by John Keay
They were not to know, writing in the 1970s, that within a generation many of the policies they had discerned would be considered mistaken and their studious analysis of them therefore excessive. With nose pressed against the present and eyes trained on the praesidium, it had been difficult to tell just what to make of it all. Isolating the significant needs patience and perspective, commodities not available in the heat of the moment, then or now. As history’s stately march breaks into the trot of current affairs, then into the stampede of news stories, scholars are expected to swivel from the reconstruction of a reticent past to the deconstruction of a clamorous present. Hammered by reality, the historian turns annalist, turns journalist.
Because so many Maoist achievements were quickly discredited, there then arose a tendency to gloss over all those initiatives that had loomed largest at the time – Soviet collaboration, agricultural collectivisation, industrialisation, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution – in favour of a narrative buoyed by the incidence of liberalising interludes. This ran from the 1956 ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement to the 1972 détente with the United States, the 1978 ‘Democracy Wall’ outburst, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the 1989 Tiananmen Square challenge, and of course the end-of-century triumph of consumerism. But such a narrative has its drawbacks too. It supposes a progressive ‘opening up’ that was not self-evident at the time, and it foreshadows an ultimate liberalisation – including multi-party politics, electoral accountability, freedom of expression and legal redress – that is far from assured.
It also misrepresents the Maoist era by down-playing some very real achievements. When on 1 October 1939 the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was officially announced by Mao in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army had much liberating still to do. Guangdong had yet to be reached (it fell two weeks later); Tibet and Xinjiang, comprising nearly half of the erstwhile empire’s landmass, aspired to qualified independence; the British were back in Hong Kong; and from Taiwan, alienated by the relocation there of Chiang Kai-shek’s still internationally recognised Republic of China, a reinvasion of the mainland remained a distinct possibility. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the United States immediately moved its Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits, so ratcheting up this threat; and when non-Communist South Korea was quickly reduced to a tiny bridgehead around Pusan, Washington showed no hesitation in finding the land, air and naval forces for a massive counter-attack. Thus within a year of the inauguration of the PRC, most of the Korean peninsula had been retaken by the PRC’s ideological opponents and US troops were nearing the Sino-Korean frontier. It was not unreasonable to suppose that, with Taiwan as the bridgehead, an equally devastating assault might be launched into China itself. Indeed it probably would have been, had Beijing not insisted that a Chinese counter-intervention in Korea was the work of a maverick ‘People’s Volunteer Army’ rather than the official People’s Liberation Army.
Regardless of such fine distinctions, China and the United States were effectively at war in Korea from 1950 to 1953. And though the Korean peninsula was eventually partitioned along the 38th Parallel, China’s ideological encirclement continued. ‘The bamboo curtain’, which looked from the inside more like an offensive blockade than defensive ‘containment’, extended down the length of China’s sea-board from bisected Korea to the Taiwan Strait and on to an about-to-be-bisected Vietnam. Thus Communist China was as firmly closed to the world’s maritime trade as imperial China before the Opium Wars. The gargantuan task of reintegrating the nation, redistributing its assets, and reorganising and re-educating its society, all in accordance with principles of socialist revolution that were decidedly novel in Asia, had to be undertaken by a regime that was still embattled.
Ring-fenced to the east and south, China’s Communist leaders sought support from the north and west. The Soviet Union had inspired, funded, armed and often directed its revolutionary Chinese brethren throughout the war years. Both sides now had victories to celebrate and pledges to redeem. In December 1939, on his first ever trip outside China, Mao took the train to Moscow. There Stalin, basking in the cult of his own personality while tyrannising both people and Party, encouraged Mao’s autocratic tendencies without over-indulging his revolution. But in hammering out the terms of a treaty of ‘Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance’ the principles of ideological fraternity and Sino-Soviet collaboration were established. In return for international solidarity, secret recognition of Moscow’s strategic interests in Xinjiang and Manchuria, and various raw materials, Mao secured a promise of support in the event of war, a $300 million loan (half to be used for military purchases), and the know-how and personnel to set up fifty state-owned heavy-industrial complexes. Additional armaments and aircraft were soon being supplied to aid the Chinese involvement in Korea. Assistance in the development of atomic weaponry was later promised, though soon withdrawn.
This Soviet support did nothing to advance Beijing’s claims to Taiwan or Hong Kong; but it did facilitate the reintegration of regions once contested by Russia, notably the north-east (formerly Manchuria) and the far west (now Xinjiang). Thanks to Soviet links with India, it also silenced some of the international disquiet over the reclamation of Tibet. Thus within a year of its inauguration, the China of the People’s Republic was territorially nearly as vast as the China of the mid-Qing empire. It was at last rid of foreign interference, master of its future, and more united than it had been for over a century. Given the appalling chaos that had overtaken republican China, this was no mean achievement. Order had been restored, inflation was being contained, national pride had been redeemed, self-belief had returned. To the Party and the PLA it all lent an impressive legitimacy, plus a certain latitude.
