The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

by Dikötter, Frank

  A curfew was imposed in the cities. In Shanghai, cars and other vehicles were banned from the streets after 9 p.m. and pedestrians after 11 p.m. Sentinels were stationed at every street corner with rifles and bayonets.17 Newspapers and radio relentlessly publicised the underground activities of the dreaded enemy, while propaganda posters exhorted the population to vigilance. The enemy seemed to be everywhere. In Tianjin a common slogan was ‘Liberate the Entire Country and Capture the People’s Enemy Chiang Kai-shek Alive’.18

  People were encouraged to write to the police or the newspapers. Neighbours and friends denounced each other, often in the hope of reward. Almost overnight half the population seemed to have become communist. ‘Everybody claimed to be a guerrilla, a soaking-red partisan,’ noted a foreign observer in Shanghai, as people scrambled to prove their allegiance to the new regime.19 Those belonging to ‘bad classes’ were visited by the police, interrogated about their past, quizzed about their links with foreigners and sometimes subjected to house searches in the hunt for suspect documents or concealed weapons. Soon even possession of an innocuous radio began to seem suspicious. In Shanghai alone, thousands of sets were confiscated, as well as guns and ammunition.

  There were no mass executions: these would come later. But behind the scenes, the new regime’s most dangerous enemies were quietly gaoled or executed. Others were registered, interrogated and kept under surveillance. In Shanghai, several hundred so-called ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – spies, underground agents, criminal bosses – were shot in the months after December 1949. In Hebei province, away from the inquisitive gaze of onlookers, more than 20,000 suspects were executed in the first year of liberation. Soon, the killing rate would rocket everywhere.20

  Yet for the time being even people with dubious backgrounds, from the regime’s point of view, remained largely undisturbed. Most of the professionals – professors, clerks, bankers, lawyers, managers, doctors, engineers – were too vital to a regime trying to establish its authority and build up the economy. But the time for laughter and song was over. All of them were sent to schools to learn the new orthodoxy. Everywhere, in government offices, factories, workshops, schools and universities, people were being ‘re-educated’, poring over official pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and textbooks and learning the new doctrine. ‘Everyone is learning the right answers, the right ideas and the right slogans.’ It was called ‘brainwashing’ (xinao). From Beijing to Guangzhou, cities became giant adult-education centres. Banks, big shops and commercial offices had their own dedicated libraries. People were asked to transform themselves into what the communists called ‘New People’.21

  Those with a suspect past had to write confessions, admitting all their personal faults and past mistakes. Sometimes a simple admission of wrongdoing could suffice, while more serious public recantations appeared in the newspapers controlled by the party. A few were summoned to appear before large audiences where they were forced to recount their sins and express contrition for them for hours on end. Another weapon was discussion. Recalcitrant individuals were worn down by interminable debates. Some were locked up in their offices and visited by a steady stream of cadres and political instructors determined to break down all resistance and win the argument. In every case the admission of guilt was added to the person’s dossier, which would follow him for the rest of his life.

  More vulnerable were classes of people the regime perceived as threats to social order and drains on its resources. They were called ‘lumpenproletariat’ in Marxist parlance, but ‘parasites’ and ‘trash’ by the cadres who had to deal with them: paupers, beggars, pickpockets and prostitutes, but also the millions of refugees and the unemployed who had come to seek shelter in the cities during the civil war. Many urban residents, who craved a return to social order after the chaotic years of civil war, welcomed these measures. Some, however, feared that the cities might be emptied.22

  In Beijing, the communist troops charged with taking over the prisons found most of them empty. To save food and heat, the municipal authorities had ordered the large-scale release of inmates a few months earlier. On the streets of the capital, some beggars thought that they were quite literally ‘liberated’: they roved the streets killing dogs, smashing windows and blackmailing shopowners, with some of them managing to make the equivalent of 8 to 10 kilos of grain a day. Rickshaw pullers, on the other hand, took ‘liberation’ as a licence to flout the traffic regulations, causing mayhem on the streets. Thousands of them were rounded up and confined in makeshift camps on the outskirts of the city. By the end of 1949, some 4,600 vagrants languished in re-education centres and government reformatories.23

  Like everybody else, they were asked to reflect on their sins, study the new orthodoxy and learn a different trade. Many made the best of their internment, but others sank into depression, despite all the propaganda about their ‘liberation’. As one report noted, ‘because they feel so miserable and unhappy they feign madness, act crazy and attempt to run away. There are even some small children who cry all the time, begging to be allowed to go home.’ A few refused to be re-educated. Liu Guoliao, enrolled in a training course for vagrants, was a proud man, stubbornly proclaiming, ‘My head is made of steel, bones and cement. It is beyond reform.’24

  Conditions in the reformatories were often dreadful. Abuse was rife. In the western suburbs of Beijing, guards stole food and clothing and regularly beat the people they were meant to reform. As a detailed investigation brought to light, some of the children in detention were sodomised. The nurses could be careless, sometimes even brutal, particularly when using syringes. People died every month, the death rate being especially high among the elderly.25

