“I know that, and we don’t want you to withdraw from Quemoy. Therefore this proposal, hypothetical of course. We’re not asking the impossible, just an undertaking not to attack the mainland. Circumstances, of course, could subsequently alter cases. But, without public renunciation of force, you’ll have no case at all as far as we’re concerned. And Quemoy could then fall.”
“I’ll have a word, Spencer. Unofficially, of course.”
“And I’ll have a word, Tom. Hypothetically, of course.”
The Chinese and the American chatted inconsequentially while they completed their guided tour, though Thomas was enraged. The Chinese General hated begging scraps from the rich Americans. But the Americans possessed the power, and his Generalissimo desperately needed their power. Thomas lapsed into silence as the jeep carried them back to the airstrip.
Through the subtropical twilight a black speck skimmed the waves of the Taiwan Straits, and the Communist batteries roared a full-throated barrage. As shell-bursts showered sand around the strip, their escort hurried the Chinese General and the American diplomat into a foxhole.
“It doesn’t seem so peaceful now, does it?” Thomas shouted. “The plane won’t stop. We’ll board while it’s rolling—slowly, I hope.”
Just before the Commando touched down, they climbed into the jeep to race onto the airstrip. The two men jumped to the ground and leaped for the small aluminum ladder dangling from the moving aircraft’s open door. The strain wrenched Spencer Taylor Smith’s arms, and his hands slipped on the smooth metal. A burly crew chief hauled him aboard. He lay panting on the scarred floor as the Commando rose into the air. A final salvo exploded just behind its mottled tail plane.
“Could you tell the pilot how grateful we are?” the American shouted over the engines’ noise after regaining his breath and strapping himself into the bucket seat. “I see it’s a different crew, but I suppose the pilot’s landed here so often it seems routine.”
Thomas Sekloong returned from the flight compartment five minutes later. He grinned enigmatically before shouting, “The pilot appreciates your compliment. He says he was scared, too. Hardly routine! He hadn’t been into Quemoy for two years!”
“I know it’s overdoing things. Just like this display, but backwards.” The Minister of Defense of the People’s Republic tapped the giant red star of a People’s Marshal on his gold-encrusted shoulder board. “It’s a reverse fanfare, muting the trumpets and muffling the drums, placing my Headquarters so far from the city.”
“It’s a waste of time and petroleum running back and forth to Peking, Ta Chiang.” James Sekloong automatically used the Minister’s nickname, “Great General,” the accolade bestowed by Mao Tse-tung himself before relations between the Chairman and his best general became gelid.
“Chin-tien ta chiang-lai, ming-tien mei chiang-lai!” The Minister wryly punned on the word chiang, meaning both general and future. “Today a big future, tomorrow no future!”
James ignored the bitter pun. Defense Minister Marshal Peng Teh-huai, senior member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party and former Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea, could still jest about his conflict with Chairman Mao in late July 1958. But it was wiser for others not to react, even a full general who was a member of the Party’s Central Committee. Suspicious distrust was as thick in Peking as a spring fog on the Yellow River.
“I suppose,” James sidestepped, “that putting Headquarters twelve miles out does enhance security.”
“Hu-shuo pa-tao,” the Minister smiled. “That’s nonsense. Any Nationalist spies must be planted here in Headquarters. They wouldn’t walk off the streets of Peking to inspect our secret files. It’s just making a big show of not making a show. So much of that nowadays.”
“Times change,” James commented cautiously. “Sometimes so fast I can’t keep up. It was simpler when we were in Korea together.”
“True enough. I can’t keep up either. But I didn’t ask you for a philosophical discussion. Though, perhaps, later?”
The question hung in the air. James knew the Minister was recruiting allies for his inevitable confrontation with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. He was to a certain extent in sympathy with Peng Teh-huai’s views, while he admired the straightforward Marshal personally and professionally. But James was already committed to Premier Chou En-lai, to Deputy Chairman Liu Shao-chi—and to self-preservation.
“We can talk philosophy another time.” The Minister ended the awkward silence. “Meanwhile, I want to check nation-wide dispositions with you.”
