S. A. SMITH
On September 21, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed to the world that “Our nation will never again be an insulted nation. We have stood up.…No Imperialist will ever be allowed again to invade our territory.” Despite this bold statement, the situation of the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) was deeply unsettled. The economy had been pounded by war, inflation was rocketing, and unemployment was high; society and polity were fragmented, and public order had broken down. Externally, the Communists had defeated the Nationalist army, forcing the Guomindang government to flee to Taiwan, taking the national treasury with it, yet Chiang Kai-shek was bent on regaining the mainland. Internally, the PRC would face significant armed revolt for the next two years, especially in the southwest; and a year after its inception would be drawn into the first “hot” conflict of the Cold War in Korea. Furthermore, although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had grown rapidly during the Civil War, to reach 4.48m and 3.57m, respectively, the PRC faced a chronic shortage of personnel to run the vast country. With only 720,000 civilian officials at its disposal, the country was effectively under military control up to 1952, four out of its five regions being run by Military Administrative Committees.
Despite endemic insecurity and a crippling lack of resources, the mood of the CCP was positive, one of relentless determination to break with the past and set about building a more just and equal society. The Common Program, passed by the People’s Political Consultative Conference on September 29, 1949, was based on Mao Zedong’s theory that China was currently in the phase of “new democracy,” the country’s profound economic, social and cultural backwardness ruling out any imminent transition to socialism. The tasks of the new government were to carry out land reform; confiscate the assets of big capitalist monopolies but protect the “national bourgeoisie” (i.e. patriotic business people); ensure a directing role for the state in banking, trade, and transport; improve the conditions of workers; and allow patriotic parties to participate in government. This is sometimes characterized as a “moderate” program, but it was clear from the start that the Communists would not hesitate to use violence and coercion to carry it out. Streets were cleaned, drains were dug, ruined buildings were demolished. Symbols of the “old society” were removed from public view: opium dens were shut down (although it took much longer to eradicate opium cultivation); gambling was curbed; the secret societies that controlled labor on the docks, in construction, in the rickshaw trade, and in human waste collection were ruthlessly suppressed. Typical of the new government’s zeal was the closure on November 21 of 224 brothels in Beijing, along with the arrest of 1,286 prostitutes and 434 owners and procurers.
The principal task of the new government was to improve the lot of the 80 percent who worked in farming and carry out a far-reaching redistribution of land, expropriating landlords and many rich peasants and transferring their assets to poor and landless peasants. Land reform had started as early as 1946 in the “old liberated areas” of the north. There landlordism was less of a problem than in the west and south, since only 10 percent to 15 percent of farmers rented land. Nevertheless it stirred up violent conflict that the CCP stepped in to curb in 1948. In June 1950 the PRC promulgated the Agrarian Reform Law, which extended land reform to the regions that had only recently been taken from the Nationalists. The work teams sent into the villages to carry out the reform often faced a tough challenge. In southeast China, for example, much land belonged to lineages, i.e. families of the same surname who traced their origins to a common ancestor, and poor families belonging to the lineage often balked at the seizure of land from their wealthier kin. In the commercialized region south of the Yangzi River, most peasants worked only part-time in agriculture, landlords owned only a fraction of the land, absentee landlords were common, and smallholders were those most likely to rent out land. The work teams commenced their work by dividing villagers into class categories (landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and landless laborers) and then prepared mass meetings to denounce “landlords.” In reality, the latter were often those local people considered “evil tyrants” or “bandit chiefs” rather than landlords in the strict socio-economic sense. The most abject members of the village were rehearsed to “speak bitterness,” i.e. to narrate the sufferings they had endured in the past in the new language of class exploitation. This theatre of accusation was charged with emotion. In 1947 in Huanghua county in Hebei the work team recorded that among the 5,184 peasants who “spoke bitterness,” 4,451 wept bitterly, 12 wept to the point where they fainted, and 195 to the point where they vomited. Women often used the occasion to tell of abuses they had received at the hands of tyrannical menfolk. By summer 1952, the “land to the tiller” movement was complete. About 43 percent of China’s cultivated land was redistributed to about 60 percent of the rural population, with about 88 percent of households affected. Poor peasants substantially increased their holdings, but this did not necessarily make their farms more viable; middle peasants fared better, since they started out from a stronger position. Needless to say, there was bitter resentment among those who lost land and property.
The other major campaign through which the CCP projected its power into rural areas was that around the Marriage Law of 1950. This law condemned the traditional family “based on arbitrary and compulsory arrangements and the superiority of man over woman” and affirmed the “equal rights of both sexes,” and the “protection of the lawful interests of women and children.” In central and south China in 1951, 10,000 women were said to have committed suicide or been murdered in family disputes over marriage and divorce. In the light of this, the campaign focused on abolishing arranged marriages, enforcing a minimum age of marriage, combating female infanticide, and supporting those who wished to escape loveless marriages. Peasants were often frank about their reasons for wanting a divorce: “my husband was too poor so I divorced him. I can find someone better.” The divorce rate rose fairly rapidly, although later in the 1950s it became more difficult to obtain a divorce if only one partner wanted it. Freer courtship and marriage became the norm in the cities, but in rural areas families continued to rely on matchmakers. Even as the Marriage Law encouraged “free choice” marriage, it also discouraged those from “good” class backgrounds—poor and middle peasants, workers, cadres, soldiers, and wives of revolutionary martyrs—from marrying those from “bad” class categories, such as former landlords, capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and “bad elements.” In this respect the Marriage Law inserted the authority of the new state into the heart of family and community decision-making.
