Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  In Yenan in 1942–43, Mao had built an efficient instrument by terrorizing his power base, the members of the Communist Party. Now he was terrorizing his economic and cannon-fodder base, the peasantry, in order to bring about total, unquestioning conformity. The result was that the peasants put up little resistance to Mao’s requisitioning of soldiers, laborers, food, and anything else he wanted for his goals.

  Mao regarded this process of terrorization as indispensable for winning the war. So when he was preparing for the last decisive campaign, Huai — Hai, he sent Kang Sheng to Shandong province, which was going to bear most of the logistics burden, to carry out a second land reform at the end of 1947, having decided that the first had not been fearsome enough. Kang decreed hideous public torture and executions on a scale so large that the Shandong Party organization revolted. It was purged en masse. A sense of the scale of the violence can be derived from the fact that in one small town, where relations had been good up till then, 120 people were beaten to death, some simply designated as landlord “sympathisers.” Among them were two boys aged seven, who were killed by children in the Children’s Corps. It was this generalized terror in Shandong that built the foundation for the Huai — Hai victory.

  IN THE LAND REFORM, the people who implemented Mao’s policy were Party cadres, who were also being terrorized and brutalized in the process. This was part of Mao’s design. Most new Party members were sent to villages to be “educated” in the ways of land reform. One person Mao made a point of hardening was his 25-year-old son An-ying, whom he placed under Kang Sheng’s tutelage in 1947–48, disguised as Mrs. Kang’s nephew. Less than ten days after arriving at Kang’s HQ, An-ying was already in torment. He was bombarded with criticisms and made to feel that his thoughts “smelled right-wing.” He lay awake at night, and was in a constant state of self-criticism for his “petty bourgeois feelings.” “I have not become proletarianised,” he wrote in his diary, which remains a secret to this day. “My character is so rotten.” He felt “extremely full of pain, so full of pain that I wept.”

  An-ying was shocked by the public, mass brutality, which was something he had not experienced in Stalin’s Russia. This was exactly what his father wanted him to get used to, and to learn to incite, by being with Kang. After two months in Kang’s company, he wrote to his father (using Red jargon) that “my own proletarian stand is firmer now.” But he retained a sense of aversion, which emerges strongly from notes he wrote about mass rallies other people had described to him. In one case, 10,000 peasants had been herded to rallies that lasted for almost a week. “It was very cold that day,” An-ying wrote. “Everyone was saying: ‘How cold! There must be quite a few frozen to death today. What have we done to deserve this!’ ” He evinced palpable distaste about the rallies themselves: “After careful rehearsals, on the fifth day, denunciations began … all the masses were told to raise their weapons when the word was given and shout several times: ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’ … the rally site was in a chaotic storm, and ended in eight people being beaten to death.” An-ying also registered that the Party was often relying on the worst people in the land reform: “Some of the activists promoted were thugs and dregs, [former] Japanese puppet soldiers and lackeys.” Such people made up a sizable proportion of the Party’s new recruits in rural areas.

  LIKE AN-YING, many Party members who had joined up during the Sino-Japanese War, and who tended to have been idealists, were repelled by the atrocities, and some petitioned the Party about it. A few top leaders also feared that this level of violence might cost the Party its chance to capture power. Mao was not worried. He knew his power did not depend on popularity. As he had done in Yenan, he let terror sink deep into everyone’s heart before he called a halt. This came in early 1948, when he circulated reports criticizing atrocities, which he pretended he was hearing about for the first time.

  After the Yenan Terror, Mao had made some unapologetic apologies to pacify Party cadres. Now he designated a scapegoat for the violence and atrocities. On 6 March, he wrote to his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, informing him that he was to be the fall guy: “I feel the many mistakes committed in all areas are mainly … the result of the leading body … not clearly demarcating what was permissible and what was not … Can you please do a critical review of yourselves.” Liu resisted at first, but then caved in: “most [mistakes] are my fault,” he told top cadres. “It was not until Chairman Mao made a systematic criticism … that these were corrected.” Thenceforth it was Liu, not Mao, whom Party officials tended to blame for the violence in the land reform. To rise high under Mao you had to carry the can for him.

