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

by Dikötter, Frank

  But along Zhejiang’s ragged coast were several thousand islands where the hand of the state barely reached. A huge waterland covered south China, veined with canals, guttered and bankless meandering rivers, fields flooded in terraces and lakes both natural and artificial. Even as most cities built asphalt, concrete and macadam roads for modern transportation, water travel continued to be popular. All along China’s busy coast, freighters, tankers and ferries plied their trade next to fishing trawlers and traditional junks. The navigable rivers also swarmed with traffic, ranging from lorchas with batten lug sails to modern motor ships.

  The inhabitants of this water world engaged in fishing and marine farming. Some were sea nomads, traditionally treated like outcasts and long barred from living on shore or marrying land people. Living in the Pearl River delta in south China, the Tanka viewed water as the safe element, land being fraught with danger. They spoke their own dialect, mooring their sailing junks and shrimping vessels side by side to form vast flotillas which even had their own floating temples and religious boats. Many fled after liberation, taking their boats and families to Hong Kong, where they joined immense floating cities of up to 60,000 people near Aberdeen and Yaumatei.

  Other groups thrived on the water. Generations of boatmen worked and lived on board large cargo-carrying vessels along the Grand Canal, an ancient waterway completed in the seventh century to haul the grain tribute from the south to the imperial capital in the north. Flower boats, often decorated in a riot of colours, carried the nightsoil that fertilised the fields in the provinces along the coast. Coal barges and grain boats cruised on the many waterways of Shandong, where the Yellow River intersected with the Grand Canal. On the Yangzi, the riverfront of Shashi was crowded with junks anchored side by side. Further upriver, a floating population of trackers waited to be hired to haul ships through the shoals and gorges of the Yangzi.

  This watery world had always attracted smugglers, drifters and outcasts. The party saw it as the last refuge of counter-revolutionaries. In the ports along the Guangdong coast, the authorities believed, up to half of the population smuggled contraband goods and harboured enemy agents. Further north, on the islands along Fujian and Zhejiang, some were secretly in touch with the nationalists in Taiwan. The vice-minister of communications Wang Shoudao described the water population as a troublesome shadow world of 4 million people, steeped in feudal customs and riddled with gangsters who controlled the ports along the coast. One out of every fifty was a counter-revolutionary, he calculated.40

  Luo Ruiqing agreed. In December 1952 he set a killing quota for people living on the water of one per thousand. Nine times as many were to be deported to labour camps. Thousands were executed in the following year. Many more were taken from their boats and sent away to do hard labour, as the revolution finally moved from the land to the water.41

  No one will ever know how many people were killed at the height of the Great Terror. The way statistics were gathered varied widely from one place to another and, more importantly, almost everywhere secret killings took place which were rarely reported. The most complete set of available figures are for the provinces under the leadership of Deng Zihui from October 1950 to November 1951. The total reached over 300,000 victims, or 1.7 per thousand of the local population (see Table 1, p. 100). And as Luo Ruiqing cautioned in his report on these provinces, a further 51,800 executions were earmarked to take place over the following months, most in Guangdong.42

  The provinces under Deng Xiaoping, namely Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan, are unlikely to have had killing rates below two per thousand. In the entire region of Fuling, composed of ten counties, the rate was 3.1 per thousand. Elsewhere in Sichuan the rate was as high as four per thousand. In the entire province of Guizhou, as we have seen, the rate was three per thousand. In an oral report to Deng Xiaoping the figure of 150,000 executions for all three provinces was mentioned in November 1951.43

  In east China, as early as April 1951 the reported killing rates already stood at more than two per thousand in Fujian and Zhejiang. They were lower in Shandong, but even before the summer began the region as a whole claimed over 109,000 executions.44

