Among workers in Nanjing, more than 7 per cent suffered from tuberculosis, 6 per cent had stomach ailments, another 6 per cent high blood pressure. Poisoning and work accidents were common. In the Nanjing Chemical Factory the concentration of harmful particles in the air exceeded the Soviet Union’s limit by a factor of 36. In the workshop dealing with saltpetre, ‘100 per cent of the workers, to varying degrees, suffer from poisoning,’ some of the worst cases causing an enlarged liver and spleen. Lungs infected with siliceous dust were common in glass and cement factories, while the number of trachoma and nose infections was ‘serious’.19
Comparisons with the years before liberation are fraught with difficulty, if only because so few detailed studies based on archival evidence are available. But the regime itself was keen to compare itself with its predecessor, and it enrolled its statisticians to come up with detailed, inflation-adjusted studies that went back to 1937, the peak of the nationalist era just before the onset of the Japanese invasion. Most were never published, and for good reason. They showed that in many cases life had been better two decades earlier. Workers in the Shenxin Textile Factory in Hankou, for instance, saw a steep decline in the amount of grain, pork and oil they could consume as well as the quantity of cloth they could buy after the revolution. By 1957, on average, a worker had an extra 6 kilos of grain per year, but almost half less pork, a third less edible oil and a fifth less cloth when compared with 1937. Many were malnourished. As Table 2 shows, the situation was hardly unique to that single factory, as workers were badly fed, badly clothed and badly housed, often in conditions not even equivalent to 1948, the height of the civil war.
Table 2: Average Annual Consumption and Living Space for Workers in Wuhan, 1937–57
Grain
(kilos)
Pork
(kilos)
Oil
(kilos)
Cloth
(metres)
Housing
(square metres)
Zhenyi Cotton Mill
1937
1948
1952
1957
157
150
161
147
8.8
2.8
7.8
5.2
7
4.5
7.3
5
10.6
4.2
8.7
6
6.5
2.7
3.9
3.9
Hankou Battery Factory
1937
1948
1952
1957
170
164
153
135
12.5
10.7
7.2
5
8.5
7.7
6.6
4.3
8
8.3
5.8
3.9
4
2.8
2.1
2.8
Wuchang Power Engine Factory
1937
1948
1952
1957
172
197
151
127
6.7
6.6
7.8
5
5.9
4.1
9.3
3.9
7.2
4.6
6
4.7
4.6
3.9
4.4
4.1
Wuchang Shipyard
1937
1948
1952
1957
159
146
167
146
8
6.5
6.5
5
5.5
7
6.5
4
7
4.7
10
7
5
4
4
4
Source: Hubei, 28 March 1958, SZ44-2-158, pp. 24, 38, 47 and 59
Even when by 1952 workers had witnessed some improvements, conditions invariably went downhill in the following five years. But these statistics mentioned only consumption, not the overall cost of living. From 1952 to 1957 living expenses went resolutely upwards. For the workers in the Shenxin Textile Factory mentioned above, the rent increased from 88 yuan a year in 1952 to 400 yuan five years later. In every factory surveyed by the Bureau for Statistics the trend was clear: average living space shrank while the rent crept up. In the Wuchang Shipyard, included in Table 2, rent rose from 271 yuan in 1948 to 361 yuan in 1952, then doubled to 721 yuan in 1955 and reached a phenomenal 990 yuan in 1957.20
Malnourishment and poor health were also common in schools. The Youth League, after a wide-ranging survey of middle-school students, declared that ‘their health is very bad’. In Wuhan, each received 300 grams of vegetables and 150 grams of bean products a month. Rough grains and sweet potatoes constituted the rest of the diet. In the entire province of Henan, no vegetables were served for a full month, with the food consisting of nothing but noodles. In Mianyang, Sichuan, students captured their diet in a popular ditty: ‘Rice is rare, it’s soup we get, the more you eat, the slimmer you get, the food is bad, the taste the same, there is no salt and there is no oil.’ In Liaoning province, one in three students was undernourished. In Yingkou, the busy port where the province’s maize, soybeans, apples and pears left by sea, students would regularly faint with hunger in physical education classes. Strict rationing was justified in the name of morality, as ‘eating too much grain is wasteful and lacking in communist virtue’. Those who went hungry were told to drink water: ‘boiled water also contains calories’. In Xinmin, a city just outside the provincial capital Shenyang, four out of ten students suffered from night blindness, a condition caused by malnutrition, in particular lack of vitamin A found in fish oils and dairy products. Some classes were held in temples or abandoned churches, although there never seemed to be enough light. Even in daytime, it could be ‘as dark as in a prison’.21
There were other setbacks. The regime was determined to eradicate disease and eliminate all pests, but this laudable goal was not always well served by mass campaigns that mobilised millions across the country. When people were given a quota of rat tails to be delivered to the authorities, they started breeding the rodents. The whole idea of a military campaign against epidemics, in which people were deployed in battalions, banners unfurled and bugles blaring, ran against common medical practice. This was the case with the drive to eliminate schistosomiasis. The number of people infected by the parasite increased every year after liberation, especially in parts of east China. The leadership ignored the issue. They were more interested in fighting the wasps and butterflies suspected of being infected with germs by enemy agents during the Korean War. Only after the Chairman had been shown the debilitating effects of schistosomiasis during a visit to Zhejiang province in November 1955 did the disease finally win attention from the party. Mao wrote a poem, grandly titled ‘Farewell to the Plague Spirit’, and in February 1956 he gave the order to start a mass campaign: ‘Schistosomiasis must be eliminated!’22
