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

by Dikötter, Frank

  Despite the atmosphere of regimentation, the party never managed to stamp out popular Buddhism. Villagers continued to turn towards religion in times of hardship. In 1953, following widespread disease and famine in Henan, thousands of pilgrims flocked towards the White Horse Temple in Luoyang, one of the cradles of Buddhism in China. On 25 March 1953 alone, some 20,000 people converged on the temple, queuing quietly to benefit from the healing touch provided by monks. Two years later, Wang Feng, in charge of the Ethnic Affairs Committee, expressed his surprise at the fact that in some cities ‘crowds of over 100,000 ceaselessly assemble to worship, pray for rain, burn incense or bow to Buddha’. Much of it was tolerated, as the days of brutal suppression still lay ahead.57

  No such patience was shown towards Taoism, which had no fellow believers outside China. Taoist belief in magic and divination was decried as superstition. And because of its association with secret societies in past rebellions, it was also identified as a political threat. Priests, monks and nuns were sent to orientation centres to train as carpenters and seamstresses, while shrines to ancestors and local deities were destroyed. In a village south of Guangzhou, temples were indiscriminately smashed immediately after liberation. Community festivals ceased and sacrificial ceremonies were curtailed; what religious activity was tolerated was driven from public view back into the homes of the villagers. The power of religion to unite and strengthen community bonds was broken.58

  But the amorphous, scattered and independent nature of many of these millenarian societies continued to bother the regime, as they reappeared under different guises after their dispersal by the authorities. During the Great Terror of 1951 their leaders were ruthlessly persecuted. They seemed to be everywhere. In Hebei the provincial boss estimated that 8 per cent of the population belonged to some cult or another, amounting to some 2 million people. He arrested 3,500 ringleaders within the first few months of 1951. Followers were given a chance to withdraw. In Beijing, according to one observer, more than 100,000 members of the Yiguandao, the Way of Pervading Unity, had apostatised by June 1951. Huanxingdao, Shengxiandao, Baguadao, Xiantiandao, Jiugongdao – there were dozens of popular religious sects and societies that were ruthlessly persecuted. And the pall of superstition seemed to hang with particular weight on people in the south. In the ports along the coastline of Guangdong, up to half the residents apparently followed one cult or another. In Shenzhen, a small fishing village just across the Hong Kong border, nineteen secret societies were counted, the most powerful one being the Yellow Ox Party, whose members were accused of smuggling, robbing and carrying out intelligence work for the enemy. Many were rounded up and executed. But despite all the killings, in 1953 head of security Luo Ruiqing could still list hundreds of leaders in counties from Yunnan, Sichuan and Zhejiang to Anhui.59

  In the face of repression, people either dropped all visible signs of allegiance or went underground – quite literally. In north China underground chambers were built with tunnels long enough to connect strategic places throughout entire villages. In Shaanxi alone, in 1955 the police uncovered over a hundred subterranean hiding places. In Hebei province, some sectarian leaders took refuge in tunnels for more than four years. In Sichuan the hated Yiguandao did not even have to hide: it flourished to the extent that in 1955 it was recruiting local cadres and members of the militia. In Gansu province, Taoist sects appeared to rule entire regions. And folk religious practices also had great staying power in other ways. There were endless reports of secret stones, holy water, sacred tombs, magic trees or ancient temples around which village people crowded in times of need, often in the hundreds if not thousands.60

  Before liberation there were approximately 3 million Catholics and 1 million Protestants. Their faith was singled out for slow strangulation. Brutal persecution, at least in the first years of the new regime, was not compatible with a policy of toleration. But in September 1950, a National Christian Council set up by the communist party issued a Christian Manifesto requiring all believers to sever foreign connections. Some termed this a ‘Manifesto of Betrayal’, but those who refused had to face accusations of aiding and abetting imperialism. Gradually the pressure increased. Cadres and activists questioned believers, at home, in church, at the market place or in the police station, day and night. They were cajoled, threatened, pressed, nagged and prodded, sometimes for days on end. Like all other people in China they were called upon to reform themselves and provide accusations against others. They had to join daily study sessions, examine their links with foreign imperialists and renounce their faith at public meetings. Everywhere religious networks crumbled, as people left the church in droves.61

