The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard Mcgregor

  The decision to close Freezing Point was popular with the conservative ranks of the Party. ‘It’s not difficult to understand,’ said Xia Chuntao, the historian from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. ‘It is an official newspaper under the youth league. It is certainly not allowed to publish voices at odds with the Party’s guidelines and policies. I would have closed it too.’ The problem, according to Xia, is that there were too many amateur historians talking about things they were not qualified to discuss. ‘Yuan’s major is not Chinese history,’ he said. ‘It does not mean he should not express his opinion about the Boxers, but what he said must be according to history, without basic mistakes.’

  Talking to him three years after his removal, Li seemed more thrilled than chastened by the episode, and not just because, like many newspaper editors, he enjoys a good fight. His attacks on the propaganda department had been widely circulated on the internet. He had released a detailed book chronicling the whole affair, with the backing of publishers in Japan. He also maintained an active blog, giving him a permanent platform to comment on freedom of speech issues. Compared to the oppressive political atmosphere after 1989, the response of the state was positively enlightened. ‘This time around, individuals have paid less of a price than before,’ Li said. ‘People have recognized that they can fight for their rights.’

  In Guangzhou, Yuan expressed similar sentiments. He had heard that the Guangdong provincial government had approached the university to complain after his article had been republished in Freezing Point. But the university had fobbed them off. ‘No one came to talk to me. My apartment was very quiet,’ he said, sitting at his home in the university grounds. ‘More than forty journalists interviewed me later. The first question was always: “Were you harassed?” I said no, no. And I think that was the best propaganda of all for the Communist Party.’

  At about the same time that Li was being pushed out of Freezing Point, Yang Jisheng was nearing completion of Tombstone. Yang, like Li, had always been a journalistic bomb-thrower, with one major difference. While Li had positioned himself as an outsider, Yang’s projectiles had always been launched from within the heart of the system itself.

  Yang spent his entire professional life at Xinhua, the official state news agency, starting in 1967 and retiring in 2002. Yang’s job at Xinhua gave him journalistic privileges that are very different from those afforded by the media in democracies. Successful journalists in the west trade on their ability to uncover scandals or lift the visibility of public policy issues with such vigour that the government must respond. The power Yang wielded as a journalist in Xinhua, however, played out backstage, out of sight of the public. When I asked Yang which of his stories had had a major impact on policy and politics in his three-decade-plus career, he didn’t name anything that he had written as an ordinary Xinhua economics reporter. His news stories and commentaries churned out for the public wire service had been cleared and sanitized by the propaganda system. The presentation of these stories was aimed at supporting the government, not shaking it up.

  Yang was more proud of his dispatches for Xinhua’s secret internal news service, written exclusively for senior party officials. Two of his stories attained the status of cabinet documents once they were adopted by the top leadership. In 1972, he filed a story saying the military had forcibly taken over schools, hospitals and houses in Tianjin, the port city near Beijing where Yang was stationed for nineteen years. Yang’s account of this episode landed on the desks of Mao and Zhou Enlai, who promptly ordered the troops to vacate the buildings. Another story, also filed while the Cultural Revolution was still raging, detailed the collapse of industrial production in the city. ‘Mao read that one too,’ he said. In 1987, he wrote a four-part series about the decline of Tianjin as an economic centre, which was leaked to the Hong Kong press, causing great embarrassment to the city’s leaders. Li Ruihan, the then mayor and later a Politburo member, had him investigated, but took no action. ‘He is just a bookworm,’ Li remarked later, of Yang, ‘so I let him go.’

  The longer Yang worked in the system, the more he became alienated from it. The turning point was 1989, when, as he wrote, ‘the blood of young students washed clean all the lies that were in my head’. By the early nineties, Yang had become a roving economics correspondent for Xinhua travelling around the country. He had also resolved to write and put his name to the stories the Party had long ordered suppressed–about the 1989 massacre, political infighting among top leaders, and most importantly, the story of the famine. The first job would prove to be a perfect cover for the second. But writing the books was only part of the struggle. Getting them to readers in China was just as difficult. ‘Once the legitimacy of the Party faces any challenge, the propaganda department will bring powerful forces to bear to suppress it,’ said Yang. ‘There is a continuous struggle with them. They will suppress me, but I would still like to challenge them.’

  Yang’s first book from this period, The Times of Deng Xiaoping, was published first in Hong Kong in 1999, and then in China itself, after it had been censored. Even then, the propaganda department directed it be taken off the shelves, shut the state publishing house for three months and told its director to write a self-criticism. To drive the point home the department cut the house’s publishing quota for that year by 20 per cent. (Publishers are issued a set quota each year to control the number of titles they can release.) Soured by that experience, Yang decided to publish only in Hong Kong, out of the reach of the department. In 2000, he put out an analysis of social classes in China. And then in 2004, he released Political Struggles in the Age of China’s Reform and Opening Up, containing interviews conducted in secret nearly a decade before with Zhao Ziyang, the party leader toppled for opposing the use of military force in 1989. They were the first such interviews with Zhao, a man whose image had been banned from the Chinese media. Yang was rebuked by his masters at Xinhua, but kept his job.

