The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957
Page 27
Private merchants, of course, were a convenient scapegoat for the famine. There was another, more pressing reason why the state introduced a monopoly on grain. The reality was that the economy was a disaster. Land reform had failed to usher the country into an era of prosperity. Trade was in dire straits. The state was running a huge deficit, with its expenditure twice as big as its income. When the leaders convened in July 1953 to scrutinise the finances, they were staring at a black hole of 2.4 billion yuan.21
One cause of the deficit was foreign trade. Since Beijing dramatically oriented its exports away from the West towards the Soviet Union, it had become dependent on Stalin to earn foreign currency. China tried relentlessly to sell more goods to its reluctant partner. By the admission of the leaders responsible for foreign trade, they constantly pestered and harassed their Soviet counterparts. But in 1953 the Soviet Union only took 81 per cent of a proposed list of items for export, falling far short of expectations.22
To add insult to injury, Stalin sharply reduced the amount of aid he was willing to commit to China’s first Five-Year Plan, due to begin in 1953. When Zhou Enlai met the Soviet boss in September 1952, he asked for a loan of 4 billion rubles. Stalin replied that the Soviet Union ‘will have to give something, although the exact amount must be calculated. We cannot give 4 billion.’ And Stalin made numerous demands in return, asking, for instance, for large amounts of natural rubber – ‘at least 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes each year’. When Zhou demurred, Stalin threatened to cut the number of lorries that China had requested. He wanted more rare-earth metals, including lead, tungsten, tin and antimony. And he insisted on foreign currency to cover the costs of the trade imbalance between China and the Soviet Union.23
This meeting was followed by endless others, as Li Fuchun, a bookish man with a self-effacing air who was in charge of the negotiations, spent ten months in Moscow bickering and wrangling for more concessions. Stalin died in March 1953, but he and his successors forced Beijing to accept deep cuts. The rate of growth that China wanted to pursue, Stalin said, was ‘rash’: he cut it from 20 per cent down to 15 per cent. He reduced the number of industrial complexes built with Soviet assistance from 150 to 91. He vetoed several projects related to military defence. As Li put it, ‘We just asked for everything we wanted, and we wanted too much, too fast.’ Mao and his colleagues had little choice but to accept a watered-down deal in June 1953.24
A few weeks later, Mao asked the Financial Committee to come up with ways of requisitioning more grain. Chen Yun, Bo Yibo and others had already proposed a state monopoly on grain in 1951, but abandoned it after local cadres warned that any attempt to curtail the freedom of farmers to sell their crop in local markets would provoke a backlash. But now the time seemed right. A few leaders still voiced reservations. Deng Zihui, the regional boss of south China who was now in charge of a powerful committee on agriculture, queried the wisdom of taking food without any exemption from those interior provinces where the soil was poor, saline or infertile. Even Chen Yun, one of the architects of the earlier plan, warned of rebellions. But he too sided with Mao.25
The grain monopoly was imposed in November 1953. The system worked as follows. The government estimated what the yield per hectare of any given field would be. This figure was often much higher than the actual yield, and it was sometimes raised again under pressure to produce more. The government also determined the quantity of grain that each person should eat. This was set at roughly 13 to 16 kilos per head each month – a little more than half the required amount of unhusked grain to provide 1,700 to 1,900 calories per day. It was a starvation diet imposed equally on all villagers. This amount, as well as the land tax and the seeds required for the next sowing, was deducted from the estimated yield. What remained was considered surplus. It had to be sold to the state at a price fixed by the state. Extra grain above the basic ration could be bought back from the state by the farmers – if they could afford it, and if there was any grain left after it had been used to feed the cities, fuel industrialisation and pay off foreign debts.
