The Korean War brought a further clampdown on the private sector. A Donations Drive replaced the Victory Bonds Campaign, as massive contributions in gold, jewellery, dollars or other foreign currencies were extracted from manufacturers, entrepreneurs and traders to finance the war. But, most of all, the campaign of terror that unfolded after October 1950 silenced all opposition to the regime. As hundreds of thousands of real or imagined enemies were executed before large crowds, entrepreneurs feared being dragged away to the police station to face accusations of being ‘a person of the compradore class who built up his fortune by means of depriving the legal livelihood of the working class’ or ‘an agent working for the nationalist government’. As most foreigners were hounded out of the country, they left behind a vulnerable, fearful and isolated bourgeoisie cut off from all their contacts with the rest of the world.
The campaign against the bourgeoisie unleashed by Mao in January 1952 followed well-established techniques which had been fine-tuned during land reform. At denunciation meetings the workers were encouraged to turn against their managers. The trade unions established work brigades, each member taking an oath of loyalty and promising to ‘stand firm’ and prosecute the campaign thoroughly. Traditional links with employers were severed as employees ‘spoke bitterness’, urged by local cadres to dig out every past slight they could think of. The workers were now the masters. Party activists took the lead, searching for evidence of criminal activity. ‘Clerks and workers, on instructions from their labour unions, pried into account books, opened safes, and eavesdropped on telephone calls in a feverish search for something incriminating.’ Entire cities were placed on a war footing, as lorries trundled through business districts, stopping before shops with their loudspeakers blaring: ‘Hey, proprietor! Evidence of all your misdeeds is now in our hands. Confess!’ The windows of suspected businesses were plastered with bills and placards, while gangs of demonstrators blocked their entrances. Denunciation boxes, bright red with a small slit at the top, were provided to make it more convenient for people to denounce others. Big banners fluttered over busy streets: ‘Sternly Punish Corruption Culprits’.27
Terrified merchants, traders and bankers crowded into confession meetings to confront their accusers. Before he was locked up in his office to write a confession on his work in the cotton mills operated by Rong Yiren, employee Robert Loh found that posters had been put up on the wall in front of his desk. They contained slogans such as ‘Crush the Vicious Attack of the Capitalist Class’, ‘Surrender, You Vile Capitalist’, ‘A Complete Confession is the Road to Survival, Anything Less Will Lead to Death’. A loudspeaker was installed in one of the office windows. It sputtered briefly and then burst into an ear-splitting racket, broadcasting the mass meeting under way in the main dining hall. Most of it was an harangue against capitalism, as party activists worked the crowd into a frenzy. Then cadres took over the microphone to address Loh directly. They shouted abuse, insults and threats, admonishing him to make a full confession. This went on for a full afternoon. In the evening a cook dropped a blanket on the floor and reluctantly placed a bowl of noodles on the edge of his desk. Guards made sure he could not leave, even accompanying him to the toilet. Later, when he tried to sleep on the floor of his office, they sat grimly in front of him, refusing to turn off the lights at night.
This went on for two days. On the morning of the third day, as he was escorted to the party secretary’s office, the employees jeered and called him a ‘capitalist swine’ and ‘unscrupulous dog’. Some spat at him, a few tried to hit him. The most vehement were those with whom Loh had been most friendly. ‘At first, this cut me deeply, but then I realized that precisely because they had been friendly to me, they would be the ones threatened the most and for their own safety they would strain to show that they no longer had anything but hatred and contempt for a capitalist criminal like me. Oddly enough, this thought made me feel better.’
After more admonitions from the leading cadre, Loh spent another two days of torment under the constant scrutiny of his guards, listening to the accusations broadcast over the loudspeaker and trying to come up with a plausible crime for which he could atone. He submitted one confession after another. His seventh attempt was accepted. Then came the day of reckoning, as he had to ‘face the masses’.
My entrance was the signal for a tremendous uproar. The screams of rage, the shouted slogans and insults, were deafening. I was made to stand with humbly bowed head before the small stage on which the communist officials sat at tables. I had lost 13 pounds. I was filthy, unshaven and exhausted. My knees trembled with both weakness and fear. The shouting behind me was turned off suddenly. The party secretary rose and read off the list of the people’s charges against me.
