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

by Dikötter, Frank

  Those caught up in the punitive wheels of the system were routinely tortured. Some were forced to kneel on broken stones, others had to bend forward in the so-called aeroplane position. A few had to go through mock executions. In Yidu entire families were put under surveillance; some of their daughters were raped. Extortion was rife. ‘Similar examples are too numerous to be enumerated,’ concluded the authors of an investigative report. Luo Ruiqing himself wrote of the pain and humiliation with which the system was shot through. In You county, he stressed, every breach of discipline was met with punishment, whether speaking at work or being absent from work for more than an hour. Some were beaten, others were stripped of their trousers, a few were given yin and yang haircuts, as one half of the head was shaved.14

  In the cities too, people could be placed under public supervision, although this was relatively rare. In one case a graduate of Stanford University who worked as dean of a law college in Shanghai was picked up one morning during the Great Terror of 1951. The only charges brought against him were that he was a ‘lackey of the rich and an oppressor of the poor’ and that he had a brother in the Taiwanese government. For this he was sentenced to be kept under surveillance for three years.

  He was made into a janitor at the trade association he had previously headed. He was paid 18 yuan a month and could live only by selling his household furnishings. His employers addressed him only to give him orders and wrote weekly reports on his behavior. He himself had to go once a week to the police with a written expression of his gratitude to the party for the leniency of the people’s justice; if his gratitude was not expressed in terms sufficiently abject, he was made to rewrite his paper until it was found acceptable. No one else dared speak to him, let alone try to help or comfort him.

  After sixteen months he threw himself into a river.15

  How many found themselves in a similar situation? Luo Ruiqing estimated that some 740,000 people were under public supervision in 1953, but from his desk in Beijing he could barely capture the extent to which people were detained locally without ever being reported to the higher authorities. A glimpse of this underground world comes from an investigation report on Sichuan filed in 1952. It noted that in four villages in Xinjin county ninety-six people were formally placed under supervision, but a further 279 found themselves in the same type of bonded labour without any form of judicial process. Nobody knows how many other people across the country were detained by local cadres, but the system must have added at least another 1 to 2 million to the captive population.16

  With collectivisation in the countryside, the difference between a prisoner sent to a labour camp, a convict placed under supervision and a free farmer tilling his own plot became less and less obvious. This was particularly true with conscripted labour. Right from the start the regime had little hesitation in rounding up villagers to work on large projects carried out for the greater good. And from the beginning this spelt misery for those unfortunate enough to be drafted. In Suqian county in 1950 dozens of ordinary people died of cold, hunger and exhaustion, forced to work outside in subzero temperatures clothed in rags. Hunger was widespread, as they were fed mere scraps.17

  These were not the teething pains of a new regime unaccustomed to organising corvée labour. The longer in power, the bigger the vision, as massive projects spread hunger and misery to millions of conscripted labourers. One of the biggest plans was to tame the Huai River, which flowed through the northern plain from south Henan towards north Jiangsu, where it joined the Yangzi River. It was notoriously vulnerable to flooding. By the winter of 1949, hundreds of thousands of paupers were sent to work along the Huai River. Instead of draining the waterlogged areas to make sure that the flow of the river could scour away its load of silt, they were compelled to build dykes and embankments. The plan had been conceived by party officials who had never even set foot in the area. When the snow melted the following spring, the river flooded some 130,000 hectares in the region around Suxian county alone, creating a lot of misery.18

  After the flooding had been blamed on nature, Mao announced a programme to ‘Harness the Huai River’ with dams on the upper reaches and upstream reservoirs for storing floodwater. The project would last several decades. People were drafted by the hundreds of thousands, toiling in the icy water bare-legged, or lugging wet sand and earth in baskets suspended on shoulder-poles. They were housed far away from their homes, in tiny sheds built of bamboo, reed or corn stalks. Many had to travel for days to reach the river, carrying with them their own tools, clothes, stoves, quilts and mats. In 1951 the alarm was raised, as local cadres conscripted neighbouring farmers without any regard for agricultural production. When rain followed snow, week after week, food reserves quickly ran out, pushing many of the villages along the Huai River into famine.19

  By 1953 the situation was even worse. Few farmers were given adequate food. Many survived on a watery concoction dished out three times a day. Some were fed nothing but sorghum, a monotonous diet that caused excruciating constipation, so much so that ‘blood is everywhere in the toilets’. In Suxian county some young workers lay prostrate on the ground, crying with hunger, while others fought each other for an extra portion. Several wrote letters to their families pleading for help: ‘Think of a way to come and rescue a crowd of hungry ghosts!’ Some hanged themselves in despair. Discipline was relentless, all the more since many of the conscripted villagers were outcasts, classified as family members of ‘landlords’, ‘rich farmers’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘criminals’. Some cadres pinned red and white strips on the workers, distinguishing ‘glorious’ from ‘shameless’ ones. Those who spent more than three minutes in the toilet were punished. Tai Shuyi, a ruthless leader, forced his team to work throughout the night on several occasions. Within three days, over a hundred people were spitting blood. Accidents were common all along the river, as dykes subsided, structures collapsed and dynamite was exploded without proper control, killing hundreds. Tens of thousands were seriously ill but received no medical treatment. Those who could tried to escape. In some places, for instance the reservoir at Nanwan in Henan province, 3,000 of a total labour force of 10,000 managed to abscond.20

