Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  HAVING SUPPRESSED dissent among the educated in general, starting in 1958, immediately after returning from the Moscow summit, Mao moved to strike fear into his top echelon by threatening to label as “Rightists” any of them who opposed the relaunch of the Superpower Program. His main concern was with his Nos. 2 and 3, Liu Shao-chi and Chou En-lai, who had championed the cuts in the Program in 1956.

  The tactic Mao chose this time was new — to abase his most senior colleagues in front of dozens of provincial chiefs. This was the first time that Mao involved these second-rank officials in directly attacking his top colleagues and their own superiors. It was a means both of humiliating Chou and Liu, and of putting pressure on them; especially as Mao personally delivered stinging assaults on his two colleagues in front of their subordinates. Bringing in these provincial chiefs to witness the working of power at the very top — and the humiliation of the regime’s Nos. 2 and 3—was also a way for Mao to empower the men responsible for supervising the actual collection of the food.

  He focused on Chou, who was in charge of planning and administering the Program. Mao described Chou as being “only 50 metres away from being a Rightist”; Chou’s attempts to curb investment in arms industries in 1956, Mao said, were on a par with the Hungarian Uprising, and had “considerably influenced the Rightists.” These were ominous charges, carrying the direst potential consequences. To make things even more menacing, Mao removed Chou as foreign minister in February 1958, and senior diplomats close to Chou were encouraged to attack him.

  The heat around Mao was unbearable, even by the usual nerve-racking standards of his regime. One minister who had been in the firing line had a fatal breakdown. When Mao’s doctor went to give the minister a check-up, he found him lying in bed, “muttering again and again: ‘Spare me! Please spare me!’ ” The minister was flown off to a hospital in Canton. In the plane, he suddenly sank to his knees and banged his head on the floor, begging: “Please spare me …” He died in Canton within weeks, aged forty-six.

  As the climax of this process of intimidation and abasement, Mao ordered Chou to make a self-criticism that would imply that he was a quasi-Rightist in front of the 1,360 delegates to a special Party Congress in May 1958. Chou apologized for his previous efforts to hamper Mao’s desired rate of “industrialisation,” whose military nature was not revealed even to this high-level gathering, nor its catastrophic implications. This self-denunciation caused Chou a great deal of pain. It took him ten days to write his speech. The normally dapper premier spent days on end shut up in his room, unshaven and unkempt, not even getting dressed. The secretary taking his dictation recalled that Chou spoke extremely slowly, Chou then dictated, on the verge of tears. Chou had chosen his wife not out of love, but out of mutual devotion to the Communist cause, and she lived right up to that specification.

  sometimes unable to say a word for five or six minutes … So I suggested I leave his office and let him compose quietly … It was midnight, and I returned to my room and lay in bed with my clothes on, waiting to be called.

  At about 2 am [Mrs. Chou] summoned me. She said: “En-lai is sitting in the office staring blankly. How come you went to bed?…” So I followed [her] to [his] office, where she and comrade Chou En-lai argued for a long time …

  Chou duly delivered his speech, to Mao’s satisfaction. The atmosphere at the congress was more frightening than usual, as reflected in the language of the press announcement, which said the meeting had “denounced Rightists who have wormed their way into the Party”—in Communist jargon, barely one step away from damning such people as enemy agents. Orchestrated by Mao, a host of provinces announced how they had uncovered Rightists among their own provincial leaders. The provincial chief of Henan was condemned and dismissed for saying the peasants could not afford to hand over too much to the state as they were “starving.” Henan, he said, had endured “endless floods, droughts and other natural disasters,” and its inhabitants were “having to pull ploughs, since many draft animals have died because of the shortage of food.”

  Liu Shao-chi also came under bitter attack from Mao’s henchmen at the congress for his role in the 1956 cuts. Like Chou, he too capitulated fulsomely, as did everyone who had a managerial role in Mao’s Superpower Program. Mao’s notes show that he had been ready to charge anyone who refused to toe his line with what amounted to treason (“using illegal methods … to carry out opposition activities”). In the end he did not need to go this far, as all surrendered.

  Liu stayed on as No. 2. Chou was so battered that he asked Mao “whether it is appropriate for me to go on being prime minister.” He was told to carry on, and he remained foreign affairs supremo, even though he was not reinstated as foreign minister. Mao was well aware that no one else could put so seductive a face on his regime. The man who took Chou’s place as foreign minister, Chen Yi, remarked ruefully that he found himself being “no more than a glorified entertainer.”