When he had finished, Loh had to bow to the crowd. One by one, representatives from every group of employees came to the stage to denounce him.28
Robert Loh escaped relatively lightly. Many others did not. Some were terrorised with threats of the death penalty, and then told that their fate depended on their own contributions to the campaign. In order to save themselves, they turned on others. Terror sometimes drove them to become even more ferocious than the cadres. Since they had exclusive knowledge of their own particular branch of business, they were also in the best position to pinpoint crimes to which others were pressed to confess. Even wives and children were used in the denunciations. In Changsha an accountant named Li Shengzhen provided information on dozens of cases, denouncing his own father. ‘Relatives are not as close as the state and members of the same class,’ he proclaimed, according to security boss Luo Ruiqing, who proudly reported the case to the Chairman. The communist press reported that children were instructed to expose the crimes of their parents. One told his father, ‘If you don’t confess your own corruption, other people will expose you just the same; if you remain obstinate, I won’t recognize you as my father.’29
Denunciations took place under intense pressure in closed meetings. But sometimes they were made in public, as victims turned up in their warmest clothes, expecting to be sent to a labour camp in Manchuria. Some captains of industry – Rong Yiren, Liu Hongsheng, Hu Juewu – shook with fear as they stood on the stage, desperately hurling accusations at each other, Bo Yibo explained with satisfaction when writing to Mao Zedong. Breaking down in tears, Rong Yiren openly proclaimed his shame when confronted with his family’s exploitative past, confessing to 20 million yuan in ill-gotten gains, an amount he had arrived at by spending weeks going through mountains of ledgers.30
Techniques acquired during land reform were widely used to inflict pain and humiliation. In the cities some victims were tied up, ordered to kneel on a small bench or bend down for hours on end. Sleep deprivation was common. Tactics became rougher in the countryside. Throughout Sichuan people accused of being ‘capitalists’ were cursed, stripped, beaten, hanged and flogged. Work teams often served as judge, jury and executioner, deciding, for example, to double a fine when a payment was made immediately and to shoot those who failed to pay up on more than four occasions. In some cities in Guangdong, tax inspectors took factory owners to witness public executions, pointing out that they would meet the same fate if they failed to comply. Some workers in Jiangmen, on the other hand, presented a ‘bill for exploitation’ to the factory owners, who were beaten, forced to kneel in accusation meetings and locked up in the toilets. Other forms of physical torture were ‘very common’. In Shenyang merchants were stripped by the workers and forced to stand in the cold for hours on end.31
Few victims died, but many committed suicide. ‘The sight of people jumping out of windows became commonplace,’ reported Robert Loh, who saw it happen twice, even though he seldom left his house during this period. ‘The coffin makers were sold out weeks ahead. The funeral homes doubled up so that several funerals were held simultaneously in one room. The parks were patrolled to prevent people from hanging themselves from the trees.’ In Beijing, when the frozen West Lake began to melt in spring, more tha
n ten bodies were found in one corner alone.32
Suicide was not easily accomplished, as suspects were under constant supervision. But nothing bred ingenuity quite like despair. Some entrepreneurs who had links to the pharmaceutical industry managed to obtain cyanide pills and swallowed them when dragged away to attend struggle meetings. Others would hide a piece of rope and hang themselves in a closet. A few slashed their wrists with a watch crystal while wrapped in a blanket, pretending to sleep on the office floor. The majority jumped from windows. Accurate statistics are impossible to come by, but in Shanghai, the city that bore the brunt of the attack, 644 people killed themselves in two months, or more than ten daily – if one can trust the statistics the party compiled.33
In an orgy of false accusations and arbitrary denunciations, few escaped with their reputations intact. By February no more than 10,000 of a total 50,000 ‘capitalists’ in Beijing were considered honest. Similar figures came from other parts of the country. To punish all would wreck the economy. Mao had a solution to this conundrum. He came up with a quota, ordering that a few should be killed to set the tone, while exemplary punishment should focus on 5 per cent of the most ‘reactionary’ suspects. Across most cities, by a rough rule of thumb, about 1 per cent of the accused were shot, a further 1 per cent sent to labour camps for life, and 2 to 3 per cent imprisoned for terms of ten years or more.34