Land reform and the Marriage Law were just two facets of the vigorous process of state building that got under way, a process that had both institutional and ideological dimensions. The party-state rapidly extended its reach deeper into local society than the Nationalist government had ever achieved. In the cities the neighborhood committees, subdivided into groups responsible for fifteen to forty households, monitored public health, unemployment, marriage and divorce registration, reported visitors, and organized kindergartens and evening classes. The Three Antis campaign from August 1951 to June 1952 targeted corruption, waste, and mismanagement on the part of officials and industrial managers, while the Five Antis campaign of 1952 targeted bribery and tax evasion by businessmen. In the countryside, in addition to peasant associations, new organizations such as the women’s federation, the youth league, the people’s militia, and trade unions appeared. Every rural household was assigned a class label that not only dealt a blow to traditional identities, based on kinship, patron–client, secret-society, or religious affiliation, but also determined the life chances of the members of the household for almost three decades. That said, in institutional terms state-building was not fully achieved until around 1954 when state and Party organs began to function fully in China’s 160 cities, 2,174 counties (or their equivalents), and 280,000 townships. Even then, the functioning of the party-state was compromised by the continuing reliance on officials inherited from the Nationalist regime.
The Korean war saw 2.3m Chinese soldiers fight and up to half a million lose their lives between October 1950 and July 1953. This brutal conflict toughened the government’s determination to purge society of internal enemies, whether real or imagined. Loyalties during the war against Japan and the Civil War had been complex and shifting, with spies and double agents active on all fronts, and this made it exceptionally difficult to distinguish friend from foe. In 1950–51, the regime launched an aggressive campaign against counter-revolutionaries that led to 2,620,000 arrests and 712,000 executions. It involved the center handing down quotas for the percentage of the population to be arrested and subjected to mass trials (quotas that were often exceeded by provincial and county Party committees). On May 20, 1951, the mayor of Beijing, Peng Zhen, addressed a crowd of tens of thousands attending the trial of 220 counter-revolutionaries: “What shall we do with this bestial group of vicious despots, bandits, traitors, and special agents?,” he asked. “Shoot them!” the audience yelled. As with “speaking bitterness,” these trials had a deeply theatrical quality, with the accused assigned roles akin to those of the villains in folk opera, and their crimes rendered according to the conventions of that genre. A trial in Beijing, for example, involved four “despots” who had lorded it over the city’s eastern, western, northern, and southern districts. The crimes of Zhang Hui, for instance, included causing a mother to lose her mind and drown herself, after Zhang forcibly conscripted her son; those of Wu Delu included pouring water mixed with millet into the wounds of six captives and then burying them alive. The crowd, hearing the detail of the crimes, was whipped into a frenzy.
The suppression of counter-revolutionaries not only targeted Guomindang special agents and military officials, war criminals, Japanese collaborators, and notorious bandits, but also the heads of redemptive religious societies. Dubbed huidaomen, these societies were committed to an ideal of individual salvation, regardless of family or community. Many were strongly millenarian, believing, as White Lotus adherents had during the Qing uprisings alluded to in Chapter 2, that the Maitreya Buddha was about to appear on earth to deliver the faithful from worldly torment. These societies had grown rapidly since the 1920s, especially in the cities and villages of north China, and some of its leaders had collaborated with the Japanese. The CCP’s campaign to smash the societies was carefully calibrated. By 1952 in Shanghai, where 768 altars of different societies were suppressed, 3,974 leaders had been punished, of whom 65 had been sentenced to death; 942 imprisoned, and 819 put under surveillance; 10,621 minor leaders had been required to register with the police and 322,400 members required to sign a declaration saying that they had withdrawn from the societies.
Formally, the persecution of the redemptive societies was at odds with the PRC’s policy towards religion at this time. In keeping with the theory of “new democracy,” the PRC chose not to adopt an “anti-religious” policy of the Soviet type, but instead to subject the five officially recognized religions of Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism to state regulation. These were required to organize national councils approved by the Religious Affairs Bureau and to purge themselves of “feudal” and “imperialist” characteristics. Significantly, the religion of the vast mass of the population—one rooted in local cults, festivals, and ancestor worship—was not recognized as a religion at all, simply dismissed as “feudal superstition” because it lacked the institutionalized structures, trained personnel, and coherent belief system that were assumed to constitute a religion proper. In the early years, the government urged that religion be treated sensitively, not least because it was deeply intertwined with ethnic identity among groups such as Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uighurs. Yet with the onset of the Great Leap Forward, policy became much more repressive. In March 1958, Red Flag declared that movements to “smash gods and spirits” were arising spontaneously as a result of the “basic desire of the masses…to raise production and improve livelihood.” In many areas local officials ordered the demolition of temples and grave sites in order to extend the land under cultivation or to facilitate irrigation and water-conservancy projects. The result was a decline in the public visibility of religion. In Anhui province in 1949 there had been 3,158 Buddhist temples, housing 3,933 monks, 2,797 nuns, and 3,500 lay officers; by 1962 there were 700 temples with 560 monks, 889 nuns and fewer than 200 lay officers.
