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

by Dikötter, Frank

  Many victims initially thought that the anti-rightist campaign had nothing to do with them, since they had only answered the call of the party when airing their views. This was the case with Wu Ningkun. But as the faculty at his university spent weeks studying party directives and newspaper editorials, he was soon made to recant and confess to being a bourgeois rightist. Colleagues and friends shunned him. He sat through meetings like a criminal awaiting his sentence, almost relieved when he was finally sent away to a labour camp in the Great Northern Wilderness.37

  Even party members who were convinced that they had played it safe found themselves facing inquisitorial meetings, with rows of stern committee members subjecting their victims to endless interrogations and denunciations. This was the case with Yue Daiyun, who was put in charge of a committee tasked with denouncing five people as rightists. She spent all summer poring over the records of dozens of colleagues. Then came her turn to face accusations of rightism. ‘Surely such a serious accusation could not be applied to me, I reasoned; surely the error would be quickly corrected.’ She had to face her entire department, as eight to nine people stood up, one after the other, calling her a traitor and a counter-revolutionary. Some of the most vicious accusations came from a young teacher who had also been labelled a rightist, as he was eager for a chance to prove himself to the party.38

  Some meetings degenerated into shouting sessions during which the victims were physically abused, with their hair grabbed and their heads pressed down on to the stage. This happened to several university professors in Beijing. In one case a participant was so furious that he shattered a teacup on the head of a victim at the Beijing Institute of Politics and Law. But intellectuals were still relatively safe from the physical violence that would erupt during the Cultural Revolution in 1966.39

  Far more distressing was the arbitrary nature of the campaign. Mao had set a quota on the number of rightists and every unit in the country had to meet it. The criteria for identifying a rightist were so vague that they could potentially include almost anyone who had ever voiced an opinion. ‘Opposing socialist culture’, ‘opposing socialist economic and political systems’, ‘opposing the fundamental policies of the state’, ‘denying the achievements of the people’s democratic revolution, the socialist revolution and socialist construction’ and ‘opposing the leadership of the Communist Party’ were all fatal mistakes.

  Even with these sweeping criteria, many of the victims were merely ‘accidental dissidents’, to use the expression of historian Wang Ning. In some places the cadres simply ticked names off a list to fill their quota. In one theatre employees were asked to draw lots. One cashier was selected as the token rightist. Qian Xinbo, a journalist in the Central People’s Broadcast Service, was approached by a cadre and asked how he felt about being named as a rightist, since several of his friends had already been denounced. ‘I don’t have a lot to say, let the party decide,’ Qian answered meekly, knowing that the party committee had already determined his fate. One young woman aged seventeen was packed off to the gulag for displaying ‘blind faith in foreign imperialist things’: she had praised shoe polish made in the United States.40

  Jealousy and personal animosity, as always, played a role. One young man was brought down for rising too quickly in the ranks. As He Ying explained:

  I became a rightist at the age of nineteen. I was the youngest editor in a literature journal in Jilin, and was well known in the literary circle of the province. I got higher pay than many of my colleagues, and I became a focus of public attention. So sometimes I was overconfident and arrogant. Many of my colleagues were jealous and wanted to see me brought down. I kept quiet about politics during the Hundred Flowers, but they convinced the party secretary to label me a rightist when the campaign started.

  The story told by Yin Jie is strikingly similar: ‘When I was studying at college, I got a higher allowance than many of my fellow students . . . In addition, I did not study hard but always got good marks. Therefore I became a target of jealousy. Some people really hated me. When the campaign started, they urged the head of my department to label me as a rightist.’41

  One response to false accusations was suicide. Cong Weixi witnessed how a victim jumped to his death in the middle of a denunciation meeting. ‘As the high pitch of condemnation echoed around the hall, a man sitting a couple of rows in front of me suddenly stood up. Before I realised what was happening, he quickly went for the balcony of the fourth floor and dived . . . Blood! I saw blood when I looked out. I covered my eyes as I did not have the courage to look any more.’ There were thousands of similar cases, and always suicide was interpreted as a final act of betrayal of the people. Hu Sidu, who had denounced his father Hu Shi in 1950 and striven to join the communist party, was hounded to his death after he had put forward suggestions to improve the quality of teaching in his college.42

