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

by Dikötter, Frank

  Just as there were model workers and soldiers, there were model schools, hospitals, factories, offices, prisons, homes and co-operatives. These offered a glimpse of the future, a vision of the world to be. By 1956 thousands of foreign visitors were carefully selected by the regime and taken on guided tours to visit these showcase sites, all expenses paid, surrounded by minders who controlled their every movement. One guest wrote that ‘one gets to feel something like an infant in transit from one country to another and being passed from one hand to another’. But many were happy to be herded around, all too ready to help dispel the misinformation and hostile stereotypes that existed abroad about communism in the People’s Republic.5

  Foreign pilgrims were allowed to interview only the most loyal and tested party members. Rong Yiren, who could no longer rely on the protection of senior leaders after the purge of Pan Hannian in Shanghai, decided to join the show. It was one way to become indispensable to the regime. He turned himself into a showcase industrialist, paid to conjure up a world of illusions. Foreign visitors to his home would find his wife contentedly knitting a sweater. Two dogs frisked about merrily in the garden, where a nurse in uniform could be seen wheeling a baby across the lawn. ‘On a wall, a crucifix discreetly suggested freedom of worship. The bookshelves showed Shakespeare as well as Marx.’ In an adjacent room his daughter practised the piano. Most of the conversation was about his garden, as if he had nothing more to worry about than the correct fertiliser for his peonies. One French visitor who witnessed this touching tableau was truly awed: ‘I have never seen a more contented family,’ she said. Rong had an answer to every question. When pressed and asked how he could be so happy, he would purse his lips and consider the question gravely: ‘I was worried at first,’ he would confess. ‘When the Communists liberated Shanghai, we were apprehensive, if not for our lives, at least for our property.’ Then he would look his guest in the eye, his voice ringing with sincerity. ‘But the Communists have kept their promise. We have come to realise that the Chinese Communists never deceive people.’6

  Throughout the country, countless shows were put on for the benefit of foreign journalists, visiting statesmen, ranking leaders, student groups and, of course, the Chairman himself. As hundreds of Buddhist temples were destroyed, large sums of money were lavished on a handful of structures where showpiece monks could lecture about a religious renaissance in the New China. In model factories equipped with the latest technology, workers were carefully picked and trained to illustrate the triumphs of the planned economy. Around all major cities, model villages were selected to showcase the benefits of collectivisation. Everywhere, or so it appeared, people worked hard and were enthusiastic, never tiring of praising the party. In the propaganda state nothing was as it seemed.7

  China was a theatre. Even outside the tourist circuit, people were required to smile. When farmers were asked to surrender a greater share of their crop, they had to do so enthusiastically, with fanfare. When shopkeepers were required to hand over their assets to the state, they had to do so voluntarily, with beaming faces. A smile, in China as in other parts of Asia, did not always mean joy; it could convey embarrassment or hide pain and anger. But, more importantly, nobody wished to be accused of dragging their feet. Most people depended on the state for their livelihood. And all had spent countless hours in study sessions since liberation, learning how to parrot the party line, provide the correct answers and create the illusion of consent. Ordinary people may not all have been great heroes, but many were great actors.

  Huge resources were poured into this giant Potemkin village. One lasting result was the immense strides made in transportation. A network of communications tied the country together as never before. Highways reached out to every destination, many of them paved by conscript labour and chain gangs. Trains ran on time, as exclusive sleeping berths with dining facilities delivered foreign guests and leading officials to their destinations. Many cities were spruced up, the drains cleaned and the roads swept regularly.

  In the capital splendid public buildings shot up like mushrooms after the rain, rising far above a sea of grey roofs of courtyard houses and the rose-red walls of the imperial city. Ministries, institutes and museums appeared in the centre and on the outskirts, some with vast curving roofs of glazed tiles, others with plain flat ones, but all inspired by a Russian predilection for monumental proportions. In one district alone, dozens of buildings sprang up, seemingly within the space of a few months, from the Institute of Aeronautics and the Oil Institute to the Institute of Metallurgy, all with spacious forecourts and extensive wings. Outside Xizhimen, the north-western gate of the ancient city wall, a Soviet Union Exhibition Hall soon appeared. Rumours circulated about the amount of pure gold used to gild its towering spire. In the heart of the capital, Tiananmen Square was cleared of many of its ancient structures to make way for the annual parades. Most of the city wall that hindered traffic was dismantled.8

  Big, tangible symbols of power also went up in other cities, as the machinery of the central government was duplicated at the provincial level, complete with all the showcase buildings and prestige projects that accompanied an expanding state. In Chongqing, a sprawling city built on hills often veiled in drizzle and mist, a beautiful concert hall was erected in the middle of the People’s Cultural Park. A large sports stadium soon followed, as well as an Assembly Hall. A huge and ornate building with three circular tiers of green-glazed roof, the latter cost an estimated 100,000 yuan per year to maintain, although it was apparently seldom used. Many other new buildings stood empty, as Chongqing was no longer the capital of Sichuan. Further north, in Zhengzhou, an entirely new city seemed to rise out of the wheat fields, far away from the old town, with a broad boulevard flanked by large administrative buildings, all with their own gardens and dormitories. In Lanzhou, the arid capital of Gansu, new government offices appeared for several kilometres on either side of the Yangzi, almost doubling the area of the city with new institutes, hospitals, factories and residential blocks. The new streets, built by pick and shovel, were wide enough to have lanes on both sides for slower-moving traffic. They were straight as an arrow, cutting through older thoroughfares without any regard for the past.9

