Hungry Ghosts
Page 15
For the entire summer of 1960 Mao did nothing, although it was by then becoming clear even to him that China was starving. The rest of the Chinese leadership was paralysed, waiting for Mao to change his mind. At the beginning of the winter, inspection teams led by senior Party leaders set out from Beijing to gather evidence of what was going on in the countryside. What happened next in Xinyang is not entirely clear. According to one version, an inspection team led by Chen Yun and Deng Liqun arrived in Xinyang but were detained as they got off the train and confined to a small room. They returned to sound the alarm. Another version has it that an army colonel from Beijing came home on leave and discovered that his relatives in Guangshan county were starving.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the famine was broken in early 1961 when about 30,000 men from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were ordered to occupy Xinyang, distribute the grain in the state granaries and arrest the prefecture’s leadership. The army stayed for three or four months. One source said that in Huang Chuan county, people were so weak they could only crawl across the ground to get to the grain. Some died only feet away from it. The troops also distributed 1.17 million winter coats and 140,000 quilts, and provided emergency accommodation. A report on Xinyang revealed that in places nine out of ten dwellings had been abandoned: the troops set about repairing a total of more than half a million dwellings and opened 80,000 government buildings as shelters for the peasants. A massive effort to gather fuel for fires was undertaken and an edict was promulgated to ensure that the peasants were not asked to do more than half a day’s work.
Mao had himself authorized the PLA’s intervention and, in a brief letter distributed within the Party, he wrote that it was necessary to do this even if he risked being accused of rightism. The PLA, together with cadres from Zhengzhou, launched an investigation into what had happened in Xinyang. About fifty of the top officials were arrested and interrogated, and a report was drawn up and widely distributed. The official version which Mao authorized blamed the whole episode on counterrevolutionaries and class enemies:
There are two reasons why our enemies could act so recklessly. On the one hand, they disguised themselves as the Communist Party and draped their counter-revolutionary souls with the banner of socialism and threw dust in the eyes of some people. On the other hand, there is a social basis for the counterrevolutionaries. As counter-revolutionaries were not thoroughly suppressed and land reform was not properly carried out, some landlords, rich peasants and bad men were left untouched and many of them sneaked into revolutionary organizations, collaborating with each other to carry out the restoration of the counterrevolutionary class and to conduct cannibalistic persecution of the masses.28
Mao’s views notwithstanding, the ‘Xinyang incident’ became widely known amongst the senior levels of the Party throughout China and was used to push for a reversal of policies in 1961. Versions of the findings of the investigation were circulated and have since reappeared in different publications that form the basis of the above account. It seems likely that one version containing higher death tolls was restricted to the top levels of the Party and that another was distributed to lower-ranking cadres to minimize the damage to morale. Evidence that morale was indeed damaged within the army comes from a document drawn up by the PLA’s General Political Department, a copy of which the US State Department obtained in 1963. It expressed strong fears that the loyalty of the army was in doubt because some of the troops were openly blaming Mao for the death of their relatives.29
Different versions of the official report on the ‘Xinyang incident’ would explain why different sources give conflicting figures for the death toll. Some claim that the total population of Xinyang1 was about 8 million in 1958 and that the final death toll was 4 million out of a provincial death toll of 7.8 million. A former Chinese Party official, Chen Yizi, who lived in Xinyang during the Cultural Revolution and, after 1979, took part in an official investigation into famine deaths, has said that the Henan provincial death toll was 8 million. When I visited the worst-hit counties, such as Luoshan and Guangshan, people readily admitted that two-thirds of the population had perished during the famine. Even in the less severely hit counties and communes, death rates of 20 or 30 per cent were standard. At the Chayashan commune, the first in China, the death rate was 33 per cent.
Other sources, including such books as Ding Shu’s Ren Huo and Su Luozheng’s July Storm, put the death toll in Xinyang at 1 million and the provincial total at around 2 million. Such sources provide detailed death tolls for each of the counties in Xinyang. Even if, in the absence of conclusive documentary proof, the lower figure of 1 million is accepted, this still means that around one in eight died, a figure which remains horrifying.
Few were punished for this holocaust. One version of the official report on Henan states that 130,000 cadres were investigated and ordered to reform their work-style. Of these, 8,000 were considered to have made ‘serious mistakes’, 983 were discharged from their posts and disciplined, and a mere 275 were arrested and brought to justice. Among them were 50 senior cadres. A handful, including the Xinyang Party secretary Lu Xianwen, were given the death sentence but were reprieved on Mao’s orders.30 Instead, Lu and the others were assigned to posts elsewhere in the country. Some of those responsible are still living in Zhengzhou over thirty years later. Wu Zhifu was protected by Mao and, though demoted to Second Secretary in 1962, was later given a high position in the South-West China Bureau. He reportedly wrote a self-criticism in which he said ‘my crimes are very great. Whatever punishment is announced, I will not protest even if it is death.’ Even today, many in Henan still consider him to have been a good man forced to do bad things. He died in the early 1970s and was praised by the Party as an honoured patriot. His mother still lives in Zhengzhou and is dignified with gifts at Qingming, the Chinese festival honouring the dead. Wu’s sons have been given good jobs in the government and allowed to study abroad. Few now want to remember Xinyang’s bitter history or to try to understand what happened there.