The leadership knew full well that taking control of the harvest was tantamount to declaring war on the countryside. It was so reminiscent of what the Japanese had done in north China during the Second World War that the party leaders agreed to avoid the term ‘procurement’. They used a euphemism instead, calling the monopoly a ‘unified sale and purchase system’ (tonggou tongxiao). Among themselves they talked of a ‘yellow bomb’, knowing that villagers would resist and fight the system. But they preferred it to the only other alternative they could envisage, namely a ‘black bomb’, as grain merchants would continue to exploit the market to their own advantage as long as no monopoly was imposed.26
The yellow bomb destroyed the very foundations of village life in China, turning a great proportion of the cultivators into bonded servants of the state. Everywhere there was resistance fuelled by rage against the party, most of it covert, but some of it public. Even some local leaders preferred to side with the villagers, whether out of strategic calculation or genuine concern over their welfare. In parts of Guangdong up to a third of the cadres helped farmers to hide their grain. Public village meetings were held in Zijin to devise ways of holding back some of the food from the grain inspectors. Open resistance was common. In Zhongshan county, not far from Macau, eighteen villages protested for four consecutive days against the grain monopoly. Arson and murder were rife.27
In Jiangxi province some villagers invited themselves into the homes of the cadres, searched the premises and then heartily tucked into the food, leaving behind a token payment in exchange for the meal: ‘In the past, when you were working, you came to my house for a meal and you gave me 0.10 yuan, so now I too give you 0.10 yuan.’ Others took seats and refused to budge, occupying the homes of party officials they disliked. Leaflets appeared seemingly out of nowhere, calling on people to resist state procurements. Bemused grain inspectors came upon teams of children roaming the countryside, loudly cursing Chairman Mao and the government.28
Harking back to a form of resistance that had appeared in 1950, groups of villagers blocked cargo boats in Hubei, adamant that grain should be used to feed the people who had actually produced it. In one village the women took a lead, as a hundred of them blocked access to the local granary. Elsewhere, 300 women armed with sticks and stones cut off access to the cargo boats. A few hurled pots filled with urine towards the agents of the state. In Sichuan, banners and tracts denouncing grain requisitions were unfurled. ‘Down with Mao Zedong!’ or ‘Resolutely Eliminate the People’s Liberation Army’ appeared by roadsides in Hanyuan and Xichang, while elsewhere popular ditties mocked the party.29
The state responded with more violence. As the militia dragged away the grain, some of the poor would break down in tears, crying for fear of hunger. Those who resisted, or failed to meet their quota, were beaten. It was ‘common’, the state Bureau for Grain reported from Guangdong, for recalcitrant elements to be stripped and left standing in the cold for hours on end. All over the province thousands of people were locked up for refusing to sell their grain. Up in the north, in Baoding, Hebei, there were scenes of chaos when the procurement teams entered the village. People hid in the toilets, others pretended to be sick, a few coming out to hurl abuse at the cadres, only to be beaten, some of the elderly women wailing in despair and fear. In the Handan region, cadres were blunt: ‘if you don’t report your excess grain, we will stop sales [of edible oil, salt and other basic items] for ten days’. In twenty-four villages in Yuanshi county, just south of Shijiazhuang, villagers were spat upon, pushed around, tied up and beaten in order to force them to produce the grain. A subsequent investigation revealed that in Yuanshi, violence was used in over half of all the 208 villages. The cadres used torture techniques learned during earlier campaigns. A few openly dismissed the villagers as mere ‘slaves’. Mock executions were held, while one pregnant woman was beaten unconscious. Even children were forced to stand upright for hours on end, a form o
f punishment that was apparently ‘very common’. Suicides were described as ‘ceaseless’.30
Sometimes pitched battles occurred between the people and the security forces. Luo Ruiqing, the head of security, counted dozens of cases of unrest and open rebellion in the countryside. In Zhongshan county, Guangdong, thousands of villagers rebelled in early 1955 and demanded an end to the grain monopoly. Four companies of public security forces were sent in to quell the unrest. People were killed on both sides of a bloody battle that lasted several days. In the end 300 farmers were dragged away to prison. In Luding, Sichuan, a sacred place in revolutionary mythology where the communists had battled the nationalists over the only suspension bridge spanning the torrential Dadu River in 1935, six riots were reported in a single month. In Miyi, also in Sichuan, people from ten villages seized weapons from the militia and converged on the party headquarters. Until the archives fully open, there is no way of knowing how many people were crushed by the state machinery during these uneven confrontations.31
