Read The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Online
Authors: Frank Dikötter
Another form of impoverishment appeared. Many of the people targeted during the campaign were hardly better off than their neighbours, but across the country there were also families who had accumulated considerable material wealth. Whether scholars, merchants or politicians, many were committed collectors of art objects, sometimes just a few small curios, inkstones, water droppers or figurines to decorate a desk or complement a study, sometimes more extensive collections of rare manuscripts, bronze coins, wooden furniture or ink paintings. In fact, such was the respect for high culture in a country governed for centuries by scholar officials that few households that could afford it lived without some token of the past.
Some of this was distributed during land reform, but much was destroyed, to the point where in June 1951 the Ministry of Culture ordered all antiques and rare books confiscated during land reform to be collected and inventoried. In many cases it was too late. In Shandong, for instance, most of the antiques had already been burned or consigned to the scrap heap, recycled as so many relics of an exploitative past. As an investigation carried out by the party revealed, ‘Everywhere old books that were considered to contain feudal ideas were thrown away or used as old paper.’ Much larger remnants of feudalism were attacked. In Jining, the Taibai Tower, where the famed Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai was rumoured to have lived, was torn down (a replica was erected in 1952). In Liaocheng the grave of the eighteenth-century poet and painter Gao Fenghan was excavated. In Jimo the labouring masses helped themselves to six graves dating back to the Han dynasty. In Zibo several Buddhist statues and temples, seen as so many marks of superstition, were mutilated. In Laoshan, a coastal mountain near Qingdao considered to be one of the birthplaces of Taoism, a large collection of more than a hundred Ming and Qing scriptures from the Huayan Temple were used as scrap. Some of the classics of Buddhism were used to roll cigarettes. There were many other examples, ‘too many to enumerate’, according to one report, as many cadres treated historical relics as ‘rubbish’ or ‘superstition’.
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By all accounts, by the end of 1951 over 10 million landlords had been expropriated and more than 40 per cent of the land had changed hands. The exact number of victims killed in the land reform will never be known, but it is unlikely to have been fewer than 1.5 to 2 million people from 1947 to 1952. Millions more had their lives destroyed by being stigmatised as exploiters and class enemies.
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5
By the summer of 1950 the communists had few friends left. The party, Mao explained to his colleagues, was ‘hitting out in all directions’, making nothing but enemies. Capitalists disliked the communist party, the jobless were restless and most workers were disgruntled thanks to the economic slump. In the countryside villagers were taxed to the hilt, while in the cities intellectuals feared losing their jobs. Those working in the arts resented political interference. Opposition to the new regime was rife in religious circles. ‘The entire country is tense,’ Mao noted, and ‘we are rather lonely’. The party had to make friends and isolate its enemies one by one. Ease up the pressure on the ethnic minorities, he advocated. Appease private merchants, create a united front with democrats and take a long view in reforming intellectuals. ‘Advance slowly.’
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Who were the real enemies who should be tackled? ‘Our general policy’, Mao continued, ‘is to eliminate the remnant Nationalist forces, the secret agents and the bandits, overthrow the landlord class, liberate Taiwan and Tibet and fight imperialism to the end.’
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Less than three weeks after Chairman Mao’s speech, the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th-parallel border and invaded South Korea. On 25 June 1950, the United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the invasion, and a few days later President Truman rallied to the defence of his South Korean ally. A UN counter-offensive under General Douglas MacArthur drove the North Koreans back past the 38th parallel on 1 October 1950, the first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Two hundred thousand Chinese troops secretly entered North Korea on 18 October. A week later they attacked the UN troops near the Sino-Korean border.
The war provided a pretext to rally popular support for the regime and strike hard against the enemies Mao had described only months earlier. On 10 October, traditionally celebrated as National Day by the nationalists, Mao issued a directive to liquidate ‘remnant nationalist forces’, ‘secret agents’, ‘bandits’ and other ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who stood in the path of revolution. For a full year a Great Terror would run alongside land reform, shaking the country to its very roots and forcing people from all walks of life to take sides.