  Everywhere the speed of construction was startling. The leadership was in a rush to catch up with the future. As a result, many buildings were erected in a ‘haphazard, wild manner’, without much planning. As local leaders tried to outdo each other in building ever larger facilities, many new structures came without running water and sewerage facilities. Where cities were built outside the centre, as in Zhengzhou, the cost of building roads and services sank a hole in the budget. And in the haste to catapult the country into communism, the most basic steps such as surveys of the local topography, the composition of the soil and the distribution of water were ignored, resulting in costly errors. In some cases newly built roads were ceaselessly torn up, as different local authorities became locked in legal battles to extract compensation from each other. Even in Beijing, the foundations of entire factories subsided, while load-bearing beams warped and split. The waste was enormous. In the empire of central planning, nothing seemed planned.10

  As a result, even some centrepieces of the Potemkin project, designed to awe and woo foreign guests, were deeply flawed. Behind a gleaming façade of socialist modernity lay a ramshackle world of shoddy construction. The Qianmen Hotel in Beijing was one of three new venues built to host foreign delegations. By 1956 it was a favourite haunt of goodwill visitors. The taps dripped, leaving stains in sinks and tubs. Water in the toilets ran constantly, sometimes overflowing the tanks. Doors did not fit properly, light bulbs flickered, windows refused to close.11

  As vast amounts of money were ploughed into prestige buildings, the housing of ordinary people was neglected – with the exception of model dormitories built for show, for instance student accommodation at Peking University or the People’s Mansion in Xi’an. Factories and dormitories were jumbled together, often with no regard fo
r basic standards of hygiene. Local people often complained that ‘the dead and the living are being continuously evicted’. Much housing was drab, built like military barracks, with row after row of low units, all identical and more often than not without any leisure facilities. It was badly constructed too. In the suburbs of the capital, away from the public gaze, housing for workers was built with reject material. Walls moved when they were touched, door frames collapsed after one storm, and rain dripped through the roof. In Nanyuan, a suburb about 13 kilometres south of the Imperial Palace, water dripped from the walls in new residential units. Some houses came without doors. This, too, was a conscious choice. As Liu Shaoqi put it in his instructions to the Ministry of Textile Industry in February 1956, ‘You must build single-storey dormitories for the workers, not multi-storey ones. Our workers are not necessarily used to multi-storey buildings, in future we can build good multi-storey buildings. And you don’t necessarily have to build those structures very well, if they are slightly better than temporary sheds then it should be acceptable, anyway in future they will be demolished.’ A few trees he deemed acceptable, but ponds, rockeries, flowers and grass were unnecessary. Even providing workers with teacups, as was the habit in the Capital Number Two Cotton Mill, was ‘too good’. This was part of a new drive for austerity, as the government periodically had to cut back on spending.12

  The housing problem was compounded by the fact that local governments, in thrall to gigantism, were keen to eliminate their existing stock. The scale of destruction was staggering. According to Li Fuchun, housing with a total surface area of over 2 million square metres had been erased in Beijing, Wuhan, Taiyuan and Lanzhou since 1949, at a cost of 60 million yuan. A fifth of Taiyuan and Lanzhou was wiped from the map. In Sichuan, from the provincial capital down to county seats, up to 40 per cent of the urban surface was reduced to rubble. The local people compared the land to tofu, the party to a sharp knife: it cut off whichever portion it wanted. Those who were evicted were often left with no accommodation, even in Beijing. Residents cleared from the area around the Dongjiao Railway Station were put up in temporary sheds for ten months. Some of them cried as they shivered in the snow. Everywhere there was a housing shortage.13

  Many workers therefore lived in appalling conditions. In Anshan, the site of a sprawling iron and steel complex in Manchuria where the glow from the blast furnaces turned the night an eerie red, the dormitories were so inadequate that families of six had to share one bed. Occasionally a roof caved in or a wall collapsed, forcing workers to live in animal pens or dark caves on the eastern fringes of the city, in the mountains where the coal and iron was mined. Some went hungry, and could be seen shuffling along the streets at the end of their shift, begging for food. Lack of clothing and heating was widespread, even though temperatures plunged to an average of minus 20 degrees Celsius in the winter. When an icy blanket of snow covered the city, the cold seeped through flimsy buildings, threadbare blankets and torn quilts, freezing some babies to death – or so the Anshan Party Committee wrote in a confidential report.14

  Further south, in Nanjing, the workforce had more than doubled since liberation, but overall living space had failed to keep pace, meaning that each worker had to be content with an average of 2 square metres. Dormitories often lacked ventilation, so people woke up with headaches caused by lack of oxygen. But they were the lucky ones, as government accommodation was reserved for single workers. Families lived outside the factory premises, often up to 25 kilometres away, meaning that many hours were wasted on the daily commute – not counting the expense of 40 cents a day for a mere dozen kilometres, a rate that would have exhausted the entire monthly allowance of 10 per cent of the population in just over a week.15

