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

by Dikötter, Frank

  A few months later a rebellion broke out in Hungary, with thousands of students marching through the streets of Budapest. As a delegation tried to enter the radio building of the parliament to broadcast their demands to the nation, they were shot at by the public security police. Violence erupted throughout the country, as pitched battles took place between demonstrators and the police. Moscow tried to restore order by sending thousands of Soviet troops and tanks to the capital. Incensed, the population took to the streets and turned against the regime. In the narrow, cobbled streets of Budapest, rebels fought the tanks with Molotov cocktails. Revolutionary councils appeared across Hungary, seizing power from local authorities and clamouring for a general strike. Everywhere the insurgents smashed the hallowed symbols of communism, burning books, stripping red stars from buildings and tearing down memorials from their pedestals, including the large bronze statue of Stalin in Városliget, the main park in Budapest. By the end of the month, most Soviet troops had been forced to withdraw from the city. Imre Nagy, the new premier, formed a coalition government. Political prisoners were released. Non-communist parties that had been banned were now allowed and joined the coalition.

  For a few brief days, Moscow appeared to tolerate the new government. But on 31 October Hungary declared that it intended to leave the Warsaw Pact. The same day violence erupted again near the party headquarters in Budapest, as a crowd grabbed members of the secret police and hung them from lampposts. The scene was shown on Soviet newsreels a few hours later. Khrushchev, who was spending the week in Stalin’s dacha in the comfortable Lenin Hills overlooking downtown Moscow, agonised all night, fearful that the rebellion might spread to neighbouring countries and prompt the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He and his colleagues reversed their decision. On 4 November a large Soviet force invaded Hungary, killing thousands of rebels. Over 200,000 refugees fled across the border. Mass arrests were carried out over several months, as all public opposition was suppressed.

  The events triggered by deStalinisation were eagerly followed in China. In October 1956, Gomułka gave a dramatic speech that was reproduced in full in Beijing, promising ‘socialism with freedom’. He revealed that collectives in Poland produced much less than privately owned farms. But, for many readers in China, Gomułka’s remarks about the Soviet Union were the real bombshell. Poland was in debt because it had been forced to sell cheaply to the Soviet Union but pay dearly for imports. It seemed that the Russians were guilty of ‘imperialist exploitation’. And just when speculation over the Polish situation reached its height, news came of the Hungarian revolt, creating even more excitement in China. ‘For the first time,’ observed Robert Loh, ‘newspapers were read avidly. Previously, we had been forced to read them because the official press items were used as discussion topics in our regular mass organization meetings. Now, however, absenteeism soared while workers waited in block-long queues for a chance to buy a paper.’ People had to read between the lines, as the news was severely censored, but workers started invoking the example of Hungary in acts of defiance against the state.4

  Discontented people in all walks of life started taking to the streets. They were fed up, striking, demonstrating or petitioning the government for a whole variety of reasons. Students boycotted classes in schools and institutes of higher learning throughout the country. In the Nanjing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, built in 1952 on the site of an old Ming palace, over 3,000 students went on strike for a month in the autumn of 1956. The college had advertised itself as a leading university but was no more than a middle-ranking technical institute. A few streets away, in Nanjing Normal University, the situation also took a turn for the worse after the Public Security Bureau sheltered six students guilty of beating up a young man who had accidentally bumped into them. Soon calls for justice rang out from the campus. The police threatened to arrest the demonstrators for ‘starting a rebellion’, prompting 480 students to gather in front of the mayor’s office chanting slogans in favour of democracy and human rights. Nanjing was not the only city rocked by unrest. Until the archives are fully open, nobody will know for certain the extent of student discontent, but in just one medium-sized city – Xi’an – workers and students petitioned or went on strike on no fewer than forty separate occasions. By early 1957 over 10,000 students were up in arms all across the country.5