Since the PLA’s success owed much to the discipline and dissemination of Marxist-Leninist precepts, it was to be expected that the new regime would give priority to extending the revolution to the whole country. This would involve sacrifices, but for many it was an exciting prospect. In the cities, families were organised into units based on places of work and residence (danwei); they encouraged a sense of local participation and purpose, as well as ensuring the surveillance associated with traditional systems of neighbourhood organisation such as the Ming baojia and Qin’s ‘legalist’ groupings. In the countryside, where 85 per cent of the population still lived, mobilising the masses was expected to take longer. Trained Party activists descended on village after village, identified and classified all households, incited the denunciation of those designated ‘rich landlords’ and, having dispossessed and disposed of these ‘enemies of the people’, redistributed their property among the landless. A million or more landowners and counter-revolutionaries may have been executed in this first phase of retributive justice; Mao himself would put the death toll at 700,000. But several hundred million peasants found themselves beneficiaries of the redistribution as, for the first time, they tilled their own fields and reaped the fruits of their labour.
Naturally the resultant proliferation of small subsistence holdings argued strongly for some collaborative work practices. Local co-operatives based on the sharing of draught animals and some pooling of labour were encouraged, although the results were disappointing. Newly landed peasants had a tendency to put personal profit before the common good; politicised cadres were often drawn into village vendettas; and the growth in output barely kept ahead of the growth in population. The generous surpluses needed to feed the expanding urban and industrial centres looked unlikely to materialise. This in turn would jeopardise the creation of an industrial base which, as per the Soviet model, was the pre-requisite for a strong and self-sustaining socialism.
In 1955, rid of the Korean War and still on good terms with the Soviets, Mao addressed this problem personally by calling for an immediate acceleration in the pace of agrarian revolution. Co-operatives were now to be amalgamated into larger collectives. Land and implements would be collectively owned, the peasant’s only input being labour and the only reward a
share of the collective’s produce based on a complicated calculation of the ‘work points’ earned by each individual. Again, the scheme was not universally unpopular. Many of those with minuscule or marginal holdings welcomed the greater security on offer from collectivisation. Others were fired by the egalitarian ideals of the revolution. Women acquired some independence as a result of their individual entitlement to work points. Economies of scale promised a higher combined yield; small fields were amalgamated, dykes and pathways ploughed under, and the cultivable area expanded by deploying the larger labour force to terrace, clear and irrigate marginal lands. The state provided a market for the commune’s surplus at guaranteed prices; and if these procurement quotas tended to escalate, that supposedly reflected the results of reclamation and irrigation.
With Party encouragement, by 1957 some districts were taking the process a stage further. Just as co-operatives had been merged into the larger collectives, so now collectives were being merged into the still larger communes. Mao endorsed the move with an exhortation for all production to be ‘larger, faster, better, cheaper’. Any privately owned plots that had survived collectivisation were now incorporated in the communised land area. With a work force of 20,000 to 100,000, a commune required an administrative infrastructure that, besides doling out work points and drumming in slogans, offered services likely to keep the existing work force in good shape and augment it by freeing up women otherwise detained at home. Organised child-care, basic schooling, dispensaries, communal dining and competitive work teams were certainly a novelty. But while they undermined the traditional primacy of the household and the family, they also introduced some genuine social uplift. In return for better healthcare, wider literacy and several square meals a day, many saw neglecting the ancestors at Qingming and putting up with round-the-clock indoctrination as a small price to pay. The 1950s would later be remembered as Maoist China’s ‘golden age’ – a comparative verdict, obviously – with the early phase of communisation being especially cherished as the ‘eat it up’ period. This was a reference not to the state’s appetite for ever more unrealistic procurement quotas but to the workers’ ‘eat as much as you want’ approach to the communal kitchens. ‘Ah, in the beginning [of the communes] we were all so fat!’ recalled a Guangdong peasant, ‘We could eat anytime we liked at the canteens.’1
And it was all free. Free food and healthcare enhanced longevity, free education promised greater opportunity and liberal new laws on inheritance and divorce ushered in more equality and association between the sexes. It sounded like bliss, a genuine liberation, in fact a lot like Heaven. For these were precisely the celestial rewards that had been on offer from those milleniarist movements in the past. From the Yellow Turbans to the Taipings and Boxers, they too had promised a dazzling new utopia and inspired great idealism. But they had failed to deliver. Marxism-as-thenew-milleniarism was actually making good on its promises. Mao had conjured up visions of a socialist paradise with peace and plenty for all; sure enough, for a few months in early 1957, this ‘great harmony’ (da tong: he used the Confucian term) seemed imminent.
Even the barriers to freedom of expression were being lowered as dissidents and scholars were encouraged to speak their minds. This was another of Mao’s ideas. In policy-making as in dialectics, he was fascinated by contradiction, by how friction sparked innovation, conflict generated endeavour, revolution validated authority. Order arose from chaos; but without more chaos, it would atrophy. Accordingly, and echoing the tag commonly applied to the Warring States period of philosophical speculation, he urged ‘a hundred schools of thought’ to contend in the field of science and ‘a hundred flowers’ to bloom in the meadow of culture.
