Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Mao issued order after order berating provincial cadres for being too soft, and urged more “massive arrests, massive killings.” On 23 January 1951, for instance, he criticized one province for “being much too lenient, and not killing [enough]”; when it raised its execution rate, he said this “improvement” made him feel “very delighted.”

  This nationwide campaign went hand in hand with the land reform in the newly occupied areas, where some two-thirds of China’s population lived. Some 3 million perished either by execution, mob violence, or suicide. Mao wanted the killings performed with maximum impact, and that meant having them carried out in public. On 30 March 1951 he instructed: “Many places … don’t dare to kill counter-revolutionaries on a grand scale with big publicity. This situation must be changed.” In Peking alone, some 30,000 sentencing and execution rallies were held, attended by nearly 3.4 million people. A young half-Chinese woman from Britain witnessed one rally in the center of Peking, when some 200 people were paraded and then shot in the head so that their brains splattered out onto bystanders. Even those who managed to evade the rallies could not always avoid seeing horrific things, like trucks carrying corpses through the streets, dripping blood.

  Mao intended most of the population — children and adults alike — to witness violence and killing. His aim was to scare and brutalize the entire population, in a way that went much further than either Stalin or Hitler, who largely kept their foulest crimes out of sight.

  More might well have been killed if it had not been for their value as slave labor. Mao said as much in one order: some people had “committed crimes that deserve to be punished by death,” but they must not be killed, partly because “we would lose a large labour force.” So millions were spared to be shipped to labor camps. With advice from Russian gulag experts on deportation and camp management, Mao sowed a vast archipelago of camps, the official term for which was lao-gai: “reform through labour.” To be sent to lao-gai meant being condemned to back-breaking labor in the most hostile wastelands and down the most contaminating mines, while being hectored and harassed incessantly. Hidden away in these camps, the physically weaker, and the spiritually stronger, were worked to death. Many inmates were executed, while others committed suicide by any means, like diving into a wheat-chopper. In all, during Mao’s rule, the numbers who were executed, and met other premature deaths in prisons and labor camps, could well amount to 27 million.

  In addition to execution and incarceration in prisons and camps, there was a third, and typically Maoist, form of punishment that was imposed on many tens of millions of people during Mao’s reign. It was called being placed “under surveillance” while the victim remained in society. What it meant was “doing time on the outside,” kept on a kind of permanent knife-edge parole, one of the usual suspects to be rounded up and tormented afresh with any new bout of suppression. It meant one’s whole family living like outcasts. The high-visibility stigma served as a warning to the general public never to cross the regime.†

  The terror worked. A report to Mao on 9 February 1951, only a few months into the campaign, said that after this first bout of killings, “rumor-mongering died down and social order stabilised.” What the state called “rumors” were often the only way people had to express their real sentiments. In one case, a seemingly bizarre alert spread not just from village to village, but from province to province: “Chairman Mao sends people to the villages to cut off [men’s] balls to give to the Soviet Union to make atom bombs.” (In Chinese, “balls” and “bombs” share the same pronunciation: dan.) In some places, when what looked like a tax collector appeared, the shout went up: “The ball-cutters are here!” and the whole village would run for cover. This story reflects the fact that Mao was already imposing extortionate food levies on the peasants, some of whom had clearly surmised that the food was being sent to Russia.

  This campaign clamped the lid down hard on any such expression of dissent, but there were still a few cracks in the system in those early years. Victims could sometimes still hide. A small landowner from Anhui province managed to stay on the run with her son for 636 days, without ever being informed on, even by people sent to catch them. When the fugitives eventually returned to their village, “the overwhelming majority of people, particularly women … shed tears of pity,” the son recalled. As the campaign was over by then, they survived.

  But control became increasingly pervasive, and with it the loss of freedom on every front: of speech, movement, work, information. A nationwide system of concierges called Order-Keeping Committees was established in every factory, village and street, composed of members of the public, often the nosiest and most hyper-active busybodies, now made complicit with the regime’s repression. These committees kept an eye on everyone, not just political suspects and petty criminals. Above all, the regime nailed every person in China to a fixed, and usually immutable, job and place of residence through a registration system (hu-kou) begun in July 1951, which soon became iron-clad.

  The government also used the “suppression of counter-revolutionaries” campaign to move against all sorts of non-political offenses, such as ordinary banditry, gangsterism, murder, robbery, gambling, drug-dealing and prostitution (“liberated” prostitutes were organized to do manual labor). Thanks to phenomenal organization and ruthlessness, these actions were extremely successful. By the end of 1952, drug-dealing was virtually wiped out, as were brothels.

  Mao repeatedly said that his killings “were extremely necessary.” “Only when this thing is properly done can our power be secure,” he pronounced.

