4Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, trans. Susan Massotty (1991).
An informer told the Germans about these Jews in hiding, and a German officer and four Dutch policemen went and took the little group away. (The Nazis paid the Dutch informer a dollar for each person he’d betrayed.) Later on that day, a good friend of the Franks climbed the stairs to the hiding place. On the floor she found what she recognized as Anne’s papers. She took them home and put them in a desk unread.
German official records tell us that a train hauled the Franks and more than a thousand other “pieces” to Auschwitz, Poland, the most infamous of death camps. Their jailers separated Otto Frank from his wife and daughters. Because they found the Franks were strong enough to work, they spared them from the gas chamber. Edith died of hunger and exhaustion after several months. Otto would survive the camp and later oversee the publishing of Anne’s diary.
Late in 1944 the Russians were approaching Auschwitz, so the Germans in the camp began to hide the evidence of slaughter. They shipped 4,000 women, among them Margot (now seventeen) and Anne (fifteen), west to Germany, to the barren mud fields of the Bergen-Belsen camp. There, in winter months, they lay on sodden straw in crowded tents surrounded by ditches serving as latrines. In a storm the wind tore off their tent. Typhus, borne by lice, swept through the camp, killing 50,000 men and women. Presently Margot, overrun with lice, died and dropped to earth from the board she lay on. Anne, brokenhearted, now a naked skeleton beneath a rag, died shortly after. Their jailers probably dumped their bodies in the giant pits of sprawling corpses found by British soldiers when they entered Bergen-Belsen one month later.
WORLD WAR II had maimed the bodies and destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions. It took 60 million lives. Of these, millions were stillborn to famished mothers, crisped by flamethrowers, roasted alive in burning tanks, baked in firestorms, vaporized by nuclear bombs, felled by radiation, blown apart by shells or mines or misfires, crushed by falling buildings, smashed by tanks and trucks, worked or beaten to death, shot, gassed in vans and death camps, hung in group reprisals, dropped alive in grottoes, shot down in planes, or trapped and drowned in sinking ships.
Millions died of wounds, infections, dysentery, cholera, or typhus. Millions drank themselves to death, fell from mountains, froze, took their lives, or died of despair.
Chapter 21
The Asian giants try to feed their poor.
INDIA AND CHINA are the giants of the earth, big in hills and plains, but even more in people. It’s as if the earth, our globe, were set in such a way that India and China were at the bottom and people tumbled down and gathered there. In the last half of the twentieth century China had the largest population in the world, and India was second and catching up. (Their neighbors, too, were big: Indonesia was fifth. Pakistan, seventh. Bangladesh, ninth.)
Anything that happened to the people of those two enormous countries happened to a third of all the humans on the earth. Their common problem was their poverty, but these giants followed different pathways as they tried to cope with it.
AT THE END of World War II, China was, as it had been for a long time, a tragic land. For a century and a half it had suffered from hunger, misrule, opium addiction, bullying Europeans, corruption, civil war, and Japanese invaders. For its many millions, existence was a daily war with violence and hunger.
The armies of Japan had left the country, but China once again was racked by civil war. On one side were the Guomindang, or Nationalists. Ever since the Chinese deposed the last Manchu ruler back in 1912, the Guomindang had tried to win control and run the country. But they were harsh and bungling, and their leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, could not beat the Communists. A U.S. senator asked about him, “If he’s a generalissimo, why doesn’t he generalize?”
On the other side was the Chinese Communist Party, which we will call the CCP. Influenced by Russia’s revolution, Chinese revolutionaries had founded the party in the early 1920s. The CCP and Nationalists had fought each other in the later 1920s and the ’30s, but they fought together against Japan after 1937, although always hostile to each other. When World War II was over they resumed their civil war. In the next four years the CCP did well and the Nationalists lost ground.
The leader of the CCP was battle-seasoned Mao Zedong. Mao was born in 1893, in a village in the midst of China. His father was a rice merchant who owned a spacious house. (Mao would later say that, had his father lived until the Communists had taken power, “he would have been classified a rich peasant, and would have been struggled against,” by which Mao meant reduced to poverty or killed.) In his early years, Mao had been a teacher, library assistant, laundry worker, writer, guerrilla, and army leader.
In autumn 1949 his armies won the bitter fight at last. In Peking’s Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chiang withdrew his battered forces to the island of Taiwan.
After a century and a half bedeviled China had a strong regime. Mao would lead the CCP for a quarter of a century. He didn’t have the total power of Stalin, but as the ablest of the party chiefs he usually had his way. He cared, or said he did, about the poorest peasant, but he easily shut his eyes to suffering. He was full of life and full of words and liked to shake things up, then calm them down. Like the emperors before him he had many concubines. From time to time he used to demonstrate his vigor for photographers, swimming in the much polluted rivers, unperturbed by floating globs of excrement.
