Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  In the absence of safety measures and medical care, accidents were frequent, as were deaths, which Mao well knew. His talks with provincial chiefs about these waterworks are littered with mentions of death tolls. In April 1958 he observed that as Henan (his model) had promised to move 30 billion cubic meters that coming winter, “I think 30,000 people will die.” Anhui, another of Mao’s favorite provinces, “said 20 billion cubic metres, and I think 20,000 people will die …” When senior officials in Gansu province appealed against “destroying human lives” in these projects, Mao had them condemned and punished as a “Rightist anti-Party clique.”

  Mao wanted instant results, so he promoted a typical slogan: “Survey, Design and Execute Simultaneously,” known as the “Three Simultaneouslys.” Geological surveying was therefore scanty, or non-existent, so a fourth “simultaneous” usually soon had to be added: Revision.

  One well-known project was a canal 1,400 km long across the drought-plagued Yellow Earth Plateau in the northwest. It had to cross 800 mountains and valleys and the 170,000 laborers had to dig caves to sleep in, and forage for herbs to eke out their meager food. Months into the project, tunnels which they had already started digging, by hand, were abandoned in favor of culverts. After more months, this approach in turn was abandoned, and some of the tunnels reinstated. The project went on in this way for three years, during which at least 2,000 laborers died, and was then abandoned. The official account admitted that not one plot of land had benefited.

  Most of the projects turned out to be a stupendous waste. Many had to be abandoned halfway: out of the over 500 large reservoirs (100 million cubic meters capacity or more), 200 had already been abandoned by late 1959. Many others collapsed during Mao’s lifetime. The worst dam disaster in human history happened in 1975 in Mao’s model province of Henan, when scores of reservoirs built during the Leap crumbled in a storm, drowning an estimated 230,000–240,000 people (official death toll: 85,600). Other Mao-era follies went on killing people long after his death, and as of 1999, no fewer than 33,000 were considered a risk to human life. The dams also uprooted untold millions from their homes, and more than two decades later there were still 10.2 million “reservoir displaced persons.”

  MAO INFLICTED MANY other half-baked schemes on the peasants, like forcing them to dig up soil by hand to a depth of half a meter. “Use the human wave tactic, and turn every field over,” he ordered. Grossly excessive close planting was another. Close planting needed fertilizer, but Mao refused the requisite investments, and in late 1958 he actually ordered: “Reduce chemical fertiliser imports.” On another occasion he said: “Turn China into a country of pigs … so there will be lots of manure … and more than enough meat, which can be exported in exchange for iron and steel.” But he did not say where the feed was to come from for these pigs. In fact, under Mao’s stewardship the number of pigs fell by no less than 48 percent between 1957 and 1961.

  Over the centuries, Chinese peasants had applied their ingenuity to find every possible substance that could be used as fertilizer. In urban areas, every spot where human waste was dumped was allocated to a particular village, and peasants coming in before dawn to collect this waste with their special oblong barrels on carts were a feature of life. Human waste was so precious that frequent fights broke out between people from different villages over poaching, using their long-handled ladles. Desperate to find new sources for fertilizer, people started to mix human and animal manure with the thatched roofs and earth walls of old houses, into which smoke and grease had seeped. Millions of peasant houses were torn down to feed into manure pits, known as “shit lakes and piss seas.”

  One day it hit Mao that a good way to keep food safe would be to get rid of sparrows, as they ate grain. He designated sparrows as one of “Four Pests” to be eliminated, along with rats, mosquitoes and flies, and mobilized the entire population to wave sticks and brooms and make a giant din to scare sparrows off landing so that they would fall from fatigue and be caught and killed by the crowds. There was much to be said for eradicating the other three, which were genuine pests, though one side-effect was that whatever slight privacy people had once had in performing their bodily functions disappeared, as eager fly-collectors loitered in droves at public lavatories. But the case for eliminating sparrows was not so clear-cut, as sparrows got rid of many pests, as well as eating grain — and, needless to say, many other birds died in the killing spree. Pests once kept down by sparrows and other birds now flourished, with catastrophic results. Pleas from scientists that the ecological balance would be upset were ignored.

