The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

by Michael Wood

The rural issue was at the heart of Mao’s early thinking. Briefly a librarian, and then a trainee teacher, he had read widely in such European radical literature as was available in Chinese.

As for his character, much is still opaque. One of the most adored, and yet most reviled, people in the history of the world, Mao’s reputation these days is enjoying a revival in China, while in the West his character has been assassinated in recent studies, which have seen him as irredeemably cruel and callous from his youth; a manipulative and ignoble person from the very beginning.

long. As for the claim of a pathologically evil nature, how is the historian to respond if a person is irredeemable from childhood, as some modern biographers have claimed? Where is there to go? At the very least it seems perverse to deny that the young Mao was driven by idealism and feelings of sympathy for peasant oppression, to help explain the still-astounding trajectory of his life, even though he would eventually become their oppressor and must bear full responsibility for some of the greatest disasters in Chinese history, and for unleashing and encouraging the irrational cruelty and murderous violence that went with them.

Sun died in 1925 in a divided country, and by then the gradual modernisation of Chinese society, which he and his party had hoped for, was looking less and less likely.

By the late 1920s the communist movement had grown in strength, and Mao was looking to put his ideas of revolution into practice in rural Hunan, where there had been peasant rebellions every year since the First Opium War.

But still at this point Mao was not a Marxist; he was at root a revolutionary nationalist.

The country he was hoping to transform was a land of extremes, with different kinds of society, different economies, and different kinds of time.

In the uncertain times of the 1930s, with increasing rural impoverishment, rising taxes and grain taxes, he still made his visits by local bus from the village to the great old walled town of Taiyuan.

‘In recent years’, Liu wrote in his diary, ‘scholars have all been divided into two groups, called “those who hold to the old” and “those who hold to the new”. Those who hold to the old cleave to the way of Confucius and Mencius, while those who hold to the new seek only after Western methods.’ In the 1930s, China saw the inexorable political rise of those who cleaved to the new.

Through the late 1920s and ’30s, however, the farming world in the north went into crisis with rising grain taxes and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria from 1931.

In the south there was now savage fighting between the communists and the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government.

This retreat, collectively known as the Long March, in time grew to be the epic founding myth for China’s Communist Party.

The battles and struggles of the Red Army guerrillas in 1934–5 were still only the subject of rumour in the outside world, and the following year the US journalist Edgar Snow journeyed through their military lines and spent four months in autumn 1936 at the communist HQ, interviewing Mao and other leaders. It was the first insight the world had of the storm that was brewing. Published in 1937, Snow’s account was the most important book on China written in the twentieth century.

By far the most important single source of information about Mao’s life, it is irreplaceable about his early years, not only about the facts, but about his own vision of his past.

The course of the revolution, however, would be determined by the Japanese invasion. The Japanese had already occupied Manchuria and set up their captive – the hapless Last Emperor, Puyi – as a puppet. Then, in summer 1937, they launched a full-scale invasion of mainland China.

That was how it felt in one village under occupation: not so different, perhaps, in some ways, from living in occupied Europe. Looking at the Chinese experience of the Second World War as a whole, however, it is easy to forget that, for the Chinese people, the war began in 1937 and effectively ended in 1949, and that it involved huge destruction and loss of life, running to perhaps 14 million dead.

40 per cent of all Japanese casualties were in China.

It was this period that led to the rise of the communists as a plausible national leadership as well as an anti-Japanese resistance.

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the national front fell apart and the nationalists and the communists fought a bitter civil war.

In autumn 1949, the Chinese Red Army occupied Beijing and the People’s Republic was founded.

At the time of the liberation, in his memoir Rao Pingru describes the mid-autumn festival of 1949, eating mooncakes in bed as moonlight floods in: ‘It was the last mid-autumn festival of the old society.’

Early 1950s Shanghai was still a lively, bustling place to be.

By 1957, Mao decided the revolution not thoroughgoing enough. Above all a revolutionary, he had always said ‘a revolution is not a dinner party’; that the new world could only be born through destruction, and that loss of life was no object in achieving the goal of China’s socialist utopia.

The analysis had much truth in it. Historic injustices and inequalities were endemic in the countryside, where over 80 per cent of the population lived and worked. But Mao’s solution was not to redistribute land gradually, using the law, but through often extreme violence against class enemies, landlords and rich peasants.

So Mao forged a repressive state, in which words and thoughts were strictly controlled and class war was brutally waged.

As the move towards totalitarian dictatorship accelerated in the late 1950s, Mao also became increasingly manipulative and dictatorial. When public criticism was encouraged in the ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign, the ensuing torrent wrongfooted and shocked the leadership, and a few months later Mao vindictively turned on his critics and persecuted them, sarcastically citing the First Emperor’s purge of scholars with approbation. Thousands of intellectuals were jailed, tortured and in some cases hounded to death.