Back in 1946, when Mao was still a gaunt guerrilla leader, fighting Chiang and living in a cave, a well-known scholar came to see him. He asked Mao what would happen if the CCP should win the civil war and rule the country. “Dynasties,” the scholar said, “begin with a surge of vigor, and then decay and fall apart. Has the Communist Party found a way to break this vicious cycle?” Mao assured him, “We have found a way. It’s called democracy.”
He must have lost that way by 1949. Although his party called their country a “republic,” the CCP and Mao directed every phase of government. They had their hands on every source of information, every way of shaping thought. For this they used the schools, the media, and neighborhood and village meetings. As the Russian Communists had done, in their early years in power they liquidated anyone they feared and hated. Most of these were former Nationalists. Some years later, Mao discussed these killings. “Basically no errors happened; that group of people should have been killed. In all, how many were killed? Seven hundred thousand were killed, [and] after that time probably more than 70,000 more may have been killed. But less than 80,000.”
Marxist dogma held that if you want to build a socialist state you have to start by seizing the means of production. In largely rural China what that meant was taking land, and so, besides killing Nationalists, the CCP destroyed the landlord class. The usual weapon was a “people’s court” in which the peasants of a village would destroy the local landlord.
This is how they did it at a village in the west of China: With CCP members present, the villagers stood up, faced the landlord, and denounced him. Even Li Lao’s wife — a woman so pitiable she hardly dared look anyone in the face — shook her fist before his nose and cried, “Once I went to glean wheat on your land. But you cursed me and drove me away. Why did you curse and beat me!” The landlord, Sheng Jinghe, bowed his head and then admitted that the charges all were true. The villagers decided that he owed them four hundred bags of grain. They beat him several times, and took his grain. When he saw them heating iron rods with which to torture him, he told them where he had buried his money, and they took it. They also found that Sheng had prepared a New Year’s feast of shrimp, and dumplings stuffed with pork and peppers. So “everybody ate his fill and didn’t even notice the cold.”1 Sheng no doubt lost his land, and possibly his life.
1Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (1990), pp. 492–93.
Historians believe the CCP and peasants put to death at least a mi
llion landlords. Mao explained, “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Anyone who used his brains to make his living was a problem for the CCP. But what to do about them? The Chinese had a deep respect for learning, and Mao himself had read widely and liked to write. But China’s intellectuals, like Mao, often came from well-off families, and some had earned degrees abroad. So they were “feudal” or “reactionary” — therefore dangerous. In 1950–51, the CCP made tens of thousands of them go to “revolutionary colleges” where teachers lectured them incessantly about the thought of Mao and Marx, Lenin and Stalin. The worn-down intellectuals groveled, condemned themselves, and wrote their “autobiographies.”
These memoirs were, of course, confessions. They had to be convincing, since the party disallowed confessions that it said were insincere. A well-known teacher of philosophy, trained at Harvard, wrote eleven pages on his failings. He criticized his easy life within his “bureaucratic landlord family.” He condemned his “crust of selfishness,” his earlier desire to stay above mere politics, and his taste for “bourgeois” thought. Then he hailed his newborn sense of purpose, for which he was indebted to the CCP.
After seven years in power Mao and others thought the CCP had gone too far, and repression was itself a danger. In a speech to party leaders Mao discussed his new idea: to let “a hundred flowers bloom” in the field of culture, and “a hundred schools of thought contend” in science. Later on he gave a speech about the “Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” and he said, “Never has our country been as united as it is today…. The days of national disunity and turmoil, which the people hate, are gone forever.”
It took a while, but intellectuals grew convinced that they could safely air complaints. In 1957 flowers began to bloom. People railed against their poverty and the CCP’s repression and corruption. “Party members,” they complained, “enjoy many privileges that make them a race apart.” And, “It seems as if an invisible pressure forces people to say nothing.” And, “It is not true that all peasants consciously want to join the cooperatives.” At Beijing University the students had a “Democratic Wall” and covered it with posters censuring the CCP. In many places students rioted, ransacked files, and called for changes.
CCP hardliners soon had had enough. They made it known that they opposed the blooming flowers and contending schools of thought. Mao himself observed how things were going and changed his message. He and other leaders made it known that the riots were anticommunist. They began to mow the flowers.
Officials labeled 300,000 intellectuals “rightist.” Their careers and often their lives were over. Bright and useful men and women went to jail, or labor camps, or exile in the countryside. Many students and professors killed themselves. In the presence of 10,000 people, soldiers or policemen shot three student leaders who had led a protest against the way the CCP ran their school.
