by Jung Chang
Chou was a master of organization, and under him the whole society was dragooned into an all-encompassing, interlocking machine. He was instrumental in building a huge bureaucracy, whose job was not only to run the base, but also to coerce the population into executing Party orders. In any one village, the state set up dozens of committees—“recruitment committee,” “land committee,” “confiscation committee,” “registration committee,” “red curfew committee,” to name but a few. People first got enmeshed in an organization from the age of six, when they had to join the Children’s Corps. At the age of fifteen, they were automatically enrolled in the Youth Brigade. All adults except the very old and crippled were put into the Red Defense Army. In this way, the entire population was regimented, and a web of control was formed.
This machine was an eye-opener to Mao. Before Chou arrived, Mao had ruled the Red land in bandit style, with less regimentation of the population as a whole; but it did not take long for him to appreciate the advantages and potential of the new way. When he eventually took power nationwide, he inherited this totalitarian machine and made it even more seamless and intrusive than Ruijin — or Stalin’s Russia. And he retained Chou’s services till Chou’s last breath.
Chou had also founded the Chinese KGB, then called the Political Security Bureau, under Moscow’s supervision, in 1928. He and his assistants brought the system into Ruijin, and kept the state alive via terror. Whereas Mao had been using terror for personal power, Chou employed it to bolster Communist rule. The henchmen Mao used for his purges had been cynical and corrupt, and out for personal gain. Chou employed Soviet-trained professionals.
When Chou first arrived in Ruijin at the end of 1931, he had adjudged Mao’s purge methods as not altogether correct. Mao had “relied entirely on confessions and torture,” and “caused terror in the masses.” Chou rehabilitated some victims. One man recalled the process. An official
took out a notebook and began to read out names. Those whose names were read out were ordered to go and stand in the inner courtyard under armed guards. There were scores of names … Mine was called, too. I was so frightened I sweated all over. Then we were questioned one by one, and cleared one by one. In no time, all the detainees were released. And all the incriminating confessions were burned on the spot …
But within a matter of months Chou had brought this respite to an end. Even so short a period of rehabilitation and easing up had released a groundswell of dissidence. “Relaxing about purges caused counter-revolutionaries … to raise their heads again,” Chou’s security men noted aghast. And as people thought, wishfully, that there would be “no more killings,” “no more arrests,” they started to band together to defy Communist orders. It rapidly became clear that the regime could not survive without constant killings, and killing soon restarted.
THE RED STATE regarded its population as a source of four main assets: money, food, labor and soldiers, first for its war, and ultimately to conquer China.
There was a big money-spinner in the region — the largest deposit in the world of tungsten, an extremely valuable strategic mineral that had previously been mined by a consortium of foreign capital. The Red regime resumed mining at the beginning of 1932. With soldiers and slave laborers as miners, the tungsten was exported across the Reds’ southern border to the Cantonese warlords who, though White, were anti-Chiang, and eager to make money. The Red area was in theory under blockade, yet trade with the Cantonese boomed, even when they and the Red Army were sometimes fighting each other. Salt, cotton, medicine and even arms, were openly trucked in, in exchange for tungsten. The operation was run by Mao’s brother Tse-min, who was head of the state bank.
In spite of the vast profits it was making from tungsten and other exports, the regime never relaxed its schemes to extract the maximum from the local population. Although peasants now got their own land, and ground rent was abolished, they were in general worse off than before. Prior to this, most people had some possessions beyond those needed for sheer survival; now these extras were taken away, under various ruses. One was to coerce people to buy “revolutionary war bonds.” To pay for these, women were made to cut their hair so that they would hand over their silver hairpins, together with their last bit of jewelry — traditionally their life savings. The fact that people had such jewelry in pre-Communist days was a telling indication that their standard of living had been higher then. After people bought the war bonds, there would be “return bonds campaigns,” to browbeat purchasers to give back the bonds for nothing. The upshot was, as some daring inhabitants bemoaned, that “the Communists’ bonds are worse than the Nationalists’ taxes.”