  This acknowledgement of “mistakes” was kept strictly within the Party. The public knew nothing about it, as the Party remained a secret organization. There was no apology to the public. Mao’s calculation was that he did not need to placate the common people, because they did not count. This went for both the Red-held areas and the Nationalist-held areas.

  Although people in the White areas knew quite a lot about the brutality in the land reform, not least through the hundreds of thousands who escaped, they often attributed it to passing excesses by the oppressed. In any case, they had no way of doing anything to stop Mao’s advance, and having no great affection for the existing regime, often willed themselves to give Mao the benefit of the doubt.

  Nationalist captain Hsu Chen had seen some terrors, which had made him strongly anti-Communist. In early 1948, when he came home to Ningbo, near Shanghai, he found that people did not want to listen to what he had to say, and saw him as a pain:

  [M]any relatives and friends came to see me … I talked to every visitor, till my tongue dried up and my lips cracked … I told them about the heartless and bestial deeds of the Communist bandits … But I was unable to wake them up from their dreams, but rather aroused their aversion … I realized that most of them thought as follows:

  “These words are Nationalist propaganda. How can you believe them all?”

  “In a violent war like this, these are only transitional means …”

  “We’ve been through Japanese occupation, and survived. You can’t say the Communists are worse than the Japanese.”

  These views could be said to represent the way of thinking in the middle and lower echelons of society … People always have to learn from their own experience …

  People were in denial — and helpless against Mao’s juggernaut. This fatalism was buttressed by disillusion with the Nationalists, who also committed atrocities, often against groups more visible to urban dwellers, and in a milieu far more open than under Mao — with public opinion, a much freer press, and where people could talk, gossip and complain. The Nationalists openly arrested large numbers of students and intellectuals, many of whom were tortured, and some killed. A Nationalist student wrote in April 1948 to the famous pro-Chiang intellectual leader, Hu Shih: “The government mustn’t be so stupid, and treat all students as Communists.” Four months later, he wrote again saying: “Now they are being slaughtered in great numbers.” Although Nationalist killings were a drop in the ocean compared with Mao’s, they raised strong feelings, and some even thought that the Reds were the lesser of two evils.

  But however averse people were to the Nationalists, only a small number of radicals embraced communism. As late as January 1949, when the Reds were clearly on the verge of total victory, Mao told Stalin’s envoy Anastas Mikoyan that even among workers in Shanghai, who should have been the Communists’ core constituency, the Nationalists were much stronger than the Reds. Even right at the end, in Canton, a hotbed of radicals in the 1920s, the Russian consul noted that there was “practically no Communist underground … Therefore people did not go out to welcome the arrival” of the Communist army. In central China, Lin Biao told the Russians in January 1950: “the population is not evincing great joy at the change of power.” There was not a single uprising, urban or rural, in the CCP’s favor in the whole of China — unlike in Russia, Vietnam or Cuba during their revolutions. There were def
ections by Nationalist troops (as opposed to surrender on the battlefield), but these were not mutinies by the rank-and-file, but by top commanders, mostly prearranged “moles,” who brought their troops with them.

  ON 20 APRIL 1949 a Communist army of 1.2 million men began pouring across the Yangtze. On the 23rd it took Chiang’s capital, Nanjing, in practice ending twenty-two years of Nationalist rule over the Mainland. On that day, Chiang flew to his ancestral home, Xikou. Knowing that this would probably be his last visit, he spent much of the time kneeling by his mother’s tomb, praying in tears. (Soon afterwards the victorious Mao issued an order to protect the tomb, Chiang’s family house and clan temple.) Then a ship carried Chiang away to Shanghai, and eventually he crossed the strait to the island of Taiwan.

  A few months later, Mao asked Stalin for Soviet-crewed planes and submarines to help take Taiwan in 1950 or “even earlier,” telling Stalin that the CCP had a large number of well-placed moles who had “fled” there with Chiang. Stalin, however, was not prepared to risk a direct confrontation with America in such a high-visibility, high-tension area, and Mao had to shelve his plan, allowing Chiang to turn Taiwan into an island stronghold.