  WHILE NUMEROUS CHINESE were executed, only two foreigners are known to have suffered this fate — one Italian, Antonio Riva, and a Japanese called Ryuichi Yamaguchi. The charge was no minor one: planning to kill Mao with a mortar bomb as he stood on Tiananmen on 1 October 1950, National Day. The two men were arrested days before, together with several other foreigners. Ten months later, on 17 August 1951, these two were driven through central Peking standing up in jeeps, and then shot in public near the Bridge of Heaven. The news was splashed across next day’s People’s Daily under the headline “The Case of US Spies Plotting Armed Rebellion,” alleging that the assassination had been ordered by the former US assistant military attaché, Colonel David Barrett.

  For anyone, let alone a foreigner, to contemplate assassinating Mao on a maximum-security occasion like National Day, amid a throng of hundreds of thousands of organized and hyper-vigilant Chinese, not to mention some 10,000 police and another 10,000 troops, was a very tall order. Actually, Barrett, the alleged ringleader, had left China many months before. Two decades later, Chou En-lai apologized, in a vague way, about implicating him, and invited him back to China. This was an indirect acknowledgment that the accusation was faked.

  Linking the plot to Barrett helped whip up anti-American feeling, which was not as fervid as the regime wished. The trumped-up charge was also used to tarnish another major target of Mao’s — the Roman Catholic Church, whose leading foreign representative, an Italian Monsignor, was one of those arrested. China had about 3.3 million Catholics at the time. Mao was very interested in the Vatican, especially its ability to command allegiance beyond national boundaries, and his Italian visitors often found themselves being peppered with questions about the Pope’s authority. The tenacity and effectiveness of the Catholics perturbed the regime, which used the phony assassination case to accelerate the takeover of Catholic institutions, including schools, hospitals and orphanages. A high-decibel smear campaign accused Catholic priests and nuns of heinous actions ranging from plain murder to cannibalism and medical experiments on babies. Hundreds of Chinese Catholics were executed, and many foreign priests suffered physical abuse.

  In general, religious and quasi-religious organizations were either branded reactionary and suppressed, or brought under tight control. Almost all foreign clergy were expelled, along with most foreign businessmen, virtually clearing China of non-Communist foreigners by about 1953. Non-Com
munist foreign press and radio were, it goes without saying, banned.

  THE “CAMPAIGN to suppress counter-revolutionaries” lasted over a year though routine suppression continued unabated after that. Mao then focused his attention on securing watertight control of the state coffers, to make sure that the funds the state extracted from the people did not revert to private hands. In late 1951 he started a campaign known as “the Three-Antis,” targeting embezzlement, waste and “bureaucratism” (which meant slacking, not bureaucracy per se). The primary aim was to scare anyone with access to government money from pocketing it. Alleged embezzlers were called “tigers.” “Big Tigers,” involving cases over 10,000 yuan, qualified for death.

  As corruption had been epidemic under the Nationalists, the campaign had genuine appeal. Many thought that the Communists were trying to root out corruption. What people did not realize was that while it was true that after this campaign few who had access to state money dared dip their hand in the till, the funds thus amassed in the state coffers were not going to be used for the interests of the people.

  Mao was hands-on about what had now, in effect, become his money. He bombarded government ministers, and provincial and army leaders, with cables urging them to catch “Big Tigers,” and setting quotas: “We must probably execute 10,000 to several tens of thousands of embezzlers nationwide before we can solve our problem.” He whipped up a competition among the provinces, goading them on to higher targets, threatening: “Whoever disobeys is either a bureaucratist or an embezzler himself.”

  The method for uncovering those deemed to be offenders was, as Mao enjoined, “confession and informing.” Using these techniques, some 3.83 million civilian officials were grilled and screened (and more in the army). Though torture was not encouraged as a public spectacle this time, it was nevertheless used in some places, and Mao was kept informed. Russians working on the railway in Manchuria reported hearing screams (“like from Japanese dungeons”) from nearby offices. These turned out to be coming from Chinese colleagues who were being “checked” by having their testicles crushed in bamboo pliers.

  In the end, relatively few officials were found to have embezzled sums large enough to qualify them as “Big Tigers.” But Mao had achieved his goal, to instill fear. From now on, few dared to pilfer state funds.

  As for its second target, waste, the campaign caused more loss than it prevented. By tying up skilled managers and technicians in sterile meetings for months on end, it deprived the economy of badly needed human assets. On 14 February 1952, Tianjin reported that wholesale trade was down by half, banks had stopped loans, and private businesses dared not buy goods. Industrial production was declining, tax income collapsing, and the economy was heading into recession. In Manchuria, production plummeted by half. In fact, the system of repression itself was a prime source of waste. One Belgian priest worked out that he was interrogated — to no effect — for more than 3,000 hours over three years, which involved at least three or four people full time (at least 10,000 man-hours), as well as vast amounts of scarce paper.

  In January 1952, shortly after the Three-Antis began, Mao ordered another campaign to run in tandem with it, this one called “the Five-Antis.” The offenses were: bribery, tax evasion, pilfering state property, cheating, and stealing economic information. It was aimed at private businessmen, whose property had not been confiscated, to force them to disgorge money, as well as to frighten them out of acts like bribery and tax evasion. One person involved at a high level put the number of suicides in these two campaigns as at least 200,000–300,000. In Shanghai so many people jumped from skyscrapers that they acquired the nickname “parachutes.” One eyewitness wondered why people jumped into the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families: “If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn’t have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong, and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down to the street.”