  In the north, the situation was more complex because so many killings had already taken place before the campaign was launched on 10 October 1950. In Hebei, for instance, 12,700 victims were executed in 1951, but in the year leading up to October 1950 more than 20,000 had already been killed.45 All of the north-west, from Gansu to Xinjiang and Tibet, remains difficult to assess in the absence of reliable archival material. On the other hand, in Manchuria, already bloodied by the civil war, the killing rate was lowered to 0.5 per thousand in May 1951.46

  Table 1: Total Executions Reported in Six Provinces, October 1950–November 1951

  Province

  Total killed

  Death rate (per thousand)

  Henan

  56,700

  1.67

  Hubei

  45,500

  1.75

  Hunan

  61,400

  1.92

  Jiangxi

  24,500

  1.35

  Guangxi

  46,200

  2.56

  Guangdong

  39,900

  1.24

  Total

  301,800

  1.69

  Source: Report by Luo Ruiqing, Shaanxi, 23 Aug. 1952, 123-25-2, p. 357

  The only total aggregate from the archives to date is Liu Shaoqi’s figure of 710,000 provided at a top party convention in 1954, a figure Mao repeated two years later.47 In a total population of approximately 550 million at the time, this can only have represented the lowest possible estimate, equivalent to a national killing rate of 1.2 per thousand. Liu was, no doubt, willing to present the party only with a politically acceptable figure, one far removed from the evidence contained in the reports filed at the time. A more plausible estimate comes from Bo Yibo, who in the autumn of 1952 mentioned more than 2 million victims. Although this figure cannot be verified, on balance it is the most likely estimate if both reported and secret killings of counter-revolutionaries from 1950 to the end of 1952 are taken into account.48

  Several million people were sent to labour camps or subjected to surveillance by the local militia. Countless more became outcasts. As the politics of hatred tore apart the social fabric of community life, tens of millions of people were permanently branded as ‘landlords’, ‘rich farmers’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘criminals’. These were the black classes, who stood in opposition to the vanguard of the revolution, called red classes. But the label was inherited, meaning that the offspring of outcasts were also subjected to constant persecution and discrimination, all sanctioned by the party. These children would be singled out by teachers and bullied at school, sometimes attacked by followers of the Youth League on their way back home. The adults became the targets of every subsequent political campaign, some of them paraded, shouted at and spat upon in denunciation meetings no fewer than 300 times – before the Cultural Revolution even started in 1966. They were the scapegoats of revolution, maintained alive in a permanent class struggle as a reminder to all of the fate awaiting those found to be on the wrong side of the party.49

  But even those who survived the terror with their reputations intact now lived in fear. The party had no compunction in executing innocents, so innocence was no guarantee of survival. The unpredictable nature of the campaign was of course the very basis of terror, as nobody could be quite secure in thinking that they were beyond reproach. Formerly close communities drifted apart, leaving people isolated and fearful of each other. By the time the campaign was over, a breakdown in normal human relationships was noticeable. As Robert Loh observed: ‘During the persecution, friend had been made to betray friend; family members had been forced to denounce each other. The traditional warm hospitality of the Chinese, therefore, disappeared. We learned that the more friends we had, the more insecure our position. We began to know the fear of being is
olated from our own group and of standing helplessly alone before the power of the State.’50

  Society became more regimented, even for party members. In the months following the assassination of Huang Zuyan, sentinels started appearing at major government offices. Searches became more common. Li Changyu, who became a party member in January 1951, remembers: ‘In those days there were ad hoc guards at the office doors of high-level leaders, and a guard had to be posted at the gate whenever a large-scale meeting was to be held. Anyone entering the meeting place was searched, and if a weapon was found the high alert went up all around.’51

  In the first year of liberation people could wander at will into different government organisations, or drop in to visit friends. But much tighter security regulations soon appeared everywhere. Esther Cheo noted:

  Almost overnight each government organisation took on its own autonomy. We had to sign a paper at the gate and be questioned what our business was. The insistence on secrecy grew to ludicrous lengths. It was impressed upon all of us that there were spies everywhere. We were issued with identity cards, badges and more identity cards together with photographs. I still have them now, a little faded but clear enough to see my name, my place of birth and my rank. We became suspicious of strangers and each other, so that it was no longer comfortable to see each other, because it would mean a long report back on what we talked about and why. One became insular and only stayed within one’s own place of work, lived among one’s own fellow workers, shared the same dormitories, ate in the same canteens.