9
Anhui: Let’s Talk about Fengyang
‘Let’s talk about Fengyang. Once it was a good place to live, But since Emperor Zhu was born there There’s been famine nine years out of every ten. The wealthy sold their horses, The poor sold their children. I, who have no children to sell, Am roaming the world with a flower drum.’31 Popular Chinese song
The first beggar to become Emperor of China buried his mother in style. She had starved to death in a little hamlet just outside Fengyang, an obscure town in the poor countryside of Anhui province. After her son Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, he returned to Anhui and built a burial complex for his mother so gigantic that it covered a dozen square miles. Six hundred years later, the tomb is still there but its imperial grandeur has crumbled into ruins: peasants have used the bricks to build their homes, the avenue of stone spirit guardians stands deep in grass, and ducks paddle in the moat around the wooded burial mound. Emperor Zhu is one of the most memorable figures in Chinese history. After the death of his parents he became first a beggar and then a Buddhist monk. He later joined a secret visionary sect, led an army to victory over the occupying Mongols and founded the Ming dynasty, almost the only ethnically pure Chinese dynasty in the last thousand years.
Mao considered Zhu his precursor and model. Like Zhu, Mao had been a peasant, a beggar and the leader of a secret sect. He too had led an army which threw out the foreigners and had unified the nation. Mao also admired Zhu for his achievements as Emperor. To prevent the recurrence of famine Zhu had ordered the reform of agriculture, the planting of trees, the construction of irrigation works and, above all, the establishment of granaries: ‘Shen wa dong, guan ji liang,’ he declared – ‘Dig deep tunnels and store grain.’ Peasants were resettled in underpopulated or virgin lands, absentee landlords were dispossessed and even his troops were ordered to grow grain. Yet, as a popular song about Fengyang’s most famous son suggests, Zhu was soon hated. He became a tyrant and in his p
aranoia turned China into a vast police state. Each morning his officials, terrified by his sudden and bloody purges, would bid farewell to their families before leaving for the court, in case they never saw them again.
In honour of Emperor Zhu, Fengyang was privileged after 1949 and became a model county. Like Xinyang in neighbouring Henan, it lies in a rich plain watered by the Huai River and is vulnerable to both floods and droughts. During the Sino-Japanese War, it was ravaged and in the civil war that followed it witnessed fierce fighting between Communists and Nationalists over a key strategic prize, the railway linking Beijing to Nanjing which runs near Fengyang. During the fighting soldiers buried villagers alive, massacred the families of enemy fighters and ate the corpses of their prisoners.
The Communist victory in 1949 brought peace to the county. Fengyang took the lead in collectivizing agriculture and even had a machine tractor station run by Soviet advisers. The county of 335,000 people was soon boasting impressive grain yields. After Mao’s death, it continued to be a model, this time for the redivision of communal land. As such, it has been the subject of numerous studies. One, a compilation based on county Party records, was smuggled out of China in the wake of the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. The 600-page document, entitled Thirty Years in the Countryside, was never intended to be circulated outside the top echelons of the Party, for it paints a detailed and appalling picture of the famine. What happened in Fengyang is significant because it reflects the role that Anhui played in the events of 1958-62. At the height of the famine, Anhui abandoned collective farming. At first Mao welcomed Anhui’s policies but later, suspecting a plot, he abruptly changed his mind and dismissed the province’s leader. Had he not done so, the recent history of China might have been very different.
The man responsible for both Anhui’s terrible famine and its reforms was a paunchy, aggressive former peasant called Zeng Xisheng. Zeng was a bully with a violent temper but during the Long March he had proved his courage as one of Mao’s bodyguards. He was slavishly loyal to Mao who trusted him, perhaps because he too was a Hunanese. Zeng had joined the Party in its early days, attended the Whampoa Military Academy and first met Mao in 1923. He achieved prominence as a signals intelligence officer in the Red Army and by the 1940s he was in charge of the Fourth Route Army in northern Anhui. When the Communists triumphed, he became the First Secretary of Anhui, a large rural province with a population of 33.5 million in 1953. As Mao pushed China faster and faster along the road to collectivization, Zeng was right behind him. When the Great Leap Forward started, he spared no efforts to show his devotion, and when Mao visited Anhui’s capital, Hefei, in 1958, Zeng brought the whole of the city’s population out to cheer him. When Mao called on the Chinese to make steel, Zeng showed this could be done not just in big furnaces but in every backyard. Soon small ‘backyard furnaces’ were melting down pots and pans all over China. Zeng penned numerous articles for Red Flag praising the Great Leap Forward and when Mao felt threatened at the Lushan summit, Zeng was outspoken in defending his policies against the objections of Peng Dehuai and others. In 1960 Mao promoted him, entrusting him with the leadership of both Anhui and Shandong.