Prior to 1949, the Chinese public had a richer understanding of life in the United States than they did of life in the Soviet Union. In the northeast the population had little love for the Soviets owing to its predatory occupation at the end of World War II. The Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty of February 1950, however, did much to dispel antipathy and ignorance. In its wake, a large number of Soviet literary and technical works were translated into Chinese; Soviet films were screened and plays performed; exhibitions were staged, and Russian language classes organized. By November 1952, the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association had 38.9 million members—mainly in the cities—making it the largest mass organization in the PRC. Not all Chinese, of course, were enamored of their “elder brother,” many finding Soviet propaganda dull and alien. Yet the not insignificant outpouring of grief at Stalin’s death in March 1953 is notable. In Shanghai shop assistants spontaneously wore black armbands and lowered the flag to half-mast, though some, including officials, were quizzical. “In the past we were told that the advances in Soviet medicine would guarantee that Stalin would live to be 100 or 150. Why then did he die at 73?” In fact, the death of Stalin eased the rather tense relationship between the PRC and the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev was more appreciative of the importance of China as a strategic ally in the Cold War and his decision to make China his first port of call in September 1954, following his elevation to General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, was appreciated by the Chinese. Yet though Mao might confess in 1956 that “if I had always followed Stalin’s advice I would have been dead,” he had always had a deep respect for Stalin, whereas his opinion of Khrushchev was much lower. Mao considered himself to have political and military experience (and putative theoretical acumen) far superior to that of the new Soviet leader, making him the obvious candidate to lead the world Communist movement. It would ultimately prove the undoing of the new friendship.
In mid-1953, the CCP leadership, itching to commence the transition to socialism, announced that the phase of “new democracy” was over. For the next four years, in spheres as diverse as economic policy, state organization, military expansion, law, and education, Soviet models would be followed closely, although not uncritically. The First Five-Year Plan (1953–57), like its Soviet prototype, emphasized central planning and the rapid growth of heavy industry, notably iron- and steel-making, machine building, chemicals and power supply. Industrial output more than doubled, with impressive growth rates of 16 percent to 18 percent per annum. Yet capital formation was relatively slow and there was little agreement about the degree of centralization appropriate to China’s regionally diverse and backward economy. Still, there was no blind imitation of the Soviet model. Capitalists, accused in 1952 of widespread bribery and tax evasion, were pressed into joining “public–private mergers,” but were notionally compensated for their loss of assets and allowed to continue in a secondary management role. The state took charge of the key industrial and financial sectors, but allowed a “collective” sector of enterprises run by towns and counties—and even some private enterprise—to function. As late as 1964 in Shanghai, for example, there were still nineteen privately owned funeral parlors, nine that were collectively owned and two that were in joint public–private ownership.
In eight years China’s manufacturing economy was transformed from one of small workshops and individual artisans to one increasingly dominated by factories, mines, and modern transportation. The urban industrial working class (including construction) grew from about 6 million in 1952 to about 10 million in 1957. The standard of living of these workers improved, certainly when compared with that of peasants. Divisions within the labor force, however, ran deep, with employees in the state sector—about 30 percent of the workforce by 1958—enjoying an “iron rice bowl” of relatively good wages and conditions and impressive job security. Workers in the collective sector, and especially those on temporary contracts, enjoyed fewer welfare benefits and worse conditions. In the state sector workers and employees were organized by work unit (danwei), which was responsible for allocating housing and food rations, providing nurseries, schools, and health clinics, administering passports, and approving marriages and divorces. The work unit exercised detailed control over the lives of its members, and this, combined with the fact that relations in the workplace tended to take the form of clientelist networks centered on party-branch officials or security-department chiefs, made collective working-class action difficult. Yet low-level conflict was endemic on the shop floor, not least as a response to the efforts by planners and industrial managers to improve productivity and keep wages low, and this sometimes led to stoppages, as in Guangzhou in 1956 and Shanghai in 1956–57. In the latter case, some 30,000 workers, mainly those excluded from the work-unit system, went on strike.
National figures for female employment show a tenfold increase between 1949 and 1959. Women’s prospects for employment were limited by lack of skills, family responsibilities, and patriarchal attitudes. As a result, they found work in low-paid, low-status sectors, such as textiles and food-processing (although banking was something of an exception). Domestic labor remained a female preserve. During the Great Leap Forward there was an attempt to pool housework, childcare, and cooking, but it ran up against the resistance of families who wished to retain control of these basic elements of daily life. The All-China Women’s Federation worked hard to improve the health of women and children, and by 1955, more than 90 percent of births in cities and 30 percent of births in the countryside involved modern methods of midwifery. Simple matters such as scrubbing hands and sterilizing instruments helped drastically to reduce infant and maternal mortality. Mao, however, was hostile to population control. His opposition, combined with declining mortality but a high birth rate (women continued to have six children on average), led to rampant population growth. This was but one of the serious problems that the pragmatic leadership, which emerged to clear up the mess of the Great Leap Forward, had to tackle in the early 1960s when the government began tentatively to promote contraception.