  Workers went on strike in unprecedented numbers. The Ministry of Industry counted more than 220 cases in 1956, the majority having started after October. Demonstrations in Shanghai attracted thousands of followers. A few were even led by party officials or members of the Youth League. Most of the workers protested against decreasing real income, poor housing and dwindling welfare benefits. Grievances had been mounting for many years, but what caused the explosion of discontent was the collectivisation of private enterprises under the Socialist High Tide. Outside Shanghai strikes also paralysed entire sectors of the economy. In Manchuria, 2,000 workers in grain transportation deliberately slowed their pace or petitioned the government for pay increases. When party officials retaliated by threatening to treat them as counter-revolutionaries, the strikers became even more determined. In Fuzhou, along the coast opposite Taiwan, workers petitioned the municipal government on sixty occasions.6

  In the countryside too, discontent with collectivisation mounted throughout 1956. The state had begun to introduce some reforms, reducing the size of collective farms and allowing villagers to trade some produce grown on their own private plots. Farmers, however, wanted the right to leave the collectives altogether. After a disastrous harvest in the autumn of 1956, everywhere in Xianju county, Zhejiang, villagers started making trouble. They withdrew from the collectives, clamoured against the party and beat up local cadres who stood in their way. Over a hundred collectives collapsed altogether. In Tai county, Jiangsu, thousands of petitioners approached the party headquarters with grievances, as whole parts of the economy in the region reverted back to barter trade in the wake of collectivisation. Villagers left the collectives in droves, some with their own cattle, seed and tools, determined to make it on their own.7

  In Guangdong tens of thousands of farmers were leaving the collectives by the winter of 1956–7, with the damage most pronounced in Zhongshan and Shunde counties. In some of the Shunde villages, up to a third of the people forcibly took back the land and started planting their own crops. They beat cadres who tried to intervene. In the Zhanjiang region, covering several counties, one out of every fifteen villagers was courageous enough to quit, in the full knowledge that they would become the target of violence from the militia, who dragged away their cattle and refused their children access to schools. Some were not even allowed to walk on the main streets. In Xinyi county irate farmers destroyed collective property, set fire to grain stores and even took knives to collective meetings, threatening party officials who refused to let them go.8

  Some of the local cadres even started speaking out against collectivisation. ‘Life in a co-operative is worse than in a labour camp,’ opined one. In Shantou, also in Guangdong, some party officials described the grain monopoly as a system of exploitation worse than the feudalism of the past. In Bao’an county, 60 per cent of cadres opposed the monopoly. A deputy secretary of Luoding county said the following about the collectives: ‘Before I went to the countryside I believed in the superiority of the co-operatives, but once I got there and ate gruel I became so hungry that my head spun, so I no longer feel that there is anything superior about it.’ At a party meeting in Yingde county, several participants openly expressed the view that the economy had been in better shape before 1949. In Yaxian county (Sanya), over forty leading cadres and their families followed the farmers in refusing to join the co-operatives. One head of a co-operative in Yangjiang county accused the party of having failed to provide farmers with anything more than gruel in the three years since the monopoly had been introduced. At a higher level, among the 14,264 cadres of eleven counties which made up the Huiyang region, over 10,000 were described as �
��confused’ in their thinking.9

  Some villagers – with or without the connivance of local cadres – made it all the way to the capital, despite the restrictions the household-registration system imposed on their freedom of movement. At any one time there were dozens of petitioners gathered outside the State Council, seeking redress in an act of last resort. In one case a woman with four emaciated infants approached the main gate with a sign strapped to her body: it read ‘starvation’, a stark term of accusation against a regime that had promised that nobody would die of hunger. On another occasion a man lit a lantern in broad daylight and approached the main gate of the party headquarters at Zhongnanhai seeking an audience with Chairman Mao. His unmistakable message was that the communist party was an agent of darkness which had shrouded the land.10

