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

by Frank Dikötter

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, carrying food and material on their backs to the front, but they were also used as human shields, forced to march in front of the troops. Dense waves of unarmed villagers overwhelmed the nationalists. 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.

Every organisation had three different kitchens, the best food being reserved for the senior leaders. From the amount of grain, sugar, cooking oil, meat and fruit to the quality of health care and access to information, one’s position in the party hierarchy determined everything. Even the quality of tobacco and writing paper varied according to rank. Medicine was scarce for those on the lower rungs of the ladder, although leading cadres had personal doctors and sent their children to Moscow. At the apex of the party stood Mao, who was driven around in the only car in Yan’an and lived in a large mansion with heating especially installed for his comfort.

Muslims too were subject to constant humiliation. In Jiangyou, Sichuan, they were lynched and beaten. ‘There is no such thing as a good Muslim,’ proclaimed a party official. In Xindu county, every mosque was confiscated and handed over to the poor. Party secretary Zhu Xijiu organised a team to dig up several thousand Muslim graves and headstones marked with Quranic inscriptions. The stone tablets were used to build granaries and repair dykes. A few ended up as building blocks for pig sheds.

The key to understanding the appeal of communism, despite the grim reality on the ground, lay in the fact that it allowed so many followers to believe that they were participants in an historic process of transformation, contributing to something much bigger and better than themselves, or anything that had come before.