  BY MAY 1953, when Mao brought the campaigns to an end, he had accomplished what he had set out to do, namely to scare people away from touching state money. Communist officialdom did become relatively uncorrupt in the conventional sense, such as not taking bribes, but it was granted a privileged standard of living, which was minutely graded hierarchically.

  Mao himself did not embezzle in the conventional way, like lesser dictators who kept Swiss bank accounts. But this was simply because he did not need to hedge against losing power. He just made absolutely sure such a day would never come. Rather than embezzling, he treated the funds of the state as his own, and used them however he wanted, disregarding the needs of the population and persecuting any who advocated different spending priorities from the ones he laid down. When it came to personal lifestyle, Mao’s was one of royal self-indulgence, practiced at tremendous cost to the country. This corrupt behavior emerged as soon as he conquered China.

  Mao lived behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, so that very few knew anything about his life and his world, including where he lived, or where he was (he made few public appearances). Even up close, he did not give an obvious impression of high living. He had no taste for opulence, and positively shunned the sort of objects usually associated with luxury, such as gold taps, antiques, paintings, vast wardrobes, elegant furniture. But these absences involved no restraint of his desires. In fact, Mao indulged every whim in his daily life.

  Mao liked villas. During his twenty-seven-year rule, well over fifty estates were created for him, no fewer than five in Peking. Many he never set foot in. These estates were set in enormous grounds, mostly in gorgeous locations. So, in many places of great beauty, the whole mountain (like Jade Spring Hills outside Peking), or long stretches of lakes (such as along the famed Western Lake in Hangzhou), were cordoned off for his exclusive use. There were often old villas on these spots, many of architectural splendor. These were torn down to make room for new buildings designed and constructed under the supervision of his security forces, with safety and comfort à la Mao as the priorities. These purpose-built edifices were bullet-and bomb-proof; some had deep nuclear shelters. Most were in the same style: a warehouse clone with identical wings, one for Mao and the other for his wife, with a huge sitting room in the middle. All were one-story, as Mao feared being trapped upstairs.

  The one floor was very high, sometimes as high as a normal two-or three-story building, to cater for Mao’s sense of the grandiose. One villa built in the mid-1960s outside Nanchang was about 50 feet high, a single floor, like a monstrous gray hangar. When many of them were turned into guest houses after Mao died, their corridors were so enormous that, even after creating a row of sizable rooms inside them, there was space enough for a normal-width corridor.

  Construction on his first new villas had started in 1949, the moment he entered Peking. These were followed by others, during the Three-Antis campaign. One, completed in 1954, was at Beidaihe on the east coast. This had been a seaside resort from the turn of the century, and had over 600 villas, many of them large and elegant, but none met Mao’s security specifications, so an enormous Mao-style identikit building was plonked down in an enclave with a spectacular view overlooking the beach, protected by lushly forested hills with bunkers and tunnels hollowed out inside them. The whole expanse of sea was placed out of bounds to all but an authorized few.

  In 1952 Mao’s security chief sent word to Hunan indicating that a villa should be built in the provincial capital, Changsha, for Mao’s possible homecoming. The Hunan leaders were unsure whether this was really Mao’s wish. As this was at the height of the Three-Antis, it seemed too blatant to be true. So they vacated their own houses, and had them refurbished for Mao. But Mao did not come. Then it dawned on them that a new estate was indeed what he desired, and construction work began. It was not until it was completed that Mao deigned to come back for a visit. Later, a second villa was built only a stone’s throw away. More villas were built in his h
ome village of Shaoshan. Other provinces, which naturally all wanted visits from Mao, would be told “But you have no place for the Chairman to stay,” and would then build the necessary mansions.

  The houses were constantly upgraded for security and comfort. In his old age, an enclosed outer corridor was added so that Mao could take walks without risking catching cold. To minimize the risk of assassination, the outside windows in these corridors were staggered with those in Mao’s rooms, so that from either direction only a wall was visible. Another security refinement in the later villas was steel gates at both ends of the portico, which became incorporated into the house, so Mao’s car effectively drove right into the sitting room.

  Sometimes, even Mao’s train drove into his villa — or strictly speaking, into the front garden, along a spur laid specially for him. In many places, an exclusive underground tunnel ran all the way from the villa to the local military airport. Mao frequently slept in his train parked at military airports, ready to make a quick getaway by train or plane, in case of emergency. Throughout his reign, he lived in his own country as if in a war zone.

  Mao mostly traveled with three sets of transport — train, plane, and ship (when applicable). Even if he was using only one kind of transport, the other two would follow wherever possible, just in case. When he flew, every other plane in China was grounded. And when his special train moved, always setting off at a moment’s notice, the country’s railway system was thrown into chaos, as other trains were not allowed to be anywhere near his. These disruptions were not infrequent, as Mao was constantly on the move by train. The crew were on permanent standby, not allowed home sometimes for weeks, even months on end.