  Other groups of protesters reached the capital. Since liberation, 5.7 million soldiers had been demobilised, but they harboured many grievances. At best they were abandoned to their own fate in the countryside, but during collectivisation many were treated like pariahs, unable as they were to earn their keep. Half a million suffered from chronic diseases, although the regime showed little interest in their medical needs. Their anger spilled over in the winter of 1956–7, as large groups congregated in the cities to put pressure on the local authorities. A few organised revolutionary committees, promising with some bravado to launch a guerrilla campaign. Chen Zonglin, who hailed from a region ravaged by famine in Anhui, argued loudly: ‘if the government does not give us jobs we will fight them to the end!’ On five separate occasions groups of veterans camped in front of the State Council to press their demands.11

  Observing the strikes in Shanghai, Robert Loh felt that ‘One could feel new life flowing back into the beaten-down people, and it was indescribably exhilarating. Equally indescribable was the changed attitude of the communist officials. They were confused as well as frightened, and their arrogance was gone. They tried to placate everyone, especially the workers whom always they seemed to fear the most.’ For good reason, the cadres were in no position to suppress the strikes. The Chairman himself defended the democratic right of students, workers and peasants to express themselves and take to the streets. He had become a champion of the people, allowing a hundred flowers to bloom.12

  After Khrushchev had delivered his secret speech in February 1956, Mao spent two months carefully considering his position. He had to be cautious with Khrushchev. Not only was he the powerful head of the Soviet bloc, but he had also increased aid to the People’s Republic, trying to put relations with Beijing on a new footing after Stalin’s death. A year earlier Khrushchev had even promised to provide China with the expertise necessary to make an atomic bomb. The Chairman’s hands were also tied as his colleagues proposed to cut back on industrial projects and slow the pace of collectivisation, invoking Khrushchev to rein in his policies.

  Mao’s response to deStalinisation came on 25 April, when he addressed an enlarged meeting of the Politburo in a speech entitled ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’. China, he announced, was ready to strike out on its own, finding a Chinese way to socialism. The Chairman was scathing about those who ‘copy everything indiscriminately and transplant it mechanically’. Instead of slavishly following the old Stalinist model, with its lopsided emphasis on heavy industry, China should develop its own version of socialism. The Soviet Union had made a grave mistake by taking too much from the peasants through a system of compulsory sales, but China, he explained, took into account the interests of both peasants and the state by having a very low agricultural tax. He believed that ‘We have done better than the Soviet Union and a number of East European countries,’ where agriculture and light industry had been neglected. In developing its own road to socialism, China should even learn from capitalist countries. But those who followed Khrushchev in rejecting every aspect of Stalin’s legacy were also wrong: ‘When the north wind is blowing, they join the north; tomorrow, when there is a west wind blowing, they switch to the west.’ ‘In the Soviet Union,’ he added, ‘those who once extolled Stalin to the skies have now in one swoop buried him thirty kilometres deep in the ground.’ Mao saw himself as occupying the middle ground, declaring that Stalin was a great Marxist who was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.

  The Chairman was seeking consensus, trying to rally his colleagues around him by accommodating many of the objections that had been raised against collectivisation. He stole their agenda by proposing a balance between heavy industry on the one hand and light industry and agriculture on the other. This was necessary ‘to ensure the livelihood of the people’. The ‘pressing problems in their work and daily life’ must be addressed and wages adjusted. Mao championed the ordinary man.

  But he went much further than merely making concessions on the economy. Seeking to reclaim moral leadership over the party, he tried to do so by posing as a protector of democratic values. He admonished his colleagues, placing himself above them: ‘The Communist Party fears two things: first it fears the people noisily crying like a baby, and secondly it fears the democrats making comments. If what they say makes sense, how can you not listen?’ Less than a year earlier, Mao had denounced Liang Shuming and Peng Yihu as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Now he praised them as the guardians of democracy: ‘We have deliberately kept the democratic parties, we have not knocked them down, nor have we knocked down Liang Shuming or Peng Yihu. We should unite all the people around us, let them abuse us and oppose us. As long as their abuse is reasonable, no matter who says what, we can accept it, it is very useful for the party, the people and socialism.’ He embraced other parties: ‘We should hail two parties, long live the Communist Party, and long live the Democratic Party, but we should not hail the capitalist class, they should have no more than two or three years left.’13