The Great Leap Forward began in Anhui, as everywhere else, with claims of extraordinary success. In Fengyang that year one sputnik field supposedly grew a national record of 62.5 tonnes of tobacco in just 0.17 acres of land.32 Fantastic pressure was exerted at every level to meet the quotas that Zeng set. Local Party secretaries were kept locked up in rooms for weeks until they agreed to meet their grain quotas and other targets. They in turn put their deputies through the same ordeal. So it went, from prefecture to county, from commune to brigade, from production team right down to the individual peasant. If a peasant didn’t agree to double or treble or quadruple his harvest the production team leader would beat him until he gave in. Nobody believed these targets could be reached but cadres reported that they had been. The lies went back up the pyramid from peasant to production chief, to brigade leader, to commune Party secretary, to county secretary, to prefectural leader and finally to Zeng Xisheng who reported to Mao. With each repetition, the lies became more and more fantastic, a ghastly parody of Chinese Whispers. All over the province, grain yields which were at best 726 lbs per 0.17 acres were inflated to an astonishing 33,000 lbs (14.7 tonnes).
Poor, impoverished Anhui now claimed to be flush with a fantastic bonanza and Zeng began to deliver large amounts of grain to other parts of the country and even abroad – in 1959 alone Anhui exported 200,000 tonnes although its grain harvest had shrunk by 4 million tonnes from the record 10 million tonnes harvested in 1958. In 1959, the state demanded that the peasants of Anhui hand over 2.5 million tonnes, that is 40 per cent of the harvest.33
In Fengyang, the year before had been bad enough. In 1958, the county had harvested 89,000 tonnes but reported 178,500 tonnes to cover up a sharp decline in output. Some of this grain was not even gathered in, but rotted in the fields because too many peasants were out making steel or building dams. After the peasants deducted what they needed to eat and to keep for seed, a surplus of only 5,800 tonnes was left to deliver to the state, but the grain levy was fixed at 35,000 tonnes on the basis of the false harvest reported. The missing 29,200 tonnes had to be extracted by force. In 1959, the county authorities lost all touch with reality. The county reported that 199,000 tonnes were harvested, a little higher than the reported figure for 1958, but in fact the harvest had further declined from 89,000 to 54,000 tonnes. Of this, the state demanded 29,464 tonnes.
In 1958 and 1959, Fengyang officials lied not just about grain production but also about the amount of arable land sown, the area of virgin land ploughed, the number of irrigation works created and practically everything else. They said they had raised 166,000 pigs when the true figure was only 43,000. One production team claimed it had grown 19.6 acres of rapeseed when it had grown none at all. The brigade chief thought this lie was too modest and informed his superior that the team had grown 10 acres.34 As the communes in the county trumpeted their new riches, the cadres were busy seizing whatever the peasants owned. All private property had to be handed over, including private land, draught animals, carts and even milling stones and houses. In Fengyang, the cadres commandeered over 11,000 houses, and to feed the backyard furnaces they took bicycles, scissors, knives, cooking utensils and even iron fences. When the Party needed more carts for its schemes, the cadres simply knocked down houses to take the necessary wood. Some peasants were left entirely homeless, others forced to live ten to a room. Even the huts that remained were stripped of their wooden doors and furniture to fuel the backyard furnaces. In the most fanatical villages, men were not even allowed to keep their wives who were forced to live separately.
In the run-up to the creation of the communes in 1958, the peasants went into a frenzy, eating as much of their food as they could and selling their livestock. People chopped down trees, dug up their vegetables and did everything to ensure that as little as possible was handed over. When the communes were established, the entire administration of daily life changed. Every minor decision or arrangement previously decided by the villagers now had to be passed to the commune headquarters which looked after around 5,000 households. By the end of September 1958, the communes were in full operation, and eating at the collective kitchens was compulsory.35 By the Spring Festival of 1959, peasants in Fengyang and everywhere else in Anhui were starving. As food supplies dwindled fights broke out at the collective kitchens. The only food that was served was a watery soup. Those who were unfortunate received the thin gruel at the top of the pot, those who were lucky got the richer liquid at the bottom. Those too weak to collect their soup went without. Amidst this desperate struggle for food in early 1959, the Party launched the first anti-hiding-grain campaign in Anhui which, in its brutality, rivalled that in Henan. After the harvest of 1959 was taken away in the autumn, people began to starve to death in large numbers.36 A sense of what life was like in Anhui in the winter of 1959-60 is e
voked by one survivor, now a grandmother, who then lived in another county near Fengyang on the Huai River plain:
In the first year [1958-9], we earned work points and the communes distributed grain to each family. This we kept at home. But in the second year [1959-60], there was nothing left at home, it had all been taken away. Nevertheless the village cadres came to every household to search for food. They searched every street and every building. They took away everything they could find, including our cotton eiderdowns, several bags of carrots and the cotton we had saved to make new clothes.