The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957
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Those least able to resist the pressure were farmers, in particular in regions where they were entirely dependent on the party after land reform had been carried out. Just as city people contributed a third of their pay, farmers were sometimes bullied into parting with a third of their crop. In a village in Huarong county, a third of the millet was taken after the harvest as a contribution to the war effort and another third as tax. But many of the poor could not afford donations. In one Sichuan village alone, dozens of farmers stripped naked in a meeting convened to meet the required target in donations. They were so poor that all they could give were the clothes they were wearing. In other parts of the province, women were forced to shave off their hair as a gift to the party.31
Some people were driven to an early grave. In Wangcheng, Hunan, a poor farmer called Dai Fengji was forced to give 14 kilos of millet. ‘I am the only one working in my family and eight people depend on me. My wife is sick and needs medicine. Nobody can look after my children. How can I possibly afford that much?’ The head of the Peasant Association had a simple answer: ‘Dead or alive you will donate.’ The farmer jumped into a pond and drowned. Nobody knows how many people were bullied to death, but in Sui county, Hubei, five people committed suicide, unable to cope with the pressure.32
Despite the hysteria of the campaign, conducted at a time of terror when a mere hint of disapproval might attract the potentially fatal label of ‘counter-revolutionary’, some people refused to contribute. When they still persisted after several visits from the authorities, they were sometimes fined the equivalent of what had been expected in the first place. But some forms of pressure were less benign. In parts of Xinjiang people were forced to strip and stand in the glaring sun for hours on end. Some activists went around Nanjing putting up notices on people’s doors stating the amounts they were expected to contribute. One man who showed insufficient enthusiasm was dragged on to a platform and taken to task from eight o’clock in the morning until the middle of the night. After he had agreed to contribute 10 yuan for six months, he was bullied again the following day until he increased the total to 300 yuan.33
But donations alone could not win a war. The army needed men. At each rally a wave of enthusiastic volunteers signed up, most of them idealistic students from the cities. In Guangzhou alone 13,000 people, many of them still in high school, wanted to go to the front and fight the enemy. Some, like Robert Loh, were suspicious of all the propaganda, but others like Li Zhisui followed the war closely. Then working in a clinic for the country’s leaders, Li was thrilled that China was defeating the United States: ‘Even as the Korean War dragged on inconclusively, I was proud to be Chinese.’ After all, this was ‘the first time in more than a century that China had engaged in a war with a foreign power without losing face’, as the doctor put it, a view shared by many other intellectuals who were responsive to patriotic propaganda. Li tried to join the army but his superiors told him to stay put.34
People in the countryside were less keen, especially in regions where years of forced conscription had left the population war-weary. In Manchuria, right next to Korea, uncounted numbers of young men tried to escape conscription. In Dehui county alone, several thousand went undercover in the cities, even refusing to return home to help their families with the harvest for fear of being caught and sent to the front. When people in Wendeng county, Shandong, heard about conscription, their faces ‘changed expression as if hearing about a tiger’. Young men took to the hills, a few even cutting off some of their fingers in order to avoid the draft. In Daixian, Shanxi, young men were on the run in a third of all the villages.35
But, like everyone else, army recruiters had quotas to fill. In Gaoping county, also in Shanxi, they pounced on their targets during fake village meetings, held to lure men out of their homes. The conscripts were locked up at night, although over a hundred still managed to escape. When the county leaders finally decided to keep only those who had genuinely volunteered, of 500 detainees all but a dozen absconded. Sometimes family members were ransomed or locked up to entice the men to enlist. In Yueyang, Hunan, a woman who insisted that conscription should be voluntary was tied up and hung from a beam in front of the assembled villagers as a warning to others.36
In the region straddling Henan, Hebei and Shandong, ten counties reported cases of young men leaping into wells in attempts to escape from recruitment. Several hung themselves, two jumped in front of a train. Such acts of desperation seem rather extreme but made sense in the context of the campaign of terror that was unfolding at the same time. As Zhou Changwu, a farmer from Hunan, put it, ‘Under the nationalists we would hide in the mountains during conscription, but now we will be denounced as spies if we go up there and hide: there really is no way out.’37
The economic cost of the war was enormous. In 1951 military expenses swallowed up 55 per cent of total government spending. Thanks to the Korean War, the annual budget that year was 75 per cent higher than in 1950.38
The mainstay of the regime’s budget was public grain taken from the farmers. Manchuria became the rear base and staging area for the war, with hundreds of thousands of troops moving along the South Manchurian Railway and the Chinese Eastern Railway under Soviet control. Manchuria was China’s breadbasket, producing an agricultural surplus even when the rest of the country suffered from famine. Its industrial heart was a small triangle formed by Shenyang, Anshan and Fushun, churning out about half of all coal and most of the country’s pig iron, steel products and electrical power. Manchuria had arsenals and supply depots for the troops in Korea. Soon it became a haven for the hundreds of planes supplied by Stalin, hovering over the stalemate across the Yalu River.
