Read The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Online
Authors: Frank Dikötter
By 1956 four out of five migrants to Gansu province faced hunger, with insufficient food to tide them over the spring. Their clothes were threadbare, while some children had no trousers and walked to school barefoot. There was no money to buy salt, edible oil, vegetables or even a needle to patch up their rags. The noble idea of reclaiming land from the desert ran into problems, as the sand was poor in nutrients. It never rained enough to grow much besides some wheat and a few vegetables. Li Shuzhen, who wormed her way back to the capital, wrote to the People’s Congress: ‘The government there only looks after you for three months, then it washes its hands of you. After the fields were ruined by hail, my father died of hunger.’ Liu Jincai also complained: ‘I spent more than two years there and did not even earn enough to buy a pair of cotton trousers.’ And if that was not enough, the local population also discriminated against the migrants. Sometimes tensions over scarce resources degenerated into fistfights, as migrants were beaten unconscious. They were aliens in a foreign land, unable to speak the local language. So bad was the situation across the entire region that in December 1956 the minister of domestic affairs temporarily halted all migration.
23
But one region was a success, and that was Xinjiang. After its annexation by Peng Dehuai in 1949, over 100,000 soldiers from the First Field Army stayed behind to prevent any secession. They cultivated the soil and protected the border. In 1954 they became part of a large development corporation called the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Tens of thousands of demobilised soldiers, political prisoners and migrants from the east joined its ranks, building irrigation canals, roads and telephone lines. They planted walls of trees to protect their camps from the sand. They grew cotton and wheat in giant collective farms around the desert oases. Soon the Corps developed into the biggest landowner and largest employer in the region. Its tentacles spread everywhere, operating factories, roads, canals, railways, mines, forests and reservoirs. It had its own schools, hospitals, laboratories, police force and courts – not to mention a vast network of prisons and labour camps. It was a state within the state. In 1949 the Chinese accounted for no more than 3 per cent of the local population. Within half a decade the Corps had created ‘an army of Han Chinese colonists’. Few settlers were volunteers, least of all the political prisoners, but all were better off than the Uighurs and Muslims around them. Penal exile in Xinjiang was the foundation of one of the most successful programmes of colonisation in modern history.
24
Backlash (1956–57)
13
By 1956 China stood proud and triumphant. War was a distant memory. Inflation had been brought under control. Unemployment, seemingly, had been solved. Industry was churning out ever increasing amounts of iron and steel. The international prestige of the regime was at a zenith. No longer was China the sick man of Asia, as the People’s Republic had fought the Americans to a standstill in the Korean War. And after the death of Stalin, no other communist leader enjoyed more prestige than Mao, the philosopher, poet and statesman in Beijing. Such was his standing that the Chairman increasingly assumed the mantle of leadership for developing countries around the world.
Ostensibly, the regime stood for values that had universal appeal: freedom, equality, peace, justice and democracy (albeit under the dictatorship of the proletariat). It promised security from hunger and want, with jobs and housing for all. Unlike liberal democracy, it proposed a unique social experiment to achieve these ideals, as people would merge into a classless society of plenty for all in which the state would wither away. Like the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, the regime excelled at mesmerising very different audiences on the road to utopia. It offered economic equality to the discontents of capitalism. It whispered freedom to those liberals outraged by authoritarian governments. ‘It flaunts patriotism before the nationalist, dedication before the devout, and revenge before the oppressed.’ Communism, in short, was all things to all men.
1
The People’s Republic widely advertised its success. It built up a glowing image with a profusion of statistics. Everything, apparently, was measurable in the New China, from the latest coal output and grain production to the number of square metres of housing built since liberation. Whatever the object of measurement, the trend was always upwards, even though the figures were sometimes rather vague. Percentages, for instance, were always favoured. Lump sums were not broken down. Categories were rarely defined, indices often came without items, and price base periods shifted erratically. Sometimes they vanished altogether. Cost and labour seemed irrelevant, and were excluded from accounting. The ways in which the data were collected and the methods used to produce the official statistics were never published. Sceptical statisticians found huge discrepancies. But dreamers around the world were dazzled. In every domain, it seemed, the People’s Republic was surging forward.