Millions of farmers were taken to lakes, crawling through the mud to catch the snails which transmitted the infection. But, all along, leading medical authorities had warned that any attempt to eradicate the disease simply by collecting snails was hopeless. The snails were merely the host of shistosome worms invisible to the human eye. Farmers and cattle who came into contact with the worms were at risk of infection, as the worms propagated themselves in the veins and liver of a parasitised body. Human and animal waste laden with worm eggs was then released back into the lakes, where the cycle was completed as the eggs hatched inside the bodies of the snails. The advice of experts was dismissed at best, denounced as bourgeois at worst. Snails were dug out and collected by hand by wh
ole platoons of villagers. New irrigation canals were opened up in order to block existing ones and bury the snails. The campaign relied on huge manpower, but as soon as it came to an end people were sent back to work in infected lakes to cut grass or collect reeds.23
This happened in Hubei, a central province along the Yangzi studded with a thousand lakes with dabbling ducks, lotus and water chestnuts. A third of the population there remained at risk. Despite glowing reports from local cadres bidding farewell to the plague spirit, more than 1.5 million people were still infected. In Hanchuan county, some 700 cases were cured during the campaign, but over a thousand new cases appeared immediately afterwards. In other provinces too, the archives show that the campaign barely dented the incidence of schistosomiasis. This was a country run by slogans and quotas, with one campaign following on the heels of another. There was little room for patient work in controlling the many dimensions of the disease, including better disposal of human waste. Collectivisation did not help, as people in co-operatives tended to care less for animals that did not belong to them, including the proper disposal of manure. Traditional rules of hygiene, including drinking boiled water and eating hot food, also suffered when people lived at the beck and call of party officials.24
In some cases a more frightening gap appeared between the world of propaganda and the reality on the ground. The People’s Republic enacted a stream of praiseworthy policies for the victims of leprosy, including the provision of leper colonies fitted with every possible amenity. Eliminating leprosy would have been an enormously complex task for any government at the time, all the more so since lepers were widely stigmatised. But in the People’s Republic local cadres could barely feed their own workforce. They had many other priorities, lowest among which were disfigured people suffering from a disease erroneously thought to be highly infectious. Prejudice was rampant, and a few educational pamphlets on the disease, distributed by the health authorities, were not about to change that situation overnight. A great deal of evidence buried in the party archives suggests that the situation actually became worse in the years following liberation, if only because the one-party state vested so much more power in local cadres than would ever have been possible in the past.
As missionaries were forced out of the country, sometimes existing leper colonies found themselves cut off from foreign funds. In Moxi, a deprived area high up in the mountains in Sichuan, they abandoned not only a church that proudly displayed its colourful bell tower, but also a leper colony with 160 patients, who were left to fend for themselves. Nobody came to their rescue, despite pleas for help. Soon some patients started leaving the colony to beg along the twisted, rutted mountain roads. Few were welcome. Some were hounded and beaten by frightened villagers. Several were buried alive. A report from the provincial health authorities stated: ‘Again one leper was buried alive in the summer of 1954 in Yongding county; similar circumstances also appeared in other counties.’ This was not confined to Sichuan alone. In neighbouring Guizhou, often rocked by rebellions from the minority people who lived in the hills and highlands that dominate the province, the number of infections increased sharply after liberation. As panic spread through the villages, some of the local cadres decided to burn the victims to death. This occurred on more than one occasion, one of the worst cases being a village where eight lepers perished at the stake. In some cases the militia acted on the orders of the local authorities: ‘The militia tied up a leper and burned him to death. His parents cried all day and night.’25
But the worst episode was probably in Yongren county, Yunnan, where a hundred lepers were set alight in June 1951. The idea was first proposed in a conference held by the county party committee a month earlier. Ma Xueshou, a high-ranking cadre in charge of rural affairs, proposed: ‘The lepers from the hospital in the fourth district often come out to wash and run about, it creates a bad impression among the masses, and they demand that they be burned.’ ‘We cannot burn them,’ answered the county party secretary. But Ma insisted, and a month later he volunteered to take full responsibility: ‘If the masses want to burn them, then let’s burn them, we should do it for the masses, it is their request, just do it and I will assume responsibility.’ Several others agreed. So the militia assembled all the lepers, locked them in the hospital and set the building on fire. The victims screamed for help, to no avail. Only six of 110 victims survived.26
Even when lepers received care, funds mysteriously disappeared. Who, after all, could call to account a few cadres looking after lepers in colonies far from the party centre? In Yanbian, Sichuan, the men in charge appropriated most of the available funds to build themselves spacious mansions. The mud huts for the patients, several kilometres further inland against the mountains, were so ramshackle that they were in imminent danger of collapse. But the problem was also one of scale. In all Guangdong province, by 1953 there were an estimated 100,000 lepers, although the medical authorities could afford to take care of only 2,000 cases.27