“At your command, Great General!”
James offered the conventional response and gave silent thanks for his own discretion. No military necessity, not even professional courtesy required the Minister of Defense to consult with the Deputy Commander of the Peking Military Region regarding the nation-wide deployment of the Liberation Army.
“The Army has been assigned an extraordinary mission.” The Defense Minister’s Hunanese burr thickened in anger. “We’ve been ordered to attack right, left, and center. But we’ve also been ordered to attack to the rear.”
“The rear, Great General?”
“Yes, the rear. The build-up against Quemoy is completed, and heavy shelling starts next week. But Quemoy is really our strategic rear.”
“I don’t quite understand.” Honest bewilderment over-rode James’s caution. “Quemoy is the front line, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. To isolate the Nationalists and the Americans, we should intensify the conflict in Vietnam and Laos. Quemoy is a risky diversion that could provoke American retaliation.”
“And the frontal attacks?” James’s curiosity rashly prevailed over his prudence. “You mean troops supporting the Great Leap Forward and the Great People’s Communes?”
“Yes, Heaven help us! This is the first time the Liberation Army’s been deployed solely to crush popular resistance—and before it occurs.” The Minister’s burr was so thick James strained to understand him. “Rape their mothers! The lao pai-hsing will be calling us the People’s Suppression Army before this lunacy ends.”
“The plans do look ambitious.” James deliberately drew out the Minister. “Is that why you’re disturbed?”
“Disturbed? I’m not disturbed, I’m appalled. This is total national mobilization for national suicide. Great Leap Forward, screw their mothers! Catch up with Britain industrially in five years and America in fifteen. Build ten million midget blast furnaces to quadruple steel production in a year. Put one hundred million men to work on dams to make deserts and marshes bloom, rape their grandmothers. Use more slave labor than the feudal princes and make the First Emperor look like a benevolent despot. Replace all local administrations with fifty thousand Great People’s Communes. Every Commune self-sufficient agriculturally, industrially, culturally, militarily, and commercially. Abolish the family … put husbands and wives in separate dormitories and take their children away. Heaven trembles and the earth shakes. Confiscate all privately held land and livestock. Collectivize everything and call the mess a Great People’s Commune. The man’s mad!”
“But, Great General, it’s not just his decision.” James’s instinct for survival compelled him to protest. “The Party Center has approved, and the theoreticians say it’s possible. How can we …”
“This room’s not bugged,” the Minister interjected contemptuously. “And I won’t repeat our conversation, whatever you do. Some people still dare speak out.”
“I am no informer.” James objected and contritely reverted to the traditional courtesy: “I beg enlightenment.”
“It’s all a great hoax, like a hawker peddling a universal cure. Poor fellow can’t cure his own pox. But guarantees everyone else miracles—all on the cheap.”
The Minister spat into the enameled spittoon beside his desk.
“Attain Communism by reforming the spirit of man. Bullshit! Marx said true Communism would take centuries after—mind you, after—creating materi
al abundance. But these two-penny conjurers promise true Communism in a couple of years.”
“What other course is open?” James chose his words with care.
“We can only back their play, not too strenuously, till it collapses,” the Minister conceded. “Then we can pick up the pieces. Be particularly vigilant in Peking. I don’t want a mutiny or a coup d’état.”
“And the Russians?” James probed. “Where do they stand?”
“They’re not happy. I don’t love our Soviet comrades, but I have been sounding them out, as you know. They helped when we needed help—at least, until last year. Now they won’t come through with technical assistance so that we can make our own nuclear weapons.”
“But they promised,” James interjected. “Promised formally. On paper.”
“Now they’ve got the perfect excuse for reneging. Old Mao’s too reckless, they say. They’re dead set against the Quemoy action. Adventurism, they call it. And they point out the obvious. It’s possible … just barely possible that we can take Quemoy without bringing in the Americans. But we can’t take Taiwan without fighting the Americans—and Taiwan’s the real objective, not a pisspot little offshore island. So Moscow’s sitting this one out. The first test of the Sino-Soviet alliance since we pulled their chestnuts out of the fire in Korea—and we’re already isolated.”
