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

by Dikötter, Frank

  One commendable result of this phobia was that some of the most important cities were cleaned up. In Beijing the pavements were scrubbed, holes in the road were filled and households ordered to paint the walls of their houses up to a height of a metre with white disinfectant. Trees were ringed with disinfectant to keep them free from crawling insects. In a swampy city like Tianjin, where mosquitoes could easily breed, local residents were organised in brigades and supplied with picks, shovels and poles to fill in hundreds of cesspools, one bucketful of soil at a time.53

  But the drive to clean up cities also had adverse effects on the natural environment. Shrubs, bushes and plants were removed to deprive pests of hiding places. Large bushfires were started to fumigate flies and mosquitoes. Lime whitewash appeared everywhere, on buildings, trees, bushes and even grass, killing vegetation and turning villages and cities into a grey mass streaked with white and dotted, here and there, with red. DDT and other harmful pesticides became a permanent feature in the attack on nature, helping to turn cities into stark concrete landscapes devoid of greenery.54

  The campaign also had another visible effect. Many residents, from traffic police and food handlers to street sweepers, started wearing cotton masks, which always surprised foreign visitors. This habit would last for decades. In the words of William Kinmond, it gave ‘even young girls and boys the appearance of being fugitives from operating rooms’.55

  From north to south, people were also required to kill the ‘five pests’, namely flies, mosquitoes, fleas, bedbugs and rats. In Beijing every person had to produce the tail of one rat every week. Those who greatly exceeded the quota were allowed to fly a red flag over the gate of their house, while those who failed had to raise a black flag. An underground market in tails rapidly developed. In Guangdong, the campaign for rodent prevention also came with strict quotas. In July 1952 each district was ordered to kill at least 50,000 rats, the tails to be severed and delivered to the authorities preserved in ethanol. As in Beijing, the pressure was such that many people turned to a thriving black market to meet their share of the quota. In some cities even 0.20 yuan was insufficient to secure a tail. In Shanghai the issue was not so much rat tails as insect larvae, which had to be collected by the tonne. The penalty for delivering too few buckets was deprivation of all material benefits. As a result, people even took trains to the countryside to collect the stuff, or else tried to bribe their way through the entire process.56

  Although the campaign did much to spread awareness of the causes of some diseases, it did little to improve basic health care. In January 1953 a report presented at a nationwide conference on hygiene revealed that the incidence of gastrointestinal diseases had actually increased the previous year. In Shanxi hundreds of tonnes of sugar products contained flies and bees. In Shanghai dead rats were found in moon cakes, while in Jinan maggots wriggled their way through bean-paste cakes. Entire groups of people suffered from appalling disease rates, ranging from tuberculosis to hepatitis. In parts of the country half of all miners were sick, as the relentless drive for higher output had led to the neglect of even the most basic facilities. Nine months later the Ministry of Health, in a self-criticism addressed to Mao Zedong, accepted that much of the campaign in 1952 had been based on coercion and had proved wasteful, ‘to the point where it prevented the masses from engaging in production and gave rise to their discontent’. More detailed investigations showed the extent of waste caused by the campaign. In Shaanxi, for instance, a full year’s supply of medicine had been squandered in just six months, as local officials had pursued showcase projects for the campaign rather than using their scarce resources to improve the health of the people they represented.57

  Dogs never appeared on the list of ‘five pests’ but were also targeted for elimination. All over China one could find them, many of them crippled and mangy, wandering the streets and rubbish dumps in packs, fighting with each other for a scrap of food. In the cities some families kept them as pets, while in the countryside they were popular for guard duty, herding and food. They were routinely put down in communist-held areas during the civil war. Like everything else, the cull came in stages after liberation. In Beijing, a swoop cleared thousands of wild dogs from the streets, often with the support of local residents, as policemen armed with wire nooses on bamboo poles rounded them up. Then, by September 1949, dog owners were required to register their pets and keep the animals indoors. A year later the destruction of registered dogs started. Some of the animals were voluntarily turned in, but a few owners refused to surrender them. In a few cases the police were even confronted by angry dog keepers, who sometimes had the crowd on their side. The police then started breaking into houses. Owners came back home to find their doors broken down and their pets gone.58