  However much Chiang hated the Communists, he did not carry out a scorched-earth policy when he fled. He took most of China’s civil aviation — and many art treasures — but only tried to move a small number of factories, mainly electronics plants, to Taiwan. This attempt was blocked by a senior Nationalist official, and virtually all significant industrial facilities were preserved and taken over by the Communists, including sixty-eight ordnance factories. Chiang did far less damage in industrial terms in the entire Mainland than the Russians did just in Manchuria. Mao did not inherit a wasteland in 1949; in fact, he was bequeathed a relatively intact, albeit small, industrial structure, no fewer than 1,000 factories and mines — as well as a functioning state. Chiang was not nearly as ruthless as Mao. As a critic of both regimes observed, “Old Mr. Chiang was not like old Mr. Mao. Perhaps this was why Chiang was beaten by Mao.”

  THAT SPRING, Mao floated into the outskirts of Peking amidst pear blossoms from Xibaipo, where he had been staying for the past year. Peking had been the capital of China for many dynasties from the twelfth century, and he had decided to make it his capital. In the heart of the city, a huge imperial compound called Zhongnanhai, Central-South Lake, with waterfalls, villas and pavilions, became the main official residence and workplace for him and the rest of the leaders, the equivalent of the Kremlin, which the Russians sometimes called it.

  While Zhongnanhai was being prepared, Mao stayed for several months in a beauty spot on the western outskirts called the Fragrant Hills. The inhabitants were moved out, and the whole mountain cordoned off for the leaders, the Praetorian Guard, and some 6,000 staff. To preserve secrecy, a plaque was hung at the entrance bearing the words “Labour University,” but this drew so many young people wanting to enroll that another sign had to be put up saying: The Labor University is not ready; consult the newspapers for enrollment dates.

  Mao moved into Zhongnanhai in September. There, and anywhere else he might set foot, the grounds were swept by Russian mine-detectors — and Chinese soldiers walking shoulder-to-shoulder as human minesweepers. An extraordinary but unobtrusive security system was installed, for which the watchword was wai-song nei-jin—“Outwardly relaxed, inwardly tight.” The system was so slick that even Stalin’s former interpreter, with extensive security experience, was unable to spot it.

  And yet, with all his watertight security, on the eve of his inauguration as supreme leader of China, deep fear was lurking in the recesses of Mao’s mind. A friend from the past, Mrs. Lo Fu, described visiting him and Mme Mao at this time. Mao was “in high spirits … When I asked about his health, Jiang Qing said he was all right, except he would tremble when he saw strangers. At first I didn’t understand … and I said: But he looks all right today! Chairman Mao interjected with a smile: You are an old friend, not a stranger.” It seems Mao knew that his terrorization had produced not only mass conformity, but quite a few would-be assassins.

  On 1 October 1949, Mao appeared standing on top of Tiananmen Gate, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, in front of the Forbidden City, and inaugurated the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was his first-ever public appearance before a large crowd of hundreds of thousands. The crowd was well organized, and very distant from the Gate high above. From now on Mao would ascend the Gate on special occasions, a practice he modeled on Soviet leaders mounting Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, which was far lower and less grand. On this occasion Mao made the only speech he ever delivered from the Gate in his entire reign of twenty-seven years. (On other occasions when he appeared there, he would at most mouth a slogan or two.) He cleared his throat every other sentence, in the manner of a nervous speaker rather than a rousing orator. Moreover, the content was extraordinarily flat, mainly a list of appointments. Its most salient feature was what he did not say. Mao did not outline any program to benefit “the people” in whose name the regime had been installed.

  The crowd of over 100,000 cried “Long live Chairman Mao!” Mao appeared excited, waving as he walked from one end of the magnificent Gate to the other, and occasionally shouting into the microphone: “Long live the people!” He had that day established himself as the absolute ruler of some 550 million people.

  Even the watered-down official CCP figure for civilian deaths from starvation in Changchun was 120,000.

