The collectivization of farm animals led peasants to kill them and sell their meat before the collective appropriated the animals. In Fengyang county in Anhui, records show why: the collective paid a peasant only 5.5 yuan for an ox but by selling it for meat he could earn 30 or 40 yuan. And since those animals that survived collectivization were now publicly owned, no one felt responsible for them. Peasants worked the animals to death and fed the fodder to their own pigs. In the autumn of 1956, 2,100 draught animals in Fengyang died: a further 440 died after the first big snow. Peasants sang a song which went: ‘In the past when a cow died we cried because it was our own, but when a cow dies now, we are very happy because we have meat to eat.’ In Hebei province, the number of draught animals fell from 4.3 million to 3.3 million in 1956.10 By the following year the First Secretary of Henan, Pan Fusheng, was complaining that women were forced to yoke themselves to the plough with their wombs hanging down, such was the shortage of draught animals.
Though the Party’s propaganda machinery continued to trumpet great successes in agriculture, especially in grain production, John Lossing Buck, who had surveyed and studied Chinese agriculture before 1949, later cast doubt on these claims. Now in America, he looked at the figures and concluded that the Communists had manipulated their statistics.11 By using too low a figure for grain yields before 1949, they had produced a ‘series of production data which record increases that are primarily statistical’. Even so, they could not disguise the fact that average grain harvests between 1949 and 1958 were below those of 1931-7 and that the peasants had been better off between 1929 and 1933 (years of great famine in northern China) when annual per capita grain production was higher.
The moderates in the Party leadership, including Zhou Enlai, wanted to retreat from collectivization. It was clear not only that Mao’s ‘little leap forward’ had been an economic failure but also that it was causing political unrest.12 They pointed to internal reports that in some places the peasants had beaten up cadres and withdrawn from the collectives, taking both grain and animals with them.13 Their hand was further strengthened by Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech in which he exposed Stalin’s crimes and criticized his agricultural policies. Collectivization under Stalin was no longer described as ‘the greatest success’. Indeed Khrushchev believed that it had created a wasteland in the villages, the like of which had not been seen since the onslaught of the Tartar armies: ‘One would go through a village and look around and have the impression that Mamai and his hordes had passed that way. Not only was there no new construction, but the old structures were not repaired.’14
Under Khrushchev’s leadership, the Soviet Union retreated from Stalinism by raising procurement prices, rescinding taxes on private orchards and vegetable patches, and abolishing the system of forced deliveries from the produce grown on private plots. In China, little was said publicly about Khrushchev’s secret speech, although Mao began to fear that the anti-Stalinism sweeping the Soviet Union would affect China.
In 1957 Mao responded to these different pressures by launching another political purge, the Anti-Rightist movement. Generally, this is portrayed as an attack against intellectuals who gave voice to their criticisms during a brief period of free speech which Mao orchestrated for a few weeks in 1957 under the banner of the ‘Hundred Flowers campaign’. Reviving an old phrase, ‘Let a hundred flowers and a hundred schools of thought contend’, Mao apparently set a trap for intellectuals, because those who did speak out were soon arrested as ‘rightists’. Some believe that he was taken aback by the degree of criticism and feared a Hungarian-style uprising. Whatever the case, at least half a million were seized in the Anti-Rightist campaign which Deng Xiaoping, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, organized.