Lepers were among the most vulnerable members of society, and their needs were not served well by a one-party state that sought to control everyone but answered to nobody. But there were many other needy members of society whose fates came to lie entirely in the hands of local cadres. In some orphanages taken over from non-governmental organisations, the death rate stood at 30 per cent. The blind and the elderly found it difficult to fit into a new society where so much depended on the ability to take orders and earn work points. With the gradual stripping away of most basic liberties – freedom of expression, belief, assembly, association and movement – the majority of ordinary people became increasingly defenceless, as very little stood between them and the state.28
By 1956 many of the hopes that sprang from liberation years earlier had been dashed. Instead of treating people with respect, the state viewed them as mere digits on a balance sheet, a resource to be exploited for the greater good. Farmers had lost their land, their tools and their livestock in the name of collectivisation. They were forced to deliver ever larger shares of the crop to the state, answering the call of the bugle in the morning to follow orders from local cadres. In factories and shops in the cities, employees were treated more like bonded labour than the working-class heroes featured in official propaganda. They were pressed into working ever longer hours, chasing one production record after another even as their benefits steadily declined. Everybody, except those inside the party, had to tighten their belts in the pursuit of utopia. China was a country seething with discontent. Social strains were about to explode into open opposition to the regime.
14
Poisonous Weeds
A turning point in the communist world came in the early morning of 25 February 1956. On the final day of the Twentieth Congress, as foreign delegates were busy packing their bags, Nikita Khrushchev assembled the Soviet representatives for an unscheduled secret session in the Great Kremlin Palace, the Moscow residence of the Russian tsars. In a four-hour speech delivered without interruption, Khrushchev denounced the regime of suspicion, fear and terror created by Stalin. Launching a devastating attack on his former master, he accused him of being personally responsible for brutal purges, mass deportations, executions without trial and the torture of innocent party loyalists. Khrushchev further assailed Stalin for his ‘mania for greatness’ and the cult of personality he had fostered during his reign. Members of the audience listened in stunned silence. There was no applause at the end, as many of the delegates left in a state of shock.1
Copies of the speech were sent to foreign communist parties. It set off a chain reaction. In Beijing the Chairman was forced on to the defensive. Mao was China’s Stalin, the great leader of the People’s Republic. The secret speech could only raise questions about his own leadership, in particular the adulation surrounding him. DeStalinisation was nothing short of a challenge to Mao’s own authority. Just as Khrushchev pledged to return his country to the Politburo, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and others in Beijing spoke out in favour of t
he principles of collective leadership. At the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, a reference to Mao Zedong Thought was removed from the party charter, collective leadership was lauded and the cult of personality decried. Hemmed in by Khrushchev, Mao had little choice but to put a brave face on these measures, even contributing to them in the months prior to the congress. But the Chairman did not hide his anger when he spoke to Li Zhisui, accusing Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping of taking control of the agenda and pushing him into the background.2
Khrushchev also accused Stalin of ruining agriculture in the 1930s, even though he ‘never went anywhere, never met with workers and collective farmers’ and knew the country only from ‘films that dressed up and prettified the situation in the countryside’. This, too, must have been too close to the bone for a Chairman who viewed the country from the comfort of his private train, passing through stations emptied of all but security personnel. Khrushchev’s scathing comments on the failure of collective farming seemed like unintended criticism of the Socialist High Tide. Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun listened to the prompts from Moscow and tried to slow down the pace of collectivisation, calling in the summer of 1956 for an end to ‘rash advances’. They reduced the size of collective farms, reverted to a limited free market and allowed greater scope for private production. Mao saw this as a personal challenge. Atop an editorial of the People’s Daily criticising the High Tide for ‘attempting to do all things overnight’, forwarded to him for his approval, Mao angrily scrawled, ‘I will not read this.’ He later wondered, ‘Why should I read something that abuses me?’ In a severe personal setback, the Socialist High Tide was scrapped at the Eighth Party Congress.3
The secret speech also prompted calls for reform in Eastern Europe. In Poland, workers took to the streets in Poznań, protesting over higher work quotas and demanding better wages. In June 1956 a large crowd of over 100,000 gathered near the Imperial Castle occupied by the secret police and overwhelmed the premises, freeing all prisoners and seizing firearms. The headquarters of the communist party was ransacked. Soviet forces were called in, including tanks, armoured cars and field guns as well as more than 10,000 soldiers. Shots were fired at the demonstrators, killing up to a hundred and injuring many more. But the Polish United Workers’ Party, as the communist party was named, soon turned to conciliation under the leadership of Władysław Gomułka, raising wages and promising other political and economic reforms. It was the start of an era known as the Gomułka thaw, as communists tried to find a ‘Polish way to socialism’.
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Page 33