  But the campaign really took off during the fight against germ warfare, when teams of dog chasers appeared on the streets, carrying out house-to-house searches. Most of the animals were removed to an enormous compound outside the city wall. As one resident in Beijing noted, ‘They were taken away in small carts like garbage cars, closed tight and packed solid, and if you passed one you could hear them thrashing inside and see blood on the sides of the cart.’ In the compound hundreds of dogs were kept in cages. As the dogs were not fed, they attacked each other, the stronger eating the weaker. Occasionally a policeman would put a wire noose over the head of a healthier specimen and swing it around till it choked to death. Then the animal would be flung to the ground and skinned. The hide, still steaming from the body heat, was put over a cage to dry as the other dogs cowered underneath.59

  Even though her roommates objected to the animal, Esther Cheo kept a small female dog in her dormitory, which she had taken in as a puppy. She shared all her food with it, and the dog was named Hsiao Mee, after the millet they ate. During the cull one of her colleagues who disliked dogs opened the door and let her out. The dog was soon caught and carried away, but, with the help of a high-ranking cadre, Esther managed to locate the compound where the animals were kept. ‘I walked up and down stumbling over dead and dying dogs, shouting out Hsiao Mee’s name, trying to drown out the barks and whines of hundreds of dogs. Eventually I found her. She was in a cage with several others. She jumped up and tried to lick my face, trembling with fear and perhaps excited, hoping that I had come to take her home. I could only sit there and stroke her.’ Esther came back to the compound regularly, even taking a pair of scissors to the dog’s coat in the hope that she would not be slaughtered for her skin. But in the end all she was allowed to do was to feed her pet some scraps of pork from the canteen and look on as the animal shivered and ate from the bowl in her mangled coat. Finally, with the help of a sympathetic cadre, Esther was given a pistol. She took off the safety catch, pressed the barrel against the dog’s ear and blew her head off.60

  Dogs were denounced as a threat to public hygiene and a symbol of bourgeois decadence at a time of food shortages. Except for those owned by a few privileged diplomats and top officials, they were soon cleared from the cities. But parts of the countryside continued to resist for several years. In Guangdong, efforts to impose a cull backfired in 1952, as angry villagers openly defied the authorities. Killing a landlord was one thing, but taking away a man’s dog was another matter altogether, as they protected homesteads, crops and livestock. In Shandong, where almost every family kept a dog, repeated culls also failed. In the end, however, even the countryside fell into line.61

  Stalin died in March 1953. Within months the new leadership in Moscow moved rapidly towards an agreement over Korea with the Americans and signed a ceasefire on 27 July 1953. Allegations of germ warfare also ended abruptly as the extent of the deception came to light in Moscow. The claims, apparently, had first come from commanders in the field. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai ordered a laboratory investigation of the evidence and dispatched epidemic-prevention teams to Korea, but even before the tests were completed they had begun condemning the United States for engaging in bacteriological warfare. Once the reports
had turned out to be inaccurate, Mao was unwilling to abandon the propaganda benefits of his crusade against the United States. A report to Lavrenti Beria, head of Soviet intelligence, outlined what had happened: ‘False plague regions were created, burials of bodies of those who died and their disclosure were organized, measures were taken to receive [sic] the plague and cholera bacillus.’ On 2 May 1953 a secret resolution of the presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers dismissed all allegations: ‘The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the United States of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.’ A top-ranking emissary was sent to Beijing with a harsh message: cease all allegations at once. They stopped as suddenly as they had started.62

  Part Three

  Regimentation (1952–56)

  8

  The Purge

  On a cold, wintry day in February 1952, a crowd of 21,000 filled the stadium in Baoding, the provincial seat of Hebei. On the stage sat several judges. Facing the people stood two victims, their hands tied behind their backs, eyes fixed on the ground, two armed guards in thick padded jackets right behind them. Long banners, reaching from shoulders to waist, denounced them as criminals and traitors. Zhang Qingchun, head of the Hebei Austerity Inspection Committee, detailed the heinous crimes each of them had committed. A stony silence followed his long speech, as the judge finally stood up to pronounce the death sentence. Heads bowed in submission, the accused never lifted their faces to look at the crowd or their accusers. They were immediately marched off to the execution grounds of Baoding. As a sign of mercy, they were shot in the heart rather than in the head.1