  Protestants were further isolated by the rise of a ‘Patriotic Church’ in 1951. It received funds from the state, preached according to the state and followed every command from the state. Those who refused to join were put under house arrest and sent to labour camps. In parts of the country Christians were forbidden to have rosaries, patron-saint medals or crucifixes. Homes were searched and prayer books, catechisms and holy pictures destroyed. Churches were stripped of sacred objects. Troops carried away altars and benches. Seminaries for training clergy were banned. Zhang Yinxian, a nun in Yunnan, remembers how her church was left empty. ‘It used to be so glorious. Overnight, everything was gone. Rats took over the place. We used to have four hundred people working at the church. Only three were left – me, my aunt, and Bishop Liu Hanchen.’ All three were ordered out but refused to leave. They were allowed to stay for a few months, but were then taken away by the militia, paraded through the village and put on public trial.

  We faced hundreds of villagers with raised fists shouting revolutionary slogans. Some spat at us. Such hatred. As the leader worked up the crowd, a peasant activist came up and slapped Bishop Liu in the face. My aunt stepped forward. ‘How dare you slap him.’ The activist used to be a poor farmer, and when the Communists confiscated the property of landlords, he was one of the beneficiaries. He pointed at my aunt and yelled back, ‘You are a counter-revolutionary and we have defeated you. You are the lackey of the imperialists who exploited us.’ My aunt said, ‘We are not. We came from poor families and we’ve never exploited anybody.’ The activists shouted again, ‘You are still stubborn and won’t admit your defeat. You need to be punished.’ Fists were raised and the crowd began chanting, ‘Down with the counter-revolutionary nun!’ My aunt wouldn’t back down. She said to her abuser, ‘Slap me if you want. If you slap me on the left side of my face, I will give you the right side too.’

  They were compelled to perform hard labour under the supervision of local cadres for many years.62

  Congregations that had no foreign ties fared just as badly. Mazhuang, a quiet, sleepy Shandong town surrounded by fields of corn and hemp, was the centre of a unique Pentecostal communitarian church called the Jesus Family. Founded in 1927, it consisted of dozens of small communities in which several hundred believers worked and lived together under a family head. Private property was banned, all goods were shared and economically self-sufficient communities followed an egalitarian lifestyle. None of this spared them from persecution. In 1952 their land was confiscated and their followers were dispersed as a ‘secret society’ with close links to imperialism. Their leader was attacked and thrown into prison. He died in 1957.63

  Reformed churches, on the other hand, fared better. In Beijing, St Michael’s Church had red flags draping the main altar, communion rail, vestibule and the path to the gate. Streamers hanging from the church columns proclaimed ‘Long Live Mao Zedong’ and ‘Long Live Communism’. Portraits of Mao and other leading communists replaced pictures of the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary and various saints. Attendance dwindled. Not far away, on Wangfujing, previously known as Morrison Street, the Roman Catholic church had a red star above the cross on its tower. Like the restored Yonghegong Temple, it was a showcase for foreign dignitaries.64

  By 1954 the number of Catholic believers had been almost halved from 3 million to just over
1.7 million. Where up to 16,000 churches had dotted the religious landscape of China in 1949, a mere 3,252 remained standing. Protestants also proved difficult to crush. Their numbers went down to 638,000, with over 6,700 places of worship still in operation. But despite the denunciations, arrests and deportations, Christianity was hard to stamp out. In some places it even experienced a revival. In Huzhuang, Shandong, over a thousand pilgrims gathered to pray on Easter Sunday in 1955. In Wucheng county, where the church had been converted into a school, some 800 followers erected a tent to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Caozhou, also in Shandong, the faithful had increased by 80 per cent in a year. Some priests addressed their flock in their own homes. Wang Shiguang, sent out to the countryside, was able to recruit 700 followers. Priests came from places as far away as Beijing and Shaanxi to preach to the poor. Throughout the province, by contrast, believers deserted the Patriotic churches. Some of them stood empty. It was the same story in Sichuan. In Xichang county, priests set out to tend to congregations in distant Chongqing and Chengdu. In Kangding, the church was one of the few buildings spared by an earthquake in 1955. The locals saw this as a sign from God and flocked to mass from all over the county.65

