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

by Frank Dikötter

Fighting in the countryside was ferocious, as both sides battled for the country’s heartland. Nationalists and communists deployed tanks and heavy artillery, while government planes controlled the skies, using cloudless days and nights to wreak havoc on the enemy. Ancient towns with moats and walls were pounded. Orange flashes of shell explosions came from villages caught in the crossfire, leaving behind nothing but wrecked houses, smouldering amid fields sown with winter wheat. In a village just north of Caolaoji, everything had been set ablaze by mortar shells. Amid the smell of burned thatch and straw, children and women poked forlornly through roofless huts and blackened walls. On a slope in front of the ruins, an old woman bundled up in a black padded jacket rocked in silent grief. All her belongings had been lost. As one communist general later reminisced, the People’s Liberation Army wiped out village after village with blanket shelling: ‘In fighting Du Yuming, we practically flattened the villages, using thousands of shells and countless bombs.’ A returning pilot reported that every village in sight was burning: ‘the fields were covered with bodies’.36 The communists were supported by some 5 million men and women, sometimes even children, conscripted by a tough party leader called Deng Xiaoping: he imposed strict quotas for each village and threatened severe punishment when his orders were not met. These pick-and-shovel crews not only provided logistical support, c...