  Had it not been for the identity of the victims, the trial might have looked like any other public execution carried out in the name of the people. But this one was different. Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan were key players in the local party hierarchy. One was the former secretary of the Tianjin Prefectural Committee, the other the head of the Tianjin Commissioner’s Office. Arrested in November 1951, they were accused of abusing their power, diverting funds and conducting illegal economic activities. Each had used his position to build a small empire, amassing exorbitant profits, embezzling large sums of money and squandering most of it.

  The trial caused ripples throughout the ranks of the party. Mao himself had approved the executions, despite pleas for pardon from Huang Jing, the head of Tianjin. ‘Only if we execute the two of them can we prevent twenty, two hundred, two thousand or twenty thousand corrupt officials from committing various crimes,’ the Chairman opined. Even their record of past service to the cause did not save them from the firing squad. Their deaths were meant to serve as a warning to others in the party.2

  Three years earlier a nervous Mao had entered Beijing, joking that he was going to sit the imperial examination. ‘We should be able to pass it,’ Zhou Enlai reassured him. ‘We cannot step back.’ ‘If we retreat we fail,’ Mao chimed in. ‘Under no circumstances can we be like Li Zicheng, all of us have to make the grade.’3

  Li Zicheng was a folk hero who had formed a rebel army to fight the Ming dynasty in the seventeenth century. He won popular support by promising a new era of peace and prosperity. Hundreds of thousands of villagers rallied behind his calls for land distribution and the abolition of exorbitant grain taxes. In 1644 his victorious rebels sacked the capital, Beijing. The Chongzhen emperor, in a fit of drunken despair, tried to kill his daughters and concubines, hoping to save them from the hands of the rebels. Then he stumbled to the imperial gardens on a hill behind the Forbidden City, loosened his long hair to cover his face, and hanged himself from the rafters of a pavilion. Li Zicheng proclaimed himself the emperor of a new Shun dynasty, but it was not to last. Within months the Manchus crushed his army at Shanhaiguan and founded the Qing.

  In a long essay commemorating the fall of the Ming 300 years before, the poet Guo Moruo warned in 1944 that Li Zicheng had been able to hold the capital only for a matter of weeks, as his rapacious troops terrorised the population and succumbed to widespread corruption. Guo’s essay spelled out the analogies between the Ming bandits and the communist rebels, warning that strict ideological discipline would be required in the civil war to control China. Mao liked the essay and wrote to Guo: ‘Small victories lead to arrogance, big victories even more so. They result in repeated failures. We must be careful not to make the same mistake.’ The essay was published in Yan’an, the remote and isolated mountain area in Shaanxi where the communist party had established its headquarters during the Second World War.4

  Far behind enemy lines, Mao used his political skills in Yan’an to consolidate his own role within the party, making sure that the constitution endorsed Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the political theories developed in his official publications. In 1942 he launched a major purge of his enemies, eliminating his rivals one by one, a drive he called a ‘Rectification Campaign’. As Gao Hua, a leading historian of the purge, has noted, its goal was ‘to intimidate the whole party with violence and terror, to uproot any individual independent thought, to make the whole party subject to the single utmost authority of Mao’. Mao orchestrated the entire campaign, supervising everything down to the last detail, but he let his henchman Kang Sheng take centre stage. Other close allies of the Central General Study Committee, set up to investigate the dossier of every party member, were Peng Zhen, Li Fuchun, Gao Gang and later Liu Shaoqi. The Study Committee ran everything, unhindered by any constitutional constraints, in effect converting the party into Mao’s personal dictatorship. Leading officials such as Zhou Enlai, Peng Dehuai, Chen Yi and Liu Bocheng were forced to produce self-criticisms, write confessions and apologise for past mistakes. Everybody went through the wringer, as accusations of spying spiralled out of control. Party members at every level were forced to denounce others, trying to save themselves from false allegations. Endless witch-hunts took place, as thousands of suspects were locked up, investigated, tortured, purged and occasionally executed. At night the ghostly howls of people imprisoned in caves could be heard. These were the ones who had lost their minds during the inquisition.