  At the other extreme were those who not only accepted the party’s judgement, but actually volunteered to go to the Great Northern Wilderness to seek introspection and self-renewal. Ding Ling, who had been the star of leftist literature in the 1930s, agreed with her husband that they should ‘renew themselves’ and carve out a new road ahead by following the values of the Chinese Communist Party. Some intellectuals had tied their own destinies so closely to the party that they simply could not envisage life without it.43

  More than half a million people were labelled during the anti-rightist campaign, including intellectuals like Ding Ling who had devoted their entire careers to the party. The leadership itself had been put on notice, knowing that Mao could call upon the people to attack them. Many party leaders fell into line, no longer daring to question the Chairman’s policies. The cautious views of Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun on the economy were pushed aside. Mao was ebullient. Less than a decade after liberation, he was ready to push for a new, bold experiment that would propel China to the forefront of the socialist camp. Mao called it the Great Leap Forward, as the country would accelerate the pace of collectivisation and soar into a communist utopia of plenty for all. Over the next four years, tens of millions of people would be worked, starved or beaten to death in the greatest man-made catastrophe the country had ever seen.

  Notes

  For abbreviations used in the Notes, please see Bibliography, p. 399.

  1: Siege

  1 Jiang Yanyan, ‘Changchun yixia shuiguandao gongdi wachu shuqian ju shigu’ (Thousands of skeletons excavated at a construction site), Xin wenhua bao, 4 June 2006.

  2 Zhang Zhenglong, Xuebai xuehong (Snow is white but blood is red), Hong Kong: Dadi chubanshe, 1991, p. 441.

  3 ‘Northern Theater’, Time, 2 June 1947.

  4 Cable by Li Keting to Chiang Kai-shek, 11 June 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002080200330042.

  5 Order from Chiang Kai-shek, 12 June 1948, Guoshiguan, file 00206010000240012; Fred Gruin, ‘30,000,000 Uprooted Ones’, Time, 26 July 1948.

  6 Zhang, Xuebai xuehong, p. 469; Wang Junru interviewed by Andrew Jacobs, ‘China is Wordless on Traumas of Communists’ Rise’, New York Times, 1 Oct. 2009.

  7 Cable from Li Keting, 24 June 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002080200331025; cable from Li Keting, 14 Aug. 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002090300188346; Duan Kewen, Zhanfan zishu (Autobiography of a war criminal), Taipei: Shijie ribaoshe, 1976, p. 3.

  8 Cable to Chiang Kai-shek, 26 Aug. 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002020400016104; order from Chiang Kai-shek to Zheng Guodong, 17 Aug. 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002080200426044; ‘Time for a Visit?’, Time, 1 Nov. 1948; Henry R. Lieberman, ‘Changchun Left to Reds by Chinese’, New York Times, 7 Oct. 1949.

  9 Cable from Li Keting, 13 July 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002090300187017; Zhang Yinghua interviewed by Andrew Jacobs, ‘China is Wordless’; Song Zhanlin interviewed by Zhang Zhenglong, Xuebai xuehong, p. 474.

  10 Zheng Dongguo, Wo de rongma shengya: Zheng Dongguo huiyi lu, Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1992, ch. 7; Duan, Zhanfan zishu, p. 5; Wang Daheng, Wo de bange shiji (The first half-century of my life), online publication, Qing pingg
uo dianzi tushu xilie, pp. 7–8; see also Zhang Zhiqiang and Wang Fang (eds), 1948, Changchun: Wei neng jichu de jiaxin yu zhaopian (1948, Changchun: The family letters and photos that were never sent), Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2003.

  11 ‘Time for a Visit?’, Time, 1 Nov. 1948; Zhang, Xuebai xuehong, p. 446; cable by Li Keting to Chiang Kai-shek, 2 Sept. 1948, Guoshiguan, file 002090300191009.

  12 ‘Time for a Visit?’, Time, 1 Nov. 1948.

  13 Zhang, Xuebai xuehong, p. 467.

  2: War

  1 Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder out of China, London: Victor Gollancz, 1947, p. 259, with a minor stylistic change; ‘Victory’, Time, 20 Aug. 1945; ‘Wan Wan Sui!’, Time, 27 Aug. 1945.

  2 Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon (eds), Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2001; Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover-Up, London: Routledge, 1994; Konrad Mitchell Lawson, ‘Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953’, doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2012.