The method was the same with food. After paying grain tax, peasants were pressured to lend more grain to the state, in drives with slogans like “Revolutionary masses, lend grain to the Red Army!” But the food “lent” was never returned. It was in fact food on which peasants depended for survival. Mao simply ordered them to cut down on their already meager consumption.
Most men of working age were drafted into the army or as conscript labor. After three years of Communist rule, there were hardly any men left in the villages aged between their early teens and fifty.
Women became the main labor force. Traditionally, women had done only fairly light work in the fields, as their bound and crippled feet meant that heavy manual labor caused great pain. Now they had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and mending clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves — no small extra burden. Mao, who had thought since his youth that women were capable of doing as much heavy labor as men, was the strongest advocate of this policy. He decreed: “Rely overwhelmingly on women to do farm work.”
The welfare of the locals was simply not on the agenda (contrary to the myth Mao fed to his American spokesman Edgar Snow). In some villages, peasants were not allowed any days off at all. Instead they got meetings, the Communists’ great control mechanism. “The average person has the equivalent of five whole days of meetings per month,” Mao observed, “and these are very good rest time for them.”
Standards of health did not improve either. There was a former British missionary hospital in Tingzhou which treated ordinary people. After Mao stayed there and liked it, he had it dismantled and relocated in Ruijin, and reserved it for the Communist elite. Mao himself was very careful about his health, always traveling with his own mug, which he used whenever he was offered a cup of tea. At one point he stayed in a village called Sand Islet, where the only drinking water came from a stagnant pond. To make sure he did not catch anything, he ordered a well to be dug. As a result, the villagers had clean drinking water for the first time. After this, Communist offices began to have wells dug where they were billeted, but there was no effort to provide the locals with clean water.
Education, Mao claimed via Snow, had brought about higher literacy rates in some counties “than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.” In fact, education under the Reds was reduced to primary schools, called “Lenin schools,” where children were taught to read and write to a level at which they could take in basic propaganda. Secondary schools were mostly closed down, and commandeered as quarters for the leaders and venues for meetings. Children were used as sentries, and formed into harassment squads, called “humiliation teams,” to hound people into joining the army and to pressure deserters to return. Teenagers were sometimes encouraged to serve as executioners of “class enemies.”
ONE OF MAO’S main contributions to the running of the Red state was to start a campaign in February 1933 to squeeze out more from the population. He told grassroots cadres to uncover “hidden landlords and kulaks.” As the Reds had been targeting these “class enemies” for years, it was inconceivable that any such species could have remained undetected.
Mao was not a fanatic, searching for more enemies out of ideological fervor. His was a practical operati
on whose goal was to designate targets to be shaken down, and to create enemies who could be “legitimately,” according to Communist doctrine, dispossessed and worked to death — what Mao himself termed “to do limitless forced labour.” The other point was to scare the rest of the population into coughing up whatever the regime demanded.
Mao’s order to cadres was to “confiscate every last single thing” from those picked out as victims. Often whole families were turned out of their homes, and had to go and live in buffalo sheds, niu-peng. It was during this era that the miserable dwellings into which outcasts were suddenly pitched came to receive this name. Over thirty years later, in the Cultural Revolution, the term was widely used for detention, even though at that time people were not usually detained in rural outhouses, but in places like toilets, classrooms and cinemas.
Mao’s campaign produced many tens of thousands of slave laborers, but it turned up little for the state coffers, as peasants genuinely had nothing left to disgorge. The authorities reported that only two out of twelve counties in Jiangxi were able to produce any “fines” and “donations” at all, and the total amount was a fraction of the target set by Mao.
The plight of the victims was vividly portrayed by a Red Army officer called Gong Chu, who described passing by a place called Gong Mill near Ruijin, inhabited by people with the same family name as his, which meant they might share ancestors with him.