  In Shanghai too, thousands of thieves, vagrants and rickshaw pullers were arrested and sent to labour camps. Arrests came in waves. In a mere three days in December 1949 more than 5,000 beggars and pickpockets were arrested and deported to custody centres. Many were selected for re-education and sent to training units, but large numbers also ended up in prison. In Tilanqiao, as Ward Road Gaol was now known, by May 1951 over 3,000 undesirable elements had been imprisoned or sent to labour camps in the countryside. Several dozen were executed or died in custody.26

  People who eked out a living as pedlars and hawkers were also cleared from the streets. In republican China, all manner of goods were delivered to the door, usually carried in baskets, swung from shoulder poles or carted on wheelbarrows, occasionally in donkey panniers. Each hawker had his own peculiar chant or mechanical rattle to advertise his wares. Vendors and itinerant traders also stood on pavement corners, offering every possible item from local fruit and vegetables, cloth, crockery, baskets, coal, meat, toys, sweets and nuts to soap, socks, handkerchiefs and towels.27

  Within months they were rounded up, questioned and sent back to their home villages. A few were allowed to remain, but prohibited from roaming the streets. Open-air markets were organised where they were assigned stalls to sell their wares. One such market in Tianjin was on a tract of wasteland. A vast marquee built with bamboo went up in two days, and in another day the whole place was walled and roofed with matting. Pitches were marked out and tables and benches appeared. A funfair was organised to attract buyers, as jugglers, tightrope walkers, actors and singers kept the market packed. But the sights and sounds of hawkers trading their goods from door to door largely belonged to the past.28

  Brothels were closed. In Beijing they were raided by 2,400 police officers on 21 November 1949. Over a thousand women and several hundred owners, procurers and pimps were arrested at a stroke. The re-education camps were already so crowded that the women were locked up in a cluster of decommissioned brothels on Hanjiatan, in the very heart of the city’s erstwhile red-light district. They too were put to work and made to attend study sessions examining the evils of feudalism as well as vocational training classes. In order to make a clean break with the past, they were taken to large assembly halls where they had to denounce their former employers, who were often stan
ding on the platform wearing shackles.29

  Similar scenarios were enacted elsewhere. Between October 1949 and January 1950, Suzhou, Bengbu, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Tianjin, among other cities, stamped out prostitution. In Shanghai a more gradual approach was adopted: the brothels were slowly starved of customers by increasingly stringent regulations. First banquets, gambling, soliciting and rowdy behaviour were prohibited, then all past contracts between the women and the owners were declared void. The police applied relentless pressure, using an inventory compiled by the previous regime listing the address and registration number of each known brothel. Every time one of the 930 or so establishments closed, the address was struck from the list. Several brothel keepers were executed as a warning to others. News of their execution was printed in bold with black borders. Many owners voluntarily handed over the premises, often for lack of customers. Some returned to their home villages, others became tailors, cigarette sellers or even freight hauliers.

  Many of the women were sent to a re-education camp. Here, as elsewhere in the country, they were made to follow a strict penal schedule, spending much of their time in study sessions denouncing the mistreatment they had suffered under the old regime. But few conformed to the image of the contrite prostitute projected by propaganda. A fair number were restive and quarrelsome, while a few insulted or physically assaulted the cadres in charge of their re-education. They denounced the manual labour they were forced to perform as a new form of exploitation, apparently unhappy to spend their days locked away, sewing olive-green shirts for the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. Cao Manzhi, one of the cadres in charge of the whole operation, later admitted that even those inmates who came from low-class brothels did not like being interned and missed their life as prostitutes. But most settled down once they realised that resistance was futile. The majority were sent back to inland areas. Brothels that had managed to survive were finally raided on 25 November 1951. Even at that stage some of the women attacked the cadres in charge of the arrests.30

  Prostitution was soon proclaimed to be an evil of the past. But in Beijing alone 350 women, some of them only recently released from re-education camps, were soon plying their trade again. Only a handful did so because they could not make a living otherwise. Some pretended to be students or housewives, accompanied by small children and mothers-in-law for cover. A few even wore party uniforms and carried badges. They stood in the doorways openly soliciting customers: ‘Come in for a cup of tea!’ In other cities too, prostitution went underground. As hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees fled the countryside after liberation, women continued to sell sex in the cities. In Shanghai hundreds of them were arrested in 1952, the women becoming more adept at hiding their activities with every new sweep. In the following years the authorities would adopt much more draconian measures to stamp out vice.31

  If disposing of vagrants and prostitutes was a challenge, handling the several million refugees, disbanded soldiers and unemployed in the cities represented an even bigger task. In batch after batch, they too were sent back to the countryside, which became the great dumping ground for all undesirable elements. But few wanted to leave the cities where they had rebuilt their lives, however precarious. In Shanghai only one in ten agreed to be repatriated to a village.32

  In Nanjing an even smaller fraction co-operated. Some steadfastly refused to be resettled, and objected to the military approach used in the dispersal plan. But despite all their objections, a third of a million people – equivalent to a quarter of the population – were sent away from the old regime’s capital. The majority were dispatched to Shandong, Anhui and northern Jiangsu, but some ended up working on reclamation projects. More than 14,000 undesirables, mainly beggars, were destined for ‘production training camps’.33

  According to the party line, people were supposed to have a home village, but in reality many had been away for decades and had no relatives or friends left. The idea was that they could till the land, but all too often they were discriminated against as outsiders and given tiny plots of unfertile land that no local farmers wanted. A few missed out on land reform altogether and became local outcasts. Many clandestinely tried to make their way back to the cities.

  Hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers, petty thieves, beggars, vagrants and prostitutes were also sent to help develop and occupy the resource-rich, politically strategic north-west, a region bordering India, Mongolia and the Soviet Union. From Beijing alone, by the end of 1949, close to 16,000 people were sent to Xinjiang and Gansu. Many objected. One beggar refused to join a work team, arguing that ‘Beijing is my hometown. How can I go to the north-west and reclaim wasteland?’ In one case a group of disbanded soldiers rebelled before being sent out to the frontier regions. They took control of the re-education camp where they had been confined and ran away in groups. So summary were the decisions made about relocation that in one case eighty-seven individuals, all classified as elderly or invalided, were sent to Ningxia to reclaim wasteland.34

  Many of those who arrived in the north-west were forced to live in holes in the ground and made to do hard labour all day long, levelling sand dunes, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. One woman remembered how she was lured to the region with tales of hot water and electricity in every house. After she and other migrants arrived they were told: ‘Comrades, you must prepare to bury your bones in Xinjiang.’35

  On paper the plan was straightforward: empty the cities of undesirables, reform all parasites and create employment. But it was a huge task, made no easier by a deep ideological suspicion of cities overall (‘Shanghai is a non-productive city. It is a parasitic city,’ complained one newspaper in 1949).36 The problem was that for every batch of people the authorities shipped away, another group covertly managed to find their way back to the city. In October 1950, up to 2 million refugees were on the road after floods caused havoc in Anhui province. In Nanjing alone 340 people arrived every day from the countryside. Whether young or old, many had to beg and steal to survive. In Shanghai the refugees slept, cooked and relieved themselves on the streets as every available camp, prison or reformatory built by the authorities since 1949 was already overcrowded.37

  The situation was compounded by steady increases in unemployment in the first couple of years of the takeover, notwithstanding extravagant promises made to workers during the heady days of liberation, when they were heralded as ‘masters of the country’ ready to ‘take charge’.38 Entrepreneurs and industrialists, on the other hand, were also deceived by the new regime’s rhetoric of inclusion in the name of New Democracy, a slogan that promised co-operation with all except the most hardened enemies of the regime. As part of this window-dressing, a small number of non-communist parties like the Democratic League were co-opted and allowed to take part in a Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body that met at the same time as the National People’s Congress.

  It all started well enough. Years of destruction, inflation and corruption had severely disrupted the economy. Communication networks were badly damaged, and the railway tracks were in disarray. Areas where local power stations had been bombed or coal stocks were low lacked electricity. So the most immediate task in the cities was salvage rather than construction. In Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan and Shanghai, the barricades erected by the fleeing nationalists were removed from the streets. Shell-damaged sites were cleared, burned-out houses pulled down, concrete fortifications and pillboxes levelled. Building debris was used to fill bomb craters. In Changchun and other besieged cities tens of thousands of bodies were thrown into collective pits. The streets were disinfected. Everywhere telephone lines went up – sometimes a military network running side by side with the restored civil installations. Sunken ships that blocked rivers and harbours were removed. Where generators had been damaged, technicians were helped by the army to repair the machines and mend cables. Railway lines were double-tracked and bridges repaired.39

  Inflation, though never fully curbed, was at least brought
under control. The People’s Republic issued its own People’s Dollar, called the renminbi, and made it the only medium of exchange. Trade in its rivals – greenbacks, silver dollars and gold – was tolerated for a few months, but then the money-changers were forced to close their doors. In Shanghai a massive rally of half a million people denounced gold dealers and other traders as so many speculators. Thousands of students were mobilised to harangue the population against hoarding silver dollars. They kept watch on the bazaars and policed the pavements where foreign coins used to change hands.40

  Soon the hand of the state started to curb other economic activities. Giant state trading corporations controlled raw materials, severely circumscribing the scope of private enterprise. Organised on a regional basis, these corporations entered into barter agreements to transfer goods from surplus areas to places of scarcity. In one example, the North China Trading Company exchanged cloth, yarn, kerosene, gasoline, caustic soda and glass for cotton, peanut oil and tobacco from the Central China Trading Company. Many of them also ran state shops and co-operatives, designed to check speculative price increases in a whole range of commodities, from foodstuffs, cloth, farming tools, household equipment, hardware, soap, matches and sugar to stationery.41