  The situation was no better elsewhere. In Hubei, the villagers rounded up to work on a dam were not even provided with makeshift huts. They slept outside in the bitterly cold winter. One in twenty became severely ill, some dying as cadres just stood by and seemed ‘not to care’. Up further north in Zhouzhi county, a region of Shaanxi covered in mountain forests, a massive water-conservancy project compelled close to a million people to work for the state in 1953. Poverty was everywhere, forcing some families to give away their children as ‘the majority of workers lack food’. It was a taste of the future. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, villagers would be herded into giant People’s Communes where food was distributed according to merit. Hundreds of millions would be forced to work on giant water-conservancy projects far from home, as the country became one enormous labour camp.21

  The boundaries between the free and the unfree were also porous in the most remote border region of the country, namely the north-west. In 1949, as Chapter 3 explained, hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers, petty thieves, beggars, vagrants and prostitutes were sent to help develop and colonise the Muslim belt which ran through Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai and Xinjiang. The trend continued unabated in the following years, as batch after batch of migrants was sent from the interior provinces, often alongside convoys of political prisoners. Migration was supposed to be voluntary, but as with everything else in the People’s Republic, quotas had to be met. All too often tales of piped water, electricity and tables laden with fresh fruit enticed credulous people seeking a better life. The reality was a far cry from the propaganda. After a long train journey followed by several days cramped in the back of a lorry, they were confronted with misery. The first contingents of settlers had to dig holes in the ground and sleep on rough mats on the floor, sheltered from the sand storms by a sh
eet of tarpaulin. Work consisted of levelling dunes, cutting shrubbery, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. Many escaped and returned home. As rumours spread about the dire conditions in the north-west, the people most at risk of relocation – the poor, the unemployed and the politically undesirable – tried to avoid face-to-face encounters with the cadres in charge of recruitment. In Beijing they placed children at key intersections to warn them of their arrival. Those who genuinely volunteered or could not avoid relocation found themselves in holding centres without beds, sleeping on straw laid over a moist earthen floor. Some cried themselves to sleep, others absconded in the dead of night.22

  By 1956 four out of five migrants to Gansu province faced hunger, with insufficient food to tide them over the spring. Their clothes were threadbare, while some children had no trousers and walked to school barefoot. There was no money to buy salt, edible oil, vegetables or even a needle to patch up their rags. The noble idea of reclaiming land from the desert ran into problems, as the sand was poor in nutrients. It never rained enough to grow much besides some wheat and a few vegetables. Li Shuzhen, who wormed her way back to the capital, wrote to the People’s Congress: ‘The government there only looks after you for three months, then it washes its hands of you. After the fields were ruined by hail, my father died of hunger.’ Liu Jincai also complained: ‘I spent more than two years there and did not even earn enough to buy a pair of cotton trousers.’ And if that was not enough, the local population also discriminated against the migrants. Sometimes tensions over scarce resources degenerated into fistfights, as migrants were beaten unconscious. They were aliens in a foreign land, unable to speak the local language. So bad was the situation across the entire region that in December 1956 the minister of domestic affairs temporarily halted all migration.23

  But one region was a success, and that was Xinjiang. After its annexation by Peng Dehuai in 1949, over 100,000 soldiers from the First Field Army stayed behind to prevent any secession. They cultivated the soil and protected the border. In 1954 they became part of a large development corporation called the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Tens of thousands of demobilised soldiers, political prisoners and migrants from the east joined its ranks, building irrigation canals, roads and telephone lines. They planted walls of trees to protect their camps from the sand. They grew cotton and wheat in giant collective farms around the desert oases. Soon the Corps developed into the biggest landowner and largest employer in the region. Its tentacles spread everywhere, operating factories, roads, canals, railways, mines, forests and reservoirs. It had its own schools, hospitals, laboratories, police force and courts – not to mention a vast network of prisons and labour camps. It was a state within the state. In 1949 the Chinese accounted for no more than 3 per cent of the local population. Within half a decade the Corps had created ‘an army of Han Chinese colonists’. Few settlers were volunteers, least of all the political prisoners, but all were better off than the Uighurs and Muslims around them. Penal exile in Xinjiang was the foundation of one of the most successful programmes of colonisation in modern history.24

  Part Four

  Backlash (1956–57)

  13

  Behind the Scenes

  By 1956 China stood proud and triumphant. War was a distant memory. Inflation had been brought under control. Unemployment, seemingly, had been solved. Industry was churning out ever increasing amounts of iron and steel. The international prestige of the regime was at a zenith. No longer was China the sick man of Asia, as the People’s Republic had fought the Americans to a standstill in the Korean War. And after the death of Stalin, no other communist leader enjoyed more prestige than Mao, the philosopher, poet and statesman in Beijing. Such was his standing that the Chairman increasingly assumed the mantle of leadership for developing countries around the world.