On a few occasions the state had to give in. In parts of Gansu dominated by the Tibetans – Xiahe, Zhuoni and other counties – procurements came to a complete halt after several regional leaders were shot dead in an ambush. The region was rife with rumours of rebellion. ‘Better rebel than wait for death through starvation’ was one slogan that made the rounds. The party was compelled to fall back, ordering that a steady supply of grain be guaranteed to Tibetans throughout the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan.32
But outside politically sensitive areas the pressure was relentless. Rather predictably, even the basic survival ration that the system was supposed to leave untouched sometimes vanished, leaving villagers with nothing to eat. In Qingyuan, Guangdong, all but two members of an entire co-operative were forced to sell all their food. Sometimes party secretaries took a lead in allowing the state to seize every last kernel of grain. Qiu Sen, a member of a public security committee, sold almost 500 kilos, leaving him and his family of five a mere 110 kilos, barely enough to feed them for two months. And as the situation slipped out of control, some local authorities started reducing the amount of grain that could be sold back to the villagers. They often discriminated against the black classes, those outcasts labelled during land reform as ‘landlords’, ‘rich farmers’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In Yangjiang nobody classified as a landlord was sold any grain at all, whether they had enough to eat or not (they often did not, because their land had been redistributed and their assets confiscated). In Deqing even farmers classified as ‘middle peasants’ were barred from buying grain, regardless of their actual circumstances. In Hainan grain was sold only if a village had suffered from ‘shortages’ for a period of at least three months. In Fengcheng, Jiangxi province, cadres pledged to sell grain only to those households who fulfilled their procurement quota.33
It was not sufficient to collect the grain. It had to be sieved, winnowed, cleaned, milled, stored, transported and sold. Common enemies were birds, rats, weevil or mildew, which had to be kept at bay. Grain had to be dry or it would rot. The most simple containers were wicker baskets, and they were made in a great variety of shapes and sizes. Earthenware jars were used for hulled grain. Granaries also existed, although before liberation most of the grain was consumed where it was produced, meaning that few large storage facilities were needed. The grain could be stored in round bins built of straw and clay, often on a cement or sandrock floor to keep out rodents and ground moisture. More common were burlap sacks, stacked up in a granary or in a simple tarpaulin shed. In Shaanxi caves were sometimes used, while on the loess plateau in the north the grain was sunk into pits lined with wooden boards, dug up to 12 metres deep with a floor of tamped earth. Whatever means had been devised to store the crop, there was one constant: people looked after it because their livelihoods depended on it.34
Now the state took over, and at great expense. The farmers, pedlars, handlers, traders, millers and others who had made a profession out of looking after the grain were pushed aside as so many speculators and capitalists. And not only did state employees increasingly look after the grain, but they also had to expand the volume of storage dramatically. Even when grain was kept for local consumption, the monopoly mandated that farmers sell it first to the state, which could sell it back to them later if they could afford it. Not surprisingly, the state suffered from a shortage of storage facilities that would last for decades. The cost was prohibitive. In 1956, according to one expert, ‘the costs to the state of storing grain for more than three years were equal to the value of the grain itself’.35
As larger state-controlled concerns replaced small, individual or family-run facilities, many of the perennial problems that had plagued grain storage spiralled out of control. In January 1954, for instance, every province in east China reported a large increase in food that was overheating and becoming damp. In Shanghai alone 40,000 tonnes developed mildew. The problem was compounded by local cadres, who cared more about quantity than quality: their job was to demonstrate to their superiors how much they had procured, not how well they performed this task. In some cases they deliberately allowed high humidity to increase the overall weight. A few even bulked up the volume by adding water. Here is the scene that met one visitor when the doors of a warehouse opened in south China:
Moths and beetles swarmed out, and I saw several rats as big as young rabbits scurrying across the floor. Different kinds of containers were haphazardly stacked on the slab-stone floor. There were also torn sacks of various sizes, along with earthenware jars and wooden casks. In one corner were huge reed-mat bins into which flour was dumped. I recoiled at the sight of insects buzzing and flitting around, not to mention the worms in the bins. The flour in one bin was covered with a blue mould that smelled awful.36