The vast majority – classified as ‘basically law-abiding’ and ‘semi law-abiding’ – were given fines, as the campaign was used to finance the Korean War. Outside the People’s Bank in Shanghai, a queue 1.5 kilometres long could be seen, as small shopkeepers eagerly sought to sell their few gold possessions to pay the heavy fines imposed on them. The queue was restive, as some had to wait their turn for several days. Eventually the government agreed to accept their gold as a deposit against their debts. The payment was registered on the day of the deposit and no return was allowed. Before long, all the savings of the business and merchant community were appropriated, reducing many to poverty and further undermining the financial structures of the country.35
In the spring of 1952 the government quietly attempted to bring the campaign against the bourgeoisie to a close. After May Day, tax burdens were gradually eased, property evaluations reconsidered, fines imposed during the campaign reduced and crippled firms offered low-interest loans. Help was neither unconditional nor universal, as the state could now pick and choose which firms to keep afloat, strengthening its grip on the private sector. The loans came with new conditions, including a 75 per cent share of the profits for the state, while dividends, bonuses and managerial salaries had to come out of the remaining 25 per cent.36
It was too little, too late. By March 1952 the entire state system was at a standstill, reeling from months of self-purification. Few cadres were willing to take any decisions – when they were not busy pursuing ideological backsliders and corrupt elements. Everything was referred to the next level up the chain of command in the party hierarchy. Delays became common, apathy was widespread.
Combined with the attack on the bourgeoisie, this resulted in the paralysis of commerce and industry. From managers down to workers, everyone was apparently tied up in denunciation meetings. Industrial output plummeted, trade ground to a halt. In Shanghai goods accumulated uncollected in temporary sheds pitched out in the open. Imported cotton had to be kept on board ships as the millhands were too busy denouncing their owners. In Tianjin, the Number One Cotton Mill worked at only a third of its capacity. Stoppages were everywhere: knitwear production fell by half, and freight transportation plummeted by 40 per cent compared to the months prior to the campaign. In some sectors workers saw their earnings slashed by two-thirds. Banks in the city stopped making loans. Tax income collapsed.37
The situation was similar elsewhere. In Zhejiang province, traditionally dominated by trade, the business community lost a third of its capital, with ruinous consequences for the local economy. In the capital Hangzhou, half the profits made in the previous year had to be withdrawn from banks to meet back taxes, refunds and fines imposed for ‘corruption’ – not including a standard tax at 23 per cent as well as other contributions, donations and incentives. Further south, across Guangdong the volume of trade was down by 7 per cent in 1952 compared with the previous year. In some cities, for instance Foshan, famed for its ceramic art, it was down by 28 per cent, in large part due to punitive measures imposed on private business.38
Small enterprises could no longer pay their employees. Unemployment rocketed. The number of workers who lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the campaign against the bourgeoisie amounted to 80,000 in Shanghai, 10,000 in Jinan and 10,000 in the region around Suzhou, an old commercial city along the Yangzi where the wealth of its former merchants was displayed in whitewashed houses with dark-grey tiles, stone bridges, ancient pagodas and secluded gardens. In Yangzhou, enriched by centuries of trade in salt, rice and silk, the turmoil caused by the campaign was so great that workers started turning on each other. Further inland, in the city of Wuhan, once described as the Chicago of the East, 24,000 workers lost their jobs as trade dwindled to a mere 30 per cent of its level the previous quarter. Railway transportation and tax collection came to a standstill. The whole city was a scene of desolation. In Chongqing, Sichuan, 20,000 people were without work thanks to the campaign, and many families had to survive on less than half a kilo of grain a day. Some ate the husks of corn or hunted wild dogs to stave off hunger. Discontent was brewing, with slogans such as ‘rebel against the campaign’ doing the rounds among disgruntled employees.39
