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

by Dikötter, Frank

  Sent to Shanxi to oversee land reform in 1947, he fomented all-out class warfare in the countryside by forcing every villager to take a stand. In a hamlet called Haojiapo, he watched approvingly as the farmers forced landlords to kneel on broken bricks. The victims were then beaten, spat upon and had excrement poured over them. Kang Sheng allowed ‘the masses’ to decide who they did not like, unleashing pent-up frustrations that could target almost anyone. In parts of the region, the search for enemies went so far as to include even farmers classified as ‘middle peasants’, who were arrested, beaten, tortured and then stripped of their property. In some places one out of five people was branded as a ‘landlord’. In Shuo county, nobody dared utter a word when someone was denounced as ‘rich’, because speaking out might lead to a potentially fatal accusation of ‘shielding landlords’. It was enough for one of the poor to point at a farmer and call him a ‘landlord’ for his fate to be sealed. In Xing county alone, over 2,000 people were killed, including 250 elderly and twenty-five children – the latter were called ‘little landlords’.

  One of the victims was a man called Niu Youlan. His surname meant ‘ox’, and he had helped the guerrilla fighters with large gifts of grain, cloth and silver. His collaboration did not save him. In September 1947 the sixty-one-year-old man was dragged on to a stage to face 5,000 villagers. An iron wire was driven through his nostrils. Then his son was forced to pull him like an ox, blood streaming down his face. He was branded with a hot iron and died eight days later, locked up in a cave. As Xi Zhongxun reported to Mao Zedong on 19 January 1948, ‘people are drowned in vats of salt water. Some have boiling oil poured over their heads and burn to death.’15

  Kang Sheng also directed land reform in other parts of the country. Soon his methods were copied everywhere. In Hebei, Liu Shaoqi reported that ‘when the masses fight, they beat, torture and kill people, and right now it is out of control’. People were buried alive, dismembered, shot, throttled to death. Sometimes the bodies of the victims were hung from trees and chopped up.16 Zhang Mingyuan, in charge of land reform in eastern Hebei, witnessed how in one village forty-eight people were beaten to death in less than thirty minutes. But in many cases the violence was carefully orchestrated, as the poor tallied their votes to decide who should die in village assemblies. When names were called out people voted by raising their hands or by casting a soybean.17

  One reason why the violence spread was that villagers literally got away with murder. After each struggle session the crowd divided up the material possessions of the victims. Greed and lust for power pushed party activists to define the individuals to be targeted in increasingly vague ways. But fear of retribution also fuelled violence. Deng Xiaoping described his experience of land reform in Anhui:

  In one place in western Anhui the masses hated several landlords and demanded that they be killed, so we followed their wishes and killed them. After they had been killed, the masses feared reprisals from the relatives of the victims, so they drew up an even longer list of names, saying that if they could also be killed everything would be fine. So again we followed their wishes and killed those people. After they had been killed, the masses thought that even more people would seek revenge, so again they came up with a list of names. And again we killed according to their wishes. We kept on killing, and the masses kept on feeling more and more insecure, taking fright and fleeing. In the end we killed two hundred people, and all the work we did in twelve villages was ruined.18

  By the beginning of 1948, when the pressure abated, some 160 million people were under communist control. On paper the party determined that at least 10 per cent of the population were ‘landlords’ or ‘rich peasants’, but on the ground as many as 20 and sometimes even 30 per cent of the villagers were persecuted. The statistical evidence is woefully inadequate, but by a rough approximation between 500,000 and a million people were killed or driven to suicide.

