But most of all, people took to the roads because they wanted to escape from famine. After the state imposed a monopoly on grain, many villagers voted with their feet and joined a massive exodus from the countryside. In March 1954, over 50,000 villagers poured into Jinan, the capital of Shandong. In Port Arthur, more than 19,000 of them overwhelmed the small city in the autumn of 1953. They begged the Soviet troops for help. Eight thousand farmers were looking for work in Anshan, the site of a sprawling steel and iron complex in Manchuria. In the streets of Wuhan, the industrial city on the Yangzi, hundreds of impoverished villagers could be seen, many of them begging for food. Some had sold all their clothes; a few tried to commit suicide, possibly disappointed by the reality of the city that had been a beacon of hope. Some protested in front of government offices, screaming, crying, a few waiting to die. But the biggest magnet was Shanghai. In the summer of 1954, around 2,000 refugees came by train every single day. Hundreds also arrived by boat, some of them too poor to buy a ticket.41
In April 1953 the State Council had already passed a directive seeking to persuade hundreds of thousands of farmers in search of work to return to their villages. The attempt failed to stem the flow. In March 1954 even more stringent regulations were put on the books, curtailing the recruitment of workers from the countryside. In the following months the public security organs were beefed up, and substations were established everywhere to control the movement of people and guard the cities against a rural influx. Then, on 22 June 1955, Zhou Enlai signed a directive introducing the household-registration system, used in the cities since 1951, to the countryside.
It was the rough equivalent of the internal passport instituted decades earlier in the Soviet Union. Food was rationed from August 1955 onwards, and its distribution closely tied to the number of people registered in each household. The ration cards had to be presented at local grain stores, thus preventing the large-scale movement of people. But while the subsistence of urban residents was guaranteed by the state, rural residents had to feed themselves. From retirement benefits to health care, education and subsidised housing, the state looked after many of its employees in the cities, while letting people registered as ‘peasants’ (nongmin) fend for themselves. This status was inherited through the mother, meaning that even if a village girl married a man from the city, she and her children remained ‘peasants’, deprived of the same entitlements accorded urban residents.
The household-registration system also carefully monitored the movements of people, even within the countryside, as a migration certificate was required for anybody thinking of changing residence. No government in China had ever restricted freedom of residence or prevented migration, except in contested zones during wartime. But in 1955 the freedom of domicile and freedom of movement came to an end for people in the countryside. Those who moved in search of a better life were now called mangliu, or ‘blind migrants’. It was a reverse homophone of liumang, meaning hooligan.42
The household-registration system tied the cultivator to the land, making sure that cheap labour was available in the co-operatives. This was the fourth stage of collectivisation. A mere step now separated villagers from serfdom, namely the ownership of the land.
11
High Tide
A solar eclipse was always a bad omen in traditional China, but New Year’s Day was the worst time for one to occur. On 14 February 1953, the first day of the lunar calendar, the moon partially blocked the sun, casting a dark shadow over the earth. Less than three weeks later Stalin died. In China flags stood at half-mast, with strips of black cloth flying on top. Public buildings in the capital were draped with black. At the Soviet embassy, the queue of mourners was four deep and so long that some streets had to be temporarily closed to traffic. People wore black armbands distributed by party activists standing on street corners. Further towards Tiananmen Square, in front of the entrance of the Forbidden City, a huge red platform was piled high with artificial wreaths and paper flowers. A portrait of Stalin towered above it. Loudspeakers alternated between funeral music and instructions to the crowd on how to behave. ‘Don’t sing – don’t laugh – don’t walk aimlessly – don’t shout – keep order – behave as you were instructed in the newspaper.’ The crowd was silent.1
The Chairman bowed before the portrait and laid a wreath. But he did not give a speech. For the previous thirty years he had followed Stalin’s advice, sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly. Even in the midst of civil war, as his troops were gaining the upper hand, he continued to look to Moscow for advice and guidance. He was a faithful follower of Stalin and took pains to prove his loyalty by declaring that China would ‘lean to one side’ in 1949. After liberation the flow of telegrams between Beijing and Moscow increased even further, as the Chairman requested Stalin’s advice on seemingly every matter.