The countryside, still linked to the cities through a network of traders, merchants and suppliers, also suffered. In the south, basic items of trade such as oil, tea and tobacco leaves remained uncollected, hurting the farmers who depended on them for their livelihoods. In the region around Shanghai, prices of agricultural goods imploded, robbing the farmers of the capital necessary for spring ploughing. And even if they had enough seeds to plant the next crop, cadres from north to south refused to give any lead, awaiting an official end to the purge inside the ranks. This was true of Jilin, up in Manchuria, where the campaign under Gao Gang was so severe that village leaders spent all their time in meetings, fearful of denunciation as rightists. The fields lay bare. In the south, agriculture also came to a halt in large parts of the countryside. In Jiangshan county, Zhejiang, a mere quarter of all villagers were at work. Most of them just sat back, waiting for orders. And all this occurred, of course, in the middle of the Korean War, when crushing requisitions to feed the soldiers at the front had already reduced large parts of the countryside in Manchuria and Sichuan to man-made starvation.40
9
Thought Reform
Like pilgrims visiting a holy site, busloads of tourists regularly wander over the yellow loess hills of Yan’an, the heart of the communist revolution. In groups wearing identical tour caps or colour-coded shirts, they file into the cave where Mao once lived and worked, respectfully admiring his spartan, whitewashed bedroom furnished with a bed, a deckchair and a wooden bath. A family portrait hangs on one wall, showing the Chairman with his fourth wife and one of his children. Outside the cave, carved out of the brittle hillside, tourists pose for group photographs.1
More than seventy years earlier, tens of thousands of young volunteers had poured into Yan’an to join the communist party. Students, teachers, artists, writers and journalists, they were disenchanted with the nationalists and eager to dedicate their lives to the revolution. Many were so excited after days on the road that they wept when they saw the heights of Yan’an in the distance. Others cheered from the backs of their lorries, singing the ‘Internationale’ and the Soviet Union’s ‘Motherland March’. They were full of idealism, embracing liberty, equality, democracy and other liberal values that had become popular in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.
They were quickly disillusioned. Instead of equality, they found a rigid hierarchy. Every organisation had three diff
erent kitchens, the best food being reserved for the senior leaders. From the amount of grain, sugar, cooking oil, meat and fruit to the quality of health care and access to information, one’s position in the party hierarchy determined everything. Even the quality of tobacco and writing paper varied according to rank. Medicine was scarce for those on the lower rungs of the ladder, although leading cadres had personal doctors and sent their children to Moscow. At the apex of the party stood Mao, who was driven around in the only car in Yan’an and lived in a large mansion with heating especially installed for his comfort.2
In February 1942, Mao asked the young volunteers to attack ‘dogmatism’ and its alleged practitioners, namely his rival Wang Ming and other Soviet-trained leaders. Soon the criticisms that he unleashed went too far. Instead of following the Chairman’s cue, several critics expressed discontent with the way the red capital was run. A young writer called Wang Shiwei, who worked for the Liberation Daily, wrote an essay denouncing the arrogance of the ‘big shots’ who were ‘indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks’, while the sick could not even ‘have a sip of noodle soup’.3
After two months, Mao changed tack and angrily condemned Wang Shiwei as a ‘Trotskyist’ (Wang had translated Engels and Trotsky). He also turned against Wang’s supporters, determined to stamp out any lingering influence of free thinking among the young volunteers. Just as the rank and file were investigated in a witch-hunt for spies and undercover agents, they were interrogated in front of large crowds shouting slogans, made to confess in endless indoctrination meetings and forced to denounce each other in a bid to save themselves. Some were locked up in caves, others taken to mock executions. For month after month, life in Yan’an was nothing but a relentless succession of interrogations and rallies, feeding fear, suspicion and betrayal. All communications with areas under nationalist control were cut off, and any attempt to contact the outside world was viewed as evidence of espionage. The pressure was too much for some, as they broke down, lost their minds or committed suicide. Mao demanded absolute loyalty from intellectuals, who had to reform themselves ideologically by continuously studying and discussing essays by him, Stalin and others. When Mao brought the Rectification Campaign to an end in 1945, he apologised for their maltreatment and pointed the finger at his underlings. The victims saw him as their saviour and accepted their own sacrifices during the campaign as an exercise in purification necessary to enter the inner circle. They embraced their mission, ready to save China by serving the party. Wang Shiwei was killed in 1947, reportedly chopped to pieces and thrown into a well.4
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Page 21