  The turning point came at the end of 1955, as the party tried to clamp down on all religious activities still outside the fold of the Patriotic Church. As thousands of counter-revolutionary cliques were uncovered in the wake of the Hu Feng affair, a fatal blow was dealt to an already weakened church in Shanghai, described as the ‘Catholic fortress’ of China. On the night of 7 September, the bishop, a mild-mannered but determined man called Ignatius Gong Pinmei, was rounded up along with more than twenty priests and nuns and hundreds of lay Catholics. By the end of November, 1,500 believers had been incarcerated, accused of counter-revolutionary crimes, collusion with imperialism, spreading rumours, poisoning the minds of youth and organising acts of violence – among other crimes. Further arrests took place in Shandong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Hubei and Sichuan, where counter-revolutionary cliques also operated ‘under the cloak of religion’. Newspaper editorials, cartoons and articles featured attacks on the bishop, as headlines proclaimed that the police had ‘Smashed the Gong Pinmei Counter-Revolutionary Clique’. The bishop was sentenced to life imprisonment.66

  Muslims too were subject to constant humiliation. In Jiangyou, Sichuan, they were lynched and beaten. ‘There is no such thing as a good Muslim,’ proclaimed a party official. In Xindu county, every mosque was confiscated and handed over to the poor. Party secretary Zhu Xijiu organised a team to dig up several thousand Muslim graves and headstones marked with Quranic inscriptions. The stone tablets were used to build granaries and repair dykes. A few ended up as building blocks for pig sheds. In mosques taken over by peasant associations, the mihrab, indicating the direction worshippers should face when praying, was destroyed. The raised platform, normally used by the imam to address his congregation, was turned into a stage for mass meetings. Some of the areas reserved for ritual ablutions were used as female toilets.67

  Similar abuse was also common across the Muslim belt running through the north-west, and soon open rebellion rocked the region. In parts of Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang shots continued to be heard every night in 1950 despite a strict curfew. Armed rebellions broke out regularly, some of them involving thousands of people and leading to heavy losses in the months following liberation. ‘The principal reason for these incidents is the failure to carry out strictly our policy on minorities,’ concluded a report on several uprisings in Gansu. In one case more than 2,000 Muslims assaulted the town of Pingliang, where abuse and beatings were described as ‘common’ and Muslim schools were used to raise pigs.68

  But few lessons were learned. In another incident a year later a crowd of 8,000 surrounded the county head of Ningding, also in Gansu. Over a thousand people were killed in a bloody showdown, prompted by anger at Chinese domination over a largely Muslim region. The local population was particularly enraged when eight corpses were dumped in the wilderness without proper burial. The bodies belonged to Muslims who had frozen to death in prison. The whole area was terrorised by Chinese militia, who used their power to loot and pillage the Muslims.69

  Again and again, the government had to bring in government troops to reinforce the local militia, putting to death insurgent leaders responsible for murder, arson, robbery and organised rebellions. A more conciliatory approach towards Islam appeared in 1952. Communist cadres were cautioned to respect Muslim customs. Soldiers were enjoined to refrain from saying the word ‘pig’ before a Muslim or from washing at Muslim bathing places. Special provisions were designed to leave the land owned by the mosques intact. Muslim leaders who co-operated with the government were used as figureheads for new associations promoting ‘patriotic ideological education’ – for instance the Chinese Islamic Association organised in Beijing in May 1953.