  Ostensibly, the regime stood for values that had universal appeal: freedom, equality, peace, justice and democracy (albeit under the dictatorship of the proletariat). It promised security from hunger and want, with jobs and housing for all. Unlike liberal democracy, it proposed a unique social experiment to achieve these ideals, as people would merge into a classless society of plenty for all in which the state would wither away. Like the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, the regime excelled at mesmerising very different audiences on the road to utopia. It offered economic equality to the discontents of capitalism. It whispered freedom to those liberals outraged by authoritarian governments. ‘It flaunts patriotism before the nationalist, dedication before the devout, and revenge before the oppressed.’ Communism, in short, was all things to all men.1

  The People’s Republic widely advertised its success. It built up a glowing image with a profusion of statistics. Everything, apparently, was measurable in the New China, from the latest coal output and grain production to the number of square metres of housing built since liberation. Whatever the object of measurement, the trend was always upwards, even though the figures were sometimes rather vague. Percentages, for instance, were always favoured. Lump sums were not broken down. Categories were rarely defined, indices often came without items, and price base periods shifted erratically. Sometimes they vanished altogether. Cost and labour seemed irrelevant, and were excluded from accounting. The ways in which the data were collected and the methods used to produce the official statistics were never published. Sceptical statisticians found huge discrepancies. But dreamers around the world were dazzled. In every domain, it seemed, the People’s Republic was surging forward.2

  Besides mere numbers, the very imagery of revolution had romantic appeal. There were mass rallies on Tiananmen every year, as the regime paraded its resources in iron, steel, flesh and blood. Tanks and rocket launchers rumbled by, with fighter jets screaming overhead, as a never-ending procession of drummers, dancers and workers waved olive branches or released doves and coloured balloons. ‘Even the tiny Mongol ponies of the Cavalry trotted precisely in step, like an articulated clockwork toy,’ noted one foreign visitor in sheer amazement, standing in the midst of an ecstatic crowd. And a sea of red could be seen even outside mass parades in Beijing. Scarlet, the symbol of a revolution for basic rights and equality, was everywhere, on banners, flags, scarves, ties and armbands. The iconography of socialism was simple and enduring, with its sheaths of wheat, its rising sun in gold and its ubiquitous red star. Workers and peasants, with raised hands or clenched fists, seemed almost to jump out of the posters so liberally plastered on the walls of many buildings. What could be more evocative of progress than the image of a young girl with pigtails proudly driving a tractor through the fields? When Cai Shuli and thirty other graduates from a high school in Beijing heard of a young girl named Liu Ying, resolutely steering a tractor through the fields of the Great Northern Wilderness, their imaginations were so fired that they volunteered to go north: ‘The stirring in our hearts is impossible to describe,’ she wrote to Mayor Peng Zhen, ‘and we have decided to offer our youth to the Great Northern Wilderness to reclaim the rich soil together with comrade Liu Ying.’3

  There was also a flow of reports, statements and announcements from the leadership, not to mention the writings of the Chairman himself. These could be impenetrable to outsiders, replete as they were with Marxist-Leninist jargon, not to mention cryptic hints at changes in the power structure of the communist party. But they also conveyed a sense of purpose and commitment, pledging better wages for workers, promising more homes for the disabled or resolving to fight for the dignity of ethnic minorities. There was no end to statements of good intent, accompanied by ever more decrees, rules and regulations that would nudge China forward on the road to communism. It was all about the world in the making, not the world as it was. It was a world of plans, blueprints and models. Even more prominent than the official literature were the many slogans intended to galvanise a broader audience. Mao himself was a master of powerful, stirring quotations that found their way into every household in China, whether it was ‘Women Hold up Half the S
ky’, ‘Revolution is Not a Dinner Party’ or ‘Imperialism is a Paper Tiger’. His was the motto ‘Serve the People’, calling out from posters and placards everywhere, the white characters written in a flamboyant hand against a red background.

  Like Cai Shuli, who pledged to help reclaim the Great Northern Wilderness, plenty of party members looked past the misery of the present to see a radiant future beckoning ahead. Dan Ling, who had joined the party as a schoolboy just before liberation, was still imbued with the idealism of youth several years later, despite his doubts over some of the campaigns against enemies of the state. Li Zhisui, now working as the Chairman’s doctor, had also grown wiser since setting foot on shore with his wife in 1949, but he remained an ardent believer. Even outside the privileged ranks of the party, the whole idea of ‘building socialism’ was taken to heart, especially by a younger generation that went through the new schools set up after liberation. A sense of adventure combined with boundless idealism when young students volunteered to go off as pioneers to border regions or distant irrigation projects. The key to understanding the appeal of communism, despite the grim reality on the ground, lay in the fact that it allowed so many followers to believe that they were participants in an historic process of transformation, contributing to something much bigger and better than themselves, or anything that had come before. In a world full of workers who set new records and soldiers who used their bodies to block enemy fire, everyone was encouraged to become a hero. The propaganda machine ceaselessly glorified heroic workers, peasants and soldiers, held up as so many models for emulation.4