At one point the party apparatchiks came round to tell Meitang that her husband was an undesirable, a class enemy, and that she should divorce him.

What Pingru called the ‘Three Years of Natural Disasters’ was a giant manmade catastrophe caused by the Great Leap Forward. Up to 1956, it was possible to argue that Mao’s role in the creation of the new China had had some positives. But the so-called ‘first phase of socialism’ was brought to a halt with the Great Leap Forward – a disastrous drive to industrialise the countryside using village forges, which ruined the environment, destroyed a household’s metal utensils and made metal too poor to be of any use.

At the end of the 1950s, these misguided campaigns pushed China into the Great Famine.

But enough evidence is there to see that even if the party’s figures are underestimates, this was the worst famine in Chinese history. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng in his Tombstone – a book to set beside Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago – estimates that 36 million people died.

But despite its brief moment in the sun in the fourteenth century, Fengyang, ‘the land of the flying dragon and the soaring phoenix’, was always a byword for poverty: ‘nine out of ten years were famine’, it was said, and beggars from the county were famous, ‘carrying the flower-drum to all four corners of the country’.

As the County Journal put it in the 1930s, ‘Fengyang is just left to suffer on its own.’

In the late 1950s Mao decided to make the countryside communist in the full sense, and what happened here in Xiaogang was documented three years after Mao’s death in an austerely titled report, ‘An Investigation of the Xiaogang Production Brigade’s Household Responsibility System in Liyuan Commune in Fengyang County’ – an account of the events in the village culminating in 1978, when the peasants refused any longer to work the commune system (a story told below page 507).

By late 1958, with a poor harvest and floods, the village sank into famine.

In reality, there was a 15 per cent drop in grain production nationally in 1959, and another 10 per cent in 1960.

In Xiaogang village alone, between 1958 and 1960, sixty-seven villagers died of starvation out of a population of 120.

Scarcely a decade after the party took over, with all its utopian plans for socialism, the village was destitute.

So, in a village with no landlord, and no wealthy peasants, by 1975, younger members of all twenty families had migrated away to beg or work. By then the Cultural Revolution had further broken communal solidarity; the end result of constant denunciations and accusations was a land left barren, poverty-stricken families, and social and spiritual division.

By the early 1960s, the imposition of Russian-style communism on the Chinese people had clearly failed.

In summer 1966, Mao mobilised millions of young people – Red Guards – to reignite the nation’s revolutionary fervour, attacking all figures of authority, whether the party, the universities, teachers or intellectuals in general.

The Cultural Revolution was another bitter time for the Chinese people, for the deliberate destruction of their past meant the severance of deep emotional attachments to what it had meant to be Chinese.

They remind me of English Puritans. Different motivations, but the same consequences. Cultural revolutions.

Virtually all temples, mosques and churches were closed and vandalised. In a gruesome symbolic attack on the hated ‘feudal’ past, the tomb of the Ming emperor Wanli outside Beijing was opened and his remains, with those of his chief consorts, were dragged out, denounced and burned.

Today, the Cultural Revolution is still difficult to talk about in China.

Others weren’t so lucky. In the old clan villages of Huizhou, tons of family documents were loaded on carts to be burned in the town square.

In Daoxian in Hunan, one horrific massacre was the subject of an official investigation years later by a Chinese journalist, Tan Hecheng, who pursued the story further after the case was closed. The story he uncovered was truly shocking. Over nine weeks in 1967, over 9,000 ‘class enemies’ in the town were massacred with sickening brutality.

The atrocities of the Daoxian story, which cannot have been unique at that time, strongly recall accounts of wanton cruelty in the wars at the fall of the Tang, or during the Five Dynasties – or, indeed, accounts from the Second World War in Eastern Europe: it was not just in China that people in our own time turned with such savagery against their old neighbours in a world where, just as in Nazi Germany, language itself was debased by totalitarianism.

Of all the regions under Chinese rule, none suffered more in the Cultural Revolution than Tibet.

Then, during the Cultural Revolution, the rift tearing China apart was exported to the Tibetan plateau. Busloads of Red Guards were brought in to devastate what remained of the old culture, and with widespread torture and murder, Tibet became a theatre of cruelty.

By the end, 90 per cent of the monasteries and nunneries were destroyed along with their artistic treasures and libraries built up over a thousand years.

At the centre of this great complex was the temple of Yeshe-O: a three-dimensional mandala with a central hall and eighteen subsidiary chapels, which made this one of the most splendid buildings in Asia. It was a memory room of Tibetan culture; a labyrinth full of magnificent bronzes, giant painted and gilded Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and a great cycle of medieval wall paintings by travelling Kashmiri masters; in sum, a literal representation of the Tibetan world of the spirits. All of it was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution save for two chapels, later used as grain stores, which preserve exquisite murals.

The cultural vandalism is horrendous. But so it is with all colonial powers.