Mao was a loyal student of Stalin, but even so the relationship had never been an easy one. Mao held many grudges against his mentor, who had humiliated him in Moscow only three years earlier. And he deeply resented the presence of Soviet troops in Manchuria. But most of all Mao wanted to be more Stalinist than Stalin would allow. In November 1947 the Chairman had written to Moscow to explain that he intended to eliminate all rival political parties: ‘In the period of the final victory of the Chinese revolution – as was the case in the USSR and Yugoslavia – all political parties except the CCP will have to withdraw from the political scene.’ But Stalin disagreed, telling him that the opposition parties in China would have to be included as part of a New Democracy for many years to come. ‘After the victory,’ Stalin explained, ‘the Chinese government will be a national revolutionary and democratic government, rather than a Communist one.’ Mao demurred, maintaining the pretence of democracy even as he set out to build a totalitarian state. Then, in February 1950, Stalin urged the Chairman to pursue a milder approach to land distribution, sparing the rich peasants who could help the country recover after years of warfare. A few months later Mao published a Land Reform Law which promised a less divisive policy even as violence tore the countryside apart. And in 1952, only months before he was felled by a stroke, Stalin had whittled down funding for China’s first Five-Year Plan, warning the Chinese leadership that they were requesting too much, too soon.2
Stalin’s death was Mao’s liberation. The Chairman was at last free from the restraining influence of Moscow. No longer were there any major constraints on his political vision. Of course, he continued to submit his views to the Kremlin, as telegraph wires continued to hum between the two red capitals, but no Soviet leader commanded as much respect as Mao, who had brought a second October Revolution to a quarter of the world, and fought the United States to a standstill during the Korean War. Soon the Chairman began to distance himself from the Soviet leadership.
He also drifted away from his colleagues. Mao had led his men to victory in 1949. Korea, too, was his personal glory, as he had pushed for intervention when other leaders in the party had wavered. He stood head and shoulders above his peers.
Even before Stalin died, Mao had started to undermine Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, who were in charge of the day-to-day handling of the economy, and were becoming too influential for Mao’s comfort. Zhou, the soft-spoken, slightly effeminate premier, had learned a decade earlier never to challenge the Chairman. In 1932 rivals of Mao had handed command over the battlefront to Zhou. The result had been a disaster, as Chiang Kai-shek mauled the communist troops and forced them on a Long March away from their bases in the south. After Mao had gained the upper hand in Yan’an, Zhou’s loyalty was tested in a series of ferocious self-criticism sessions from September to November 1943. He was accused of having led a faction that had sided with one of Mao’s rivals. Zhou grovelled and admitted that he had been a ‘political swindler’ who lacked principles, something he blamed on his pampered upbringing in a ‘feudal aristocratic family’. It was a gruelling experience, but Zhou managed to emerge from the ordeal as Mao’s faithful assistant, putting his organisational s
kills entirely at the service of the Chairman in order to redeem himself.3
Liu Shaoqi had gone to Moscow as a student in 1921. He was a frugal, taciturn man, best known as a zealous apparatchik who would regularly toil away through the night. Two decades later, in Yan’an, he and Zhou had sat at opposite ends of the table, as Liu was neck-deep in the campaign to flush out spies and saboteurs from the party. Although he left the dirty work of extracting confessions from suspects to Kang Sheng, the grim man who had worked with the Soviet secret police, Liu was the main architect of a theoretical framework justifying the witch-hunt. He excelled at his task and became Mao’s second-in-command in 1943.4
Mao lacked interest in matters of daily routine and organisational detail, and he needed first-rate administrators he could trust to carry out his vision. Zhou and Liu were his able servants, always at his beck and call, come day or night. The Chairman’s schedule was erratic, as he suffered from severe insomnia, anxiety attacks and depression, often caused by his constant fear that other high-ranking leaders were disloyal to him. Trust was of the essence. Mao relied on heavy doses of barbiturates, chloral hydrate and sodium seconal to sleep, and he often dozed off during the day and worked throughout the night, not hesitating to summon his staff and colleagues at all hours. He expected them to turn up immediately. So, in turn, top officials like Liu and Zhou relied on sleeping pills to get some rest, as they could never quite synchronise their working schedules with the routines of the Chairman.