  Yang’s political epiphany took on a more personal note after the longtime governor of Hubei told him hundreds of thousands of people had died in his home province in the great famine. He began to rethink his own father’s death in 1959. He had always remembered clearly the moment he found out his father was dying. As a 15-year-old high school student and propaganda officer for the local branch of the Communist Youth League Yang was an enthusiastic supporter of Mao. He was in the middle of writing a wall poster to promote the Three Red Flags campaign glorifying the Great Leap Forward and the farm collectives when a classmate burst into the room. ‘Your father is not going to make it,’ he told him. Yang later blamed himself for not going home earlier, to dig for wild vegetables to feed the family. He never thought at the time to blame Mao or the Communist Party. It was an individual case, something to be handled within the family. Thirty or so years later, he had developed an entirely different perspective.

  On and off over the next decade, Yang locked himself in provincial archives and pored over their records–population figures, grain production, weather digests, personnel movements, internal reports by investigation teams and anything else he could get his hands on. Researching the great famine was the largest and riskiest project he had undertaken. Pretending to be investigating rural issues and grain production, Yang was able to gain access to documents which had been locked away for decades. If his status as a senior Xinhua reporter wasn’t enough to get into the archives, he used the relationships his colleagues had built up with the provincial authorities. ‘My colleagues knew what I was doing,’ he said. ‘They secretly supported me.’

  In Gansu, in western China, a former Xinhua branch head well known for his leftist views backed Yang and handed over materials. In Sichuan, China’s populous breadbasket, another ageing journalist did the same. His ruse did not work every time. In Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces, Yang almost came undone. His colleagues took him to the provincial party compound to seek permission to access the archives. The nervous section head consulted the head of the archives about the requ
est, who referred it to the deputy of the provincial party secretariat. He referred the request upwards to his boss, who then decided to consult Beijing. A query to the central government could easily have exposed the research as a sham. ‘We would have been finished,’ Yang said. On hearing about the request to Beijing, Yang coolly excused himself and said he would come back another time. Tombstone, as a result, has no detailed chapter on Guizhou.

  Yang worried constantly that he would be caught and his colleagues punished. ‘I felt like a person going deep into a mountain to seek treasure, all alone and surrounded by tigers and other beasts,’ he said. ‘It is very dangerous, as using those materials is prohibited.’ The sourcing in Tombstone is meticulous, down to the documents’ serial numbers and the years in which they were published. But anticipating potential trouble ahead, Yang fudged some of his more than 2,000 footnotes. Instead of naming the official archives, he refers to his sources as ‘original documents with very reliable sourcing’.

  In Xinyang, a small city in Henan province where the famine was at its worst, the local government didn’t direct Yang to the official archives. The officials received him hospitably and sent him instead to see a retired cadre from the local waterworks bureau, Yu Dehong. In their own quiet way, the Xinyang officials might have been giving Yang a helping hand as well. Yu was what you might call the local history crank, except that the stories he nagged people about did not concern mundane municipal landmarks and the arrival of the city’s first steam train. As political secretary to the Xinyang mayor in the late fifties, Yu was an eye-witness to a mini-Holocaust in his home town, its surrounding villages and his own family. According to the most conservative calculations, one million people out of a population of eight million in Xinyang died over a three-year period. Yu had often been gently advised to drop the issue in the years since. Instead, he wrote a detailed account and submitted it to the local party secretary under his own name. ‘Some people asked me–“haven’t you committed enough mistakes?”’ he said. ‘But if the official history won’t include this material, then my private history will. I have the materials to back me up.’

  Xinyang was generally blessed with good harvests, unlike much of Henan, known as the ‘land of beggars’ for its history of impoverishment and not infrequent famines. But any advantage the city had was undermined by the officials who ruled over it. At the time, Henan and Xinyang were overseen by radical leftists fanatically devoted to Mao who viewed the grain harvest solely through the prism of violent class struggle. Yu remembers vividly a series of surreal meetings in 1959, when the eighteen counties in the Xinyang area reported their harvest for the year. The correct figure for the harvest was about 2.9 billion jin. (One jin is half a kilogram.) Desperate to meet the political demand for record production, each county began to wildly exaggerate its own harvest and bid up the figure. The first time they totted up the production figures from all eighteen counties, the collective harvest equalled an astonishing 35 billion jin in what had been a relatively poor year. In 1958, a good year, the total harvest had been only 5 billion jin.