  3 Stephen MacKinnon, ‘Refugee Flight at the Outset of the anti-Japanese War’, in Lary and MacKinnon, Scars of War, pp. 118–35; see also R. Keith Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the Sino-Japanese War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

  4 ‘I am Very Optimistic’, Time, 3 Sept. 1945.

  5 White and Jacoby, Thunder out of China, p. 263.

  6 C. K. Cheng, The Dragon Sheds its Scales, New York: New Voices Publishing, 1952, p. 122.

  7 Stalin’s requirements on seven typescript pages are mentioned in John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia, New York: Viking Press, 1947, p. 248; see also David M. Glantz, The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: ‘August Storm’, London: Frank Cass, 2003, p. 9, and Robert H. Jones, The Roads to Russia: United States Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969, pp. 184–5.

  8 ‘To the Bitter End’, Time, 20 Aug. 1945.

  9 Michael M. Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 103 and 156.

  10 Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 317.

  11 Ibid., pp. 321–3.

  12 ‘The Short March’, Time, 17 Dec. 1945.

  13 Yang Kuisong, Mao Zedong yu Mosike de enen yuanyuan (Mao and Moscow), Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1999, ch. 8; Yang Kuisong, ‘Zhongjian didai’ de geming: Guoji da beijing xia kan Zhonggong chenggong zhi dao, Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 2010, p. 474; essential on the relationship between Mao and Stalin is Dieter Heinzig, The Soviet Union and Communist China 1945–1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004.

  14 Taylor, The Generalissimo, pp. 323–4.

  15 James M. McHugh, letter to his wife dated 30 June 1946, Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, quoted in Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009,p. 530; ‘Wounds’, Time, 18 March 1946; William Gray, ‘Looted City’, Time, 11 March 1946; Taylor, The Generalissimo, p. 327; see also ‘Soviet Removals of Machinery’, 8 July 1947, US Central Intelligence Agency Report, CIA-RDP82-00457D00070010002-5, National Archives at Park College.

  16 Zhang Baijia, ‘Zhou Enlai and the Marshall Mission’, in Larry I. Bland (ed.), George C. Marshall’s Mediation Mission to China, December 1945–January 1947, Lexington, VA: George C. Marshall Foundation, 1998, pp. 213–14; Simei Qing, ‘American Visions of Democracy and the Marshall Mission to China’, in Hongshan Li and Zhaohui Hong (eds), Image, Perception, and the Making of U.S.–China Relations, Lanham, MA: University Press of America, 1998, p. 283; Taylor, The Generalissimo,p. 346.

  17 Zhang, Xuebai xuehong, pp. 170–1; Marshall to Truman, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 9, p. 510, quoted in Chang Jung and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005,p. 295.

  18 Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 297; Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism, p. 156; Steven I. Levine, Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945–1948, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987,p. 178.

  19 Taylor, The Generalissimo, p. 358; Freda Utley, The China Story, Chicago: H. Regnery, 1951, ch. 2.

  20 Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, pp. 242–3.

  21 Carsun Chang, The Third Force in China, New York: Bookman Associates, 1952, p. 172.

  22 Associated Press Report, 24 July 1947, quoted in Michael Lynch, Mao, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 141; ‘Report on China’, Time, 13 Oct. 1947.

  23 Utley, The China Story, ch. 2.

  24 Taylor, The Generalissimo, pp. 378–9.

  25 ‘Worse & Worse’, Time, 26 Jan. 1948.

  26 ‘Sick Cities’, Time, 21 June 1948.

  27 ‘Next: The Mop-Up’, Time, 23 Feb. 1948; ‘Rout’, Time, 8 Nov. 1948; Henry R. Lieberman, ‘300,000 Starving in Mukden’s Siege’, New York Times, 2 July 1948; Seymour Topping, Journey between Two Chinas, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 312.

  28 Frederick Gruin, ‘30,000,000 Uprooted Ones’, Time, 26 July 1948.

  29 Taylor, The Generalissimo, pp. 385–9.

  30 Doak Barnett, letter no. 25, ‘Communist Siege at Peiping’, 1 Feb. 1949, Institute of Current World Affairs; ‘One-Way Street’, Time, 27 Dec. 1948.

