The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (45 page)

Even when lepers received care, funds mysteriously disappeared. Who, after all, could call to account a few cadres looking after lepers in colonies far from the party centre? In Yanbian, Sichuan, the men in charge appropriated most of the available funds to build themselves spacious mansions. The mud huts for the patients, several kilometres further inland against the mountains, were so ramshackle that they were in imminent danger of collapse. But the problem was also one of scale. In all Guangdong province, by 1953 there were an estimated 100,000 lepers, although the medical authorities could afford to take care of only 2,000 cases.
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Lepers were among the most vulnerable members of society, and their needs were not served well by a one-party state that sought to control everyone but answered to nobody. But there were many other needy members of society whose fates came to lie entirely in the hands of local cadres. In some orphanages taken over from non-governmental organisations, the death rate stood at 30 per cent. The blind and the elderly found it difficult to fit into a new society where so much depended on the ability to take orders and earn work points. With the gradual stripping away of most basic liberties – freedom of expression, belief, assembly, association and movement – the majority of ordinary people became increasingly defenceless, as very little stood between them and the state.
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By 1956 many of the hopes that sprang from liberation years earlier had been dashed. Instead of treating people with respect, the state viewed them as mere digits on a balance sheet, a resource to be exploited for the greater good. Farmers had lost their land, their tools and their livestock in the name of collectivisation. They were forced to deliver ever larger shares of the crop to the state, answering the call of the bugle in the morning to follow orders from local cadres. In factories and shops in the cities, employees were treated more like bonded labour than the working-class heroes featured in official propaganda. They were pressed into working ever longer hours, chasing one production record after another even as their benefits steadily declined. Everybody, except those inside the party, had to tighten their belts in the pursuit of utopia. China was a country seething with discontent. Social strains were about to explode into open opposition to the regime.

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Poisonous Weeds

A turning point in the communist world came in the early morning of 25 February 1956. On the final day of the Twentieth Congress, as foreign delegates were busy packing their bags, Nikita Khrushchev assembled the Soviet representatives for an unscheduled secret session in the Great Kremlin Palace, the Moscow residence of the Russian tsars. In a four-hour speech delivered without interruption, Khrushchev denounced the regime of suspicion, fear and terror created by Stalin. Launching a devastating attack on his former master, he accused him of being personally responsible for brutal purges, mass deportations, executions without trial and the torture of innocent party loyalists. Khrushchev further assailed Stalin for his ‘mania for greatness’ and the cult of personality he had fostered during his reign. Members of the audience listened in stunned silence. There was no applause at the end, as many of the delegates left in a state of shock.
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Copies of the speech were sent to foreign communist parties. It set off a chain reaction. In Beijing the Chairman was forced on to the defensive. Mao was China’s Stalin, the great leader of the People’s Republic. The secret speech could only raise questions about his own leadership, in particular the adulation surrounding him. DeStalinisation was nothing short of a challenge to Mao’s own authority. Just as Khrushchev pledged to return his country to the Politburo, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and others in Beijing spoke out in favour of the principles of collective leadership. At the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, a reference to Mao Zedong Thought was removed from the party charter, collective leadership was lauded and the cult of personality decried. Hemmed in by Khrushchev, Mao had little choice but to put a brave face on these measures, even contributing to them in the months prior to the congress. But the Chairman did not hide his anger when he spoke to Li Zhisui, accusing Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping of taking control of the agenda and pushing him into the background.
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Khrushchev also accused Stalin of ruining agriculture in the 1930s, even though he ‘never went anywhere, never met with workers and collective farmers’ and knew the country only from ‘films that dressed up and prettified the situation in the countryside’. This, too, must have been too close to the bone for a Chairman who viewed the country from the comfort of his private train, passing through stations emptied of all but security personnel. Khrushchev’s scathing comments on the failure of collective farming seemed like unintended criticism of the Socialist High Tide. Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun listened to the prompts from Moscow and tried to slow down the pace of collectivisation, calling in the summer of 1956 for an end to ‘rash advances’. They reduced the size of collective farms, reverted to a limited free market and allowed greater scope for private production. Mao saw this as a personal challenge. Atop an editorial of the
People’s Daily
criticising the High Tide for ‘attempting to do all things overnight’, forwarded to him for his approval, Mao angrily scrawled, ‘I will not read this.’ He later wondered, ‘Why should I read something that abuses me?’ In a severe personal setback, the Socialist High Tide was scrapped at the Eighth Party Congress.
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The secret speech also prompted calls for reform in Eastern Europe. In Poland, workers took to the streets in Poznań, protesting over higher work quotas and demanding better wages. In June 1956 a large crowd of over 100,000 gathered near the Imperial Castle occupied by the secret police and overwhelmed the premises, freeing all prisoners and seizing firearms. The headquarters of the communist party was ransacked. Soviet forces were called in, including tanks, armoured cars and field guns as well as more than 10,000 soldiers. Shots were fired at the demonstrators, killing up to a hundred and injuring many more. But the Polish United Workers’ Party, as the communist party was named, soon turned to conciliation under the leadership of Władysław Gomułka, raising wages and promising other political and economic reforms. It was the start of an era known as the Gomułka thaw, as communists tried to find a ‘Polish way to socialism’.

