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

by Dikötter, Frank

  In August 1949, two months before the People’s Republic was founded, Mao published an editorial entitled ‘Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle’. He denounced Hu Shi, Qian Mu and Fu Sinian, three leading university professors who had fled south with the nationalists, as ‘running dogs’ of imperialism. He put the educated elite on notice. ‘Part of the intellectuals still want to wait and see,’ he observed. They were ‘middle-of-the-roaders’ who still harboured illusions about ‘democratic individualism’. The Chairman urged them to unite with progressive revolutionary forces.5

  With liberation, millions of students, teachers, professors, scientists and writers – in communist jargon termed ‘intellectuals’ – found themselves forced to prove their allegiance to the new regime. They were joined by compatriots who had returned from overseas to answer the call to serve the motherland. Like everybody else, they attended endless indoctrination classes to learn the new orthodoxy, studying official pamphlets, newspapers and textbooks. And like everyone else, they soon had to write their own confessions, making a clean breast of the past by ‘laying their hearts on the table’. They were asked to re-educate themselves, becoming New People willing to serve the New China.

  Many did so with relish. For years they had seen the decay and corruption of the nationalist regime, helpless to remedy these, while underground propaganda had done much to portray the party as the only true force for change. ‘You know, for honest young people, the ideals propagated by the communist party were really attractive. Democracy, equality, everybody enjoying the fullest freedom: is there anything more meaningful for a young man than to allow this world to change for the better?’ remembered Cheng Yuan, then a quiet but determined student from a respected family of scholars in Chongqing. His two elder brothers were highly placed officials in the nationalist party, but Cheng had already been won over by an underground cell in high school. A student of physics at Peking University during liberation, he embraced the new learning, plunging into the classics of Marxism to seek self-improvement.6

  Some viewed the party almost as a surrogate family. Liu Xiaoyu, born in an impoverished and broken home, abused and beaten by her foster parents, was a student at the Ginling Women’s College, a Christian university in Nanjing, when she joined the underground movement. She was never so happy as in the first year of liberation, taking classes in a military school: ‘Many students joined, as we got up together and studied historical materialism and the history of social development. It was a tough life, but in my heart I was happy: this was the new life.’7

  She was not the only one. Within months the new regime made the study of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought compulsory at all levels, but even senior academics did not wait for the call to set up study groups. Jin Yuelin, a philosopher and logician born in 1895, took the lead by teaching Marxist philosophy at Tsinghua University and taking classes in Russian. He published an article denouncing his own work as the product of a bourgeois mind. Feng Youlan, a leading philosopher trained at Columbia University, boarded a ship back to the motherland in 1948, full of anticipation. So confident was he that the new regime would be a resounding success that on leaving the United States he surrendered his visa, which was valid for life. Back in Beijing he repeatedly distanced himself from his own landlord background, taking up the study of Marxism with the zeal of a new convert. In July 1949 he opened a conference in Beijing to ‘propagate Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought’. He corresponded with Mao, announcing his determination to reform himself and selflessly serve the new society. ‘It is very good for someone like yourself, who has committed errors in the past,’ answered the Chairman, ‘to be prepared to correct them now, if this can indeed be carried out in practice.’ A month later Feng publicly repudiated his earlier philosophical musings, which spanned several decades. He would spend the next thirty years rewriting his work, constantly trying to conform with the latest dogma.8

  But Mao was deeply suspicious of educated people, and wanted them to demonstrate their mettle. Book learning was out, practical experience was in (‘only social practice can be the criterion of truth’, the Chairman opined). Already in 1927, when he had compared the peasants to a hurricane, he had hinted that everybody would be put to the test: ‘There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticising? Or to stand in their way and oppose them?’9

  To prove their commitment to the new order, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were sent to the countryside as part of the work teams tasked with carrying out land reform. They had to dirty their hands, living and working alongside poor farmers for several months, helping the cadres to make a class analysis of each village. Then they had to bloody their hands, participating in the denunciation meetings during which some of the traditional leaders were accused of being landlords, traitors or tyrants.

  For many it was a baptism of fire. Some had never set foot in the countryside, and few had ever spent much time working with their hands – traditionally taboo in a society run by scholars. Liu Yufen, who had just turned twenty at the time and was freshly graduated from a party school, remembered: ‘I visited the poorest home in the village, it had no bed, no sheets or blankets, just an old man wearing old cotton clothes made of rags held together by a few threads. I was completely shaken by seeing such conditions.’ Cut off from all modern amenities, living in rough, cramped huts where whole families huddled together with their livestock, then rising at the crack of dawn to haul manure or dig earth all day long, many experienced culture shock. They overcame it quickly, often through a combination of necessity, fear and conviction, assisted by daily study sessions in which their peers assessed and criticised their performance.10