“And Moscow feels the Chairman’s also reckless at home?”
“They’re right. He directly challenges the Russians by declaring we’ll reach true Communism before them. Opium Communism, they call it. Do you expect them to like it?”
“I can see their position,” James admitted. “But I don’t have to like it either.”
“Who likes it? I certainly don’t. But it’s real. And it’s time we faced reality, stopped befuddling ourselves with visions out of the opium-pipe. But we can only wait for the collapse. Then every sane man in the Party will have to pick up the pieces. That’s my view.”
James took his dismissal from the Defense Minister and faithfully reported his “view” to the Premier. Chou En-lai listened without comment to the warnings of disaster. Unlike the Defense Minister, he understood that the first duty of a statesman was to survive.
“The Marshal may be right or wrong about the consequences,” the Premier finally said. “He is certainly right about the choice before us. All we can do is go along for now.”
August, September, and October of 1958 were the cruellest and most tumultuous months since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The Great Leap Forward and the Great People’s Communes were proclaimed to transfigure both China and the Chinese people. The earthly paradise of true Communism promised by Karl Marx was to be attained in a historical instant, perhaps a year, certainly no more than three to five years. The Chinese people were to awe the world by entering a new epoch of man’s life on this earth under the inspired guidance of Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
At the beginning, few of China’s millions of cadres shared the Premier’s skepticism. Even fewer believed with the Defense Minister that the heroic enterprise must end in catastrophe. The audacity of the endeavor and the apocalyptic language that described the endeavor dazzled the men and women who were charged with transforming the Chairman’s vision into reality in the rice-fields of the south, in the wheat fields of the north—and in the impressionable minds of their six hundred million compatriots.
James Sekloong marveled at the magnitude of the Chairman’s vision. Dishonesty and strife, greed, lust and envy—indeed all ignoble emotions and actions—were to be destroyed by destroying the evil society that bred them.
Nature herself was to abate her harshness and gracefully yield her favors to the industrious wooing of hundreds of millions of Chinese. The mighty rivers were to become docile servants, and the earth was to surrender its iron to tens of millions of questing hands, the ore to be transformed into steel in millions of backyard blast furnaces. Time itself was to be vanquished when inspired human energy accomplished “twenty years’ work in a single day.” That “wholly new basis for a perfect new social structure,” the Great People’s Commune, was not only to supplant the family, but to transcend the individual human being. He was to be idyllically happy, but he was no more to be an independent organism than a single polyp in a coral reef. Instead, he was to live in idyllic collective happiness.
Five hundred million peasants were to own all property in common—except, perhaps, their shoes, the notebooks in which they scrawled political maxims, and, for a few, their toothbrushes. They were not even to possess garden plots, domestic animals, houses, cooking pots—or their own hearth fires. Drawing their clothing from central supply depots, eating in public mess halls, and bathing in public bath-houses, they were to become perfect “producing units.” Parents were neither to discipline nor to cherish their children, who would be the Commune’s charges. Both parents and children were to cast off the “narrow, selfish bonds of filial love”; all their love was to flow to the Motherland, to the Communist Party, and to Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
No Chinese was to sit in sinful idleness for an instant. Grandmothers were to weave baskets and tie brooms in Halls of Venerable Joy, while mothers and daughters worked in fields or workshops. Perhaps one woman in five was to undertake domestic tasks—looking after children, mending clothing, keeping house, and preparing food. With the disappearance of the family, distinctions between the sexes were to vanish in the crucible of perfect equality. Women would differ from men only in their reproductive functions. Men were neither to assume responsibility for women and children nor to exercise authority over them. Women were neither to adorn themselves nor to exercise their tactful domination over men.
A perfect egalitarian society—perfectly featureless and perfectly responsive to authority—was to emerge when the Communes had destroyed all distinctions between manual and intellectual labor, between agriculture and industry, between city and countryside. Under the sway of the Communist priest-kings, the unitary Golden Age celebrated by Chinese mythology would reappear.