Following land reform, state and peasant became locked in a struggle for control of the agricultural surplus. Industrialization depended on the peasantry, since only they could provide the agricultural produce and textiles that the country needed to export if it were to pay for the import of capital goods; and only they could provide the raw materials, such as cotton and oil seed, needed for domestic industry. In addition, only the peasants could feed the rapidly growing urban population, which rose from 58 million in 1949 to nearly 100 million in 1957. In 1953–54, a system of grain procurement was introduced, whereby each district was assigned a quota of agricultural produce to hand over to the state. Simultaneously, the government stepped up efforts to establish mutual-aid teams in the countryside, a move also designed in part to increase state control over the agricultural surplus. Although the share of the agricultural surplus transferred to the state grew substantially, by spring 1955 it was failing to meet its export target (even as a few rural areas were complaining that they were beginning to go hungry). Up to this point, it had been assumed that collectivization of agriculture would be deferred until such time as China’s agriculture was mechanized. On July 31, 1955, however, Mao called for the acceleration of cooperativization, albeit on a “gradual and voluntary” basis. His assumption was that since the country could not afford mechanization, labor-intensive methods, such as close planting, extension of double and triple cropping, and collection of natural fertilizers, would bring about the breakthrough in agricultural productivity that was so obviously needed. His speech marked the onset of a “socialist high tide” during which frenetic organizing led to 80 percent of households becoming members of lower-level cooperatives by January 1956. By the end of 1956, 88 percent of households (400 million people) had been pressed into joining “advanced cooperatives,” each comprising 200 to 300 households. In these cooperatives, members were paid according to the amount and quality of work they performed, rather than the amount of land and other assets they brought into the cooperative. This hectic process of collectivization was far from voluntary: many peasants resented their loss of control over land and the constraints on their right to sell produce, although there was some support among the young and the poorer layers of rural society. In contrast to collectivization in the Soviet Union in 1928–32, there was no mass violence, thanks to the existence of a disciplined Party apparatus in the countryside. Yet nearly all the forms of resistance that had occurred in the Soviet Union occurred in China too, such as slaughtering livestock, reducing levels of production, withdrawing from cooperatives, and circulating fear-inducing rumors, such as that state grain reserves were about to run out.
The mid-1950s witnessed a drive to eradicate illiteracy though the extension of primary education into rural areas and through a crash campaign targeted at adults. This was prompted by the twin desires to improve the technical skills of the population and to transform political consciousness. However, the literacy drive was dogged by lack of teachers, textbooks, and poor pedagogy. In March 1956, the government announced a new campaign to eliminate illiteracy within five to seven years. Literacy for peasants was defined as mastery of 1,500 characters, plus the ability to comprehend popular books and newspapers, write simple notes, keep basic accounts, and use an abacus. This was less than the minimum 4,000 characters expected of those graduating from senior primary school. A process of simplifying Chinese characters also got under way, with an initial list of 486 characters reduced from an average of sixteen to eight strokes. Over the next three years, nearly 80 million people received some form of literacy training. However, in 1959 it was reported that in Wanrong county in Shanxi more than 12,000 out of 34,000 who had undergone the crash programme had subsequently forgotten the characters they had learned. This spurred experiments in pinyin romanization, the press reporting that 8,750 peasants in Wanrong had read Mao’s essay “A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire” in pinyin and “completely emancipated their minds and come to understand how to greet new developments.”
The politicization of literacy teaching, together with the mass dissemination of slogans, simple print publications, radio broadcasts, study groups, and speeches, helped to popularize the new language of Communism, mainly in the form of catchphrases and fixed expressions. Spouses were encouraged to call one another airen (loved one), rather than “my wife” (wo taitai) or “my husband” (wo xiansheng). People were encouraged to address one another as “comrade” (tongzhi), with the severe exception of the “black” categories of the population. Citizens were exhorted to feel “warm love” (re ai) towards the CCP and Chairman Mao. Once the Great Leap Forward was launched, everyday language became militarized as “battles” for production were staged and “battle lines” drawn in the workplace, part of a bid by the authorities to instil the discipline, heroism, and urgency of war into the drive to create Communism. Official language seeped into the oddest places: some Catholics defined the conflict between the officially approved Patriotic Church and the underground church, still loyal to the Vatican, as a “line struggle,” echoing Mao’s claim of 1959 that “the correct line is formed in struggle with the incorrect line.”
