Mao

by Philip Short

  *

  At this point relations with the Soviet Union – still, despite mutual tensions, China's only major ally – took an abrupt turn for the worse. The Tibetan revolt that spring, and the subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama, had caused friction with India. In August, less than ten days after the end of the Lushan plenum, a border clash occurred in which an Indian soldier was killed. Khrushchev, to Mao's fury, adopted an attitude of neutrality. A month later, after returning from a triumphal visit to the United States, which consecrated the policies of peaceful coexistence that China so detested, he flew to Beijing, ostensibly to attend the tenth-anniversary celebrations, but in fact to make one last attempt to get the relationship back on a normal footing. It was doomed from the outset. The Russian leader's decision to abrogate the nuclear co-operation accord; his wooing of American imperialism; his insistence in recent months that Taiwan be recovered only by peaceful means; not to mention the Indian dispute – were all, in Mao's view, so many acts of deliberate betrayal.

  For three days, the two sides argued. Nothing was resolved.

  The suspicion that had begun to form in Mao's mind in 1956, that the Soviet leadership was abandoning ‘the sword of Leninism’, now crystallised into certainty. Just as in Stalin's day, he decided, Russia would always put its own interests first and those of China, second: it was time to make the conflict public.249 For Khrushchev, too, the visit marked a parting of the ways. Mao, he concluded, was bellicose, duplicitous and nationalistic. The basis for a fraternal relationship simply no longer existed.

  In February 1960, at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow, the two sides aired their differences over peaceful coexistence before the east European members of the bloc.250 In April, in an article to mark the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin's birth, which Mao himself revised, the People's Daily set out the ideological basis for China's stance. As long as imperialism existed, it said, wars would occur; peaceful competition was a fraud, perpetrated by ‘the old revisionists and their modern counterparts’. Both sides began canvassing support among other communist parties. Inevitably, an open clash followed. At the Romanian Party Congress in June, Khrushchev, for the first time, denounced Mao by name as ‘an ultra-Leftist, an ultradogmatist and a left revisionist’ who, like Stalin, had become ‘oblivious of any interests but his own, spinning theories detached from the realities of the modern world’. Peng Zhen, representing China, responded in kind. Khrushchev, he said, was behaving in a ‘patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical’ manner in order to impose non-Marxist views.

  Bizarrely, Mao and his colleagues remained convinced that this inter-Party struggle could be confined to the ideological plane without affecting state-to-state relations. The chances of a complete rupture, the Politburo decided, were ‘relatively small’.251

  That proved not to be the case.

  Three weeks later, the Soviet leadership informed China that, with immediate effect, all Russian experts were being withdrawn and all Russian aid was being terminated. Factories were left half-built; blueprints torn up; research projects abandoned. Nearly 1,400 Soviet specialists and their families boarded special trains to Moscow.

  If Khrushchev's intention had been to force Mao to back down, as his aides asserted, he had miscalculated grievously. Even those Chinese leaders who harboured private doubts about the communes and Mao's Great Leap Forward strategy now rallied to their defence. Russia's treachery proved that Mao's insistence on China finding its own independent path to communism had been amply justified. Never again would it allow itself to become reliant on a foreign power.

  The break with Moscow, while damaging, had little direct impact on the famine. None of the cancelled projects was agricultural.252 Indirectly, however, it did play a role. It distracted Mao's attention from the grain crisis, and he insisted that, for reasons of face, China should repay its debts to Moscow ahead of schedule. Roughly 650 million roubles (equivalent to 5 billion US dollars in today's terms) were reimbursed in four years. To generate those sums, the peasants had to be squeezed still more harshly to produce exportable foodstuffs while starvation was rampant. For the same reason, Chinese foreign aid to Third World countries was maintained throughout this period, averaging 500 million RMB (equivalent to 1.6 billion US dollars) a year.253 Those decisions exacerbated the famine. But the root cause was the Great Leap itself and Mao's continuing refusal to take effective action to remedy its terrible effects.