The Special Investigation Teams of the People’s Liberation Army discovered a quite different reality when the military were, toward the end of the year 1958, ordered to “pick up the pieces,” as the Defense Minister had predicted. The Communist Party had been forced to call in the Liberation Army, the only remaining effective instrument of power, when civil administration virtually collapsed, the economy was verging upon paralysis, and the lao pai-hsing, vastly overburdened and pitifully underfed, began to mutter in revolt.
“No one knew what a Great People’s Commune was.” An intense sixteen-year-old schoolboy described the apotheosis of Sansung Village to James Sekloong, who was in command of the investigation in North China. “But it sounded wonderful. We were to govern ourselves. No foreign cadres were to tell us what to do. Everyone would get more food and better clothing—all free. The Commune would produce everything we needed—hoes and shovels, baskets and plows, cloth and thermos bottles, iron and steel too. We’d even be our own soldiers—to defend the country and enforce the people’s will.”
James lit another cigarette and listened in brooding silence.
“It sounded all right to get free meals in a mess hall, but no one really believed we couldn’t ever cook our own food or that all parties and holidays were banned. People were glad that old people and young children would be specially looked after. But who could believe husbands and wives would be separated from their children and from each other? That didn’t fit the new slogans the cadres recited: Today in the Mao Tse-tung Era, heaven is here on earth! The new era of universal, almighty man has arrived!”
The people of Sansung Village, the schoolboy recalled, found that the Great Peace and Prosperity Commune did not bring more food, less work, and untrammeled liberty. They got much less food and that little badly prepared; forced labor was radically intensified; and they lost almost all freedom of choice in their personal lives.
“We worked fourteen to eighte
en hours a day for a few mouthfuls of food. They promised four ounces of pork a month, but we never saw meat, eggs—or even bean curd. All our rice went to the Commune, so did our chickens and pigs. If we stole a handful of our own rice or hid an egg, we couldn’t cook it. All pots and pans had gone to the iron-and-steel drive to help the Motherland resist American aggression in the Taiwan area.”
The travail of the Chinese people in September 1958 was hidden from the outside world. Observers in Hong Kong were not struck by the Great People’s Communes and the Great Leap Forward until the middle of that month. Both then appeared no more than repetitions of the unremitting campaigns that had convulsed the People’s Republic since its establishment. Heavy artillery bombardment of Quemoy, backed by Peking’s full-throated threats to “liberate” first the offshore island and subsequently Taiwan itself, did not divert the Chinese people from their ordeal. The crash of guns and the thunder of propagandists did divert the men who “watched” China from outside because they could not enter the country itself. Besides, the audacity of the Chairman’s new endeavor numbed their perceptions. Like the lao pai-hsing themselves, the “China Watchers” could not really believe that Mao Tse-tung was determined to make a wholly new China by totally exploiting the nation’s single greatest resource, the Chinese people.
Dewey Miller, Hong Kong correspondent for Newsweek, intuitively knew that the two “movements” were transcendent. He read the Communists’ literal descriptions of their visionary purposes with fascination, but regretfully postponed the necessarily painstaking analysis of Peking’s most extraordinary pronouncements. New York wanted full coverage of the intensifying Quemoy crisis, since direct American involvement could lead to a collision with Peking and, perhaps, with Moscow. Resignedly, Miller boarded a DC-6 of General Claire Chennault’s Civil Air Transport to Taipei and ensconced himself in the gray-stone Friends of China Club. Formerly a hostel for the puritanical Officers’ Moral Endeavor Association, the Club offered minimal comfort to the foreign press corps that crammed all its facilities. It was, however, centrally located, just across the square from the red-brick Presidential Offices that housed the Ministry of Defense, and its telephones functioned as well as any on the island. The staff was accustomed—if not reconciled—to the correspondents’ outrageous professional demands and sometimes equally outrageous personal behavior, while the Club’s convenience attracted both senior Chinese officials and foreign diplomats.
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