2
Besides mere numbers, the very imagery of revolution had romantic appeal. There were mass rallies on Tiananmen every year, as the regime paraded its resources in iron, steel, flesh and blood. Tanks and rocket launchers rumbled by, with fighter jets screaming overhead, as a never-ending procession of drummers, dancers and workers waved olive branches or released doves and coloured balloons. ‘Even the tiny Mongol ponies of the Cavalry trotted precisely in step, like an articulated clockwork toy,’ noted one foreign visitor in sheer amazement, standing in the midst of an ecstatic crowd. And a sea of red could be seen even outside mass parades in Beijing. Scarlet, the symbol of a revolution for basic rights and equality, was everywhere, on banners, flags, scarves, ties and armbands. The iconography of socialism was simple and enduring, with its sheaths of wheat, its rising sun in gold and its ubiquitous red star. Workers and peasants, with raised hands or clenched fists, seemed almost to jump out of the posters so liberally plastered on the walls of many buildings. What could be more evocative of progress than the image of a young girl with pigtails proudly driving a tractor through the fields? When Cai Shuli and thirty other graduates from a high school in Beijing heard of a young girl named Liu Ying, resolutely steering a tractor through the fields of the Great Northern Wilderness, their imaginations were so fired that they volunteered to go north: ‘The stirring in our hearts is impossible to describe,’ she wrote to Mayor Peng Zhen, ‘and we have decided to offer our youth to the Great Northern Wilderness to reclaim the rich soil together with comrade Liu Ying.’
3
There was also a flow of reports, statements and announcements from the leadership, not to mention the writings of the Chairman himself. These could be impenetrable to outsiders, replete as they were with Marxist-Leninist jargon, not to mention cryptic hints at changes in the power structure of the communist party. But they also conveyed a sense of purpose and commitment, pledging better wages for workers, promising more homes for the disabled or resolving to fight for the dignity of ethnic minorities. There was no end to statements of good intent, accompanied by ever more decrees, rules and regulations that would nudge China forward on the road to communism. It was all about the world in the making, not the world as it was. It was a world of plans, blueprints and models. Even more prominent than the official literature were the many slogans intended to galvanise a broader audience. Mao himself was a master of powerful, stirring quotations that found their way into every household in China, whether it was ‘Women Hold up Half the Sky’, ‘Revolution is Not a Dinner Party’ or ‘Imperialism is a Paper Tiger’. His was the motto ‘Serve the People’, calling out from posters and placards everywhere, the white characters written in a flamboyant hand against a red background.
Like Cai Shuli, who pledged to help reclaim the Great Northern Wilderness, plenty of party members looked past the misery of the present to see a radiant future beckoning ahead. Dan Ling, who had joined the party as a schoolboy just before liberation, was still imbued with the idealism of youth several years later, despite his doubts over some of the campaigns against enemies of the state. Li Zhisui, now working as the Chairman’s doctor, had also grown wiser since setting foot on shore with his wife in 1949, but he remained an ardent believer. Even outside the privileged ranks of the party, the whole idea of ‘building socialism’ was taken to heart, especially by a younger generation that went through the new schools set up after liberation. A sense of adventure combined with boundless idealism when young students volunteered to go off as pioneers to border regions or distant irrigation projects. 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. In a world full of workers who set new records and soldiers who used their bodies to block enemy fire, everyone was encouraged to become a hero. The propaganda machine ceaselessly glorified heroic workers, peasants and soldiers, held up as so many models for emulation.
4
Just as there were model workers and soldiers, there were model schools, hospitals, factories, offices, prisons, homes and co-operatives. These offered a glimpse of the future, a vision of the world to be. By 1956 thousands of foreign visitors were carefully selected by the regime and taken on guided tours to visit these showcase sites, all expenses paid, surrounded by minders who controlled their every movement. One guest wrote that ‘one gets to feel something like an infant in transit from one country to another and being passed from one hand to another’. But many were happy to be herded around, all too ready to help dispel the misinformation and hostile stereotypes that existed abroad about communism in the People’s Republic.