Since the PRC did not have the resources to provide primary and secondary education to the entire population, educational policy oscillated between an “expert” pole, which entailed concentrating resources on producing the expertise needed to run a modern economy and administration, and a “red” pole, which deplored academic specialization, lauded the integration of manual labor and academic study, and stressed decentralized, part-time education for the masses. During the First Five-Year Plan, educational policy focused on creating a system of high-quality urban schools designed to feed universities and professional institutes (in 1955 an experiment in short-course middle schools for workers and peasants was abandoned). In early 1957, however, Mao summoned working people “to be simultaneously intellectuals and intellectuals simultaneously to be laborers.” This became the watchword of the Great Leap Forward, when emphasis shifted from state-run schools to part-time schools and to schools based on factories, mines, and communes. The syllabus was reoriented towards ideological education and applied knowledge in areas such as agricultural improvement and animal husbandry. Mass cultural, sporting, and scientific activities were also promoted as part of this “technological and cultural revolution.” The result was steady improvement in mass education, despite the twists and turns in official policy. Primary schools increased from 346,800 in 1949 to 1,681, 900 in 1965, while the number of secondary schools rose from 5,216 to 80,993.
Mao Zedong was convinced that Communism could only be achieved if there was a spiritual and moral transformation of the masses. He thus ascribed huge significance to ideological and cultural policy, maintaining that it was precisely in the realm of thought that the remnants of “feudalism” and “capitalism” were most recalcitrant. Cultural policy was carefully calibrated. On the one hand, much “feudal” and “capitalist” culture was banned or censored. In Beijing in 1949–50, 2,391 “old society entertainers” were barred from working on the grounds that they “perform and propagate feudal, superstitious and backward ideology.” The commercial entertainment industry inherited from the republican era was also suppressed, as dance halls, amusement parks, singsong girls, and pool halls were shut down. On the other, the CCP drew on its long experience in utilizing popular cultural forms such as rice-planting songs or New Year prints to project its message to the unlettered masses. The blind story-tellers of northern Shaanxi, for example, who had traditionally prayed to the gods for good fortune, or diagnosed illness and told fortunes, were retrained to tour villages telling stories about the golden future. A vast range of activities was funded by the government to “raise the cultural level” of the masses: from libraries and reading rooms, to peripatetic film and slide shows, to roving opera performances, to cultural stations in the cities that aimed “to spread literacy, conduct political propaganda, promote recreational activities and popularize scientific knowledge.” Again, with the Great Leap Forward, the accent shifted to the masses themselves writing, painting, staging plays, and making music. In Pi county in Jiangsu province peasants produced 105,000 drawings, paintings, and murals in summer 1958 that depicted the Communist future as one of plentiful food, bright, colorful clothing, elegant, Western-style housing, and a splendid Palace of Culture. Nevertheless, many perceived officially sponsored culture as too dry and didactic and continued to practice traditional forms of entertainment, such as local opera. In 1966 the cultural bureau in Jilin bemoaned the fact that in the city’s 139 rental bookstalls (50 of which were unlicensed), 70 percent of the books borrowed concerned “emperors and kings, scholars and beauties, feudal morality, feudal superstition, bourgeois ideology, and revisionist ideas.”
So far as elite culture was concerned, the PRC did not hesitate to ban or censor artistic and literary production it considered harmful and to promote an aesthetic that stressed an orientation towards the masses and presented the achievements of the CCP and the struggles of heroic individuals to bring about Communism in a positive light. On July 2, 1949, a congress of 753 writers and artists pledged to make their work “a tool to serve workers, peasants, and soldiers,” but this was easier said than done. The artist Dong Xiwen was required to repaint his “Founding Ceremony of the Nation” three times, in order to remove Party leaders who had fallen foul of Mao in the meantime. Visual forms of culture, such as posters, cartoons, woodcuts, and serial picture stories, were especially important in getting across the CCP’s message to a largely illiterate population. Cartoonists churned out depictions of Chiang Kai-shek as a cunning rat or a running dog, or featured folksy tales of “Aunt Yao,” an old lady with bound feet, arresting a Guomindang spy. Yet like all artists, cartoonists found it difficult to reconcile the formal requirements of their art—satire and caricature, qualities guaranteed to discomfit cultural bureaucrats—with the political requirements of the state. It hardly came as a surprise when in 1957 the editorial board of the main cartoon magazine was condemned for producing “poisonous weeds.”
A surprisingly high proportion of China’s 100,000 “higher intellectuals” had chosen to stay in China in 1949 rather than move to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Many hailed from landlord, bourgeois, or petty-bourgeois backgrounds and, far from being welcomed as patriots, the CCP viewed them with distrust. Yet the new government needed their knowledge and expertise and was ready to pay them accordingly. Teachers, for example, were in such short supply that many with problematic political histories (such as those who had worked for the Japanese or been activists in the Guomindang) were taken on. At the same time, they were pressed to reform their thinking in accordance with Communist principles and values. In 1950–51, tens of thousands underwent “thought reform” at “revolutionary universities” where they were introduced to Marxism-Leninism. This was often a grueling experience, yet even intellectuals who sincerely wished to work for the new government continued to display a certain independence of mind that Party leaders considered suspect. In late 1954 the regime launched a vicious campaign against the left-wing writer Hu Feng, who had had the temerity to complain to the Central Committee about the stultification of intellectual life. By 1956—and typifying the twists and turns in official policy that characterized this period—Mao felt that intellectuals had become too cowed, too reluctant to suggest ways in which the quality of government could be improved. In April 1956, therefore, he proposed to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” by encouraging intellectuals to speak their minds. Initially reluctant, they plucked up courage for five weeks in May and June to engage in an unprecedented spate of “blooming and contending.” “Who runs the country,” some asked, “the Party or the government?” “Which is superior, the Party or the law?” Such criticism far exceeded the bounds anticipated by Mao, confirming his suspicion that the intelligentsia was mired in bourgeois liberalism. On June 8 People’s Daily announced that a new struggle against “rightists” was about to commence.