  Erstwhile friendships faded away. Visitors stopped coming. People turned inward, leading increasingly blinkered lives. A mass exodus of all foreigners further deepened the country’s insularity.52

  6

  The Bamboo Curtain

  The Festival of the Dead, according to the lunar calendar, falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. A ceremony is traditionally held for those wandering ghosts who have not yet found their way to the next world. In 1951 the occasion came on 17 August, but instead of celebrating the festival with lanterns, songs and plays, in Beijing groups of people loitered on the streets, waiting for something to happen. They were unsure quite what to expect. There were obvious preparations for an execution, as groups of vehicles made their way towards the Bridge of Heaven, where most killings usually took place. When the formal procession finally arrived, onlookers were taken aback by what they saw. The first carriage, filled with armed soldiers, was followed by a jeep with a foreigner standing in the back. Tall and erect, with a long white beard, his hair brushed back, he peered into the distance with his hands bound together. Another jeep carried a Japanese man, also tied up and forced to stand. Several more vehicles followed, full of police officers who were laughing and apparently enjoying themselves. According to Radio Peking, the streets were thronged with people who shouted ‘Down with imperialism! Suppress counter-revolutionaries! Long live Chairman Mao!’ According to the sister-in-law of one of the condemned as well as the British embassy, the crowds were uncomfortably silent.1

  Antonio Riva and Ruichi Yamaguchi were the first foreigners to be sentenced to death in communist China. Riva, an Italian pilot who had relocated to Beijing in the 1920s to train the nationalists, and Yamaguchi, a Japanese bookseller, were convicted in a one-hour trial of a plot to murder the Chairman. The conspirators, so the state media trumpeted, had planned to fire mortar shells at a reviewing stand outside Tiananmen Gate during National Day celebrations. Several other foreigners received long prison sentences as part of the conspiracy. The Italian bishop Tarcisio Martina, aged sixty-four, head of the Roman Catholic diocese of Yixian in Hebei province, was imprisoned for life (he was expelled in 1955 and died a few years later).

  The evidence hinged on a mortar seized from Riva’s house and a drawing from Yamaguchi’s notebook. The Stokes mortar was a non-functional part of an antique from the 1930s which Riva had found in a pile of junk outside the Holy See legation. The drawing was a map of Tiananmen Square commissioned by the Beijing Fire Department, to whom Yamaguchi was selling firefighting equipment. The ringleader of the imperialist plot was an American serviceman named David Barrett, who had simply been a neighbour to both men but had moved out a year earlier. ‘I never at any time . . . attempted to assassinate or contrive the assassination of anyone,’ he protested from Taiwan at the time of the trial. Twenty years later Zhou Enlai, the premier from 1949 onwards, apologised to him and invited him back to China. The whole affair was a fabrication designed to frighten the foreign community and scare local people away from any association with outsiders.2

  After they had been executed in the capital, Riva and Yamaguchi were quietly buried in the outskirts of the city, on a farm that looked no different from any other, except for wooden markers and a few headstones scattered among broad fields of melons and vegetable marrows. Most of the graves were overgrown with vegetation, but here and there the markers were newer and could still be spotted. This was one of the burial sites for counter-revolutionaries executed at the Bridge of Heaven. Riva’s wife, determined that her husband should be buried in a Catholic cemetery, eventually managed to wrestle his body back from the Public Security Bureau. His improvised coffin of thin wood was exhumed and the body placed in a proper coffin. On a clear day with a stark blue sky, the coffin was loaded from the field on to a mule cart and covered with a black cloth marked with a white cross. After a five-hour trek along rutted roads covered in dust, the cart reached the Zhalan Cemetery, shaded by the green foliage of cypresses, pines and poplars. The premises had been given to the Jesuits in 1610 by the Ming emperor Wan Li to receive the body of Matteo Ricci. Here Antonio Riva was finally laid to rest. In the following years the Jesuits would be denounced and expelled. In 1954 the grounds of the cemetery were taken over by the Beijing Communist Party School. For good measure, most of the graves were vandalised during the Cultural Revolution. Only a few remain today, hidden from view.3

  Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit who arrived in China in 1583 and adopted the language and culture of the country in order to spread the Catholic faith. The first foreigner to receive permission to remain in the imperial capital in 1601, he spent the rest of his life teaching, translating and befriending leading scholars in Beijing. Other missionaries soon followed, but few were allowed to stay in the empire. Foreign traders – Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British – were confined to a small area outside the city walls of Guangzhou after 1757. Only in the wake of the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1858–60 did more substantial foreign communities gain a foothold in the empire, living in concessions under foreign administration in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Tianjin. Foreign residents were subject to the extraterritorial jurisdiction of their own courts. They could buy land and houses in the treaty ports and travel in the interior for business purposes. After the Treaty of Shimonoseki concluded in 1895 they could also build factories and manage workshops.

  Some of these ports were transformed into beacons of modernity. In Shanghai, a quiet weaving and fishing town before 1842, a massive urban infrastructure appeared that rivalled the very best internationally, ranging from sewerage systems, port installations, communication networks and insurance facilities to hospitals, banks and schools. First the Russians and later the Japanese developed Dalian, changing it from a small fishing town into a major deep-water port in Manchuria.

  Many of the best local enterprises were also established in the concessions, often with foreign partners in order to obtain security of persons and property. The historian Hao Yen-p’ing has written about a ‘commercial revolution’ at the end of the nineteenth century, as local compradors and foreign entrepreneurs joined forces to pursue new opportunities created by free trade. Bills of exchange eased credit, the money supply grew with Mexican dollars and Chinese paper notes, the volume of trade expanded on international markets and global communications underwent a revolution. Local merchants often dominated these new synergies, financing as much as 70 per cent of all foreign shipping.4
r />   But the real boom came after the fall of the Qing empire in 1911. Within less than a decade the number of foreign residents in the Republic of China trebled to well over 350,000. Even as the concessions were retroceded to China – some in 1918, the last few in 1943 – the foreign influx continued. Many lived insular lives, their existence revolving around the expatriate community. But just as many settled and laid down roots in the country. Whether British, French, American or Japanese, entire families could be established in the country for generations: in many cases treaty-port life was home, regardless of whether or not much contact was established with local people. Many settler families had children, and not all of these were sent to boarding school, as English, American, French, German and Japanese schools in China maintained their own national curricula. Many children born of missionary parents or business people grew up in China, some becoming bilingual and profoundly attached to their adopted country. As the historian John K. Fairbank noted, ‘treaty-port cemeteries are filled with foreigners who understood China well enough to live and die there’.5

  The government itself was fully aware of the role of foreigners as conduits of cultural and technological transfer. Leaders like Yuan Shikai and Chiang Kai-shek used a stream of experts, including League of Nations technicians, Japanese legal advisers, German army officers, British construction engineers, French postal personnel and American transportation experts. In the first few years of the republic alone, among the most prominent advisers were Ariga Nagao, prominent international jurist; George Padoux, expert on public administration; Henry Carter Adams, standardiser of railway accounts; Henri de Codt, writer on extraterritorial jurisdiction; William Franklin Willoughby, noted political scientist; Frank J. Goodnow, legal adviser; and Banzai Rihachiro, military expert. At less eminent levels, many foreign employees contributed to the country’s modernisation, ranging from engineers, clerks, accountants and lawyers to teachers and translators.6