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

by Dikötter, Frank

  The party archives are full of cases of blatant abuse driven by cadres eager to show their determination to stamp out counter-revolution. In Yanxing county, a wealthy region in Yunnan covered in salt flats, over a hundred middle-school students were arrested and tortured in April 1951 after an anonymous denunciation reached the local party headquarters. Wu Liening, ten years old, was hung from a beam and beaten. Ma Silie, aged eight, was tied up on a cross in a kneeling position. A wooden pole was placed across his thighs and pressed down by two of his tormentors, crushing his legs and knees on the concrete floor. Even Liu Wendi, aged six, was accused of being the head of a spying squad. Two of the children were tortured to death. This was not an isolated example. A team of militia in Sichuan also tried to uncover counter-revolutionaries among schoolchildren. Some had both hands and feet tied up while being suspended upside down, others were made to go through mock executions. Three were tortured to death, another five of the children committed suicide. About fifty of the victims survived the abuse, although many were crippled or maimed for life.14

  In Guangdong a full third of all the victims were wrongly accused – by the standards of the party itself. In Luoding county, a single case of suspected theft by a student led to the arrest and interrogation of 340 young people aged thirteen to twenty-five. Only after hundreds of letters of complaint were sent to the provincial inspectorate was one leading official dispatched a year later to investigate the case.15

  In the fight against counter-revolutionaries entire hamlets were mistakenly eradicated. In one notorious incident in Bigu, Jiangxi, a squad leader discovered smoke coming from a cluster of homes suspected of harbouring enemies. He opened fire without asking any questions. Then all the houses were torched. Twenty-one people were killed, another twenty-six victims later dying of their wounds. All except one were women and small children.16

  As cadres rushed to achieve their killing quota, false arrests were common. They reached over 50 per cent in parts of Guizhou. In Congjiang county, fewer than a third of all arrests were based on any kind of concrete proof. In Chang’an village, Xie Chaoxiang aroused suspicion by merely knocking on the door of a landlord. He was locked up and beaten till he denounced forty-eight other farmers, most of them poor. Eight of these were arrested and beaten unconscious, doused with water, revived and beaten again. Six committed suicide. In another case a man killed himself after he was accused of having murdered eight people in 1929 – when he was a baby aged one.17

  Merely looking suspicious could determine a person’s fate. In Qujing county, Yunnan, 150 ‘bandit spies’ lingered in prison without any supporting evidence. As the cadre in charge explained, ‘if they look like bandits, and they look like spies, we call them bandit spies’. A mere link with the old regime, no matter how tenuous, could lead to death. In Fushun, a county in Sichuan, 4,000 government employees were arrested for having had contact with the nationalists at one point or another in their careers. Often the local cadres had to second-guess what their superiors expected from them, in much the same way that party leaders tried to divine what their Chairman really wanted. Both Yunnan and Sichuan were under the firm grip of Deng Xiaoping, who wrote to Mao to announce that counter-revolutionaries were rife in the local government, while up to 90 per cent of the local cadres in some villages in Yunnan were spies, landlords or other bad elements.18

  As with land reform, leaders everywhere were afraid of falling behind, comparing their performance with that of others. Villages, counties and provinces emulated each other, preferring to kill too many rather than too few – and risk being purged as ‘rightists’. In Yunnan some cadres killed at random: ‘Some places simply look at how many have been arrested and how many have been killed elsewhere and then hurriedly proceed to arrest and kill within a few days.’ Some party members were so afraid of appearing to be lacklustre that they had to steel themselves. As a party official enjoined: ‘You must hate even if you feel no hatred, you must kill even if you do not wish to kill.’ Thousands were silently executed in order to fulfil and surpass the quota.19

  As the gaols – from formal prisons to schools, temples and clan halls commandeered by the military – were overflowing, the authorities sometimes thought it more convenient to execute the inmates rather than go through all the formalities of an investigation. In west Sichuan, as Hu Yaobang reported, ‘there are extremely few people sentenced to a term of five or more years, as some comrades feel that if a prisoner is given a long sentence, he might as well be killed to save time’.20