Between 1957 and 1958 the anti-rightist campaign was ruthlessly carried out in Party and government agencies, research institutes, and universities. It is reckoned that 1.1 million people were branded “rightists,” many picked out to meet centrally determined quotas. They included not only intellectuals but also government and military officials. Subject to fierce attack by colleagues, many were demoted, dismissed, or sent to labor camps in remote areas. Ding Ling, feminist writer and recipient of the Stalin Prize for literature, had in recent times displayed exemplary loyalty to the CCP, yet she was put through twenty-seven “struggle sessions” before being dispatched to work on a chicken farm near the Soviet border. She would not be rehabilitated for twenty-two years. Hu Feng would languish in prison and labor camp for twenty-five years. Yet such was the desire of some to see their country prosper that they maintained faith that the CCP was engaged in a righteous struggle for a better society. In a lightly fictionalized story by Yang Xianhui, a train conductor reflects: “I took part in the war against the Nationalist government and was wounded in the Korean War against the Americans. After being convicted as a rightist, I still clung to the hope that I could reform myself through hard labor and that the Party would eventually forgive me and embrace me. If I had escaped, it would have meant I had jettisoned all my old ideals.”
As the apparatus of rule grew steadily, so did problems of bureaucracy and arbitrary power. In April 1957, the Central Committee announced that leading officials must do stints of manual labor to combat “bureaucratism, factionalism and voluntarism.” By 1962, 2 million urbanites had been sent down to the countryside, usually for one month a year, supposedly to learn from the masses. This seems hardly to have dinted the underlying trend and would be a major factor leading Mao to unleash the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
Despite the increased proportion of the agricultural surplus that the state had wrested as a result of rapid collectivization, in September 1957 Chen Yun pointed out starkly that there was a “sharp contradiction” between the limited supply of grain and cloth and the growth in population and urban employment. A debate was under way in the Party leadership at this time concerning the appropriateness of the Soviet model to China, the potential for decentralizing economic decision-making, and the relationship of socialization of agriculture to its technical transformation. In January 1958 Mao cut this short by announcing that a “Great Leap Forward” should commence, intended to be in effect a leap away from the Soviet model. Instead of putting energy into modernizing the forces of production by installing advanced technology and prioritizing heavy industry, Mao resolved that China should rely on the one productive force she had in abundance: namely, her human resources. The “subjective factor,” i.e. the consciousness of the masses, Mao argued, could overcome even the most daunting obstacles posed by socio-economic backwardness. So long as values and behavior inherited from the past were renounced and new values of struggle, austerity, and self-sacrifice embraced, then the masses, always, of course, under Party leadership, would achieve a rapid advance to Communism. In winter 1957–58, more than 100 million peasants were mobilized to undertake large-scale irrigation and land reclamation projects and to build and operate “backyard iron furnaces.” A campaign against the “four pests” got under way, which saw the population organized to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Some 220 million people were drafted into the people’s militias—30 million of them bearing arms—so peasants marching to the fields bearing red flags and rifles became a common sight.
The attack on book learning and scientific expertise was renewed. Mao opined that many people in history without formal education had intellectual and technological achievements to their credit, citing (with varying degrees of accuracy) Confucius, Jesus, Sun Yat-sen, Marx, and Benjamin Franklin as examples. On the positive side, school students, workers, and peasants were encouraged to become red and expert, not least by getting involved in scientific experimentation. On the negative side, many Party leaders proved breathtakingly ignorant. Kang Sheng promised that “if by National Day next year (1959), Shanghai’s schools are able to launch a third-grade rocket to an altitude of 186 miles, they should get three marks…A third-grade rocket with a satellite should get five marks. This is very easy.” A book entitled “They Are Creating Miracles” described how children at a primary school had “developed ten more new crops on its experimental plot.” “It’s a story that…involves no fairy-tale magicians, no white-bearded wizards of never-never land. The heroes of our story are Young Pioneers studying in an ordinary primary school.”
Mao convinced himself that massive communes responsible for production, consumption, residence, social services, and local modernization were the solution to China’s backwardness. The Beidaihe resolution of August 1958 extolled these as a combination of the Communist principle of “each according to his needs” and the socialist principle of “each according to his work” and predicted that “ownership by the whole people” would be realized within a few years. In the most “advanced” province of Henan, the drive to create communes was declared completed by the end of August: 38,473 advanced cooperatives, comprising an average of 260 households, had been converted into 1,378 people’s communes, each with over 7,200 households. An extraordinary utopianism gripped society. In the words of one Western observer: “There were communal mess halls, communal kitchens, communal labor, communal indoctrination, and hortatory meetings—a form of communal living totally different from the family and village way of life.” In Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces model communes provided their members with free food, clothing, medical care, education, and housing.