  But, most of all, in 1953 the Muslims living along China’s strategic border areas received an empty gift called ‘autonomy’. All over China autonomous districts, autonomous counties, autonomous prefectures and autonomous regions appeared for ‘minority’ people. Xinjiang, where Muslims had long dreamed of a Uighur Republic, was carved up into different portions, for instance the Sibo people near Gulja, the Kazakhs in the north and the Tajik in the Sarikol area of the Pamir mountains. In October 1955 the Uighur presence was formally recognised by naming Xinjiang a Uighur Autonomous Region. But the borders of the ‘autonomous’ parts of the province were drawn in such a way that no ethnic group could control an area they dominated numerically. Territories with a relatively homogeneous minority were divided up, while cities and prefectures with large Uighur populations were denied any autonomous status. The Ili Kazakh autonomous prefecture was set up in a region dominated by Uighurs, while Korla was the capital of a Mongol autonomous prefecture mostly populated by Uighurs. It was a predictable strategy of divide and rule, or, to borrow from ancient Chinese tactics, a case of ‘using barbarians to deal with barbarians’. And from top to bottom the party controlled every important decision in these government structures.70

  Thought reform was less pronounced in these restive borderlands, but nonetheless indoctrination went hand in hand with autonomy. Before liberation the mosques were in charge of education, teaching the Koran and at least enough Arabic for the faithful to understand the religious services. The new regime made great efforts to bring all Muslim children into government schools, where science was taught in Chinese. Special schools were set up in the capital for Muslims, including the Central Institute for Nationalities in 1951, while the Islamic Theological Institute oversaw training for religious leaders. In the Muslim belt, indoctrination of the imams was introduced by 1951, supplemented by reform through labour for obstinate religious leaders. Those who went along, using the pulpit to help propagate the new ideology, became clergymen. They were paid a stipend by the state after the lands, mills, shops, orchards and other belongings of the mosques and madrasas were redistributed, stripping Islamic institutions of their economic independence.71

  Gradually, as hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived by lorry from the coastal areas to develop the region, Islam receded into the background. The white skullcaps and long jackets, so ubiquitous before 1949, were seen only at times of worship at the mosque, as men and women alike wore the blue and black uniform of the revolution. Visitors from Pakistan noted in 1956 that there were no free newspapers, while most of the libraries contained books devoted largely to communism. All radio sets were tuned to Beijing. It was gradual assimilation. But the real assault on Islam would come only with the Red Guards in 1966.72

  10

  The Road to Serfdom

  On 30 June 1949, as victory in the civil war seemed assured, Mao announced that China would ‘lean to one side’. Under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, the Chairman explained, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had built ‘a great and splendid socialist state’. ‘The Communist Party of the Sovi
et Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it,’ he continued. And in the Soviet Union, farming had been collectivised to serve the needs of industry. China would be no different. ‘Without socialisation of agriculture, there can be no complete, consolidated socialism.’ Judging by the Soviet Union’s experience, Mao added, this would require ‘a long time and painstaking work’.1

  The work would be painstaking indeed, but the road to collectivisation took much less time than anybody could have anticipated.2 This road was taken out of necessity as much as by choice as soon as land reform came to an end. Once the villagers all had a roughly equal share of the land, there were not enough animals and tools to go around. Before land distribution, farming was a full-time occupation for some people, but only an avocation for others. And even then, a fully occupied farmer seldom had more than one working animal and a small set of farming equipment. The further one went south, the more acute the problem became, as population density increased. The archives offer examples of stark warnings of the consequences of land reform. From Yichang, a transportation hub along the Yangzi River in Hubei, came a message from the party headquarters explaining that the land was no good to the poor, as they lacked cows, tools, seed, fertiliser and even sufficient food simply to survive the spring season. The problem was ‘widespread’, but it was particularly pressing in areas where land had just been redistributed. ‘This year the outlook for poor peasants and farm labourers truly bears no reason for optimism. Their productivity cannot be increased, their lives cannot be changed.’ Collectivisation seemed the only way forward.3