  Sometimes party members used the terror to pursue their own vendettas against the local population, trying to conceal their activities from their superiors. All over Sichuan local cadres killed secretly, eradicating their enemies without any of the public rallies mandated by Beijing. In Maogong, a town where the communists had regrouped under Mao Zedong after crossing the rugged Great Snow Mountain during the Long March in June 1935, only ten victims of a four-month reign of terror were announced in a public notice. A further 170 were covertly assassinated. Twenty were stabbed to death with bayonets. A few of their heads were cut off and displayed outside the city gates. Some of those killed were farmers who had never participated in any opposition to the party. Maogong was an area inhabited by ethnic groups, and only stark violence, the local cadres reasoned, would bring them to heel.21

  By May 1951 the situation was slipping out of control in those regions of south China controlled by Deng Zihui and Deng Xiaoping. The Chairman intervened, ordering that authority to kill must be transferred one level up, removing the initiative from the counties.22 A frenzy of killing ensued, as party officials hurried to eliminate their targets as fast as possible before the impending deadline. In the Fuling region, made up of some ten counties with terraced fields along the Yangzi River in Sichuan, they disposed of 2,676 suspects in ten days. A further 500 were executed in the two days following the deadline, by which time 8,500 people had been killed in little more than two months. Fuling was not exceptional, although the full scope of what happened will never be known. When underlings asked the party secretary in Wenjiang county to approve further killings from a batch of 127 prisoners, he simply said, ‘Just have a look and pick a few.’ Fifty-seven were shot within three days after the moratorium had been imposed. In west Sichuan, a thousand victims were systematically slaughtered every day for a gruesome week before the authority to kill was lost.23

  Across the country people were tortured or beaten to death. A few were bayoneted and decapitated. But for the most part they were shot. This was not always as straightforward as it might seem. In the ancient city of Kaifeng, dotted with temples and pagodas, the executioners first tried to shoot their targets in the head, but this turned out to be so messy that after a while they aimed for the heart instead. This too proved difficult. Some shots missed, leaving the victims writhing on the floor in agony so that they had to be shot again. Killing demanded skills that came only with practice.24

  Occasionally a victim had to kneel and bow, as a long machete-like knife came swinging down to sever the head from the body. In Guangxi the heads were sometimes suspended by ropes on wooden frames, resembling football goalposts, at the entrance to the market place. The crimes of the victims were written beside the posts.25

  The countryside echoed to the crack of the executioner’s bullet, as real and imaginary enemies were forced to kneel on makeshift platforms and executed from behind before the assembled villagers. Usually only a few of the targets were shot. This is how Zhang Yingrong, who was carried on a wooden plank on to the stage after being beaten, remembers the occasion:

  There were ten others on the stage for denunciation, all tied with ropes. My eldest brother was there beside me, his arms held behind him by two militiamen, his body bent to 90 degrees. I lay on the wooden plank, looking up. The rain had stopped. Amid the loud shouting, I could hear the river nearby. The clouds had dispersed and the sky was clear blue. I thought: People lived harmoniously under the same sky in the same village for many year
s. Why did they act like this now? Why did they hate each other and torture each other like that? Was that what the Communist revolution was all about? All the ‘class enemies’ had been beaten; their faces were swollen and their heads scarred. Beatings couldn’t quench the Communists’ thirst. They started killing. After that meeting, all the former officials under the old regime were executed, including my brother; their children were sentenced to ten or twenty years in jail, where some lost their minds, or died.26

  After public executions, family members were often allowed to collect the bodies. In the countryside silent figures would move stealthily towards the corpses at dusk, clutching some straw with which to wrap the bodies and improvised stretchers to carry them back home. But sometimes the killers blew up the bodies of their victims with dynamite, a practice so common that some provinces had to issue a formal ban against it.