  By July it was clear that the 1960 harvest would be even worse than the previous year's. This time the weather did play a role.254 One hundred million acres, more than a third of all cultivated land, were in the grip of the worst drought for a century. In Shandong, eight of the twelve main rivers were bone-dry. Even the Yellow River fell to a point where men could wade across its lower reaches, something not seen within living memory. Then came floods. Another 50 million acres were devastated. After a winter of hunger, the peasantry had neither the strength to fight back, nor – more crucially – the means to do so because of the disruption caused by the frenzy of the Leap. ‘The people are too hungry to work, and pigs are too hungry to stand up,’ one young soldier complained. ‘The commune members are asking: “Is Chairman Mao going to let us starve?”’ That year, China did starve. All the grain that could be gathered amounted to a paltry 143 million tons. Even on the outskirts of Beijing, people ate bark and weeds. The death-rate in the capital, the best-supplied city in China, rose two-and-a-half times. In parts of Anhui, Henan and Sichuan, where Leftist provincial secretaries had promoted the Leap most strongly, a quarter of the population perished. Altogether more than 20 million people died in the famine in 1960, far more than in any other year.255

  The campaign against right-opportunism launched after the Lushan conference had made a bad situation infinitely worse. A year later Mao would acknowledge:

  What was the nature of our error? … We should not have transmitted the resolution against Peng [Dehuai and the others] below the county level … Below that level, only … the measures against leftism should have been disseminated … Carrying it further resulted in a large number of people being accused as right-deviating opportunists. Now we can see that that was a mistake, and that good people who spoke the truth were labelled as [rightists] or even as counter-revolutionaries.256

  It was a lame excuse. The problem was not that the movement against rightism had been enlarged: the problem was that Mao had launched it in the first place. Even if it had been less extensively publicised, grass-roots cadres would have learned that Mao was once more on the warpath against rightists. Every campaign since 1949 – the land reform; the suppression of counter-revolutionaries; the cultural campaigns against The Life of Wu Xun and The Secret History of the Qing Court; the campaign against Hu Feng; the anti-Rightist movement; the repudiation of those who opposed ‘rash advance’; and now the campaign against right-opportunism – all, in one way or another, had targeted ‘rightists’. To find a time when Mao had opposed leftism, it was necessary to go back to the civil war, when he had opposed excessive rigour in the land reform, if not to the 1930s, when the Party was split over the Li Lisan line.

  At the end of the 1950s, Mao was at the summit of an imperial system, reinforced by a Leninist organisational structure, in which all power and privilege flowed from the top down. He himself spoke of ‘combining Marx with Qin Shihuang’ – legalist despotism with a totalitarian base.257 In such a system, one Chinese historian wrote: ‘Each official wore two faces: before his superiors, he was a slave, and before his subordinates, a tyrant.’258

  Those who wanted a retreat from the Great Leap, as the Central Committee had urged in the spring, knew that if they spoke out they risked being purged as followers of Peng Dehuai. Acknowledging food shortages, overwork or starvation – a word whose use was forbidden; officials spoke instead of ‘an epidemic’ (of what was left unsaid) – was viewed as right deviationism, to be struggled against and crushed.

  At the most basic level, in the communes, in the production brigades and teams
and in the work groups, the cadres resorted to coercion of medieval barbarity: villagers suspected of stealing food were branded on the face with red-hot irons, forced to eat excrement, drenched in urine, beaten to death or buried alive. Starving children who stole food risked the same fate.

  There were exceptions. In some areas, local officials turned a blind eye to the peasants’ attempts to feed themselves and allowed what were called ‘salvation fields’, where they could grow their own crops. But most tried to protect their own backs by mercilessly squeezing those under their authority.