I went into a big black-tiled bungalow … I was struck by a tremendous air of sadness and desolation. There was no furniture at all, only one broken table and a bench. There were two middle-aged women and an old woman, plus three young children, all in rags, and looking famished. When they saw me come in with four bodyguards wearing pistols, they went into a tremendous panic …
Then they heard Gong Chu’s name, and they “went down on their knees in front of me, and begged me to save their lives.”
Between sobs the old woman said: “My old man had read some books [which meant the family had been relatively well off], and so had my two sons. We had over ten mu of land and my two sons tilled it … my old man and two sons were all arrested … and were beaten and hung up, and 250 yuan was demanded from us. We did all we could to make up 120 yuan, and also gave them all the women’s jewelery … But … my old man was still left there hanging till he died, and my two sons were killed as well. Now they are forcing us to pay another 500 yuan, otherwise all six of us will be imprisoned. Commander! We hardly have anything to eat, where can we find the 500 yuan? Please, think of our common ancestry and put in a fair word for us.”
The woman told Gong Chu her husband had wanted to go and look for him. But the authorities
“forbade us from setting one step outside the village. Today Heaven really opened its eyes, that you should have come into our family. Please Commander, save us!” After these words, she banged her head on the ground non-stop. Her two daughters-in-law and the children were all kowtowing and crying.
Gong Chu promised to help, but ultimately did nothing — as he knew that intervening could easily make things worse. Some months before, when he had tried to help a doctor in a similar situation, vengeful grassroots cadres had waited till he left and then “killed the doctor and confiscated his medicine shop. His widow and children became beggars.” It was events like these that drove Gong Chu to reject communism and flee at the first opportunity.
Mao was also resourceful in making people “volunteer” to join the Red Army. When one cadre had difficulty getting people to enlist, Mao told her to “find counter-revolutionaries within three days.” She did, and those scared of falling foul of the regime joined up. In one district, the man in charge of conscription failed to produce enough conscripts. Mao had this man, Cai Dun-song, brought to him, and had him worked over, most likely tortured, as Cai “confessed” to having formed an “anti-Communist brigade.” A mass rally was held at which Mao announced the confession, and Cai and a number of others were executed on the spot. A cadre who had worked with Cai said that afterwards “in less than half a month, I enrolled more than 150 people.”
CHINA’S FIRST RED STATE was run by terror and guarded like a prison. A pass was needed to leave one’s village, and sentries were ubiquitous round the clock. One person who did have a chance of getting away was the manager of state monument-building who had access to cash. He took 246.7 yuan — enough to buy a pass and pay contacts. But before he could make his getaway, he was arrested. He then managed to break out of jail, with the collusion of two senior cadres, one of them a man who had seen his brother killed as AB. The manager was caught and brought before a kangaroo court attended by hundreds of people, then executed. Old-timers recalled that not only was anyone “trying to flee to the White area” killed, but sometimes “if a prisoner escaped, the jailer was executed.”
In this prison-like universe, suicide was common — an early wave of what was later to grow to a flood throughout Mao’s reign. The number of suicides was so staggering, even among officials, that the regime had to tackle it publicly, as proclaimed by a slogan: “Suicides are the most shameful elements in the revolutionary ranks.”
Even a very high-ranking officer, Yang Yue-bin, a favorite of Mao’s, was desperate enough to flee and defect to the Nationalists. He gave away the location of Party leaders’ houses. The Nationalists bombed the site, and the leaders had to decamp wholesale.
Ordinary people had more chance to escape if they lived on the edge of the Red region, and some grassroots cadres who hated the regime organized mass escapes. Any cadre under the slightest suspicion of being unreliable would be transferred away from the outlying districts at once. Many waited until the Nationalists attacked and then tried to go over. In the last days of the Red state, when the Nationalists were closing in, whole villages rebelled, and started to attack the Red Army as it retreated, wielding the only weapons they had, knives and spears, as all firearms had been rounded up by the regime.