A few months later a rebellion broke out in Hungary, with thousands of students marching through the streets of Budapest. As a delegation tried to enter the radio building of the parliament to broadcast their demands to the nation, they were shot at by the public security police. Violence erupted throughout the country, as pitched battles took place between demonstrators and the police. Moscow tried to restore order by sending thousands of Soviet troops and tanks to the capital. Incensed, the population took to the streets and turned against the regime. In the narrow, cobbled streets of Budapest, rebels fought the tanks with Molotov cocktails. Revolutionary councils appeared across Hungary, seizing power from local authorities and clamouring for a general strike. Everywhere the insurgents smashed the hallowed symbols of communism, burning books, stripping red stars from buildings and tearing down memorials from their pedestals, including the large bronze statue of Stalin in Városliget, the main park in Budapest. By the end of the month, most Soviet troops had been forced to withdraw from the city. Imre Nagy, the new premier, formed a coalition government. Political prisoners were released. Non-communist parties that had been banned were now allowed and joined the coalition.

For a few brief days, Moscow appeared to tolerate the new government. But on 31 October Hungary declared that it intended to leave the Warsaw Pact. The same day violence erupted again near the party headquarters in Budapest, as a crowd grabbed members of the secret police and hung them from lampposts. The scene was shown on Soviet newsreels a few hours later. Khrushchev, who was spending the week in Stalin’s dacha in the comfortable Lenin Hills overlooking downtown Moscow, agonised all night, fearful that the rebellion might spread to neighbouring countries and prompt the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He and his colleagues reversed their decision. On 4 November a large Soviet force invaded Hungary, killing thousands of rebels. Over 200,000 refugees fled across the border. Mass arrests were carried out over several months, as all public opposition was suppressed.