  As in famines throughout Chinese history, men sold their wives, if there were buyers – and women were pleased to be bought, because purchase meant survival. Banditry reappeared. Cannibalism was rife. Bodies were exhumed and eaten. During the winters of 1959 and 1960, when the ground was too hard for burials, corpses littered the roadsides and river banks. Scavengers cut off the flesh and cooked it. There were cases of parents killing and eating their own children, and elder brothers and sisters eating younger siblings. That, too, was not new. In the north China famine of the 1870s, when a third of the population of Shanxi died, missionaries who travelled to the area found children being boiled and eaten.VIII

  At every level, officials tried to prevent their superiors discovering the true state of affairs in order to save their own skins. In Guizhou, when a county Party committee learned that inspectors were about to arrive, ‘sick villagers and neglected children were locked up by the militia, while tell-tale trees without bark [which starving villagers had eaten] were torn out, roots and all’. In another incident, in Anhui, 3000 villagers suffering from oedema were rounded up and kept out of sight.259 Militiamen manned checkpoints to prevent travel out of famine-stricken areas. Letters which mentioned the famine were intercepted and destroyed and the writers arrested. Provincial leaders, in turn, sent reassuring reports to the central leadership. When later the truth emerged, they claimed, falsely, that they had been duped by their subordinates. For some this murderous charade was a cynical means of winning advancement. But most acted out of fear: to tell those in power that Mao's policies were failing was a risk few wished to take.

  None the less, by October 1960, after the campaign against right opportunism had been raging for more than a year, the death toll was beyond the power of even the provincial leadership to conceal. That month two of Mao's cousins came to see him from Shaoshan. ‘Chairman brother,’ said Mao Zerong, ‘You live in Beijing, as remote as the Emperors of old, and you don't know what's happening. Now all is in chaos and people are starving. You need to do something!’260 Shortly afterwards, Mao received a report on the situation in Xinyang prefecture, in Henan, where more than a million people, an eighth of the population, had starved to death.261 At an emergency meeting of the State Council, summoned to discuss the situation, Zhou Enlai insisted: ‘Not a single person reported [this] to us. The central government knew nothing about it.’ That was a barefaced lie. Eight months earlier, a senior official in the Central Committee's internal affairs department had minuted that 200,000 to 300,000 people had died in Xinyang, but Tan Zhenlin, the vice-premier in charge of agriculture, had had the report suppressed. Tan had also objected to a second report, which spoke of 400,000 deaths. Later Liu Shaoqi shelved a report stating that there were 600,000 dead.262 From February to October, while the state granaries were bulging with grain, most of Mao's colleagues were well aware of the extent of the starvation, yet did nothing. Had they acted to open the grain reserves in order to feed the starving, more than ten million lives might have been saved. They did not because they were unwilling to commit themselves until the Chairman had spoken.

  The Xinyang Incident, as it was called, forced a change of policy. In one third of the country, Mao now conceded, ‘the situation is very bad … Scoundrels have taken power, people have been beaten to death, food production has dropped, people are going hungry.’263 In January 1961, the Central Committee finally approved a wholesale retreat, disguised as ‘adjustment, consolidation, replenishment and enhancement’. Relief grain was sent to the worst-affected areas.264 But the leaders, from Mao on down, refused to admit their own responsibility. Wang Renzhong, then second secretary of the South Central Bureau, told the Henan provincial Standing Committee that winter that the errors had been at the local level:

  To see the masses dying, yet keep the grain locked in storerooms and refuse to distribute it; to watch the communal kitchens close down and yet not allow the masses to light stoves in their own homes; to refuse to let the masses harvest wild herbs or flee the famine; to deny walking sticks to those crippled with starvation; to treat people worse than oxen or horses, arbitrarily beating and even killing them, lacking even a shred of human feelings – if these were not the enemy, what were they? … These people, for the sake of their own self-preservation, slaughtered our class brothers, and we just kill them with equal ruthlessness.265

  Who were ‘these people’ who had acted so shamefully? To Mao they were ‘class enemies’ – ‘landlords and local despots, henchmen of feudalism, bandits, reactionary secret societies and secret agents’ – who had survived the ‘new democratic revolution’ which had accompanied the communist victory and had then managed to usurp positions of power in the countryside. Their actions were an attempt at ‘counter revolutionary class restoration’.266

  It was singularly unconvincing. Indeed, one may wonder whether even Mao believed it, for none of these supposed ‘class enemies’ was executed and, after undergoing ‘study sessions’, most were allowed to keep their posts. The majority of the provincial leaders also escaped unscathed, and the smaller fry who had been purged as right opportunists were rehabilitated. In the end the only ones to be punished were Peng Dehuai and his colleagues – the group which had had the courage to tell Mao to his face that his plans were misconceived and would lead to nationwide disaster, as indeed they had.