  The terror and the extraordinarily high level of killing were recorded on the spot in Hebei province by Jack Belden, an American reporter extremely sympathetic to the Reds, who told US diplomat John Melby about “the increasing use of terror against any form of opposition, and the extermination of large sections [sic] of the population.” The Reds, Belden said, have “create[d] in the peasants a terror and furtiveness he has never before seen in Communist areas …”

  But Stalin responded eagerly to Mao’s request to help subdue the vast and remote northwestern deserts and annihilate a fierce anti-Communist Muslim army there. No problem, Stalin said. The Muslim horsemen “could be destroyed by artillery very easily. If you wish, we can give you 40 fighter planes which can rout … this cavalry very fast.” A senior Russian diplomat told us, with accompanying “rat-a-tat” of machine-guns and mowing-down hand gestures, that this is what Stalin’s air force had done, far from prying eyes, in the wastes of the Gobi.

  This system fooled foreigners into thinking that security was light, from which many concluded, wrongly, that the regime was popular, and so did not need much protection. A not untypical reaction was that of a French journalist who watched Chou En-lai drive across Tiananmen Square with India’s Premier Nehru in October 1954: “Assassinating Chou En-lai … would have been child’s play,” he wrote.

  31. TOTALITARIAN STATE, EXTRAVAGANT LIFESTYLE (1949–53 AGE 55–59)

  THE TRANSITION FROM Nationalist to Communist rule was managed without great disruption. The advancing Communist army took over all civilian institutions, and recruited educated young urban men and women to staff them, in addition to seasoned Party cadres. This machine immediately assumed control of the country.

  Many old administrators stayed on, under their new Party bosses, and for a time the economy ran much as before. Private businessmen were told that their property would not be touched for a long while and that they must keep their factories functioning and shops open. Industry and commerce were not nationalized for some years, and the collectivization of agriculture was not carried out until the mid-1950s.

  In these few years, with much of the economy still in private hands, the country quickly recovered from well over a decade of war. Agriculture saw considerable growth, as the new government issued loans and invested in water works. In the cities, subsidies were doled out to alleviate starvation. Death rates dropped.

  Some sectors were subjected to instant drastic change. One was the law, where courts were replaced by Party committees. Another was the media, on
which tight censorship was imposed at once; public opinion was stamped out. Mao would digest the rest of society gradually.

  Mao had an able team, headed by his No. 2 Liu Shao-chi, with Chou En-lai, the No. 3, as prime minister. In June 1949 Mao sent Liu to Russia to learn about the Soviet model in detail. Liu stayed there for nearly two months, and saw Stalin an unprecedented six times. He held meetings with a stream of top Soviet ministers and managers and visited a wide range of institutions. Hundreds of Soviet advisers were assigned to China, some returning with Liu on his train. A Stalinist state was being constructed even before Mao had formally assumed power.

  The new regime ran into armed resistance in the countryside and dealt with it without mercy. Once the state was secure, Mao began systematic terrorization of the population, to induce long-term conformity and obedience. His methods were uniquely Maoist.

  Mao was viscerally hostile to law, and his subjects were utterly shorn of legal protection. He described himself to Edgar Snow in 1970 as “a man without law or limit” (which was mistranslated as him saying he was “a lone monk”). Instead of laws, the regime issued edicts, resolutions and press editorials. It accompanied these with “campaigns” conducted by the Party system. There was a paper facade of law, which formally allowed the “right of appeal,” but exercising it was treated as an offense, a “demand for further punishment,” as one ex-prisoner put it, which could result in one’s sentence being doubled, for daring to doubt the wisdom of “the people.”

  In October 1950 Mao launched a nationwide “campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries,” and devoted much energy to this, his first major onslaught since taking power, ordering his police chief to “send reports directly to me.” The targets were what remained of the old Nationalist regime. They came under the general heading of “class enemies,” broken down into categories like “Bandits,” which referred to anyone involved in armed resistance: these alone ran into many millions. Another group was “Spies,” which meant not people actually spying, but anyone who had worked in Nationalist intelligence. Grassroots Nationalist chiefs also fell victim en bloc — although senior Nationalists were protected, as bait to entice others back from abroad. “We don’t kill a single one of those big Chiang Kai-sheks,” Mao said. “What we kill are small Chiang Kai-sheks.”