  Mao outdid Khrushchev. Months earlier he had been forced on the defensive, looking like an ageing leader out of touch with reality and clinging to a model that had failed in the past. Now he, rather than Khrushchev, was the true rebel, striking a far more liberal and conciliatory tone than his counterpart in Moscow. A week later, on 2 May, he encouraged freedom of expression among intellectuals, asking the party to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend’.

  But Mao was still annoyed with his colleagues. He had been compelled to endorse spending cuts and other economic reforms, and there was nothing he could do to block a return to the principles of collective leadership. A few days later he boarded a plane and travelled to the south, trying to bolster support from regional leaders. At the end of May, he sent a warning signal to his inner circle by swimming in the muddy, dangerous Yangzi, the mightiest river in China. He did so on three occasions, despite strong currents and whirlpools, surrounded by his security men. Dr Li Zhisui had to use all his energy to stay afloat. He was a fast learner. He turned around and soon floated along with the Chairman, basking in the sun. By braving the Yangzi, the Chairman had demonstrated his determination to his colleagues. A poem soon followed:

  I don’t care whether the winds thrash me or the waves pound me,

  I meet them all, more leisurely than strolling in the garden court.14

  Over the following months Mao continued to approve popular unrest and open discussion of the country’s problems. He kept quiet during the Eighth Party Congress, which dropped the Socialist High Tide, deleted all reference to Mao Zedong Thought from the constitution and denounced the cult of personality. He appeared conciliatory, biding his time.

  The Hungarian revolt provided him with an opportunity to reclaim the initiative. As Soviet troops crushed the rebels in Budapest in early November, the Chairman faulted the Hungarian Communist Party for having become an ‘aristocratic stratum divorced from the masses’, allowing complaints among the people to fester and run out of control. Mao wanted a purge of the ranks in its Chinese counterpart to avoid a similar fate. What he proposed was nothing less than a new Rectification Campaign, invoking the days of Yan’an when he had compelled every party
member to go through the wringer, ferreting out spies and enemy agents. The real dangers, Mao opined in a meeting with his top echelon, were not workers and students demonstrating on the streets, but ‘dogmatism’, ‘bureaucratism’ and ‘subjectivism’ inside the party itself. ‘The party needs to be given some lessons. It is a good thing that students demonstrate against us.’ In 1942, Mao had asked young, idealistic volunteers to attack ‘dogmatism’ inside the party, trying to use them against his rivals. Now he wanted the Chinese Communist Party to welcome critical views from outsiders in a great reckoning: ‘Those who insult the masses should be liquidated by the masses.’ Mao was using the students and workers on strike everywhere in the country as a way of putting his comrades on notice.15

  There was, of course, the danger that some intellectuals would voice counter-revolutionary ideas. In 1942, instead of following the Chairman’s cues, the young volunteers had savaged the way in which the red capital was run. Mao turned against them with a vengeance, forcing them to denounce each other in endless struggle meetings. But fourteen years later the Chairman was confident that this would not happen again. Repeated campaigns of thought reform had produced a pliant intelligentsia. Only a year earlier 770,000 people had been arrested as counter-revolutionaries. Mao assured his doubtful colleagues that they had nothing to fear, as ‘right now nine and a half out of ten counter-revolutionaries have already been cut out’. This was confirmed by security boss Luo Ruiqing two weeks later. During the Hungarian uprising a few weeks earlier, he reported, some people had written anonymously to advocate the overthrow of the party. A few even wanted to get rid of the Chairman. But these were isolated voices, as all the hotbeds of counter-revolution had been successfully wiped out the previous year.16