Lack of sleep was only a minor inconvenience. They had to cope with Mao’s unpredictable mood swings, tiptoe around him, flatter his ego and avoid any comments that might provoke suspicion or misunderstanding. They had to decipher his often obscure remarks, used to keep them guessing about his intentions. But the Chairman also deliberately employed vague terms to conceal his own ignorance, particularly in the realm of economics, of which he understood very little. He rarely voiced an opinion on concrete financial issues; when he did so, he sounded uninformed. This too was a delicate issue for Zhou and Liu, all the more so since they had to assume responsibility for running an increasingly complex state bureaucracy encompassing millions of employees. It was tempting for them to leave aside some of the more technical details of the economy in order to avoid embarrassing their master. But this was also fraught with danger, as Mao had a habit of switching unpredictably from complete aloofness in government affairs to obsessive attention to detail. During the purge of government ranks in 1952, for instance, he issued directives on the number of culprits to be arrested almost daily, only to abandon interest suddenly as the campaign tapered off, leaving Liu to cope with the mess.5
By 1952 Zhou and Liu had assembled a powerful team of economic managers, including Bo Yibo, Chen Yun, Li Fuchun and Deng Zihui. Mao began to feel that he was being sidestepped, losing his grip over his subordinates as the debate over the economy became ever more complex. He was also impatient with slow economic growth, and realised that some of his colleagues had doubts about the pace of collectivisation. Liu, in particular, took the view that a transition to socialism would take a great deal of time. He even envisaged a business community that would contribute to the national economy for years to come. This jarred with Mao, but while Stalin was still alive he had to be prudent in taking Liu to task. Liu had studied in Moscow. In the summer of 1949 he had been the party’s envoy to the Soviet Union, and Stalin had showered attention on him in six separate meetings. Mao, on the other hand, had been given the cold shoulder. In late February 1953, as Mao learned that Stalin was on his deathbed, he tried to stop Liu, who was in hospital for an appendectomy, from finding out. Liu was excluded from the memorial ceremony in honour of Stalin a few weeks later.6
In early 1953 Mao confronted Bo Yibo, the minister of finance who was part of Zhou and Liu’s team of economic managers. Bo was responsible for a new tax system that alleviated some of the pressure on the private sector. In a note circulated to Bo and copied to several other top leaders, the Chairman complained bitterly: ‘I did not know about this until I read about it in the newspapers, and I still don’t understand it!’ Zhou immediately realised that the Chairman was angry, and wrote a letter that very evening to try to defuse the situation. But a few days later the Chairman confronted Bo Yibo during a top leadership meeting: ‘The revision of the tax system was not reported to the Centre in advance, but it was discussed with the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is seen to be more important even than the Party Centre! This new system is welcomed by the bourgeoisie, it is a mistake of rightist opportunism!’ Mao’s real targets, beyond pressing for speedier collectivisation, were the two men behind Bo, namely Zhou and Liu. The Chairman adopted a tactic he called ‘pitching a stone to cause a ripple’, using a proxy to assail the two most powerful men below him.7
The Chairman did not relent in the following months, despite Bo Yibo making several self-criticisms. Mao was strengthening his grip over the government even as he undermined his colleagues, demanding in March that ‘all major and important directives, policies, plans and events in government work must be reported to the Centre for instruction beforehand’. In May he wrote a menacing note to Liu, insisting that ‘all documents and telegrams issued in the name of the Centre can only be issued after I have seen them, otherwise they are invalid. Please be careful.’ Before the assembled leadership a few weeks later, he reprimanded those who ‘do not care so much’ about collective leadership, preferring instead to be left alone.8
Having put Zhou and Liu on notice, Mao announced a change of speed in the pursuit of socialism at a Politburo meeting on 15 June 1953. Here is how he phrased it in the parlance of Marxism-Leninism:
The general line or the general task of the party for the transition period is basically to accomplish the industrialisation of the country and the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce in ten to fifteen years, or a little longer. This general line is a beacon illuminating our work in all fields. Do not depart from this general line, otherwise ‘Left’ or Right mistakes will occur.9
Mao called his speech ‘Refute Right Deviationist Views that Depart from the General Line’. Zhou and Liu were never named, but his audience was in no doubt about what was happening. Both had worked hard to maintain the pretence of a New Democracy, used on Stalin’s advice to assure entrepreneurs and industrialists that they could continue to run their businesses on a private basis. Mao savaged Zhou Enlai’s formulation of ‘the social order of New Democracy’, and the term would never be used again. Even slogans about ‘sustaining private property’, according to the Chairman, were manifestations of ‘rightism’. Democracy was out, socialism was in. The Chairman proposed the General Line, and in doing so he positioned himself above the party, using it as a yardstick to determine who was a rightist and who was a leftist on the road to socialism. It was a yardstick he would change repeatedly.10
Mao also promoted a number of outsiders to senior positions in Beijing as part of his strategy to undermine the tight group of economic managers gathered around Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. He called this ‘putting sand in the mix’. The most important newcomer was Gao Gang, the leader of Manchuria, who arrived in the capital in October 1952 to head the newly created State Planning Commission. He also took responsibility for eight economic ministries, ranging from light industry and fuel to textiles, thus sharing a large portion of what had previously fallen under Zhou Enlai’s exclusive purview. Soon he was a fixture at all important leadership meetings. At the party headquarters in Zhongnanhai, the beautifully manicured compound where the empress dowager had lived, he had an office just across the hallway from Mao. His family moved into a spacious residence on Dongjiao Mingxiang, formerly occupied by the French embassy. There was extensive personal contact between the two, with discussions going into the early hours of the night. Gao took cues from the Chairman, laying into Bo Yibo at one of the self-criticism meetings with the minister of finance, carefully reading from notes that Mao had revised and approved b
eforehand. Gao relished the attack on one of his personal enemies. A year earlier Bo had handed the Chairman a report on corruption in Manchuria, directly implicating Gao. Mao circulated the letter within the higher echelons of the party.11
The Chairman was impressed with Gao, and in the summer of 1953 trusted him with another task. He ordered him to investigate Liu Shaoqi’s past to find out whether his number two had spied for the nationalists in the 1920s. Gao interpreted this as a sign that the Chairman wanted to get rid of Liu. But Mao was a master of the divide-and-rule game. Just as he held grudges against Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, he was also wary of Gao Gang. Years earlier, Gao had accompanied Liu to meet Stalin in Moscow. At one meeting that summer of 1949, Gao had floated the idea that Manchuria be declared the seventeenth republic of the Soviet Union to protect it from the United States. Stalin had fixed his eyes on Gao, and after a moment of awkward silence he had shrugged off the idea with a joke. But the proposal prompted Liu to telegraph Mao, demanding that Gao be recalled to Beijing. Mao approved the request, and on 30 July 1949 a defeated Gao went to the airport unaccompanied by other members of the delegation. Months later, when Mao undertook his own pilgrimage to Moscow, Stalin handed him a dossier containing incriminating evidence showing that Gao had personally sent confidential messages to the Soviet leader. Exactly what was in these files remains a mystery, but it did not seem to harm Gao’s career. He remained in charge of Manchuria, which soon had thousands of technical advisers from the Soviet Union, working in every capacity from top executives to lowly trackmen on the railways, operated jointly by China and Russia.12
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Page 28