  But an even greater challenge was to see revolution in action. Few were prepared for the sheer violence of land distribution, as victims were beaten, tortured, hanged and sometimes shot. All had to reconcile the huge gap that existed between the propaganda on the one hand and the reality of revolution on the other. They had to steel themselves, silencing the doubts that welled up when they witnessed physical abuse, constantly reciting the vocabulary of class struggle to justify the violence. A vision of communist plenty for all had to be conjured up to see past the squalor of denunciation rallies and organised plunder. They had to convince themselves that they had seen the New World. Some even had to will their hands to stop shaking when they were asked to pull the trigger. A friend of Liu Yufen trembled so violently when ordered to execute a man condemned as a counter-revolutionary that every one of his shots missed its target: the regular soldiers in the execution squad finished the job for him.11

  By no means all passed the test. Some were courageous enough to criticise the violence of land reform. Several members of the Democratic League, co-opted by the communist party as part of the New Democracy, denounced the random torture and killing that was taking place in the countryside, demanding instead that a court of law should deal with landowners who had committed genuine crimes in the past. Others stressed the need to treat everyone humanely, even victims of land reform. A few queried the notion that every landlord was bad to the bone: ‘There are bad farmers too, who like to eat but shirk work, while some landlords work hard and practise thrift their entire lives.’ But few persisted in such views, which were derided as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘humanist’. When Yue Daiyun, a young woman who had joined the underground movement in Beijing before liberation, tried to protect an old and impoverished tailor from the execution squad, her leader denounced her as a bourgeois sentimentalist who could not take a firm class stance. Unlike others, she failed in her attempt to preserve her own fate through self-deception: ‘I tried to use “class” in order to force myself to look past all sorts of inhuman acts of violence. But I saw how so-called class designations were entirely artificial.’ After the tailor had been shot, she felt pain resembling ‘one half of my body being torn from the other’.12

  But most decided to ‘march at the head and lead’, in the Ch
airman’s words. If they wanted a job under the new regime, they had little choice but to become willing accomplices – whether through opportunism, idealism or sheer pragmatism. Many did so with relish. Feng Youlan used the experience to distance himself from his own landlord background and prove his revolutionary credentials. He took a lead in helping farmers outside Beijing confiscate the property of landowners and hailed revolution as a transformative experience. For Wu Jingchao, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University, the most memorable moment of his time in the countryside came when a pauper jumped up from the crowd at a rally, ripped off his shirt and started beating his chest before grabbing a landlord by the collar, angrily waving a finger in his face. Wu enthused about land reform in the Guangming Daily: ‘After liberation, we also studied the class viewpoint and the mass viewpoint, but what we learned is nowhere near as profound as a month’s practice.’ Mao approved and wrote to Hu Qiaomu, the head of the propaganda department: ‘This is very well written, please order the People’s Daily to reprint it and have the New China News Agency circulate it.’ Wu Jingchao’s career seemed assured.13

  Many were genuinely filled with anger towards the old order. Zhu Guangqian, already in his fifties and a founding figure in the study of aesthetics in China, could feel hatred flow through his entire body. ‘When I heard a peasant air his grievances against a landlord, the tears streaming down his cheeks, it seemed as if I myself was transformed into that angry peasant, and I really regretted not being able to step forward and give that landlord a good thrashing.’14

  Some went further. Lin Zhao, a headstrong, idealistic young woman who wrote searing denunciations of government corruption before joining the underground movement in 1948, told her classmate that ‘my hatred for the landlords is the same as my love of the country’. This she demonstrated by ordering a landowner to be placed in a vat of freezing water overnight. She felt ‘cruel happiness’ on hearing the man scream in pain, as this meant that the villagers would no longer be afraid of him. After a dozen victims were executed in the wake of a rally she had helped organise, she looked at each of the corpses, one by one. ‘Seeing them die this way, I felt as proud and happy as the people who had directly suffered under them.’ She was barely twenty.15

  ‘You do not need to be overly anxious about seeing results in haste; you can come around gradually,’ Mao told Feng Youlan in October 1949 after the philosopher had announced his intention to reform himself. But two years later his time was up. As the previous chapter showed, Mao launched a purge of the government and assaulted the business community in the autumn of 1951. He was also ready to expand the model of thought reform, first developed in Yan’an, to the entire country. Willingly or involuntarily, the educated elite were to be regimented and absorbed into the state bureaucracy and have their creative freedom or independent livelihood rooted out.