Commune “workers” (as peasants were now called) received work points for all the tasks they performed for the collective. These points were calculated according to the size and value of the year’s harvest, minus the state-levied grain taxes, and could be exchanged for grain and cash. Work was assigned by team leaders and workers had little or no say in the decisions they took. Though the press hailed all this as a sign that Communism was just around the corner, many—probably most—peasants were less than enraptured. Li Anyuan, a middle peasant from northern Sichuan, recalled: “When we had our land we could harvest between 500 and 2,000 kilograms of rice a year. During collectivization, all our food was taken away by the canteen—that was the policy. We were not even allowed to cook at home. The cadres sent people to destroy our stove and took away our wok.” In reality what was hailed by the media as a bold experiment in collective living was more like barracks-style regimentation.
It is now indisputable—and has become the clinching piece of evidence in the case against Mao Zedong—that by late 1958 the leadership knew that famine was spreading in certain regions. Indeed in spring 1959 Mao seems to have been minded to curb excesses in the implementation of the Leap. Yet when he heard Marshal Peng Dehuai criticize “petty-bourgeois fanaticism” at the Lushan plenum in July 1959, he dug in his heels and ordered a “second leap” to go ahead. The result was cataclysmic: the worst famine in human history, judged in terms of absolute numbers. The estimate that 30 million peasants starved to death does not seem wide off the mark. This was, in effect, a “man-made” famine, brought about by the quixotic aspirations of the central leadership to create Communism as quickly as possible and by draconian procurement of grain by local officials keen to prove to that they were “overcoming reactionary conservatism.” Compounding factors were the diversion of labor power and other resources away from farming—the agricultural labor force was reduced by 38 million between 1957 and 1958—together with the waste of grain resulting from communal eating and poor storage. In early 1959, several provincial governments inveighed against supposed under-reporting of the grain harvest and set cadres to hunt for “hidden grain” in peasant houses. Starving peasants staggered into the fields to eat unripe grain before the state could get its hands on it, and were beaten for their audacity, occasionally to death. The rate of “unnatural deaths” (that is, death through starvation plus direct killing) was appallingly high in the provinces of Henan, Anhui, Gansu, Sichuan, and Guizhou, lower in others, such as Zhejiang and Shanxi, this variation reflecting the zeal of provincial Party leaders in squeezing grain from starving peasants. One confidential CCP report noted: “For a long time, the masses have lost interest in collective production. They have lost faith in the future. They say they would rather be dogs somewhere else than people here.”
It fell to a new pragmatic leadership under Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to cope with the disaster between 1961 and 1964, Mao withdrawing from routine policy-making. Although the official talk had been of “walking on two legs,” i.e. of balanced development of agriculture and industry, investment in heavy industry had run at a level that would have made Soviet planners blanch. Between 1956 and 1958 the percentage of state capital investment in heavy industry had risen from 38 percent to 56 percent. The Leap then led to financial chaos, as controls on capital construction and the ordering of supplies disappeared; as the abolition of material incentives caused labor productivity to plummet; as labor costs spiraled as a result of a doubling in the size of the workforce; and as massive waste resulted from campaigns such as that to make “backyard steel” (steel produced using small blast furnaces constructed in the backyards of communes). The new leadership imposed massive financial cutbacks and scrapped prestige construction projects, once again illustrating the Maoist pattern of breaks and leaps followed by troughs and retrenchment. It was agriculture, however, that cried out for a change of policy. The government thus scaled down the size of communes and devolved decision-making to the brigade and later to the production team. By summer 1962, 30 percent of households were farming independently, on the basis of contracts with the production team. Private plots were restored and farmers were allowed to sell produce in rural markets. Similarly, small industrial enterprises were made responsible for their own profitability. Mao seethed at these measures, warning in August 1962 that China faced the “danger of capitalism and revisionism,” and urging the country the following month “never to forget class struggle.”
The consequence was a new national campaign to uphold ideological rectitude, known as the Socialist Education Movement. This was motivated by a desire to pin the blame for the Great Leap disaster on local Party officials. In rural areas, where the movement was known as the Four Cleanups, 1.5 million to 1.6 million cadres descended on the villages to ferret out bribery, embezzlement, illegal trading, gambling, and general back-sliding by grassroots cadres. In the course of struggle meetings, peasants sometimes took vengeance on those they held to be responsible for their suffering. In Hubei some 2,000 officials were murdered. Following the issuance of the Ten Points in May 1963, the movement was stepped up: Party leaders warned that landlords and rich peasants were “trying to stage a comeback” and “carry out class revenge.” In Guizhou the first secretary of the provincial Party committee, Zhou Lin, who as late as December 1960 had described the famine as “an expression of the most acute class struggle in the village,” now found himself accused of spreading capitalism. In Qinglong county in that province the work teams uncovered 164 households of “newly emerging landlords or rich peasants”; 129 “black category” households; and 212 “newly discovered households of secret counter-revolutionaries or backbone elements of reactionary political parties.” Out of 1,875 CCP members in the county 430 were subject to disciplinary action. In 1964 Zhou Lin was dismissed and the following year the entire leadership of Guizhou province was removed.