  It was not long before a request from the Chinese government marked “Top Secret” reached the Soviet embassy in Peking. In the name of socialist internationalism, it read, please send us 200,000 sparrows from the Soviet Far East as soon as possible. Mao had to accept that his anti-sparrow drive was counter-productive, and it gradually petered out.

  The “Four Pests” campaign was a sort of Maoist DIY substitute for a health service, as it was labor-intensive and investment-free. Mao had wanted to get rid of dogs, which consumed food, but relented, when he was advised that peasants needed them to guard their houses when they were out at work.

  ANOTHER FIASCO that drained the peasants’ energy, and brought disaster, was an order from Mao that the entire nation had to “make steel.” The Superpower Program needed a lot of steel — and steel was also Mao’s yardstick for superpower status. When he boasted to Communist leaders in Moscow in 1957 that China would “overtake Britain in fifteen years” (which he later shortened to three) and when he told the Chinese he was fully confident that China could “overtake America” in ten years, steel output was what he had in mind. Mao set the 1958 target at 10.7 million tons. How this came about illustrates his broad-brush approach to economics. Sitting by his swimming pool in Zhongnanhai on 19 June he said to the metallurgy minister: “Last year, steel output was 5.3 million tons. Can you double it this year?” The yes-man said: “All right.” And that was that.

  Steel mills and related industries like coal mines were ordered to go flat out to speed up production. Rules, and common sense, were cast aside. Equipment was overworked to the point of breakdown, and over 30,000 workers were killed in serious accidents alone within a few months. Experts who tried to talk sense were persecuted. Mao set the tone for discrediting rationality by saying that “bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated as dogs’ fart, worth nothing, deserving only disdain, scorn, contempt …”

  Even going flat out, the existing steel mills could not fulfill Mao’s target. His response was to order the general population to build “backyard furnaces.” At least 90 million people were “forced,” as Mao said matter-of-factly, to construct such furnaces, which Khrushchev not unfairly dubbed “samovar” furnaces, and which produced not steel at all, but pig iron, if that.

  To feed these furnaces, the population was coerced into donating virtually every piece of metal they had, regardless of whether this was being used in productive, even essential, objects. Farm tools, even water wagons, were carted off and melted down, as were cooking utensils, iron door handles and women’s hair-clips. The regime slogan was: “To hand in one pickaxe is to wipe out one imperialist, and to hide one nail is to hide one counter-revolutionary.”

  Across China yet more peasant houses were torn down, and their occupants made homeless, so that the timber and thatch could be burned as fuel. Most accessible mountains and hillsides were stripped bare of trees. The resulting deforestation was still causing floods decades later.

  The furnaces required constant attention, consuming vast amounts of labor time. Tens of millions of peasants, plus a large proportion of draft animals, were pulled out of agriculture, leaving only women and children to bring in the crops in many places. By the end of the year, some 10 billion work-days had been lost to agriculture, about one-third of the time that would normally have gone to producing grain. Though the total 1958 crop output was slightly up on 1957, there was no increase in t
he amount harvested.

  As the year-end deadline approached for his steel output goal, every time Mao saw his managers he would use his fingers to count the days left, and urge them: “We must make it!” By 31 December, the 10.7 million tons figure was reached, but as Mao acknowledged to his top echelon, “only 40 percent is good steel”; and more than 3 million tons were completely useless. The “good” steel had been produced by proper steel mills; the useless stuff from the backyard furnaces, almost all of which were soon abandoned. The whole venture, a gigantic waste of resources and manpower, triggered further losses: in one place, local bosses hijacked shipments of high-quality Russian alloys and had them melted down so that they could claim a bumper output, called an “Iron and Steel Sputnik.” “No good at constructing, but super-good at destruction”: never was Mao’s own assessment of himself more accurate.