  In March 1951 a letter was published in the People’s Daily. Several farmers from Hunan had written to ask about land reform. ‘Why doesn’t Chairman Mao just print some banknotes, buy the land from the landlords and then give us our share?’19

  It was a good question. That was, after all, what was happening in the island fortress of arch-villain Chiang Kai-shek. Between 1949 and 1953, large landowners in Taiwan were compensated with commodity certificates and stocks in state-owned industries for the land that was redistributed among small farmers. This approach impoverished some wealthy villagers, but others used their compensation to start commercial and industrial enterprises. Not a drop of blood was shed. The experience was based on Korea and Japan, where land reform was successfully carried out under General Douglas MacArthur between 1945 and 1950. Not a drop of blood was shed there either.20

  Land reform in the north of mainland China had been carried out in the midst of the civil war. But in the south, where the campaign unfolded from June 1950 to October 1952, it could have been peaceful, as the nationalists had fled to Taiwan. Even Stalin advised Mao to pursue a less destructive approach towards the countryside. Having presided over a ruthless war against the kulaks in the Soviet Union at the height of collectivisation in the 1930s, he was in a good position to offer a word of counsel. He had launched a pitiless campaign of dekulakisation in 1928, resulting in thousands of people being executed and close to 2 million being deported to labour colonies in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. But now Stalin stressed the need to limit the struggle to landlords only and leave the economy of the rich peasants intact in order to speed up China’s recovery after years of warfare. His views were wired to Beijing in February 1950. A few months later the Land Reform Law was published, promising a less divisive policy.21

  It was not to be. Promises on paper were a world apart from the violence on the ground. Mao wanted the traditional village leaders overthrown so that nothing would stand between the people and the party. As a Chinese saying has it, ‘The poor depend on the rich, the rich depend on Heaven.’ Now all were to become dependent on the party. And unlike the Soviet Union, where the security organs had liquidated the kulaks, Mao wanted the farmers to do the job themselves. The moral values and social bonds of reciprocity that had long regulated village life were to be destroyed by pitting a majority against a minority. Only by implicating the people in murder could they become permanently linked to the party. Nobody was to stand on the sidelines. Everybody was to have blood on their hands through participation in mass rallies and denunciation meetings. Even before the law was published, Mao warned the assembled leaders on 6 June 1950 to prepare for a battle to the death: ‘Land reform in a population of over 300 million people is a vicious war. It is more arduous, more complex, more troublesome than crossing the Yangzi, because our troops are 260 million peasant soldiers. This is a war for land reform, this is the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords. It is a battle to the death.’22

  The need to break traditional village bonds was particularly acute in the south, where a series of popular rebellions directly challenged the communist party. There were many reasons why villagers objected to their new rulers, but the main one had to do with grain requisitions. These were carried out by the military, and often brutally. In parts of Guangdong 22 to 30 per cent of all the grain was requisitioned, sometimes as much as 60 per cent, forcing people to sell everything they had, from their cattle down to the seed necessary to plant the next crop. Throughout the south-west, the region under Deng Xiaoping’s purview, ruthless house searches left their owners with just enough food to last for three days. In Sichuan, farmers were beaten, hung up and had smoke blown into their eyes or alcohol forced down their noses when they refused to hand over their crop. A bulletin reserved for the eyes of the top leadership noted that pregnant women were ‘frequently’ beaten so badly that they miscarried. Whole families swallowed poison in an attempt to find in death an escape from the tax inspectors. In a bizarre incident in Rongxian county, four women and a man were stripped naked and forced to run with kerosene lamps attached
between their legs as an incentive to hand over more food. As a result, 2.9 million tonnes of grain were collected in tax from south-west China in 1950, although the state spent 4.3 million tonnes, most of it on an army of 1.7 million troops. Traditionally, the region had produced a grain surplus. Now it was bankrupt.23

  People rebelled throughout the south. In Hunan, villagers took to the streets to demonstrate against the new regime. In a single incident in Nanxian county, a rice-growing region near Dongting Lake, more than 2,000 farmers clashed with soldiers. Shots were fired and thirteen people were killed or injured. The following day a crowd of 10,000 irate farmers made their way to the county seat. Their demands: ‘Stop the Procurements, Oppose the Transportation of Grain’. There were a dozen similar incidents in the province. A secret report described assaults against granaries in Hubei as ‘ceaseless’. In Xiaogan a crowd of 2,000 people dragged away 7.5 tonnes of grain from a state warehouse. In Xishui, a county with a long revolutionary history, a crowd forcibly removed food from freight boats. In Enshi, a mass demonstration against procurements resulted in four dead. In Wuli, just outside Wuchang, the local people rebelled against the physical abuse they had to endure from the local cadres as well as ‘random beatings and random killings’ by members of the peasant association. By March 1950, dozens of ‘relatively large rebellions of a mass character’ – to use the wooden language of the party – had rocked Hubei. In Guizhou some of the incidents involved over 100,000 insurgents, ready to fight the communist party to the death.24