The work teams were shocked at the extent to which village life had slipped the anchor of Party control. Everywhere, peasants engaged in free trade, gambling, and “extravagant” weddings and funerals. Occasionally, there were more political, if desperate, attempts to escape the status quo. Between 1960 and 1965 there were 195 “attempts to restore the old order” in Jiangsu province and 184 in Liaoning province, many involving would-be emperors announcing the inauguration of a new dynasty. The work teams expressed particular disapproval of the rampant “feudal superstition” that was everywhere visible, evinced in everything from temple rebuilding, spirit mediumship, pilgrimages in search of holy water, to the circulation of disturbing supernatural rumors. Millions were convinced that the famine had come about because they were no longer free to practice the rituals designed to harmonize relations between the spirit and human worlds. In Pei County in Jiangsu, peasants declared: “In recent years, people have lost their good conscience and are not offering incense. Consequently, we haven’t had good harvests.” They vowed to pray to the gods to “wipe out disaster and bestow happiness.” For their part, the work teams vowed to “uproot superstition utterly, to bring materialist education to the masses, and to propagate scientific atheism.” In 1965 in Kaifeng alley in Zhabei district of Shanghai the neighborhood committee tore down red-paper strips bearing good-luck sayings and replaced them with strips bearing quotations from Mao. It pressured 180 households to throw out their ancestral tablets and images of Guanyin, Guandi, and other gods and replace them with portraits of Mao.
A monumental cult of Mao had been burgeoning since the early 1960s when Minister of Defense Lin Biao exhorted PLA soldiers “to arm our minds with Mao Zedong Thought, to defend the purity of Marxism-Leninism, and combat every form of ideological trend of modern revisionism.” Soldiers were organized into study groups to read Chairman Mao’s essays, and out of this experience a book of quotations was published in 1964 that would have a global impact as the Little Red Book. The potency of Mao’s ideas was propagated through campaigns “to learn from Dazhai” (a brigade in eastern Shanxi) in agriculture, and to “learn from Daqing” (a giant oilfield in Heilongjiang) in industry, the success of these two model sites being ascribed to assiduous study of Mao Zedong Thought. Educated youngsters were sent into the villages as Mao Zedong Thought counselors to teach the masses the “three constantly read articles,” which dealt, respectively, with serving the people, Communist internationalism, and perseverance in the face of hardship. In Chen village in Guangdong one counselor recalled: “We had every party member, every Communist Youth League member, and every counselor memorize the entire articles. After that, all the peasants were set to memorize the articles, but their level of literacy was too low.” Nevertheless study sessions and struggle meetings do appear to have instilled rudimentary elements of Maoist ideology into the peasantry. “Hey, you’re selfish!,” one might say to another: “Chairman Mao tells us to work selflessly for the collective.” At a deeper level, the ceaseless blitz of propaganda reinforced in millions of people a sense of Mao as an emperor, the symbolic father of the nation, his every utterance a sacred edict.
The years between 1949 and 1964 witnessed the most ambitious attempt in history to smash an existing social order and to replace it with a radically improved society, in this instance one based on collectivism, equality, and ideological uniformity. Against the odds, the CCP rapidly built a powerful state, using violence, mass campaigns, and relentless propaganda, and extended its extractive power and ideological influence deep into the population. In many respects, the PRC was a quintessentially totalitarian state in that the population, especially in the countryside, was subjected to traumatic social engineering, with little thought to the human cost, and to a remorseless campaign to rework its beliefs and values in line with those of the Great Helmsman. Yet beneath the totalitarian carapace, the population displayed a qualified independence of mind and action, proving restive and truculent by turns, which was partly a reflection of the limits of state power and partly a reflection of the resilience of traditional culture.
These years between 1949 and 1964 also saw China fall in and out of love with the Soviet Union. Up to 1958, the Sino-Soviet alliance was purposeful and dynamic, although never free of tension. It was Mao’s unwillingness to play “younger brother” to Khrushchev plus his determination to institute rapid and far-reaching economic and social transformation with no heed for “objective” circumstances that were the fundamental causes of the rift that opened up between the two largest Communist states between 1960 and 1963. Following the withdrawal of Soviet experts from China in 1960, Mao began to reflect on the evolution of the Soviet regime, coming to the view that it had turned into a state-capitalist society in which a privileged stratum of bureaucrats had “converted the function of serving the masses into the privilege of dominating them.” Seeing the revival of the market, the restoration of material incentives in industry, the re-emergence of a two-track system in education, or the resurgence of “feudal superstition,” Mao was haunted by the fear that capitalist restoration would occur in China too.
The Great Leap not only initiated the break with the Soviet Union, it proved to be a watershed in the evolution of the CCP. Up to 1958, the Party leadership was relatively united, but the Great Leap divided it permanently around the appropriate strategy for taking China out of backwardness. The Great Leap, too, irrevocably undermined the prestige of the Party at the grass roots, so that it never regained the trust it had enjoyed in the early 1950s. Ironically, however, one consequence of the Leap was that it opened the way for the apotheosis of the man who was most responsible for its terrible human and material cost. Yet if Mao achieved godlike status in the first half of the 1960s, the adulation of millions was clearly insufficient to quell his fear that he was losing control over the course of the revolution.