Villagers in Manchuria came under relentless pressure to contribute grain, cotton and meat for the war effort. The People’s Congress noted that at the end of 1950 in many parts of the region the insatiable demands from the army had swept aside the restrictions on procurements designed to protect ordinary people from hunger. By the end of the year, a third of the region had sunk into poverty, as villagers lacked cattle, food, fodder and tools. Some even had too little seed to plant the next crop.39
The pressure did not abate over the following two years, as coercion on the ground became the norm. Cadres locked villagers into meetings until they agreed to deliver more grain. They sealed off the mills and entered homes, moving furniture, probing cupboards and lifting floorboards in search of hidden grain. The militia blockaded entire villages, allowing no foodstuffs to enter or leave until the quota had been fulfilled. One in three villagers was starving. In Huaide county people ate wild herbs and soybean cakes, normally used to feed poultry and cattle. Horses were starved until they fell over, and were then eaten, which was considered a sign of extreme deprivation unknown since the civil war. Near Changchun villagers bartered all their belongings, including their clothes, to meet their tax obligations. Some families sold their children. The provincial party committee in Jilin decided that widespread starvation in the province had nothing to do with natural disasters: it was the direct result of the coercion that came with orders to supply more grain.40
Further south Sichuan was known as the country’s rice basket. As Deng Xiaoping proudly proclaimed his determination that every man and woman should contribute up to 4 kilos of grain in war donations, tens of thousands of people in the county of Ya’an alone were reduced to foraging for roots to eat. In Yunnan, also under Deng’s purview, more than a million people were starving, many of the victims stripping the bark off trees or eating mud that filled the stomach but often caused excruciatingly painful death as the soil dried up the colon. But the pressure did not abate. In November 1951, despite ruthless requisitions, Deng Xiaoping announced that farmers in south-west China would be asked to contribute an extra 400,000 tonnes of grain beyond the usual procurements. Six months later 2 million people were starving in the region, with reports of cannibalism reaching the higher echelons of the leadership.41
The war did nothing, either, to help the u
rban economy. Chapter 3 showed how a recession in the spring of 1950 crippled such once bustling hubs of trade and industry as Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou. Tianjin, the commercial centre in the north, managed to keep afloat. With Shanghai blockaded by the nationalists, much of the export trade was routed through Tianjin, which was beyond Taiwan’s reach. But the Korean War brought about trade restrictions imposed by the United States on more than 1,100 commodities, badly hitting private importers and exporters. A full embargo followed in October 1950, leading to a 30 per cent decline in foreign trade in the first half of 1951. The city port was allocated government contracts for war materials, and some of the new state trading companies thrived on the back of the war, but the private sector soon entered a terminal decline.42
Beijing put the country on red alert in April 1952, charging that the Americans had secretly been waging germ warfare since the end of January. The enemy had allegedly dropped infected flies, mosquitoes, spiders, ants, bedbugs, lice, fleas, dragonflies and centipedes over parts of North Korea and Manchuria, spreading every variety of contagious diseases. The Americans had also purportedly released contaminated rats, frogs, dead foxes, pork and fish. Even cotton, Beijing warned, could spread plague and cholera. Enemy planes, it was claimed, had deployed these biological weapons in about a thousand sorties, most of them over Manchuria but a few reaching as far south as Qingdao, the port of Shandong province.43
Beijing first alleged that the United States was waging germ warfare in February 1952, claims that rapidly made headlines around the world. The charges gained credibility after several captured American pilots confessed to dropping the disease-carrying insects on Korea and China. Even more damaging was an international commission chaired by Joseph Needham, a Cambridge University biochemist, who published a lengthy report corroborating these allegations – after visiting Manchuria and finding one diseased vole.44
The regime’s propaganda machine went into overdrive, giving renewed impetus to the Hate America Campaign. Endless articles on anthrax-laden chickens or brittle bombs filled with tarantulas appeared in the newspapers, with photos showing clumps of dead flies, close-ups of diseased insects, microscopic images of bacteria and smudges identified as germs. In Beijing there were reports of germ-laden joints of pork, as well as dead fish (forty-seven of these found on a hilltop), corn stalks, medical goods and confectionery.45
A revolving exhibition toured all major cities. In Beijing it filled three large halls, with exhibits of parachuted cylinders allegedly full of germ-carrying insects, and maps indicating where the Americans had dropped biological weapons 804 times at seventy points. In the corner of one room, a loudspeaker broadcast the recorded confessions of two captured enemy pilots over and over again. Their written statements were displayed in a glass case. A series of microscopes revealed bacteria cultures claimed to have been developed from infected insects. One photograph showed three victims of plague who had been infected by flies dropped by enemy planes.46
The campaign strongly resonated in China, where the Japanese had conducted experiments in germ warfare during the Second World War. Now that Japan was an ally of the United States, it was easy to imagine that those tests had carried over into the Korean War. Beijing highlighted how scientists from the notorious Unit 731 had been granted immunity after the Second World War in exchange for their expertise – even though the United States denied this at the time and would only reveal the extent of their collaboration with the Japanese scientists decades later. After General MacArthur had openly toyed with the idea of using the atom bomb, the threat of mass destruction seemed all too plausible, lending credibility to the idea of secret biological weapons. In Asia more generally, as Frank Moraes, the editor of the Times of India, noted, public opinion was sensitive to the idea that the Americans were using Asians as guinea pigs for another weapon of mass destruction. Li Zhisui, the doctor working for the party leaders, was only one among many intellectuals appalled by the news that the United States was using bacteriological warfare in Korea.47