How many ‘bandits’ and ‘secret agents’ were still threatening to overthrow the communist regime in October 1950? Quite a few according to the propaganda machine, relentlessly pumping out dark warnings of sabotage and subversion by hidden spies and fifth columnists. Paranoia was intrinsic to the regime, which lived in fear of its own shadow. The party had long developed a habit of blaming every setback on real or imagined enemies. Behind every poisoned well or granary that went up in flames lurked a spy or landlord. Every act of resistance by ordinary farmers – and there were many – was seen as proof of counter-revolution. Tension was also deliberately cultivated to keep people on edge and justify ever more intrusive forms of policing.
On the other hand there was a real threat to the new regime in much of the south. As we have seen, dozens of armed rebellions and popular insurrections endangered the regime in provinces such as Hubei, Sichuan and Guizhou. In Guangxi, a subtropical province covered in karst mountains and lush forests on the border of Vietnam, over 1,400 cadres and 700 troops had been ambushed and killed by opposition elements by the summer of 1950. The communists had eliminated 170,000 nationalist troops from the province in the first months of liberation, but soon violence flared up again, as villagers joined the opposition. In Yulin county over 200 villages took part in armed rebellions. In a single village in Yining county a third of all men vanished into the forest to join the rebel forces. For decades the communists had waged a highly mobile war on the nationalist government in scattered raids and ambushes, striking vulnerable targets only to withdraw immediately into the countryside. ‘The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.’ So Mao had written in 1930. Now his own party faced the threat of guerrilla warfare in the south.
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Mao singled out Guangxi for special blame, lambasting its leaders for ‘shocking leniency’ towards the insurgents. The province acted quickly, killing 3,000 guerrilla fighters in the first couple of months following the 10 October 1950 directive. Then Mao sent Tao Zhu, the man popularly characterised as a ‘tank’, to crush all opposition, killing 15,000 people by March 1951. Over 100,000 were sent to prison, where many died of starvation and sickness. In parts of Yulin a fifth of the entire population was put behind bars. Others were labelled as landlords, their wives and children persecuted in their absence. By the summer of 1951, Tao Zhu wired a message to Mao: ‘Guangxi: 450,000 bandits pacified; 40,000 killed; one-third may or may not have deserved death.’
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By the time the campaign ended in October 1951, a total of 46,200 had been killed, or 2.56 per thousand of the total population in the province. In other words, more than one person out of every 400 had been executed.
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But the terror was just as relentless elsewhere. The man Mao entrusted with overseeing the operation was Luo Ruiqing. He was born into a landlord family in Nanchong, a region rich in rice, oranges and silkworms in mountainous Sichuan. He never smiled, having suffered a facial injury while fighting against the nationalists. His mouth was frozen in a permanent rictus. Like Lin Biao, Luo was trained in the famed Whampoa Military Academy under Chiang Kai-shek, but joined the communist party in 1928. He was one of the first to be sent to the Soviet Union, where he worked with the secret police. In Yan’an, he was put in charge of cleaning up an anti-Mao faction in the rival Fourth Front Army. This he apparently did with such ‘crudeness, savagery and maliciousness’, according to one high-profile refugee, that he earned the gratitude of the Chairman. Once he became head of the security machine in Beijing, he hung a huge portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky in his office. The founder of the Cheka, the infamous state security organisation in the Soviet Union, was his model and mentor.
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Luo was an essential cog in the machinery of repression, transmitting the Chairman’s orders directly to the provincial leaders. When Li Xiannian, the leader of Hubei, went to see him in Beijing in January 1951, a mere 220 counter-revolutionaries had been liquidated in his province. The killings accelerated. By February 8,000 suspects had been executed, followed by a further 7,000 in the spring. Soon 37,000 people had been eliminated, as parts of the countryside descended into a reign of terror where cadres ruled by the gun. So habitual became reliance on terror that Li Xiannian could no longer restrain the campaign he had started. Some local officials refused to stop the killings, using terror as a routine tool of control. They blackmailed their superiors when told to curb the executions: ‘If I am not allowed to kill people, I won’t help out with production and I won’t mobilise the masses. I’ll just wait till you issue me with your permission and then I’ll work on the masses.’ In the end, more than 45,000 people were killed, or 1.75 per thousand of the population in Hubei.
