mao was ecstatic. On the advice of Russian scientists, a twelve-year nuclear plan was drawn up. As 1956 dawned, Mao told his aides he was in better spirits than when he had taken China six years before. He felt on top of the world, and announced grandly to his inner circle: “We must control the Earth!”
TO CORRESPOND WITH the twelve-year nuclear plan, in January 1956 Mao and a group of his cronies drafted a twelve-year plan for agriculture. This was really Mao’s scheme to extract much more food to fund his upgraded and expanded Superpower Program. It ordered peasants to produce the equivalent of 500 billion kg of grain per annum by the end of the twelve years, more than triple the highest-ever previous annual output (in 1936). And this tall order had to be achieved with virtually no investment, not even of fertilizer.
At this point, Mao met with new resistance — this time from virtually the whole Politburo, spearheaded by the usually doglike Chou En-lai, who was in charge of planning, and Chou was backed by Liu. They all knew that Mao’s astronomical output target was unattainable. Mao had set the figure by a process of “back-calculation,” starting not from reality, but from the amount of food that he would need to fund his purchases, and working back from there. The obvious conclusion was that Mao’s plan would involve extracting a much larger percentage of the harvest from the peasantry than before. As the peasants were already living on a knife-edge, millions, at a minimum, would be tipped over the edge into starvation and death.
Realizing the implications, in February 1956, Chou cut spending on industrial projects by over a quarter. He was just as keen as Mao for China to be a superpower, but he was willing to face up to the fact that the country did not have nearly enough resources to pay for everything Mao wanted, much less simultaneously. So he opted for focusing on the nuclear program and key projects, and cutting back on other projects, which was necessitated anyway by shortages of basic materials like steel, cement and timber.
Mao, however, wanted all the projects, and all at once. Quite apart from his devil-may-care attitude to his subjects’ welfare, Mao had no grasp of economics. According to Bo Yi-bo, Mao asked to read and listen to reports from the ministries at this time, but “he found it extremely taxing,” and complained that the reports contained “only dull lists and figures, and no stories.” Once, as he listened to a minister, he knitted his eyebrows, and said it was “worse than being in prison” (where he had never been). Chou En-lai found himself being admonished for “flooding Chairman Mao with boring materials and figures.” Mao had trouble even with basic numbers. Once, while he was talking about trade with Japan, his prepared notes contained a figure of US$280 million, but one line later he wrote this as US$380 million, throwing the whole calculation out by US$100 million. “Statistics
and numbers were not in any way sacred to him,” Yugoslavia’s No. 2, Edvard Kardelj, observed after he met Mao in 1957. “He said, for example, ‘In two hundred years’ time, or perhaps in forty.’ ” The chief Soviet economic adviser in China, Ivan Arkhipov, told us, with a sigh of exasperation, that Mao “had no understanding, absolutely no understanding at all” of economics.
In April 1956, Mao told his colleagues that the cuts must be restored, but for once they dug their heels in. Mao dismissed the meeting in a fury. Afterwards, Chou went to see him and begged him to accept the cuts, saying, most extraordinarily, that his “conscience would not allow” him to obey Mao’s orders. This sent Mao into a mad rage, but he could not stop the cuts going through.
Mao’s colleagues stood up to him because, hard men though they were, the consequences — millions dying of starvation — were too appalling. They were also emboldened by an event that had just occurred in Moscow. There, on 24 February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the the Soviet Party, Khrushchev had denounced Stalin for his killings and tyrannical behavior — and for the costs of his forced-march industrialization, a process which in fact was a lot less extreme than Mao’s was to be. Mao’s colleagues now started criticizing Stalin on these same issues (always within the confines of the inner circle). Liu called Stalin’s peasant policy one of his “major mistakes.” Former Party No. 1 Lo Fu observed that Stalin “put too much emphasis on … heavy industry.” “When I was ambassador to Russia,” he noted, “I went to the shops and found almost nothing to buy. They are also always short of food … We should draw a big lesson.” “We will be making big mistakes if we ignore agriculture,” Chou told the State Council on 20 April. “The lessons in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries all proved this.” The parallels with Mao’s practices hardly needed laboring.