But some observers were less convinced. On 6 April the New York Times published an article demonstrating that the photos presented as proof by the People’s Daily were fraudulent. One scientist who had pored over the evidence pointed out that infected lice and fleas could not survive the freezing temperatures of North Korea in winter. Weeks earlier people in Tianjin had already expressed similar doubts: ‘The weather in Korea is very cold, how come the flies have not frozen to death?’ one of them wondered. Others were openly sceptical of the danger from the alleged germs, suspecting they were fake. Li Shantang, identified by the regime as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ who had worked for the nationalists, boldly proclaimed that ‘This is all communist propaganda in an attempt to get the world to hate America, don’t listen to all that rubbish!’ In Manchuria farmers shrugged their shoulders, pointing out that insects always appeared at the end of winter.48
Others panicked. The outbreak of the Korean War had unleashed fears of a Third World War. Now, two years later, some people lived in terror of an invisible enemy seemingly lurking in almost any kind of organic matter. In Shenyang several people who had been bitten by insects rushed to the hospital pleading for treatment. The premises were already crowded with those suffering seizures, pains or partial paralysis, all induced by the mere sight of a bug. A few hoarded food in anticipation of an apocalypse. Others, believing that the end was nigh, squandered what was left of their savings on wine and meat for one final feast. In places as far away as Chongqing, children were locked up inside their homes for fear of contamination. Entire villages in Henan shut down, as rumours spread of secret agents poisoning the wells. More worrying to the regime was the popular habit of interpreting natural catastrophes as harbingers of dynastic change. It was whispered that the regime was about to collapse and the nationalists would return. ‘Heaven, the old regime is coming back!’ proclaimed someone in Dalian. In Linying, Henan, farmers desecrated images of Mao, burning out his eyes, tearing down the posters or even attacking them with choppers.49
Everywhere, it seemed, poor villagers turned to miracle cures, drinking holy water thought to have magical powers. In Xuchang, surrounded by tobacco plants on the northern plain of Henan, thousands of farmers turned up at various sacred locations to drink the water, said to confer protection against germ warfare. In a village in Dehui, a region in Manchuria where brutal levies had brought famine, up to 1,000 believers gathered daily around an ancient well. Some were demobilised soldiers from the Korean War who came by bus from neighbouring provinces. The authorities decried these practices as superstition, but the local cadres were just as jittery. In Wuyang county the entire leadership locked themselves up in the government’s health bureau to drink realgar, traditionally used in alchemy to ward off disease. They also covered themselves in a miracle balm.50
Whatever their reactions to the allegations, around the country people were mobilised to detect germ-warfare attacks. In Manchuria suspected victims were doused in a liquid solution of DDT. In Andong, close to the border, a team of 5,000 equipped with gauze masks, cotton sacks and gloves were on the hunt, scouring the surrounding mountains around the clock for suspicious insects. In Shenyang 20,000 people were deployed to mop floors, sweep streets, remove trash and disinfect the city down to every last pavement slab. Here is how Tianjin fought back against biological infection:
Case #4: June 9, 1952. Insects were first discovered at 12 noon near the pier at the Tanggu Workers Union Hall. At 12:40 p.m., insects were discovered at the New Harbour Works Department, and at 1:30, in Beitang town. Insects were spread over an area of 2,002,400 square metres in New Harbour, and for over twenty Chinese miles [approximately 10 kilometres] along the shore at Beitang. Insect elimination was carried out under the direction of the Tianjin Municipal Disinfection Team. Masses organized to assist in catching insects included 1,586 townspeople, 300 soldiers and 3,150 workers. Individual insects were collected and then burned, boiled or buried. Insect species included inchworms, sno
ut moths, wasps, aphids, butterflies . . . giant mosquitoes, etc. Samples of the insects were sent to the Central Laboratory in Beijing, where they were found to be infected with typhoid bacilli, dysentery bacilli and paratyphoid.51
Carried out like a military campaign, the drive to cleanse the country soon alienated large sections of the population. In Beijing everybody was inoculated against plague, typhus, typhoid and just about every other disease for which there was a vaccine, whether they wanted it or not. In the countryside compulsion assumed a wholly different dimension. In parts of Shandong the militia would arrive and block off both sides of the market, locking villagers in until they had been injected. In a village in Qihe the military locked all the houses and injected the assembled villagers themselves. Some young men, already worried about conscription, clambered over walls to escape. Women carrying their children tried to hide in a ditch and were too frightened to return home. Everywhere threats were common, and some of those who refused an injection were portrayed as spies on the imperialists’ payroll. In Shaanxi, too, the campaign treated ordinary villagers as so many potential enemies to be brought to heel. In some places local cadres commanded that ‘he who does not kill flies is guilty of germ warfare’. Households that failed to comply with the instructions had a black flag pinned on their front door. Under the pretext of germ warfare, a few women were forced to undergo a humiliating physical examination before a wedding certificate was granted.52