  MAO WASTED MUCH of the technology and equipment bought from Russia, along with the skills of the accompanying specialists. Machinery often lay idle, as the gigantic industrial infrastructure they required was lacking. The equipment that was working was overworked, often twenty-four hours a day, while maintenance was neglected or dismissed as irrelevant. Mao encouraged ignoring regulations, and told those Chinese who were working with Russian advisers that they must not be “slaves” to Russian expertise. Russian pleas for common sense got nowhere. Even the very pro-Chinese chief adviser Arkhipov was rebuffed. In 1958, he told us, “I asked Chou and Chen Yun to try to persuade Mao to keep his ideas to himself, but Mao wouldn’t listen … They said to me: Very sorry; Mao didn’t agree with the Soviet side.” In June 1959, Soviet deputy premier Aleksandr Zasyadko, a metallurgy and missile silo expert, visited China and afterwards reported to Khrushchev that “They’ve let the whole thing go to pot.”

  By the end of 1958, the number of large arms-centered industrial projects that were under construction had reached a staggering 1,639—yet only 28 had been completed and were producing anything at all. Many were never finished, because of a lack of basic materials like steel, cement, coal and electricity. The regime itself called these “greybeard projects.” Mao was the only ruler in history to produce a rust-bowl at the start of industrialization rather than at its end.

  All this was destructive to Mao’s own dreams. The breakneck speed he imposed sabotaged quality and created a long-term problem that was to plague arms production throughout his reign. China ended up with planes that could not fly, tanks that would not go in a straight line (on one occasion a tank swerved round and charged at watching VIPs), and ships that were almost a greater hazard to those who sailed in them than to China’s enemies. When Mao decided to give Ho Chi Minh a helicopter, the manufacturers were so scared it might crash that they detained it at the border.

  The four-year Leap was a monumental waste of both natural resources and human effort, unique in scale in the history of the world. One big difference between other wasteful and inefficient regimes and Mao’s is that most predatory regimes have robbed their populations after relatively low-intensity labor, and less systematically, but Mao first worked everyone to the bone unrelentingly, then took everything — and then squandered it.

  Mao demanded a fever pitch of work, using non-stop “emulation” drives to make people vie with each other. Undernourished and exhausted men, women and children were made to move soil at the double, often having to run while carrying extremely heavy loads, and in all weathers, from blazing sun to freezing cold. They had to trot for kilometers along mountain paths carrying water for the fields, from dawn till dusk. They had to stay up all night to keep the useless “backyard furnaces” going. Mao called this way of working “Communist spirit.” In one of his many bits of theater, on 6 November 1958 he first asserted that peasants refused to take breaks (“even if you want them to rest, they won’t”), and then played magnanimous and codified his optimal day: “Change from 1 January next year: guarantee 8 hours sleep, 4 hours eating and breaks, 2 hours studies [i.e., indoctrination] … 8–4–2–10,” with the “10” referring to the hours of work. In the same generous tone, he bestowed a few days off: two a month, and five for women (up from the three he had originally contemplated).

  In fact, these tiny concessions resulted in part from reports of epidemics, which Mao took seriously, not least because they affected the workforce. One account that startled Mao involved a typhoid epidemic near Peking. He called for “greatly reducing diseases” so that people “can go labouring every day.”

  IN SUMMER 1958 Mao pitchforked the entire rural population into new and larger units called “People’s Communes.” The aim was to make slave-driving more efficient. He himself said that by concentrating the peasants into fewer units—26,000-plus in the whole of China—“it’s easier to control.” The first commune, “Chayashan Sputnik,” was set up in his model province, Henan. Its charter, which Mao edited, and touted as “a great treasure,” laid down that every aspect of its members’ lives was to be controlled by the commune. All the 9,369 households had to “hand over entirely their private plots … their houses, animals and trees.” They had to live in dormitories, “in accordance with the principles of benefiting production and control”; and the charter actually stipulated that their homes were to be “dismantled” “if the commune needs the bricks, tiles or timber.” Every peasant’s life must revolve around “labour.” All members were to be treated as though in the army, with a three-tier regimentation system: commune, brigade, production team (usually a village). Peasants were allowed negligible amounts of cash. The communes were de facto camps for slave-laborers.

