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

by Frank Dikötter

Like Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Mao achieved power by promising every disaffected group what they wanted most: land for the farmers, independence for all minorities, freedom for intellectuals, protection of private property for businessmen, higher living standards for the workers. The Chinese Communist Party rallied a majority under the banner of the New Democracy, a slogan promising co-operation with all except the most hardened enemies of the regime. Under the façade of a ‘united front’, a number of non-communist organisations such as the Democratic Party were co-opted into power, although they remained under the leadership of the communist party.

Throughout their occupation, the Japanese had used biological and chemical weapons. Lethal experiments were conducted on prisoners of war in a string of secret laboratories stretching from northern Manchuria to subtropical Guangdong. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia after being infected with various germs. Others had their limbs amputated, their stomachs excised or parts of their organs surgically removed. Weapons, including flamethrowers and chemical agents, were tested on prisoners tied to stakes.

Mao would agree to almost anything on paper, as long as nobody was checking what he was doing on the ground.

Lin Jingwu, an ordinary soldier in the trenches, remembered years later that his hands went numb from firing bullets into a sea of civilians. He felt sick at the idea of firing at them and tried to close his eyes, but kept on shooting.

As Mariano Ezpeleta noted, they insisted on calling everybody ‘comrade’, but there was nothing comradely about their behaviour.

China had a hidden asset, one it jealously protected from the prying eyes of strangers in small, family-based villages all across the country. It was the land. Nobody knew exactly how much of it there was, and every government had failed fully to measure, assess and tax it. More often than not the land tax was based on a rough approximation carried out decades if not centuries earlier.

Deng Xiaoping described his experience of land reform in Anhui: In one place in western Anhui the masses hated several landlords and demanded that they be killed, so we followed their wishes and killed them. After they had been killed, the masses feared reprisals from the relatives of the victims, so they drew up an even longer list of names, saying that if they could also be killed everything would be fine. So again we followed their wishes and killed those people. After they had been killed, the masses thought that even more people would seek revenge, so again they came up with a list of names. And again we killed according to their wishes. We kept on killing, and the masses kept on feeling more and more insecure, taking fright and fleeing. In the end we killed two hundred people, and all the work we did in twelve villages was ruined.

In Sichuan it was enough for a farmer actually to make a profit in order to be classified as a ‘landlord’.

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.

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.

Some victims were executed away from the public eye, in forests, near ravines and riverbanks, alone or in batches. The bodies were thrown into pits or shallow mass graves, but a few were left to rot. Relatives often spent weeks trying to find the corpses of their loved ones. Those who were fortunate collected what remains they could gather and gave them a discreet burial. Zhang Mao’en had to wait ten months before receiving permission to collect the body of his brother, who had been shot by the roadside and dumped into a ravine in Yunnan. ‘My brother’s rotting corpse looked like a fallen tree stuck in a stream. My second oldest brother and my mother went down into the water to drag it out, and it fell to pieces. We collected the bones, washed them, and put them in a box we had brought with us.’27 Sometimes the bodies were eaten by wild animals. In Hebei some of the mass graves were so shallow that feral dogs dug up the remains and devoured them. In Sichuan one woman suspected of having hidden a gun was dragged away and so badly tortured that she hung herself from a tree. Her body was dumped in the forest and eaten by wild boars.

As the historian Paul Wingrove notes, ‘Mao’s victorious, independent, revolutionary state was being treated in much the same way as the captive territories of Eastern Europe, from which the Soviet Union also extracted the standard tariff in exchange for services of “experts”.’ And in an echo of the extraterritorial rights that had been abolished under Chiang Kai-shek in 1943, none of the Russians would be subject to Chinese law. Mao’s hands were tied. China was weak and needed a strong protector as international positions were hardening in an unfolding Cold War. The treaty provided just that, extending the Soviet Union’s protection in the event of aggression by Japan or its allies, in particular the United States. But despite all the fanfare around the treaty, Mao and Zhou must have left Moscow feeling aggrieved at how they had been treated.

The Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been boycotting proceedings since January over Taiwan, was expected to return to the Security Council and vote against the resolution, but Stalin told him to stay away. Two days later tacit agreement was received from the Soviet Union that American intervention would not lead to an escalation. Stalin did nothing to prevent Western involvement in the conflict. He alone knew that Mao had made a commitment to sending troops to Korea. Perhaps he hoped that China would destroy large numbers of Americans in the conflict.

The Americans fell into what one historian has called ‘the largest ambush in the era of modern warfare’.10 On 25 November, MacArthur’s men were struck by massive numbers of hidden soldiers. Their bugles blaring, drums, rattles and whistles adding to the din, screaming Chinese troops appeared in the middle of the night, shooting and throwing grenades. They instilled sheer terror in the United Nations forces. Wave after wave of ferocious assault groups hurled themselves on to gun positions, trench lines and rear areas. The onslaught almost instantly changed the course of the war, forcing the Americans into a headlong retreat southwards. The communists recovered Kim Il-sung’s capital Pyongyang on 7 December.

The South China Daily, for example, trumpeted its utter contempt for America: This is a country which is thoroughly reactionary, thoroughly dark, thoroughly corrupt, thoroughly cruel. This is the Eden of a few millionaires, the hell of countless millions of poor people. This is the paradise of gangsters, swindlers, rascals, special agents, fascist germs, speculators, debauchers, and all the dregs of mankind. This is the world’s source of all such crimes as reaction, darkness, cruelty, decadence, corruption, debauchery, oppression of man by man, and cannibalism. This is the exhibition ground of all the crimes which can possibly be committed by mankind. This is a living hell ten times, one hundred times, one thousand times worse than any hell that can possibly be depicted by the most gory of writers.

The campaign also had another visible effect. Many residents, from traffic police and food handlers to street sweepers, started wearing cotton masks, which always surprised foreign visitors. This habit would last for decades. In the words of William Kinmond, it gave ‘even young girls and boys the appearance of being fugitives from operating rooms’.

Stalin died in March 1953. Within months the new leadership in Moscow moved rapidly towards an agreement over Korea with the Americans and signed a ceasefire on 27 July 1953.

On 2 May 1953 a secret resolution of the presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers dismissed all allegations: ‘The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the United States of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.’ A top-ranking emissary was sent to Beijing with a harsh message: cease all allegations at once. They stopped as suddenly as they had started.

But Mao was deeply suspicious of educated people, and wanted them to demonstrate their mettle. Book learning was out, practical experience was in (‘only social practice can be the criterion of truth’, the Chairman opined). Already in 1927, when he had compared the peasants to a hurricane, he had hinted that everybody would be put to the test: ‘There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticising? Or to stand in their way and oppose them?’

The poor were often at the vanguard of collectivisation. In Yangjiang, they accepted state grain while openly declaring that none of it would ever be returned. One man who carted away 1,500 kilos of rice was asked how he would ever be able to reimburse his loan. ‘In a year or two we will have socialism and I won’t pay back shit’ was his answer.

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.

‘An intellectual has a tail just like a dog,’ he explained, ‘if you pour some cold water on it, he will tuck it between his legs, but if you try a different attitude he will wag it high in the air, and he will look quite cocky. Just because he has read a couple of books he feels quite cocky. When working people see his cocky air, when they see that attitude, they feel a little uncomfortable.’

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.