5
Foreign pilgrims were allowed to interview only the most loyal and tested party members. Rong Yiren, who could no longer rely on the protection of senior leaders after the purge of Pan Hannian in Shanghai, decided to join the show. It was one way to become indispensable to the regime. He turned himself into a showcase industrialist, paid to conjure up a world of illusions. Foreign visitors to his home would find his wife contentedly knitting a sweater. Two dogs frisked about merrily in the garden, where a nurse in uniform could be seen wheeling a baby across the lawn. ‘On a wall, a crucifix discreetly suggested freedom of worship. The bookshelves showed Shakespeare as well as Marx.’ In an adjacent room his daughter practised the piano. Most of the conversation was about his garden, as if he had nothing more to worry about than the correct fertiliser for his peonies. One French visitor who witnessed this touching tableau was truly awed: ‘I have never seen a more contented family,’ she said. Rong had an answer to every question. When pressed and asked how he could be so happy, he would purse his lips and consider the question gravely: ‘I
was
worried at first,’ he would confess. ‘When the Communists liberated Shanghai, we were apprehensive, if not for our lives, at least for our property.’ Then he would look his guest in the eye, his voice ringing with sincerity. ‘But the Communists have kept their promise. We have come to realise that the Chinese Communists never deceive people.’
6
Throughout the country, countless shows were put on for the benefit of foreign journalists, visiting statesmen, ranking leaders, student groups and, of course, the Chairman himself. As hundreds of Buddhist temples were destroyed, large sums of money were lavished on a handful of structures where showpiece monks could lecture about a religious renaissance in the New China. In model factories equipped with the latest technology, workers were carefully picked and trained to illustrate the triumphs of the planned economy. Around all major cities, model villages were selected to showcase the benefits of collectivisation. Everywhere, or so it appeared, people worked hard and were enthusiastic, never tiring of praising the party. In the propaganda state nothing was as it seemed.
7
China was a theatre. Even outside the tourist circuit, people were required to smile. When farmers were asked to surrender a greater share of their crop, they had to do so enthusiastically, with fanfare. When shopkeepers were required to hand over their assets to the state, they had to do so voluntarily, with beaming faces. A smile, in China as in other parts of Asia, did not always mean joy; it could convey embarrassment or hide pain and anger. But, more importantly, nobody wished to be accused of dragging their feet. Most people depended on the state for their livelihood. And all had spent countless hours in study sessions since liberation, learning how to parrot the party line, provide the correct answers and create the illusion of consent. Ordinary people may not all have been great heroes, but many were great actors.
Huge resources were poured into this giant Potemkin village. One lasting result was the immense strides made in transportation. A network of communications tied the country together as never before. Highways reached out to every destination, many of them paved by conscript labour and chain gangs. Trains ran on time, as exclusive sleeping berths with dining facilities delivered foreign guests and leading officials to their destinations. Many cities were spruced up, the drains cleaned and the roads swept regularly.
In the capital splendid public buildings shot up like mushrooms after the rain, rising far above a sea of grey roofs of courtyard houses and the rose-red walls of the imperial city. Ministries, institutes and museums appeared in the centre and on the outskirts, some with vast curving roofs of glazed tiles, others with plain flat ones, but all inspired by a Russian predilection for monumental proportions. In one district alone, dozens of buildings sprang up, seemingly within the space of a few months, from the Institute of Aeronautics and the Oil Institute to the Institute of Metallurgy, all with spacious forecourts and extensive wings. Outside Xizhimen, the north-western gate of the ancient city wall, a Soviet Union Exhibition Hall soon appeared. Rumours circulated about the amount of pure gold used to gild its towering spire. In the heart of the capital, Tiananmen Square was cleared of many of its ancient structures to make way for the annual parades. Most of the city wall that hindered traffic was dismantled.
8