The events triggered by deStalinisation were eagerly followed in China. In October 1956, Gomułka gave a dramatic speech that was reproduced in full in Beijing, promising ‘socialism with freedom’. He revealed that collectives in Poland produced much less than privately owned farms. But, for many readers in China, Gomułka’s remarks about the Soviet Union were the real bombshell. Poland was in debt because it had been forced to sell cheaply to the Soviet Union but pay dearly for imports. It seemed that the Russians were guilty of ‘imperialist exploitation’. And just when speculation over the Polish situation reached its height, news came of the Hungarian revolt, creating even more excitement in China. ‘For the first time,’ observed Robert Loh, ‘newspapers were read avidly. Previously, we had been forced to read them because the official press items were used as discussion topics in our regular mass organization meetings. Now, however, absenteeism soared while workers waited in block-long queues for a chance to buy a paper.’ People had to read between the lines, as the news was severely censored, but workers started invoking the example of Hungary in acts of defiance against the state.
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Discontented people in all walks of life started taking to the streets. They were fed up, striking, demonstrating or petitioning the government for a whole variety of reasons. Students boycotted classes in schools and institutes of higher learning throughout the country. In the Nanjing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, built in 1952 on the site of an old Ming palace, over 3,000 students went on strike for a month in the autumn of 1956. The college had advertised itself as a leading university but was no more than a middle-ranking technical institute. A few streets away, in Nanjing Normal University, the situation also took a turn for the worse after the Public Security Bureau sheltered six students guilty of beating up a young man who had accidentally bumped into them. Soon calls for justice rang out from the campus. The police threatened to arrest the demonstrators for ‘starting a rebellion’, prompting 480 students to gather in front of the mayor’s office chanting slogans in favour of democracy and human rights. Nanjing was not the only city rocked by unrest. Until the archives are fully open, nobody will know for certain the extent of student discontent, but in just one medium-sized city – Xi’an – workers and students petitioned or went on strike on no fewer than forty separate occasions. By early 1957 over 10,000 students were up in arms all across the country.
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Workers went on strike in unprecedented numbers. The Ministry of Industry counted more than 220 cases in 1956, the majority having started after October. Demonstrations in Shanghai attracted thousands of followers. A few were even led by party officials or members of the Youth League. Most of the workers protested against decreasing real income, poor housing and dwindling welfare benefits. Grievances had been mounting for many years, but what caused the explosion of discontent was the collectivisation of private enterprises under the Socialist High Tide. Outside Shanghai strikes also paralysed entire sectors of the economy. In Manchuria, 2,000 workers in grain transportation deliberately slowed their pace or petitioned the government for pay increases. When party officials retaliated by threatening to treat them as counter-revolutionaries, the strikers became even more determined. In Fuzhou, along the coast opposite Taiwan, workers petitioned the municipal government on sixty occasions.
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In the countryside too, discontent with collectivisation mounted throughout 1956. The state had begun to introduce some reforms, reducing the size of collective farms and allowing villagers to trade some produce grown on their own private plots. Farmers, however, wanted the right to leave the collectives altogether. After a disastrous harvest in the autumn of 1956, everywhere in Xianju county, Zhejiang, villagers started making trouble. They withdrew from the collectives, clamoured against the party and beat up local cadres who stood in their way. Over a hundred collectives collapsed altogether. In Tai county, Jiangsu, thousands of petitioners approached the party headquarters with grievances, as whole parts of the economy in the region reverted back to barter trade in the wake of collectivisation. Villagers left the collectives in droves, some with their own cattle, seed and tools, determined to make it on their own.
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In Guangdong tens of thousands of farmers were leaving the collectives by the winter of 1956–7, with the damage most pronounced in Zhongshan and Shunde counties. In some of the Shunde villages, up to a third of the people forcibly took back the land and started planting their own crops. They beat cadres who tried to intervene. In the Zhanjiang region, covering several counties, one out of every fifteen villagers was courageous enough to quit, in the full knowledge that they would become the target of violence from the militia, who dragged away their cattle and refused their children access to schools. Some were not even allowed to walk on the main streets. In Xinyi county irate farmers destroyed collective property, set fire to grain stores and even took knives to collective meetings, threatening party officials who refused to let them go.
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Some of the local cadres even started speaking out against collectivisation. ‘Life in a co-operative is worse than in a labour camp,’ opined one. In Shantou, also in Guangdong, some party officials described the grain monopoly as a system of exploitation worse than the feudalism of the past. In Bao’an county, 60 per cent of cadres opposed the monopoly. A deputy secretary of Luoding county said the following about the collectives: ‘Before I went to the countryside I believed in the superiority of the co-operatives, but once I got there and ate gruel I became so hungry that my head spun, so I no longer feel that there is anything superior about it.’ At a party meeting in Yingde county, several participants openly expressed the view that the economy had been in better shape before 1949. In Yaxian county (Sanya), over forty leading cadres and their families followed the farmers in refusing to join the co-operatives. One head of a co-operative in Yangjiang county accused the party of having failed to provide farmers with anything more than gruel in the three years since the monopoly had been introduced. At a higher level, among the 14,264 cadres of eleven counties which made up the Huiyang region, over 10,000 were described as ‘confused’ in their thinking.
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