The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (27 page)

Mass rallies were held. The Ministry of Heavy Industry organised a huge parade in Zhongshan Park, dragging out every major suspect and forcing them to confront the masses in denunciation meetings. Extensive publicity surrounded the most notorious cases. In Beijing the biggest tiger was Song Degui, an officer in the Public Security Bureau who seemed to embody every kind of depravity. He was accused of siphoning off a gigantic sum of money. He had had an affair with the wife of a former capitalist, and then slept with the woman’s daughter. He was even a drug addict. Song was wonderful material for Dan’s team, who studied the case as a guide for their own investigations.
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‘Every organization became a battlefield where ruthless struggles were fought.’ First major culprits like Song Degui were forced to admit their own corruption, then they were made to inform on the corruption of others below them in an effort to save themselves. Suspects were also unleashed on other suspects in mutual-denunciation sessions: this was called ‘using a tiger to bite a tiger’. Lesser offenders were suspended from their duties and put under house arrest so that they could ‘reflect on their past behaviour’. Even those who were not suspect had to make reports on their past activities and proffer self-criticisms, only to risk being denounced and ostracised.
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Soon ‘confessions’ began to pour out of every government office. Corruption seemed to be everywhere. Another 133 cadres besides Song Degui were found to be corrupt in the Ministry of Public Security. In the Ministry of Finance, government officials had connived with the private sector to defraud the state of goods worth millions of yuan. Overall, in the upper echelons of power, an astounding 10,000 people were corrupt, according to Bo Yibo, including eighteen big tigers who had taken more than 10,000 yuan.
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Even more serious was the situation among the rank and file, as local cadres socialised with businessmen and entrepreneurs, accepting bribes as if they were fringe benefits. In the entire north-west, 340,000 cases of corruption were uncovered, although Xi Zhongxun suggested that in reality there might well be three times as many culprits. In Tianshui, Gansu, one out of every three officials working in tax collection lined his own pockets. Other regions were just as bad. In Jinan, the capital of Shandong, the leading officials of virtually every department wined and dined private entrepreneurs. In the police, bribes extended from the ordinary patrolman all the way up to the head of a police station. One deputy mayor was guilty of having lavished 3,000 yuan – or sixty times the monthly salary of a skilled worker – on entertaining guests in less than a year. The local Bureau for Industry was accused of taking 70,000 yuan in kickbacks. Everywhere, it seemed, the sugar-coated bullets of the enemy had created a class of corrupt, depraved government officials just as bad as their predecessors.
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Many people applauded the campaign. Here was a party so determined to stamp out corruption that it even shot some of its own leaders. ‘The general belief was that the regime really was going to clean up its ranks. I also believed this, and I approved of it,’ noted Robert Loh, who now worked for a cotton mill in Shanghai. Others, such as Chow Ching-wen, a leader of the Democratic League co-opted by the communist party, had seen the extravagance and corruption from the inside and also believed that the movement was necessary to correct the situation. But others had their doubts. Dr Li Zhisui, who was such a supporter of the cause that he became frustrated when he was not allowed to join the war effort in Korea, felt a deep anguish that would stay with him for the rest of his life. His brother and cousin, the very men who had introduced him to the communist party three years earlier, were now being attacked, although Li knew they were innocent. But he was too afraid to speak out. ‘Had I defended them, I too would have been attacked.’
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Underneath the veneer of a well-orchestrated campaign, the pressure to find targets produced abuse at every level. In Hebei some suspects were insulted, beaten or forced to stand in the cold without clothes. The sessions could last for days on end, as the victims were ‘ceaselessly interrogated until they uttered a figure [of embezzled funds] that corresponded to the one demanded of them’. In Wu’an county, hair was pulled and heads were plunged into toilets. Over a hundred tigers were discovered using these methods, although not one single case was based on hard evidence. In Shijiazhuang suspects were buried in snow, forced to kneel on hot ashes or threatened with execution. A few were paraded through the streets with tall conical hats, to the delight of the children who had joined Tiger-Hunting Teams.
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When no tigers could be identified, the cadres turned against the workers instead. In the Shijiazhuang Railway Factory, several hundred of them were subjected to struggle sessions that were so gruelling that one man drank petrol to put an end to the misery. In the North-west Normal University in Lanzhou, Gansu, official support for violence was such that:

everyone, whether or not there is any proof of corruption, is beaten at denunciation meetings, and even their wives are beaten and denounced. Some of the merchants outside the campus are dragged into the school and beaten. Once the suspects have been beaten, they are tortured. For instance, they are forced to sit on their haunches with a kettle of boiling water on their heads, they are stripped of their clothes, beaten with ropes, sometimes until they pass out, a few almost to death.
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But under cover of popular approval and high-power publicity for outstanding cases, something even more sinister was taking place. The authorities were quietly liquidating many government officials without trial. ‘Disappearances’ became common, and they pointed towards another purpose of the campaign: the liquidation of a whole group of people. When the communists had first come to power in 1949, they had urged all the civil service employees to remain at their posts, repeatedly assuring them of the regime’s protection and even gratitude. They helped by maintaining the continued operation of essential services; they ensured a smooth transfer of power. By late 1951, however, sufficient communist cadres had been trained to take over the administration. The former employees were no longer needed, and many were purged.
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Close to 4 million government employees were hounded throughout the campaign, some of them tortured so badly that they chose to commit suicide. In a summary made in October 1952, at the end of the campaign, a secret report by An Ziwen concluded that 1.2 million corrupt individuals had been discovered to have embezzled a total of 600 million yuan. Fewer than 200,000 of these culprits were party members, demonstrating the extent of the purge against civil servants who had been retained from the previous regime. The report also admitted that at least 10 per cent of all cases were based on false accusations and forced confessions. But in the end it mattered very little that so many victims had been wronged, as long as the government was cleansed of its most unreliable elements. Tens of thousands of people were sent to labour camps.
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A few high-ranking leaders were executed in public, but it is doubtful that the real corruption at the top of the party was tackled. Chow Ching-wen, who welcomed the campaign at first, quickly became disabused. He noted that ‘those who were corrupt, but loyal to Mao, escaped with only their money confiscated and light punishment, while those who were found to be wavering in their support of Mao were killed’. After Zhang Zishan and Liu Qingshan had been arrested, a team of investigators pored over the dossiers of the top leadership in Tianjin, finding a web of deceit involving scores of senior party members, most of whom escaped with a mere slap on the wrist. As Chow noted, ‘to punish all the offenders would give a bad name to the regime and even threaten its stability’.
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Soon the campaign moved beyond the ranks of the government. Dark hints that malevolent outside forces were undermining public morality were everywhere. On 30 November 1951, as he was about to launch the campaign against corruption, Mao told the leadership that ‘our cadres have been corrupted by the bourgeoisie’. Over the following weeks reports came in from cities all over the country, linking government officials to cases of bribery, theft and tax evasion by businessmen and entrepreneurs. On 5 January 1952 Mao reached the conclusion that the bourgeoisie had been waging a ‘savage offensive’ against the party that was ‘more serious and dangerous than a war’. A resolute counter-offensive was needed to deliver a fatal blow within a matter of months. In the words of historian Michael Sheng, ‘Mao now declared war on the bourgeoisie.’
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The war came in the guise of a campaign against the five alleged sins of the bourgeoisie: bribery, tax evasion, pilfering government property, cheating on contracts and stealing state secrets. These terms were broad enough to encompass virtually anything. Cadres jumped at the opportunity to deflect accusations of corruption against themselves, and turned on private trade with a vengeance.

The business community was already reeling from three years of communism. Not all of its members had tied their fates to the new regime by deciding to stay behind in 1949. Many entrepreneurs and industrialists had fled the country even before Manchuria fell to the communists. For a brief period after the Second World War, trade and commerce seemed to be booming again. Factories went back into production after the devastation of the war, and some businessmen had ambitious plans for expansion. But the nationalists soon started interfering with the market, adopting policies that subjected private enterprise to the heavy hand of the state, heralding what would happen after 1949. In the banking sector, for instance, over 200 banks were competing for customers in 1945, but by 1948 the Bank of China had imposed a virtual monopoly, as its competitors had been driven out of business or taken over by the government. The central bank, in turn, started controlling the import and export of foreign currency, limiting what individuals could take with them while travelling abroad to just US$200. Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was put in charge of fighting inflation: he gaoled several thousand entrepreneurs in Shanghai for corruption before abandoning state control in October 1948.
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Squeezed out of business by the nationalists, entrepreneurs and their families started leaving in droves in the years following the Second World War. Many went to South America. Paraguay, where a visa could be obtained on arrival, was an attractive destination. Brazil also loomed large, all the more since Soong May-ling, the wife of the Generalissimo, had visited the country in June 1944. Some industrialists shipped whole factories to South America, while others bought properties, acquired stakes in banks, oil and shipping or invested in coffee and cocoa plantations from São Paulo to Caracas and Buenos Aires.

A few had exceptional foresight, others were just lucky in deciding to relocate abroad well before 1949. Another popular destination was Hong Kong. The Japanese occupation of China from 1937 onwards had already prepared many industrialists to emigrate to the crown colony, as they sought a safe haven away from the mainland. Many thought that their exile would be temporary and took only the bare essentials with them. Others went back and forth, hoping to be able to resettle after the end of the war. Alex Woo’s family came to Hong Kong in 1948, stayed for a while and then decided to go back: ‘The first time we came was by boat, but after three months we went back to Shanghai. Things there were getting really bad so my father came out with my younger brother and myself. I was just eight years old. There were no longer any commercial flights so we took a military plane. It was just before the Communists marched in,’ he remembered. Many families tried to hedge their bets, moving some members to South America, keeping a foothold in Hong Kong while packing off a few of the younger ones to study in the United States.
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In some cases one or more members stayed in China in order to protect the family assets. In the case of the Rong (also known as the Yung family), one of the wealthiest in the country, most of their assets were liquidated or mortgaged to the hilt before 1949. They left behind one of their seven sons as an informal hostage to the bank. Aged thirty-three, a graduate of St John’s University in Shanghai, Rong Yiren looked after some twenty textile factories and flour mills with 80,000 employees.

The communists welcomed him – as well as the many shopkeepers, bankers, traders and entrepreneurs who had no choice but to remain in China in 1949. The official slogan was the New Democracy, and the party assured those now labelled as the ‘national bourgeoisie’ that they could continue to run their enterprises on a private basis. In reality, as in the satellite states of the Soviet Union, the New Democracy was part of a bogus coalition between different forces that the party was simply unable to control at this early stage. When they took the country in 1949, the communists suffered from an acute shortage of manpower, leaving them little choice but to use the commercial and industrial skills of the business community. Like the retained government employees, they were told to stay in their jobs and work for the new regime.
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Privately Mao had no illusions about the need to eliminate capitalism. In May 1949, as the leadership camped on the outskirts of Beijing, preparing themselves to take over the country, Mao shared a meal with Huang Kecheng, then a commander in the army. The Chairman asked him what the communist party’s first priority should be, now that victory was close. Having seen the devastation caused by years of warfare, Huang opined that economic reconstruction would rank highest. Mao sternly shook his head: ‘No! The most important task is class struggle. We have to resolve the question of the capitalist class.’ Months earlier he had lambasted as ‘muddle-headed’ those who thought that the party should rely on the bourgeoisie.
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