However, the origins of this purge may also lie in the failure of the first round of collectivization. The targets of the Anti-Rightist campaign were not just intellectuals but also large numbers of high-and low-ranking officials who had complained about Mao’s agricultural policies. Among those who fell at the centre was Deng Zihui, the leader in charge of the Party’s rural work department, who was declared a rightist for his opposition to overnight collectivization. He was replaced by the Stalinist Chen Boda. In the provinces, numerous deputy secretaries and governors lost their posts as well. In Henan, even the First Secretary, Pan Fusheng, was toppled for saying that the co-operatives were a mess and too large to be efficient. He had decided to break up some of the collectives and had allowed the peasants to leave if they wished. For this he was accused of being a follower of Bukharin and a patron of the peasant smallholder.15 Mao replaced him with Wu Zhifu, an enthusiastic supporter of the collectives, whose efforts were highlighted in Mao’s book devoted to such achievements, entitled The High Tide of Socialism in the Countryside. In Anhui province, the First Secretary Zeng Xisheng arrested not only large numbers of leading officials and intellectuals, including his deputy Li Shinong, but also any official who was critical of, or was even suspected of being opposed to, the collectives.16 In one county alone, Fengyang, 4,362 Party cadres were investigated, 22 died under interrogation and 160 were sent to labour camps.
The Anti-Rightist campaign silenced any conceivable opposition within the Party, or from experts in the agricultural sciences, and paved the way for the Great Leap Forward. Mao began planning it in 1957. A year later he was ready to imitate Stalin with a crash industrialization campaign. Mao was no longer – if he ever had been – the first among equals but a semi-divine being who could ignore not only the advice of his colleagues but even that from his ‘big brother’ in Moscow. The Russians counselled him to avoid repeating Stalin’s mistakes, pointing out that China was much poorer than Russia had been in 1928. In China, per capita grain output was still half that of the Russians in the 1920s and so the margin for error was much smaller. Khrushchev even told Mao that those who set up the collectives in the 1920s had ‘a poor understanding of what Communism is and how it is to be built’. Yet, as he sarcastically remarked, ‘Mao thought of himself as a man brought by God to do God’s bidding. In fact, Mao probably thought God did Mao’s own bidding.’ He believed Mao wanted to show that the Chinese were capable of building socialism and to ‘impress the world – especially the socialist world – with his genius and his leadership’.17
Mao’s bid for the leadership of the Communist world inspired him not merely to match the Russians but to attempt to outdo them in reaching Communism first. His communes and his ‘agro-cities’ would be larger than those in the Soviet Union and more Communistic because they would abolish all private plots and private possessions – something not even Stalin had dared attempt. Khrushchev, who was himself far from modest when it came to devising grandiose goals and plans, announced in 1958 that in three or four years the Soviet Union would catch up with America in the per capita production of meat, milk and butter. At the same time he launched the massive ‘virgin lands’ scheme to bring 30 million acres of steppe in Kazakhstan and Siberia under the plough. Mao responded by proclaiming that China would overtake Britain; first he said this would be achieved within fifteen years, but he later shortened the time to three and then two years. Such rivalry was expressed even on relatively small issues. When the Soviets said in January 1958 that they would put their tractors in the hands of the collectives instead of machine tractor stations, a separate administration, Beijing delayed reporting this until China announced, quite independently, that she would do the same.18
In 1958, the Chinese Communists declared that the attainment of Communism and the withering away of the state ‘is no longer a remote future event’. Chinese leaders talked as if it were only three or four years away. According to his doctor, Mao boasted to his circle that ‘for decades the Soviet Union tried to establish an advanced form of social development but always they have failed. We have succeeded in less than ten years.’ In 1961, Khrushchev was to take up the challenge and announce that the Soviet Union would enter the final stage of Communism in fifteen years.19
/> The two countries were to fall out over many other issues, such as Moscow’s détente with the West and its unwillingness to help China build a nuclear bomb. The final split came in July 1960 when, in the space of a few weeks, the Soviets withdrew all the thousands of experts they had sent to help China after 1949, and widened still further after a series of vitriolic exchanges. Yet Mao remained an avid believer in the achievements of Stalin, including his agricultural policies and the miracles of Soviet agricultural science. He wanted China to copy and then outdo the methods used by Russian scientists such as Trofim Lysenko which had allegedly raised output to record levels. Khrushchev had at first criticized Lysenko as a fraud but later changed his mind when he launched his virgin lands scheme. Lysenko convinced Khrushchev that he had discovered a way of making the steppe lands fertile without the expense of manufacturing chemical fertilizers and herbicides. This misplaced faith in the wonders of Soviet science betrayed both Khrushchev and Mao into thinking they held the secret to creating a bonanza of food. Khrushchev’s ambitious agricultural schemes ended in disaster, the virgin lands turned to dust and Soviet meat production figures proved to be fraudulent. In 1964, Khrushchev was toppled from power, partly because of this failure. No such fate awaited Mao, although in 1958 he too was convinced that he had a formula for boosting agricultural production which would guarantee the success of his Utopian plans. There would be so much food that, as Marx had prophesied, the time would be reached when the principle of each according to his needs would be realized. There was no need to wait for gradual change because, as Hegel said, progress, like evolution, comes in sudden leaps and bounds. So Mao called his programme ‘The Great Leap Forward’.