  In October 1951 Mao announced that ‘Thought reform, especially thought reform of the intellectuals, is one of the most important prerequisites for the realisation of democratic reform and industrialisation.’ Shortly afterwards, Zhou Enlai, dressed in a grey woollen Mao suit, lectured 3,000 eminent teachers in the Huairen Hall in the party headquarters at Zhongnanhai. The premier warned them that they were imbued with the ‘mistaken thoughts of the bourgeois class and the petty bourgeoisie’ and must work hard to ‘establish the correct stand, viewpoint and method of the working class’. The lecture lasted a full seven hours. Wu Ningkun, a scientist educated in America who had only just returned to China, against the advice of his brother in Taiwan and his elder sister in Hong Kong, gave up his perfunctory attempt to take notes after a mere hour. ‘Little did I know that the seven-hour report was nothing less than a declaration of war on the mind and integrity of the intelligentsia for the next forty years!’16

  Before boarding the USS President Cleveland for his homebound voyage six weeks earlier, Wu Ningkun asked T. D. Lee, a fellow graduate student who later won the Nobel Prize in physics, why he was not coming home to help the new China. His friend answered with a knowing smile that he did not want to have his brain washed. For Wu and countless others, ideological education now became the norm, as sessions of self-criticism, self-condemnation and self-exposure followed one another, day in, day out, until all resistance was crushed and the individual was broken, ready to serve the collective. As in Yan’an a decade earlier, everyone had to name their relatives and friends, and provide details of their political background, their past activities, their every belief, including their innermost thoughts. Even transitory, fleeting impressions were to be captured and scrutinised, as they often revealed the hidden bourgeois underneath a mask of socialist conformity. All this took place under formidable social pressure, before assembled crowds or in study sessions under strict supervision, as other participants tried to find a chink in the armour of every suspect, grinding him down with a barrage of probing queries.17

  ‘One day we found that the university’s party organization had been suddenly strengthened. A new ruling specified that a member of the party or the Youth League should sit at every table in the dining hall and should occupy a place in every dormitory room. These Communists took notes on the day and night behaviour of every student. Even the words of a student talking in his sleep were recorded and considered for political significance.’ So observed Robert Loh, still working at a university in Shanghai at this time. In Shanghai, in addition to endless group meetings, a lorry was sometimes parked in front of the house of an accused, a loudspeaker pouring out a shrill stream of invective.18

  Few of those denounced managed to withstand the pressure for more than a few days, frantically writing confession after confession in a desperate search for something the leading cadre would accept. Stubborn teachers who insisted on their innocence were usually locked up in a room and harassed by relays of cadres until a confession was obtained. In Nanjing, teachers and professors were hauled on to a stage, hung up and beaten. Several committed suicide. ‘We will crush those who resist,’ announced the party secretary of Nanjing, whose report was praised and circulated by Mao. In Chengde, the vast imperial garden city formerly used as the summer residence of the Manchu emperors, some teachers were arrested and killed.19

  Many tried to atone for their past misdeeds, whether real or imaginary. Jin Yuelin, the logician who took classes in Russian, wrote twelve confessions before he was considered reformed. Feng Youlan, despite all his best efforts, failed to pass the test. Chen Xujing, a leading sociologist with a degree from the University of Illinois, stood in front of the assembled students and staff of Lingnan University and atoned for a full four hours, reduced to tears: he too failed to appease the authorities.20

  In some cases extremely loyal intellectuals were hounded so fiercely that they became alienated from the party. This too served a purpose, as Loh noted in the case of a colleague called Long:

  At first, I considered the Communists stupid for alienating Long. After the betrayal, persecution and humiliation he had received from the Communists, he undoubtedly hated them, and they therefore had turned a valuable pro-Communist into an anti-Communist. Only later did I perceive that the Communists had been fully aware of Long’s loyalty to their cause and were equally conscious that after the ‘reform’ he was disaffected. They had succeeded, however, in terrorizing him so thoroughly that henceforth, regardless of what he thought, he spoke and acted during every waking moment exactly as the Communists wanted. In this state, the Communists felt safer and more secure about him.21

  Another true believer was Liu Xiaoyu, the young woman who had embraced the communist party as her own family. ‘We all felt fear. We stopped speaking even to those with whom we were normally very close. You did not dare speak with others about what was on your mind, even with those close to you, because it was very likely that they would denounce you. Everybody was denouncing others and was denounced by others. Everybody was living in fear.’ But what ultimately caused her to lose faith in the party was the unprecedented intrusion into her own private
life. She had just married, but was now accused of spending too much time with her husband instead of devoting herself to revolution. ‘There were people who lingered around our home, peeping through the windows and the gap in the front door, trying to find out if we were behaving in an intimate manner. They were supervising us around the clock, and if they saw anything suspect they would report it at a public meeting, making you feel really embarrassed.’ She was soon denounced as a servant of imperialism who harboured ulterior motives.22

  But not everybody was willing to go along. Gao Chongxi, an expert in the chemical industry at Tsinghua University, committed suicide. At the East China Normal University in Shanghai, Li Pingxin was so viciously denounced that he took an axe and tried to chop off his own head. He bled to death. Eileen Chang, on the other hand, was one of the few who would not even buy into the patriotic rhetoric of the new regime. One of the most talented writers in China, she quietly slipped across the border to Hong Kong under a false name in 1952.23