  Mao even toyed with getting rid of people’s names and replacing them with numbers. In Henan and other model areas, people worked in the fields with a number sewn on their backs. Mao’s aim was to dehumanize China’s 550 million peasants and turn them into the human equivalent of draft animals.

  As befitted the labor-camp culture, inmates had to eat in canteens. Peasants were not only banned from eating at home, their woks and stoves were smashed. Total control over food gave the state a terrifying weapon, and withholding food became a commonplace form of “light” punishment, which grassroots officials could deploy against anyone they felt like.

  As the canteens were sometimes hours’ walk away from where people lived or worked, many tended to move to the site of the canteen. There, men, women, children and old people lived like animals, crammed into whatever space was available, with no privacy or family life. This also hugely increased the incidence of disease. Meanwhile, many of their own homes, which were often made of mud and bamboo, collapsed from neglect, in addition to all those torn down to make fertilizer, or to feed the backyard furnaces as fuel. When Liu Shao-chi inspected one area near his home village in spring 1961, of the previous 1,415 abodes, only 621 decrepit huts remained.

  Mao’s claim about there being “too much food” contributed in another way to increasing the peasants’ misery. When the canteens were first set up, many cadres allowed the hungry peasants to fill their stomachs. This spree only lasted a couple of months, but it hastened the onset of famine — and wholesale deaths — in many areas before the end of 1958. Three years later, Mao reluctantly agreed to abandon canteens. Yet closing down the canteens, though hugely popular in itself, was almost as painful as their opening had been, as the many peasants who had gone to live where the canteens were located now had no home to return to. Even when their dwellings had survived, their stoves and their woks had not.

  UNDERNOURISHMENT and overwork quickly reduced tens of millions of peasants to a state where they were simply too enfeebled to work. When he found out that one county was doling out food to those too ill to work, Mao’s response was: “This won’t do. Give them this amount and they don’t work. Best halve the basic ration, so if they’re hungry they have to try harder.”

  The people who drove the peasants on were the commune cadres, who were Party men. These were the resident slave-drivers. Knowing that if they failed to do their job, they and their families would swiftl
y join the ranks of the starving, many adopted the attitude articulated by one man: people were “slaves who have to be beaten, abused, or have their food suspended to get them to work.”

  These cadres doubled as jailers, keeping the peasants penned inside their villages. On 19 August 1958, Mao clamped down even further on anyone moving without authorization, what he called “people roaming around uncontrolled.” The traditional possibility of escaping a famine by fleeing to a place where there was food, which had long been made illegal, was now blocked off. One peasant described the situation as worse than under the Japanese occupation: “Even when the Japanese came,” he said, “we could run away. This year [1960] … we are simply shut in to die at home. My family had six members and four have died …”

  The cadres’ other job was to stop peasants “stealing” their own harvest. Horrific punishments were widespread: some people were buried alive, others strangled with ropes, others had their noses cut off. In one village, four terrorized young children were saved from being buried alive for taking some food only when the earth was at their waists, after desperate pleas from their parents. In another village, a child had four fingers chopped off for trying to steal a scrap of unripe food; in another, two children who tried to steal food had wires run through their ears, and were then hung up by the wire from a wall. Brutality of this kind crops up in virtually every account of this period, nationwide.

  AS PART OF his Leap, in 1958 Mao also tried to turn the cities into slave-labor camps by organizing urban communes. His plan was to abolish wages and put the whole society on a non-cash barracks system. This did not work out, as the slave system could not be made to fit onto modern cities, where life had more complex dimensions.

  But this failure did not mean that Mao left the cities unravaged. His guideline for them was “Production first, Life takes second place.” His ideal city was a purely industrial center. Standing on Tiananmen Gate and looking out over the gorgeous palaces and temples and pagodas which in those days decorated Peking’s skyline, he told the mayor: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!”