  By 1944 over 15,000 alleged agents and spies had been unmasked. Mao allowed the terror to run amok, assuming the role of a self-effacing, distant yet benevolent leader. Then he stepped in to curb the violence, letting Kang take the fall. Those who had managed to survive the horror turned to him as a saviour. The Rectification Campaign was the prototype of many movements to come.5

  Guo Moruo’s essay on the fall of the Ming came at the height of the Yan’an terror. Mao had it reprinted and widely distributed, warning that weak-willed cadres who had survived the guns of the enemy would be defeated by the ‘sugar-coated bullets’ of the bourgeoisie, a metaphor for corruption. By the end of 1951, almost three years after the conquest of the country, it seemed indeed that the underhanded ways of capitalism were vanquishing the party. The sudden expansion of power and the intake of new members had weakened ideological purity and bred complacency. A taste for the good life extended from the top leaders all the way down to local cadres, who felt that, after fighting hard for the revolution, they should sit back and enjoy the material perks to which their struggle entitled them. ‘Extravagance, waste and much feasting’ flourished among the lower ranks, tarnishing the image of the party.

  Bureaucracy crippled the economy, threatening China’s ability to conduct the war in Korea. The budget ballooned out of all proportion. Even worse, many cadres were corrupt, pocketing large sums of money they should have contributed to the war effort. Zhang Zishan and Liu Qingshan had just been arrested. The Chairman imagined that their case was merely the tip of the iceberg, as a plethora of greedy hands dipped into the state coffers. Mao warned his colleagues: ‘[We] must pay serious attention to the fact that our cadres have been corrupted by the bourgeoisie and are guilty of severe embezzlement. [We should] pay attention a
nd detect, expose and punish them. We also need a big struggle to deal with them.’6

  It was time to clean out the party. Bo Yibo, minister of finance, was put in charge of the campaign, but Mao presided over the entire operation, issuing dozens of directives to other top leaders. The Chairman barely consulted his senior colleagues. All had to report to him directly. Zhou Enlai was treated like a secretary at his master’s beck and call. By the end of December, the Chairman demanded that monthly reports from the county level upwards be sent directly to Beijing so that the performance of their officials could be monitored.7

  Mao used his control of the central apparatus to set the tone and whip up the pressure. As usual, his instructions were vague, leaving his subordinates to guess what his real intentions were. Seemingly everyone was a target, from powerful ministers down to local officials. No legal definitions existed of what precisely constituted ‘corruption’, not to mention ‘waste’, which was so broad a category as to include virtually everything from deliberate stripping of state assets to minor acts of negligence. Mao was adamant: ‘Although waste and corruption are different in nature, the losses caused by waste are bigger than those caused by corruption, and are similar to embezzlement, theft, fraud or bribery. So we should severely punish waste at the same time as we severely punish corruption.’ The only guideline was the distinction between trivial suspects, described as mere ‘flies’, and larger cases labelled ‘tigers’. Big tigers were those who had embezzled over 10,000 yuan, and small tigers were guilty of fraud involving more than 1,000 yuan.8

  Tiger-Hunting Teams tried to outdo each other in trapping their targets, encouraged from above by Mao. Units were set against units, counties competed with counties, provinces vied with provinces. On 9 January 1952 the Chairman praised Gansu for resolutely fighting tigers. He worried that other provinces, where corruption was even worse, had set much lower targets: ‘this is not realistic’, he pronounced. On 2 February 1952 Zhejiang reported that there might be up to a thousand tigers inside its borders. Mao scoffed, pointing out that in a province of that size at least 3,000 cases could be discovered. Five days later came the announcement that Zhejiang harboured 3,700 tigers. Mao circulated the report, urging other provinces to adjust their targets upwards. Soon Bo Yibo enthusiastically reported a new record of 100,000 tigers for all of east China.9