  Just south of Nanjing, in the industrial city of Ma’anshan, lying on the bank of the Yangzi River, workers were sick for months on end, unable to afford even basic medical care. The dormitories were crowded, although pressure on housing also meant that some families lived in sheds so exposed to the elements that even in winter a fire could not be started. Ragged urchins were seen begging in the streets. Some workshops even lacked drinking water. There were no toilets. Leading cadres were too busy meeting production targets to care about the workforce. As the workers put it, ‘they do not send us hardship funds, they send us only burial fees’. 16

  More detailed studies show that the average space per worker shrank inexorably after liberation, sometimes by half (see Table 2, p. 269). In Wuhan it was 2.4 metres, although this figure excluded a quarter of the workforce who lived in sheds and huts. The city that was home to 1.9 million people had 80,000 workers without a roof above their heads. These were the numbers crunched by the Bureau for Statistics. According to the Bureau for Labour, everywhere ordinary people suffered from a chronic shortage of housing.17

  People beamed with health, at least when they appeared in propaganda posters, peering confidently into the future. The numerous statistics that the regime churned out on every aspect of health and hygiene, from the number of flies that had been swatted to the incidence of cholera in the countryside, encouraged an image of unceasing progress. Health campaigns punctuated daily life, as people were mobilised at intervals to sweep the streets, remove rubbish, kill rats or fill cesspools. During the Patriotic Health Campaign in 1952, as the country was on a war footing against enemy germs, battalions of conscripted citizens had disinfected entire cities. Much of the campaign, as the Ministry of Health admitted, turned out to be wasteful, as Chapter 7 showed.

  But there were real gains. China had always had huge health-care problems, in particular in the countryside where schistosomiasis (an intestinal disease which attacked the liver and spleen), hookworm and beriberi were common. Infant mortality was high before liberation, and there were few modern doctors, except in the big cities. Some improvements of the 1950s were due to new medical breakthroughs. After the Second World War, for instance, mass production of penicillin began in many countries, bringing a steady decline in the number of bacterial infections. The end of more than a decade of war helped other aspects of public health in China. Piles of garbage that had accumulated in many cities during the civil war were removed. Streets were cleaned, trenches filled, drainage improved. Inoculation became widespread, even if it was forcibly performed by cadres keen to fill their quotas. Most of all, the one-party state mobilised its resources against devastating epidemics, many of which were brought under control soon after they appeared.

  But health care was not free. The much flaunted barefoot doctors, trained to bring basic health care to the countryside, only appeared years later during the Cultural Revolution. And much medical help that farmers would have received from non-governmental sources before liberation vanished, sometimes overnight. Hundreds of mission hospitals scattered throughout the countryside were liquidated. Taoist and Buddhist temples, along with other religious or charitable institutions, were closed down, except for a few under government control. Everywhere pharmacists, doctors and nurses had to jump through the hoops, demonstrating their allegiance to the new regime as one campaign of thought reform succeeded another. And everywhere, by 1956, the state had taken over most companies, including retail pharmacies and private clinics.

  Whatever improvements may have followed liberation, health was soon on the decline. Published reports and newspaper articles described great strides in health care, but far more critical surveys, quietly filed away in the archives, reveal a picture of chronic malnutrition and poor health. This was true not only of the countryside, where collectivisation had reduced the farmers to the status of serfs, but also of the cities. One reason was the decline in income for most workers across the country. Just as farmers had to live on increasingly smaller rations of grain, workers had to make do with dwindling salaries. But health care involved considerable costs, and medicine was expensive. The Bureau for Labour, which studied hundreds of factories in 1956, concluded that ‘over the past few years the real income of workers has followed a downward trend’. Infl
ation outpaced wages. About half of all workers in heavy industry failed to make even 50 yuan a month. The proportion was higher in light industry. In Beijing one in six workers barely managed to scrape a living, making less than 10 yuan a month for basic expenses. And below them, in the shadowy world of construction, dwelled an underclass of paupers who made up 40 per cent of the workforce. Health everywhere was on the decline, as disease rates inched up year after year. By 1955 almost one in every twenty workers had to take sick leave for more than six months. In some factories 40 per cent of workers suffered from a serious chronic illness, although few could afford to take rest – despite the propaganda about workers’ sanatoria and holiday retreats.18

  Conditions were much worse outside the capital. In Nanjing a worker earning less than 20 yuan a month for himself was unable to afford anything beyond the most basic daily necessities. But in 1956 one in ten people throughout the city lived in sheer destitution, making no more than 7 yuan a month. This was despite the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of undesirables in the years after liberation. Half of these paupers were people impoverished as a result of collectivisation. They ranged from unemployed rickshaw pullers and small shopkeepers hounded out of their trade to the family members of victims denounced as counter-revolutionaries. Some were workers fired from state enterprises, often for the slightest infraction of labour discipline. These people were marked for life, becoming untouchables, pariahs living on the margins of society, unable to find another job.