  Unrest and rebellion also flared like tiny flash fires in parts of the north where land reform had not yet been carried out. In many parts of Shaanxi, where the dusty, dewless land was cracking from the summer drought, farmers armed with hoes started to hide their wheat for fear of state procurements.25 Further inland along the ancient silk road, in Yongdeng county, Gansu, people banded together to resist state procurements. In one village, 200 farmers surrounded the grain collectors and beat them. In Minle county they were tied up.26 In east China, some forty rebellions rocked the countryside in the first three months of 1950 alone. Most occurred in poor regions, and the target was always the same: famished villagers turned against the party and stormed the granaries. The rebels removed 3,000 tonnes of grain, leaving over 120 soldiers and cadres dead. As a report noted, local officials ‘are completely unconcerned about the hardships of the masses, and even randomly beat, arrest and kill people in the course of their work, producing antagonisms with the masses’.27

  The party blamed ‘landlords’ – as well as spies and saboteurs – for standing behind the rebellions. By expropriating large numbers of them and redistributing their assets, the communists hoped to persuade the villagers to rally behind them.28

  But as the second round of land reform unfolded, a new problem appeared: the further south the communists went, the less land there was. A world of difference existed between the sparsely populated plains of Manchuria and the crowded villages south of the Yangzi. As there was not enough land to be distributed to the poor, the pledge not to interfere with ‘rich peasants’ was soon broken. In Sichuan it was enough for a farmer actually to make a profit in order to be classified as a ‘landlord’. Families who owned a pot of white sugar or a buffalo to plough the fields were denounced so that their meagre possessions could be confiscated. Even north of the Yangzi, where parts of the countryside had already gone through a gruelling process of land distribution in 1947–8, villagers were subjected to a second round of terror. In Shandong many ordinary farmers were randomly arrested and beaten, regardless of whether or not they met the definition of a ‘landlord’. In Pingyi county, where only a quarter of those locked up were landowners, a local party official proclaimed that ‘from now on we should kill somebody at every one of our meetings’. Indiscriminate beatings at village rallies were ‘common practice’: ‘some of the cadres drop hints that encourage beatings, others do not interfere when beatings take place’. In Teng county, as one party secretary reported, people were topped with dunce’s caps, forced to kneel and then beaten or stripped and exposed to the cold in the winter. Some had their hair pulled out, a few their ears bitten off. In the village of Xigangshan villagers urinated on their victims.29

  Parts of the countryside descended into a spiral of violence because so many ordinary farmers who were classified as ‘landlords’ or ‘rich peasants’ started to retaliate. In a village in Guizhou, seventy-year-old Zhang Baoshan was mistakenly classified as a landlord. Party activists dragged the man to a rally where he was beaten, tortured and drenched in freezing water. Infuriated, two of his sons went on a rampage, hacking several of their enemies to death. Unable to return home, the sons hid deep in the mountains where they were soon hunted down and lynched by a search party. A frenzied mob cut off their tongues and genitals. Their bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into a river. The entire family of Zhang Baoshan, more than twenty people, were beaten before being sent to prison. An investigation later showed that eight people in the village lost their lives as a consequence of random labelling of the poor as ‘landlords’.30

  Sometimes whole villages turned against the communists. In Lanfeng county, Henan, on average one farmer was killed every three days in April 1950. Some of the victims were ordinary people on their way to market. They were set upon by cadres who beat them with the butts of their rifles. After one woman had been shot in the stomach and died amid screaming children and frightened villagers, the crowd turned, overpowering the perpetrators and seizing their weapons.31