Thanks to its monopoly on grain, in 1954 the state took in more than ever before, in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the overall crop. In Shandong the amount procured jumped from 2 million tonnes in 1953 to just under 3 million in 1954. Even when the increase was relatively modest it could be devastating: in Hebei it went from 1.9 million tonnes to 2.08 million, which represented a shift from 23.5 per cent up to 25.9 per cent of the harvest. In Shaanxi the overall proportion of food taken away increased from 19.5 per cent to 25.5 per cent in 1954. One of the highest proportions of all was in Jilin, where 50.7 per cent of all the grain was hauled away, even though the crop that year shrank to 5.31 million tonnes. It left the villagers with an average of 145 kilos a year.37
Deng Zihui, the man who oversaw work in the countryside from Beijing, put it in a nutshell. In July 1954, ten months after the monopoly had come into effect, he admitted that before liberation on average a villager had about 300 kilos set aside for food each year. Now that amount was reduced for every one of them, from north to south, to just about half a kilo a day, or a third less. And other foodstuffs were also lacking. Most people outside the cities never received more than 3 kilos of edible oil a year. Deng called the monopoly on grain ‘the only way when there is no way’, and that way was to ‘spread the pain evenly’. He would soon pay the price for his frankness.38
Evenly spread pain meant starvation, which was widespread in 1954, coming right on the heels of the famine in 1953. Already on 2 January 1954 the Central Committee warned that farmers were being driven to their deaths due to the state monopoly. In Henan and in Jiangxi, 4.5 million people were in dire straits. In Hunan up to one in every six villagers went hungry. Three million lacked food in Shandong. In Guizhou and Sichuan, where up to a quarter of the population in mountainous areas did not have enough to eat, people sold their clothes, their land and their homes. Across the country people sold their children. In the single county of Ji’an, Jiangxi, thirty-two were sold within two months. This happened even in subtropical Guangdong. In a village in Puning county, Zhang Delai sold his offspring for 50 yuan. It was enough to buy rice and see him through the famine. In Anhui hordes of up to 200 beggars roamed the countryside. Some froze to death.
In Linxia, Gansu, some of the victims were too weak even to walk down the road to the next village. ‘The main reason’, explained the inspectors dispatched by the provincial government, ‘is that local cadres have not paid sufficient attention to the conditions of the crop last year and have committed serious errors in carrying out the unified sale and purchase system.’39
Most of these reports pointed out how much of the starvation was man-made. But in August the Central Committee decided to ascribe the worst famine since 1949 to ‘natural disasters’. Instead of helping people in the countryside, it stressed how vital it was to procure the state-mandated amounts of grain, oil and cotton, all of which were essential to ‘industrial production in the cities and the socialist reform of industry and commerce in the countryside’. A year later, as the telltale signs of famine appeared again in the spring of 1955, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai approved a directive explaining that ‘among those who shout loudly about grain shortages, the absolute majority in fact do not lack grain at all’. Zhou Enlai, as head of the State Council, merely tinkered with the numbers, concluding that the monopoly worked rather well. It worked so well that already in November 1953 and September 1954 it had been extended to oil crops and cotton respectively. Soon it covered all major foodstuffs and agricultural raw materials.40
One response to collectivisation was to leave the countryside. Villagers had always supplemented their income by going to the city in the slack season, working in factories or peddling goods. Sometimes they would stay away for years on end, sending remittances back home to support their families. In Raoyang county, Hubei, a quarter of all men from the countryside worked in the cities during the winter months in the early 1950s. But the state did not encourage rural mobility. Soon after liberation it sent millions of refugees, unemployed, demobilised soldiers and other undesirable elements to the countryside. They kept on coming back. Despite state efforts to reverse the flow, there were close to 20 million rural migrants, often relegated to dirty, arduous and sometimes dangerous jobs on the margins of the urban landscape. As in the old days, they came in search of new opportunities and a better life, but other motivations also drove migration. As the state curtailed private commerce, pedlars, traders and merchants left the countryside in droves, seeking better pastures.