5
False Science, False Promises
‘Practical success in agriculture is the ultimate criterion of truth’ Stalin
‘Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how can I alone remain sober?’ Tang dynasty poem
To launch the Great Leap Forward, Mao whipped up a fever of expectation all over China that amounted to mass hysteria. Mao the infallible, the ‘great leader’, the ‘brilliant Marxist’, the outstanding thinker and genius, promised that he would create a heaven on earth. Even in the 1940s, the Party had encouraged a personality cult around Mao but now this reached new and grotesque heights: Mao was an infallible semi-divine being. The nation’s poets, writers, journalists and scientists, and the entire Communist Party, joined him in proclaiming that Utopia was at hand. Out of China, the land of famine, he would make China, the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so much food they would not know what to do with it, and people would lead a life of leisure, working only a few hours a day. Under his gifted leadership, China would enter the final stage of Communism, ahead of every other country on earth. If the Soviets said they would reach Communism in ten or twenty years, Mao said the Chinese could get there in a year or two. In fact, he promised that within a year food production would double or treble. Even Liu Shaoqi entered into the spirit of things by coining the slogan ‘Hard work for a few years, happiness for a thousand.’1
The Great Leap Forward was preceded by a new campaign to raise Mao’s personality cult to a level rivalling that of Stalin. From the end of 1957, his portraits, large and small, began appearing everywhere. Mao was compared to the sun and people declared that the era of Mao was already like heaven on earth. The China Youth Daily wrote that ‘the dearest people in the world are our parents, yet they cannot be compared with Chairman Mao’. In songs, too, Mao was eulogized:
Chairman Mao is infinitely kind,
Ten thousand songs are not enough to praise him.
With trees as pens, the sky as paper
And an ocean of ink,
Much would be left unwritten.2
Officials toured the country in 1958 describing what happiness and bliss were at hand. Tan Chen Lin, the Minister of Agriculture, painted a fantasy of peasants jumping in one leap from mud huts to skyscrapers, travelling not on donkeys but in aeroplanes.
After all, what does Communism mean?... First, taking good food and not merely eating one’s fill. At each meal one enjoys a meat diet, eating chicken, pork, fish or eggs... delicacies like monkey brains, swallows’ nests, white fungi are served to each according to his needs...
Second, clothing. Everything required is available. Clothing of various designs and styles, not a mass of black garments or a mass of blue outfits. After working hours, people will wear silk, satin and woollen suits... Foxes will multiply. When all people’s communes raise foxes, there will be overcoats lined with fox furs...
Third, housing. Housing is brought up to the standard of modern cities. What should be modernised? People’s communes. Central heating is provided in the north and air-conditioning in the south. All will live in high buildings. Needless to say, there are electric lights, telephones, piped water, receiving sets and TV...
Fourth, communications. Except for those who take part in races, all travellers and commuters will use transport. Air services are opened in all directions and every xian [county] has an airport... The time is not remote when each will have an aeroplane.