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Like steel production or grain output, death came with a quota mandated from above. Luo Ruiqing could not possibly oversee the arrest, trial and disposal of the many millions who became the targets of terror, so instead Mao handed down a killing quota as a rough guide for action. The norm, he felt, was one per thousand, a ratio he was willing to adjust to the particular circumstances of each region. His subordinates kept track of local killing rates like bean counters, occasionally negotiating for a higher quota. In May 1951 Guangxi province, for instance, was told to kill more, even though a rate of 1.63 per thousand had already been achieved. Guizhou province, destabilised by popular uprisings, requested permission to kill three per thousand, and the Liuzhou region five per thousand. ‘The provincial party committee of Guizhou requests a target of three per thousand, that too is too much, I feel. This is how I look at it: we can go over one per thousand, but not by too much.’ Once a death rate of two per thousand had been achieved, the Chairman opined, people should be sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to work in labour camps.
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Mao adjudicated the numbers, posing as a voice of moderation. He lashed out at ‘rightists’ who fell behind their target but reined in the zeal of ‘leftists’. Words of praise were handed out in directives circulated among the top leadership. In March 1951 the Chairman lauded Henan for having killed 12,000 counter-revolutionaries, as the province steeled itself for liquidating another batch of 20,000 in the spring, bringing the total to about 32,000. ‘In a province of 30 million that is a good number.’ But figures were merely a guide, he warned, as more might have to be killed. Mao emphasised that the terror should be ‘stable’ (
wen
), ‘precise’ (
zhun
) and ‘ruthless’ (
hen
): the campaign should be carried out with surgical precision, without any slippage into random slaughter, which would undermine the standing of the party. ‘But before anything else, the term “ruthless” has to be emphasised.’ Perusing the reports he was handed by Luo Ruiqing, he nudged the country further: ‘In provinces where few have been killed a large batch should be killed; the killings can absolutely not be allowed to stop too early.’
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Mao was deliberately vague, forcing his underlings to pore over every one of his numerous remarks, speeches and directives for guidance on how to carry out the terror. He allowed his subordinates to compete with each other in presenting new ideas and policies. Mao casually picked and chose from among their proposals. This form of government allowed ambitious elements to push for a more radical implementation of what they thought were the Chairman’s true intentions, although it left them open to criticism later if their initiatives backfired. It also meant that everybody in the top leadership became implicated in the terror. Nobody merely acted under orders, as leaders created their own guidelines, trying to guess what was required of them. Deng Zihui, the regional boss of south China, and Deng Xiaoping, for instance, suggested in February 1951 that between half and two-thirds of all counter-revolutionaries be executed. Mao approved, on condition that the killings be ‘secretly controlled, without disorder or mistakes’.
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Another proposal came from Rao Shushi, the man in control of the east of the country. On 29 March 1951, Rao proposed that the campaign be moved from the ‘outer circle’ to the ‘inner circle’, meaning that the fight should be taken to traitors and spies within the party. Mao approved, sweeping aside the idea that the party was ‘killing too much’. A central directive on a purge of enemies within the ranks was issued on 21 May 1951.
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By April 1951 three out of every five provinces had reached or surpassed the target of one per thousand. In Guizhou three per thousand had been eliminated, despite the words of admonition from the Chairman.
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Over a million people lingered in prison, and Luo Ruiqing ordered all arrests to cease for several months so that the backlog could be cleared. But by the summer the lull in the slaughter came to an end, as Luo expressed regret for the kindness shown to enemies of the regime and announced that ‘we must kill and resolutely eliminate the remnant forces of counter-revolution’.
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