  There was, none the less, a grain of truth in the leadership's explanation. A Central Committee Special Investigation Group reported that local cadres had adopted ‘the tactics of the landlords and the Guomindang’. As often in revolutions, those charged with enforcing the new order had embraced the brutal and discredited methods of those they had overthrown.

  But the roots of the catastrophe lay elsewhere. Officials at the county and provincial level, let alone on the communes and production brigades, could never have wrought the havoc that they did had Mao not established a system where no one, not even his closest colleagues, could question his decisions, and none of those around him could move to alleviate the tragedy that was unfolding until Mao himself allowed them to do so.

  Throughout the period of the Great Leap and for decades after, the extent of the disaster was a closely guarded secret. In each province only five people had access to demographic statistics: the Party first secretary and his deputy; the governor and his deputy; and the head of the Public Security Bureau. At the national level, even the Politburo was kept in the dark: only members of the Standing Committee were informed, and not all of them. In 1961, the Food Minister, Chen Guodong, and two other senior officials were directed to compile detailed records from each province. They estimated that the population loss throughout the country was in the tens of millions. Their report was sent only to Mao and Zhou Enlai. After Zhou had read it, he ordered that all copies be destroyed.267

  Twenty years later, in June 1980, Hu Yaobang, who was then about to succeed Hua Guofeng as Party Chairman, became the first Chinese leader publicly to acknowledge the magnitude of the tragedy. He told a group of Yugoslav journalists that 20 million people had died. That figure was not reported within China, however. Subsequently the leadership approved a figure of just under 17 million, which remains the official death toll today. Yang Jisheng, who has made the most careful study of the population figures thus far, has concluded that a total of 36 million deaths ‘approaches the reality but is still too low’, and that in addition there was a shortfall of 40 million births, because women stopped menstruating a
nd couples were too weak to procreate. That is probably as close as we shall ever come to a definitive figure.268 It is, in all conscience, enough.

  As Mao contemplated the ruins that his delusions had brought about, he began gloomily to implement his long-delayed promise to retire to the ‘second front’. The Great Leap had ended in an apocalyptic failure. His grandiose dream of universal plenty had metamorphosed into an epic of pure horror. At the end of 1960, he set aside once and for all the idea of making China a great economic power, never to concern himself with it again.

  I It is sobering to reflect that those predictions, which at the time were dismissed in the West as pure fantasy, have since been borne out. China overtook the United States in steel production in 1993, and twenty years later was producing more than 800 million tons a year, almost ten times the American figure. Despite slowing growth, the Chinese economy is on track to become the world's largest by 2025 or earlier (as Mao envisaged in 1955, when he told the 6th Plenum of the 7th Central Committee that China would catch up with the United States in 50 to 75 years: see Lin Yunhui, Wutuobang yundong: Cong dayuejin dao dajihuang, 1958–1961, Xianggang zhongwen daxue chubanshe, Hong Kong, 2008, p. 9).

  II Following the communist victory in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Taiwan, with the support of the United States, continued to occupy China's UN seat. On Stalin's orders, the Soviet Union boycotted meetings of the Security Council from January to October, 1950, ostensibly in protest against the nationalists’ presence. The result was to perpetuate the exclusion of the People's Republic, in keeping with Stalin's aim of maximising Chinese dependence on, and subjection to, Moscow. After China's entry into the Korean War, Beijing's debarment was ratified by annual votes of the General Assembly until 1971, when Taiwan, in its turn, was excluded. Although Eisenhower agreed to ambassadorial talks with China in August 1955, first in Geneva and then in Warsaw, they marked time until 1970 when Kissinger visited Beijing.