Fifth, higher education for everyone and education is popularised. Communism means this: food, clothing, housing, transportation, cultural entertainment, science institutes, and physical culture. The sum total of these means Communism.3
This fantasy of American life was repeated even to peasants in faraway Tibet where people had never even seen an aeroplane or heard of a skyscraper: ‘Everyone would live in one big family... We would have no worries about food, clothing and housing as everyone would wear the same clothes, eat the same food and live in the same houses... practically everything would be done by machines. In fact a time would come when our meals would be brought by machines right up to our mouths.’4
Such fairy-tales of overnight prosperity had been spread as early as 1956. One interviewee, a former journalist from Shaanxi, recalled going to a meeting of propaganda chiefs in 1956 and hearing Mao say that after three years of hard work, China would enjoy such prosperity that no one would need to work hard, or grow much, yet all would live in great luxury.
Writers, too, were busy painting pictures of this happiness. A character in Qin Chaoyang’s Village Sketches described what would happen:
Socialism means that our mountain district will be clothed with trees, that our peach blossom and pear blossom will cover the hillsides. Lumber mills will spring up in our district, and a railway too, and our trees will be sprayed by insecticide from aeroplanes, and we will have a big reservoir...
Can we cover more and more of the mountains in the whole district with green trees, and make the streams clearer each year? Can we make the soil more fertile and make the faces of the people in every village glow with health? Can we make this mountain district of ours advance steadily on the path to socialism? If you ask me, I tell you it can be done! We have the heart, and we have the hands! It can be done!
Another novel, Great Changes in a Mountain Village by Zhou Libo, describes how the secretary of a village youth league envisages a future with all modern conveniences:
It’ll be soon, we won’t have to wait for ten or even five years. Then we’ll use some of the co-operative’s accumulated funds to buy a lorry and when you women go to the theatre in the town, you can ride a lorry. With electric light, telephones, lorries and tractors we shall live more comfortably than they do in the city, because we have the beautiful landscape and the fresh air. There’ll be flowers all the year round and wild fruit, more than we can eat: chinquapins [dwarf chestnuts] and chestnuts all over the hills.5
Naturally enough, peasants all over China began to ask when they would get to Communism and were told soon, very soon. Such fantastic optimism was based on Mao’s fundamental ignorance of modern science. Although he had barely ventured outside China and had never studied Western science, Mao believed that science could make his dreams come true. While in the remote hills of Yanan, Mao and his colleagues carefully studied Moscow
’s propaganda works eulogizing the great achievements of such Soviet scientists as Pavlov, Lysenko and others, and became convinced that they were genuine.
Marxism claims, above all, to be a ‘scientific’ philosophy, one which applies the principles of science to politics and society. In like manner, Mao believed, modern science could transform the lives of those millions of ignorant peasants sunk in the mire of centuries of feudal superstition. There was no time to wait for them to become convinced, they would have to be forcibly dragged into the twentieth century. Everything connected with traditional beliefs was smashed in the Great Leap Forward (although many observers tend to assume that this happened later, in the Cultural Revolution) but, ironically, what Mao put in place of these beliefs was a pseudo-science, a fantasy that could not be validated by science, or stand up to rational examination, any more than could the peasant superstitions which the Party ridiculed.
Kang Sheng, Mao’s loyal henchman, exemplified this casual approach to facts: ‘We should be like Marx, entitled to talk nonsense,’ he told everyone, and he toured the country lecturing about the need to add imagination to science. ‘What is science?’ he asked teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in 1958. ‘Science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing mysterious about it.’ In Hefei, Anhui province, he continued on the same theme: ‘There is nothing special about making nuclear reactors, cyclotrons or rockets. You shouldn’t be frightened by these things: as long as you act daringly you will be able to succeed very quickly... You need to have spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was no one beside you... You shouldn’t care about any First Machine Building Ministry, Second Machine Building Ministry, or Qinghua University, but just act recklessly and it will be all right.’6
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine Page 7