  Some victims were executed away from the public eye, in forests, near ravines and riverbanks, alone or in batches. The bodies were thrown into pits or shallow mass graves, but a few were left to rot. Relatives often spent weeks trying to find the corpses of their loved ones. Those who were fortunate collected what remains they could gather and gave them a discreet burial. Zhang Mao’en had to wait ten months before receiving permission to collect the body of his brother, who had been shot by the roadside and dumped into a ravine in Yunnan. ‘My brother’s rotting corpse looked like a fallen tree stuck in a stream. My second oldest brother and my mother went down into the water to drag it out, and it fell to pieces. We collected the bones, washed them, and put them in a box we had brought with us.’27

  Sometimes the bodies were eaten by wild animals. In Hebei some of the mass graves were so shallow that feral dogs dug up the remains and devoured them. In Sichuan one woman suspected of having hidden a gun was dragged away and so badly tortured that she hung herself from a tree. Her body was dumped in the forest and eaten by wild boars.28

  The terror initially claimed fewer lives in the cities. Party leaders were concerned about the adverse publicity that too many executions might generate. They also had to compromise with the professionals, businessmen, entrepreneurs and industrialists on whom the economy still depended. But the conciliatory tone soon changed.

  On 13 March 1951 some 200 military leaders assembled in Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong, to attend a concert organised in their honour. As applause erupted at the end of a folk performance, a young man stood up at one of the tables, walked towards Huang Zuyan, a top-ranking military leader, and fired a gun. The bullet entered his neck and exited through the jawbone. Huang collapsed on his chair before slumping to the ground, covered in blood. As the guests panicked and hid under the tables, the aggressor fired one more shot before killing himself. Huang later died on his way to hospital. Wang Jumin, the assassin, was thirty-four years old and had joined the communist party in 1943. He had turned against the cause after his family was attacked during land reform.

  Mao put the party on high alert. Here was a case that showed how devious the enemy could be: penetrating the party, lying low for years before suddenly striking out against leaders at the highest level. ‘We absolutely cannot be irresolute. To tolerate evil is to abet it. This is critical.’29

  Within days of the assassination, Mao demanded ‘several batches of big killings’ in the cities. When writing to Huang Jing, the party secretary of Tianjin, he invoked the will of the people to justify more shootings: ‘The people say that killing counter-revolutionaries is even more joyful than a good downpour.’30

  Raids were organised across the country. In Shandong, where the assassination had taken place only weeks earlier, the police rounded up over 4,000 suspects overnight on 1 April. In Jinan, where 1,200 were arrested, people spent the night peering fearfully through the windows, trying to find out who was being dragged away. Within days several dozen had been executed in public, attracting words of praise from the Chairman. Shandong, he pronounced, was a model for those ‘faint-hearted comrades’ who failed to carry out the campaign resolutely.31

  Three weeks later, on 28 April, the police swept through Shanghai, Nanjing and fourteen other cities in one co-ordinated raid, targeting 16,855 individuals. It was a Saturday, and Robert Loh, a returned student who had joined a Shanghai university two years earlier, spent the evening marking student essays. ‘For hours I heard the screaming of sirens and the roar of lorries speeding through the streets. I was uneasily aware that something momentous was happening, but I was not alarmed. The next morning, however, the servants reported in consternation that thousands of people had been arrested. They said that all those who had held positions in the Nationalist Party under the previous regime were taken by the security police.’32

  The doors of those who had been arrested were sealed with a large red paper X, meaning that the belongings of the occupant were not to be disturbed until the police had investigated them. So many red crosses appeared on doors that the Shanghai police took over public buildings as prisons. The raid had been well prepared. For weeks before the night of the arrests the Public Security Bureau had requested all those who had worked for the nationalists to register. The stated purpose was to give those who had made ‘political mistakes’ a chance to ‘start life anew’. Autobiographies had to be submitted and details of every known person had to be provided, whether family, friend or associate. With every full confession came the promise of lenient treatment.