The state’s response was to be merciless and not to take the slightest chance. At its nadir, even everyday social intercourse and hospitality could bring death. “No family was allowed to have visitors to stay overnight,” veterans recalled. “Any family found to have done so was killed together with the visitor.”
The Ruijin base, the seat of the first Red state, consisted of large parts of the provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian. These two provinces suffered the greatest population decrease in the whole of China from the year when the Communist state was founded, 1931, to the year after the Reds left, 1935. The population of Red Jiangxi fell by more than half a million — a drop of 20 percent. The fall in Red Fujian was comparable. Given that escapes were few, this means that altogether some 700,000 people died in the Ruijin base. A large part of these were murdered as “class enemies,” or were worked to death, or committed suicide, or died other premature deaths attributable to the regime. The figure of 700,000 does not include the many deaths in the large areas the Reds occupied for intermittent periods, or the huge number of deaths in the five Red bases in other parts of China that came under Ruijin.
Years later, locals would point out to travelers mass graves and derelict villages. People who lived under China’s first Communist regime rejected it. When the first Russian intelligence officer visited the area immediately after the Communists took it in late 1949 the newly arrived Party chief told him that in all Jiangxi “there was not one member of the CCP.”
The nominal Party No. 1, Hsiang Chung-fa, had been executed by the Nationalists that June, after a tip-off which the Nationalist intelligence chief U. T. Hsu strongly suggested had come from the Communists themselves. At first Hsiang refused to admit he was the CCP No. 1. “And, seeing this rather stupid-looking man,” Hsu wrote, “we felt we could well be mistaken. But a colleague said that … when Hsiang was a sailor, he had been addicted to gambling, and once when he had lost every penny, he vowed to kick the addiction, and chopped off the tip of the little finger of his left hand … The man’s left little finger did indeed have a chunk missing �
�” After Hsiang was identified, he went down on his knees to beg for his life, “and at once gave us four top addresses.” Chou En-lai later remarked that Hsiang’s fidelity to communism could not be compared even to the chastity of a prostitute.
Gong’s devastating memoir was published in Hong Kong in 1954. The post-Mao president of China, Yang Shang-kun, himself a witness to the Ruijin time, acknowledged to a small circle that the memoir was true, though it was banned in China. However, Gong was allowed to go back and live in the Mainland in 1991, age ninety.
In 1983, after Mao was dead, 238,844 people in Jiangxi were counted as “revolutionary martyrs,” i.e., people who had been killed in wars and intra-Party purges.
10. TROUBLEMAKER TO FIGUREHEAD (1931–34 AGE 37–40)
WHEN MAO WAS inaugurated as president of the Red state, he had in fact lost his former absolute control over the area, and especially over the Red Army. Moscow had appointed Zhu De the army chief. Moreover, as Party secretary, Chou En-lai was the No. 1. Mao refused to fit into a collective leadership and tried intimidation. His colleagues fought back and accused him of a multitude of sins, even of adopting a “kulak line,” an accusation Mao himself had used to send many Jiangxi Reds to their deaths. Now he was up against a steel wall. At a meeting after Chou arrived, Mao took the chair and started behaving as though he were still in charge. The others intervened to unseat him, and put Chou in the chair. Very soon Mao asked for “sick leave,” which was happily granted, and he left Ruijin in a sulk at the end of January 1932.
He went off to a commandeered Buddhist temple called Donghua Hill, one of many giant rocks rising out of the plain round Ruijin. Covered with metasequoias, cypresses and pines, and dotted with smooth black stones, the hill sheltered the ancient temple in its luxuriant midst. Here Mao spent the days with his wife, Gui-yuan, and a detachment of guards. It was large and rang with echoes. Moss grew on the damp earthen floor. Outside Mao’s monastery room, leaves fell in the winter wind and rain sank into the cracks of the stone courtyard, bringing out more chill. It was a mournful scene.