  More subtle forms of resistance appeared everywhere. Despite all the efforts of the work teams in charge of land reform – the painstaking collection of information on the local power structure, the carefully choreographed meetings to ‘speak bitterness’, the endless propaganda, the village rallies backed up by the power of local militias – ordinary people had qualms about persecuting and stealing from their erstwhile neighbours. Many knew how to keep their emotions in check, locking them away deep inside, to be exhibited only on appropriate occasions. They learned how to perform as a way to survive. Esther Cheo, who joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1949, saw how people could switch their emotions on and off during village meetings: ‘I noticed one woman shout and scream at the landlord. As soon as her part was played out, she returned to the crowd, took her baby who had been peacefully suckling at another woman’s breast, and continued feeding it at her own, while she calmly watched the next participant in the struggle meeting.’ Those who shouted the loudest sometimes supported the victims, for instance by furtively returning the spoils that had accrued to them. In Xushui, a young party activist called Sun handed back a bucket of corn to a former employer who had always treated him like a family member. Sun was stripped of his party membership.32

  As work teams in charge of land reform fanned out south of the Yangzi, they encountered powerful clans that were far more diverse and integrated than the rhetoric of class warfare implied. Entire villages shared the same surname. In Hubei, some of the leaders paraded at denunciation meetings managed to turn the assembled throng against the cadres. In Fang county the farmers unanimously agreed not to dispossess any of those targeted as landlords. In Hunan some wealthy farmers slaughtered their cattle, sold the land and bartered their tools before land reform had even started. In Xiangtan one man pulled down his house to sell the bricks. In two counties some 27,000 fir trees on private land were chopped down before they could be redistributed. In Zhejiang, local leaders harangued the villagers against land reform, warning them that ‘year after year the taxes will increase’: a few predicted that ‘it will be hard to avoid famine in future’.33

  In Sichuan a few landowners took control of the situation, carefully studying the land-reform law, assembling the villagers and staging fake ‘struggle sessions’ before the work teams had even arrived. They determined their own class status, ascribing the label of ‘landlord’ to a mere handful of people. Some voluntarily distributed parts of their land. Others deposited, barter
ed or gifted their property to other villagers, making sure that people actually sided with them. In some cases entire villages stood firmly behind those denounced as ‘landlords’. And when all else failed, some would rather torch their houses than hand them over to the mob. This happened all over Sichuan.34

  The party interpreted popular resistance as clear evidence that the dark powers of feudalism were still holding sway over the countryside. The less support it found among the villagers, the louder its call for violence. Landlords and counter-revolutionaries, party officials claimed, aided and abetted from abroad, poisoned the minds of the villagers with religion, infiltrated peasant associations with their henchmen and corrupted party cadres with offers of cash and women. Nothing short of terror would overcome the forces of reaction, as ever more murder was mandated. On 21 April 1951, provincial head Li Jingquan ordered that 6,000 landlords, several thousand of them lingering in prison, be paraded and executed in west Sichuan in order to give land reform greater momentum: ‘In land reform we should arrest those who lie low, link up with foreign powers and commit counter-revolutionary crimes: we should kill half of them, or about four thousand, in addition to some one or two thousand currently in gaol who still need to be executed. If we follow this plan we will execute five to six thousand of them, which corresponds roughly to the principle of killing a small batch in land reform.’ His report was endorsed in Chongqing by his superior Deng Xiaoping, the man in charge of the south-west of China.35

  Other regions were just as tough, although precise figures are hard to come by. In Luotian, a Hubei county covered in chestnut forests, as many as one out of every 330 villagers was shot. In a mere twenty days in May 1951, over 170 people were executed as ‘landlords’. First some of the victims were asked to surrender 500 kilos of grain. Then they were asked for a tonne. Then they were shot. Many of the targets were not wealthy at all, but ‘the masses did not dare to speak out’ in denunciation rallies.36