  Public executions followed. ‘One of the execution grounds was near the university. Every day we would see truckloads of prisoners. While we were in our classes we would hear the terrible shooting. The lorries carrying away the corpses dripped blood onto the road that ran past the university buildings.’ Robert Loh, like others across the country, was forced to attend more than one shooting. The stated purpose was to educate the people, although he left more terrorised and sickened than enlightened.

  I remember especially the trial of a factory foreman who had extorted money from his employees and had seduced women workers under him. When found guilty, he was shoved off the platform. He rolled grotesquely because of his tied hands. While he was still on the ground, a policeman shot him through the head. I was about ten paces away. I saw the splatter of the victim’s brains, and the obscene twitching of his body.33

  With the executions came a wave of suicides, as desperate people threw themselves from tall buildings along the Bund. The police soon erected nets which jutted out from windows on the first floor. Instead of leaping from windows, candidates for death now took running jumps from the roof. One man landed on a rickshaw, killing himself, the puller and his passenger. After the police and the military had started guarding all tall buildings, corpses appeared daily in the rivers of Shanghai.34

  Mass executions were held in every city. In Beijing they were chaired by the mayor. Peng Zhen shouted at a mass meeting in Beijing: ‘How should we deal with this herd of beastly tyrants, bandits, traitors and spies who are guilty of the most heinous crimes?’

  Answered a crowd of followers: ‘Execute them by firing squad!’

  Peng: ‘We have already disposed of a number of counter-revolutionaries, but there are still some in prison. Besides, there are still spies and special agents hiding in Beijing. What shall we do with them?’

  The crowd: ‘Suppress the counter-revolutionaries resolutely!’

  Peng: ‘Among the accused today there are despots in the markets, among fishmongers, real-estate brokers, water carriers and nightsoil scavengers. How should we cope with these feudal remnants?’

  The crowd: ‘Execute them by firing squad!’35

  The large gatherings in stadiums in Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing were carefully orchestrated, from speeches scripted in advance to ritual denunciations of victims on stage. But smaller batches were executed in front of party activists as a way of testing their resolve, determination and loyalty to the cause. Esther Cheo, who was being groomed for promotion to cadre, had to attend a mass execution in Beijing: ‘We were taken in a lorry to
the place of execution, near the famous tourist spot, the Temple of Heaven. The victims were kneeling down beside cheap coffins, their hands tied behind their backs with wire. About six security police moved nonchalantly along shooting them in the back of the head. As they fell, some of their heads split open, some just fell with a neat little hole, while others had their brains splattered all over the dusty ground and on to the clothes of the next victims.’ As she turned away in revulsion, a cadre grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Take a good look!’ he shouted. ‘This is what the revolution is all about!’ She screamed and wanted to hide her face, but he held her tight and forced her head around to make her look. She saw her companions running over the bodies, cheering.36

  Few victims ever spoke out. The cadres in charge had honed their skills in mass rallies during land reform, and they knew how to prevent a last-ditch attempt by the condemned to proclaim their innocence or shout anti-communist slogans. Threats of retaliation against family members were very effective. Other measures were used. As one organiser explained: ‘We put a wire ring around every accused person. If he tries to struggle or resist, the soldiers have only to pull the wire back against his windpipe and choke him.’ Sometimes local authorities mandated a rope instead of wire.37

  There were fewer slippages in the cities, where it is unlikely that more than one per thousand of the population was killed. Mao thought that fewer would be acceptable in order not to antagonise the public. He calculated in April 1951: ‘So in Beijing, with its population of about 2 million, over 10,000 have already been arrested and 700 of these have been killed, while another batch of 700 is scheduled for execution. Killing roughly 1,400 should be enough.’38

  The campaign of terror was over by the end of 1951, but the killings never really stopped. With each new wave, ever larger sections of the population were brought into the fold. In Zhejiang, one of the smallest and most densely populated provinces, with valleys and plains along its coastline and mountain ranges covering most of its interior, a quarter of a million militia mounted guard along all the major roads at the peak of the campaign. Few enemies of the regime managed to escape from this tight network, and many died of hunger and cold in the mountains.39