Killing critics wasn’t hard. The CCP’s big task was changing the economy. This meant raising much more food and vastly raising factory production. They had to do this the communist way, but without starving and slaughtering peasants as Stalin had done in Russia. The CCP began by giving peasants plots of land, but in the middle 1950s they tried to persuade them — and often forced them — to pool their land and form “cooperatives.” Each cooperative was told to raise a specified amount of food. The CCP also began a Five-Year Plan to build up heavy industry. (They knew that their communist model, Russia, had done this so well that it was able to repel the Germans in World War II.) China’s plan for industry went well, and output rose dramatically.
In theory, a regime as strong as Mao’s could do what others couldn’t. He once made war on sparrows, calling them a pest and nuisance. By the millions Chinese stood outside their doors, banging woks to scare the birds. The purpose was to make them fly until they perished of exhaustion. And they did. However, caterpillars, safe from sparrows, multiplied, ate the crops, covered trees, and defecated on passersby. The CCP halted the campaign.
The CCP decided how you dressed (like Mao), where you lived, what you did for a living, whom you were allowed to wed, and how much rice you ate. It even gave advice on frequency of sex: newlyweds: “very often”; others: every week or two. The party banished China’s splendid poetry and novels. People sang such songs as “Socialism Is Good” and “Night Soil [feces] Collectors Coming Down the Mountain.”2
2For this and much other information about China’s recent decades I am indebted to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1995).
The CCP decreed reforms but didn’t always follow through. It outlawed old abuses of women, such as child marriage and concubinage, but gave most government jobs to men. The government claimed that it had wiped out illiteracy, but a census showed it hadn’t.
By 1957 the leaders of the CCP were much concerned about the country’s economic path. Industry was doing well enough, but not the new cooperative farms. Food production was increasing only 4 percent a year. That was not enough to feed the growing hordes of factory workers, and to pay back loans from Russia.
The CCP debated what to do. Some planners took a soft approach. They thought the peasants would produce more food if only they received incentives and could purchase more consumer goods. They also needed farm machines and fertilizers.
Mao disagreed. He trusted, as he always did, the power of the masses and what he thought of as the heroism of the human will. He explained his thinking to the party’s leaders: the vital point regarding China’s many million people was that they were “poor and blank.” This might look bad but in fact was good. “Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.” He believed the way to raise production was to mobilize the peasants and inspire them. He wanted to make half a billion people find fulfillment in their never-ending work.
And so in 1957 and 1958 he launched a “Great Leap Forward.” The CCP combined the new cooperatives into giant units known as communes. Their purpose was to grow more food and also to develop rural factories. A commune might contain as many as 10,000 households, and had communal kitchens, nurseries, and boarding schools. These arrangements largely took the place of families, freeing women so that they could work on farms and in the rural factories.
The slogan for the Great Leap Forward was “More, faster, better, cheaper.” Communes struggled to fulfill their grain production quotas. Worker armies dragged in from the farms and cities dug enormous irrigation projects. A million peasants smelted iron in little furnaces behind their huts. According to the government’s reporters, everybody worked with zeal. At an iron mill a reporter wrote, “The air is filled with the high-pitched melodies of local operas pouring through an amplifier above the site and accompanied by the hum of blowers, the panting of gasoline engines, the honking of heavy-laden trucks, and the bellowing of oxen hauling ore and coal.”
Mao and colleagues claimed the Great Leap Forward was a triumph. Certainly the grain-production figures that the rural managers furnished were astounding. They showed production doubling, rising tenfold, rising “scores of times.”
But in fact the Great Leap was a great disaster. The grain-production figures were all lies. The peasants had resisted doing what was ordered, and the crops were poor. A long and dreadful famine followed. Starving peasants tried to live on ground-up corn-cobs, husks of rice, and powdered tree bark. From 1959 to 1962 the famine took the lives of 20 million people.
What was Mao to say and do? He first denied the failure of the Leap, denied that there were peasants starving. Then he quit as head of state, implicitly admitting failure, but he soon returned. He decided to scale back the Leap,
then abruptly changed his mind. At a party leaders meeting, he responded to his critics by defending the Great Leap and the communes, and insisting they continue. He told the CCP that Marx and Lenin also made mistakes, and he said that he would take some blame and so must they, the party leaders. Charmingly he told them, “If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart!”
In the end, the party moderates restrained their leader’s zeal. They kept the giant communes, but they halted much of Mao’s experiment in human engineering. As the Russians also sometimes did to raise production, they let the farmers sell a portion of the food they raised.
While the communes kept on failing, industries did somewhat better. Although steel was crucial for development, until the communists took over China hadn’t ever produced a million tons of steel a year. After just a decade of the new regime, China’s yearly steel production may have risen to nearly 20 million tons, although the quality was low. Its industries were poor and yet, like Russia, when it wanted to, China could do wonders. By 1964 its scientists had made and tested nuclear bombs. A decade later Chinese satellites were orbiting the earth.
The Human Story Page 38