  31 Taylor, The Generalissimo, p. 396; Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 308–9.

  32 Derk Bodde, Peking Diary: A Year of Revolution, New York: Henry Schuman, 1950, pp. 100–1; Doak Barnett, letter no. 25, ‘Communist Siege at Peiping’, 1 Feb. 1949, Institute of Current World Affairs; ‘Defeat’, Time,7 Feb. 1949; Jia Ke interviewed by Jane Macartney in ‘How We Took Mao Zedong to the Gate of Heavenly Peace, by Jia Ke, 91’, The Times, 12 Sept. 2009.

  33 Sun Youli and Dan Ling, Engineering Communist China: One Man’s Story, New York: Algora Publishing, 2003, pp. 10–11.

  34 Arne Odd Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 259; Bo Yibo, Ruogan zhongda shijian yu juece de huigu (Recollections of several important decisions and events), Beijing: Zhonggong zongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 160–1.

  35 ‘To Defend the Yangtze’, Time, 20 Dec. 1948; Roy Rowan, Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist’s Firsthand Account of the 1946–9 Chinese Revolution, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2004, p. 146.

  36 Frederick Gruin, ‘Eighteen Levels Down’, Time, 20 Dec. 1948; Su Yu, Su Yu junshi wenji (Collected military writings by Su Yu), Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1989, p. 455, quoted in Luo Pinghan, Dangshi xijie (Details in the history of the Communist Party), Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2011, p. 150; ‘Or Cut Bait’, Time, 29 Nov. 1948.

  37 Long Yingtai, Da jiang da hai 1949 (Big river, big sea: Untold stories of 1949), Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 2009, p. 221.

  38 Topping, Journey between Two Chinas, p. 29.

  39 Ibid., p. 43.

  40 ‘Sunset’, Time, 31 Jan. 1949.

  41 ‘Shore Battery’, Time, 2 May 1949; Rowan, Chasing the Dragon,pp. 195–6.

  42 Topping, Journey between Two Chinas, pp. 64–7; Robert Doyle, ‘Naked City’, Time, 2 May 1949.

  43 Topping, Journey between Two Chinas, pp. 64–7.

  44 Ibid., p. 73; Robert Doyle, ‘Naked City’, Time, 2 May 1949; Jonathan Fenby, Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present, New York: Ecco, 2008, p. 346.

  45 ‘Swift Disaster’, Time, 2 May 1949; Rowan, Chasing the Dragon, p. 201.

  46 ‘The Weary Wait’, Time, 23 May 1949; Rowan, Chasing the Dragon, pp. 198–9; Jack Birns, Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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  47 ‘Will They Hurt Us’, Time, 16 May 1949.

  48 Mariano Ezpeleta, Red Shadows over Shanghai, Quezon City: Zita, 1972, p. 185.

  49 Christopher Howe, Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 43.

  50 Feng Bingxing interviewed by the Shanghai Daily, ‘Shanghai Celebrates its 60th year of Liberation’, Shanghai Daily, 28 May 2009.

  51 ‘The Communists Have Come’, Time, 6 June 1949; Rowan, Chasing the Dragon, pp. 198–9.

  52 Dwight Martin, ‘Exile in Canton’, Time, 17 April 1949.

  53 ‘Next: Chungking’, Time, 24 Oct. 1949.

  54 Doak Barnett, letter no. 17, ‘Sinkiang Province’, 9 Sept. 1948, Institute of Current World Affairs.

  55 Doak Barnett, letter no. 21, ‘Kansu, Sinkiang, Chinghai, Ninghsia’,15 Oct. 1948, Institute of Current World Affairs.

  56 Doak Barnett, letter no. 20, ‘Kansu, Province, Northwest China’, 8 Oct. 1948, Institute of Current World Affairs.

  57 On the history of Xinjiang, see Andrew D. W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Republican Sinkiang, 1911–1949, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; see also the memoirs of Sheng Shicai in Allen S. Whiting and General Sheng Shih-tsai, Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot?, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1958; letter from Peng Dehuai to Mao Zedong, 29 Dec. 1949, RGASPI, 82-2-1241, pp. 194–7; Trade Agreement with Peng Dehuai for Xinjiang, 5 Jan. 1950, RGASPI, 82-2-1242, pp. 20–39; on Russian troops in December 1949 see O. C. Ellis, Report from Tihwa, 15 Nov. 1950, PRO, FO371-92207, p. 7; on the communist conquest and subsequent rule of Xinjiang, one should also read James Z. Gao, ‘The Call of the Oases: The “Peaceful Liberation” of Xinjiang, 1949–53’, in Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz (eds), Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 184–204.