  One of Yu’s colleagues dared to express doubts about the figures and began to argue them down. A new consensus about the harvest size was formed, first at around 30 billion. The official pushed further, and the number fell to 20 billion, and eventually dropped to 8 billion, until the party secretary erupted. Mao had himself sanctioned new, and quite miraculous, figures of output per acre. The party secretary raged that lowering the figure further would amount to repudiating Mao. After more furious argument, Xinyang finally declared its official grain harvest at 7.2 billion jin, about three times the real figure.

  That was more than enough of a distortion to set in train the disaster that followed. The government, which calculated its annual levy on the official figure, took more than half the real harvest for itself, placing it in its own granaries and putting the rest under the control of the central government. ‘The principle at the time was to collect everything surplus to the daily needs of the peasants, so when they gathered grain according to the 7.2 billion jin harvest, many homes and villages were simply emptied of food,’ said Yu. ‘And of course, the government refused to open up its granaries, because they said there should have been lots left over.’ People had few personal stocks of grain, because under Maoist collectivization policies they were forced to eat in communal kitchens. It was not long before mass starvation began to grip the city and surrounding areas.

  As winter turned to spring in the early months of 1960, a thick smell of death began to rise from the land. Yu remembers the change of season clearly. Walking around the semi-rural enclave, he saw thousands of corpses strewn alongside the roads and in the fields. Over the winter, the bodies had hardened and then set in the cramped, bent shapes in which people had finally expired and died. The bodies looked like they had been packed into a freezer and then randomly scattered across the landscape. Some of the corpses were clothed. Others had had their garments ripped off them, and flesh was missing from their buttocks and legs. In the warming spring sun, the corpses had begun to thaw, emitting a sickly smell that permeated the everyday life of a shell-shocked local citizenry.

  The surviving residents protested later that they had been too shorthanded or exhausted to give the dead the dignity of burial. They blamed the ravaged corpses on hungry stray dogs, whose eyes, according to rumours which swept the area, had turned red after gnawing at human flesh. ‘That is not true,’ said Yu. ‘All the dogs had already been eaten by humans. How could there be any dogs left at the time?’ The corpses hadn’t been eaten by ravenous canines. They had been cannibalized by local residents. Many people in Xinyang over that winter and the two which followed it owed their survival to consuming dead members of their families, or any stray corpses they could find.

  By his count, Yu wrote sixteen reports to his superiors over that winter, warning them of the impending catastrophe. They were labelled his ‘sixteen crimes’ and used to remove him from his position as an adviser to the mayor. One of the officials who criticized him for speaking out was a man named Li Wenyao. Li’s own father had died of starvation. His wife had taken boiled human flesh home to feed to their children, although she was unable to bring herself to eat it. Yu could scarcely believe that the same person was chastising him for trying to alert Chinese leaders to the famine. ‘Your wife took home human flesh. Your father died of hunger, and you still lash out at me!’ Yu said he told Li. ‘Do you still have any humanity left in you?’

  Xinyang’s leaders posted sentries at train stations and other transport hubs to stop word about the extent of the famine getting out. A number of officials who protested were beaten to death. Petitioners who did try to leave were put in prison and often left to starve to death there. ‘The city leaders all became madmen,’ said Yu. In late 1961, the central and provincial governments could no longer ignore the catastrophe and dispatched a team of officials, backed by military units, to take over Xinyang in a kind of in-house coup d’état. Over the years, the memories of the area’s famine were allowed to fade into the dark recesses of the city’s history.

  Stories like Yu’s shocked Yang. ‘I did not foresee this level of cruelty,’ he said. ‘There was cannibalism in ancient times in famines. People used to talk about “exchanging children to eat”, because they could not bear to eat their own children. But this was much worse.’ Even the final nationwide death toll, a figure which has been known in the west for more than two decades, was a revelation. To calculate the number, Yang had the confidential figures he had gained in the provincial archives. But he also called on another insider, a Chinese demographer who had been quietly gathering material for years about the impact of the famine.

  Wang Weizhi returned from studying demography in the Soviet Union in 1958, the first year of the famine, and was employed by the Public Security Bureau, or police, where he worked for the next three decades. The job was to give him a unique vantage point from which to track the famine’s impact. China conducted just thr
ee censuses, in 1953, 1964 and 1982, in the first three and a half decades of communist rule. The police, by comparison, compiled household registration data from around the country and updated it twice a year. Wang, in theory, had access to fresh population figures submitted directly to the centre from each county in the country.

  Wang got his first inkling of the on-the-ground impact of the famine in 1962, a year after the famine ended, when he was sent to Fengyang, in Anhui, an area with a death toll on a par with that of Xinyang. The team was dispatched, but not to investigate the reports of starvation which had been reaching Beijing in the previous two years. That would have been too politically sensitive. They were sent to find out why there had been such a spike in the birth rate that year. The villagers rather sardonically told the visitors from Beijing they should expect another birth spurt in 1963. The reasons weren’t difficult to fathom. The elderly and the young in the district had all been wiped out in the famine. ‘The oldest person left in the area was forty-three and the youngest was seven,’ said Wang.