Both meadow and field were hastily ploughed under. Springtime’s ‘great harmony’ lasted only weeks. ‘The hundred flowers’ bloomed in unacceptable shades of opinion and ‘the hundred schools’ contended much too contentiously; they even debated the defiance that had just been silenced in Hungary by Soviet tanks. By summer 1957 all those who had been rash enough to speak out were rounded up. Mao pretended that exposing and then purging these ‘rightist’ elements had been the plan all along. Whether that is true or not, it now seemed that nothing could be taken at its face value when viewed through the looking-glass of Maoism. A new unease permeated the Party and extended down through the ranks of the administration; to deluded ambitions born of extravagant idealism were added servile compliance and duplicity born of the terror of disapproval.
Ironically, the 1958 harvest gave grounds for optimism. It was the best yet, though not as exceptional as the returns – or the procurement quotas based on them – suggested. Now heavy industry, especially steel production, was the sector lagging behind. Mobilising the masses to torment sparrows, mice and other grain-eating vermin had supposedly boosted the harvest; just so, mobilising the masses to turn pig-iron into steel would boost industry. In danwei and communes, the night sky flared as thousands of backyard blast-furnaces spewed forth sub-standard metals. Fantastic production targets were set, and if the quality was ignored and the returns believed, were nearly met. Thanks to a traditional technology – the blast-furnace had probably been pioneered in Henan in the third century BC – China would become a world-class economy in one ‘great leap forward’. This mass-action formula was emulated up and down the country as millions marched forth to undertake Herculean construction projects with no more in the way of equipment than the barrows and baskets used by the builders of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. Caution was thrown to the wind; anything seemed possible in a climate of hysterical mass endeavour. Instead of grinding through the geared stages of growth laid down in the Marxist-Leninist manual – heavy industry first, then mechanisation, collectivisation and eventually state-ownership of all the means of production – Mao revved the engine and let fly the clutch.
But already there were rumours of famine; the reports were suppressed, the observers silenced. Instead of an investigation, the communes were favoured with a new wave of young urban ideologues intent on teaching the peasants how to grow corn, albeit ‘larger, faster, better, cheaper’. Their innovations and naivety contributed to the impending disaster. Procurement quotas for 1959 had been set at hopelessly unrealistic levels; even without the drought of that year, the cold and rains of the next and the inevitable Yellow River flood, the state’s requisitions could be met only at the expense of the communal kitchens. There meals became fewer, weeds replaced vegetables, and muddy water was passed off as soup. The severity of the famine varied – from serious in the cities to acute in some provinces, absolute in others. Talk of cannibalism and of graziers eating their own grass was dismissed as mischievous; the bountiful reports still emanating from the local cadres belied it.
So wheat continued to be exported while those who grew it grazed on grass. And so, in an age when roads and railways should have made relief a formality, nothing was done. Alleviating conditions meant admitting the disaster; but since the leadership and its policies were beyond criticism, those responsible must be incompetent or reactionary elements within the communes. In effect, whistle-blowers merely denounced themselves. Prudence dictated signing-off on the fictitious production figures and keeping quiet.
How many victims were claimed by the famine of 1958–61 will never be known. It was certainly the twentieth century’s worst. From the pattern of population growth for the period, statisticians have extrapolated a catch-all figure of 2030 million. Half may have actually starved to death; the rest were circumstantial victims. Minor diseases proved fatal to the enfeebled; the old died younger and the young failed to replace them. Aborted, still-born and short-lived babies were probably exceeded by the millions who were simply never conceived, abstinence and infertility being concomitants of malnutrition. Communes turned into death-camps. The fields lay fallow because the new seed had been eaten or the people were too weak to sow it. Mao’s impatient crashing of the gears had thrown the economy into reverse. The Great Leap Forward occasioned a catastr
ophic lurch backward.
A possible verdict on Mao’s manic chairmanship might echo that applied to the Qin First Emperor, he whose great failing had been ‘not changing with the times’. According to Grand Historian Sima Qian, the qualities essential for acquiring an empire were not the same as those needed for ruling it; or as an adviser had pointed out to Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty, an empire won from the saddle could not be run from the saddle. Violent and impulsive tactics were fine in the field but quite inappropriate in the council chamber. Thus, failing to adapt, or ‘not changing with the times’, was a flaw common to many dynastic founders. Mao was exceptional in just two respects: he lasted longer than most, so multiplying his potential for mischief, and he discovered a rationale for prolonging the mischief that masked his mere love of power. This lay in his belief that constant turmoil and class struggle were essential to the integrity of the revolution, which would otherwise be undermined by inertia, corruption and ideological back-sliding. It did not occur to him that the revolution might also be undermined by histrionic efforts to perpetuate it.