  MAO MADE ONE most important personnel shift at the congress. He promoted his old crony Lin Biao to be one of the Party’s vice-chairmen (alongside Liu, Chou, Zhu De and Chen Yun). This gave Mao an ally-in-need in the core, one who also held a top army rank: a marshal. Formal military ranks had been introduced in 1955, when Lin and nine other generals were made marshals.

  Along with these steps, Mao intensified his personality cult, which he had started to promote from the time of the Yenan Terror in 1942–43. In March 1958 he told his top echelon (colleagues, provincial chiefs and ministers): “There has to be a personality cult … It is absolutely necessary.” His henchmen vied to declare their “blind faith” in Mao, with Shanghai boss Ke actually advocating the herd instinct: “We must follow the Chairman like a blind herd.”

  To stoke his cult, Mao took the most unwonted step of visiting places like factories and agricultural cooperatives, and these visits were reported with huge fanfare. Mao was filmed for newsreels that were shown nationwide, and featured in a painting aptly titled Chairman Mao Walks All Over China, which became a household image. After Mao visited a village outside Chengdu in Sichuan, huge publicity was given to the story that the excited villagers changed its name to “Happiness Cooperative.” When Mao lifted a few bits of earth on a shovel at the Ming Tomb Reservoir on the outskirts of Peking, People’s Daily wrote: “As soon as Chairman Mao put down the spade, a soldier named Yu Bing-sen wrapped the spade up in his clothes. He said with brimming emotions: ‘Whenever we see this spade we will think of Chairman Mao, and we will have greater energy.’ An agricultural co-op member wept and told the reporter …” These exaltations of Mao in the press were then force-fed to the entire population, the illiterate as well as the literate, at newspaper-study sessions that were a permanent fixture of life under Mao.

  On 13 August, for the only time throughout his 27-year reign, Mao ate in a restaurant, in Tianjin. There he was sighted, undoubtedly as intended, as he not only got out of the car in front of the restaurant, but appeared at the window upstairs. “Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao!” people began to chant. Word spread fast, and soon a hysterical crowd of tens of thousands surrounded the restaurant for several blocks, jumping up and down and screaming “Long Live Chairman Mao!” One of Mao’s secretaries got worried about security, and suggested that Mao should leave while a bodyguard with a build similar to Mao’s drew the crowd off. But Mao vetoed it. He had come to the place to be seen, and he was not in any danger, as this was a surprise visit, and he was distant enough from the crowd, none of whom could possibly have a gun anyway. (One of his regime’s first acts had been to confiscate weapons.) And the people around the restaurant had almost certainly been preselected, as happened in other places where Mao appeared. Mao waved at the crowd, who replied with more frenzy and weeping. All of which was reported in great detail in the papers.

  When Mao eventually left, after several hours, he described his departure to his inner circle in almost godlike language: “I gave one wave, and the crowd receded.” He reveled in the way his cult was thriving and
told his coterie that he “was deeply impressed.” Years of force-feeding his personality cult had endowed him with awesome power.

  This minister, Huang Jing, had been the second husband of Mme Mao. They married when he was a handsome twenty-year-old radical student and she an eighteen-year-old librarian in 1932, and she joined the Party under his influence. After she married Mao, she occasionally invited her ex-husband over “for a chat,” but he declined every time. The pressure on him now was nothing personal on Mao’s part, as Mao was never jealous. In fact, in Chongqing in 1945 Mao had made a point of inviting another of his wife’s former husbands, Tang Na, to a reception, and greeted him with a twinkle in his eye and a crack, as Tang Na had once attempted suicide over the future Mme Mao. Tang Na settled in Paris after Mao took power, and subsequently died there.

  Shoveling earth at the Ming Tomb Reservoir for those few minutes was the only physical labor Mao put in during his entire rule, although he made heavy labor compulsory and routine for nearly everyone in China, children included, on the grounds that it helped maintain their ideological purity.

  40. THE GREAT LEAP: “HALF OF CHINA MAY WELL HAVE TO DIE” (1958–61 AGE 64–67)

  WITH HIS cult fed and watered among the population, his colleagues cowed into submission, and potential voices of dissent silenced through the “Anti-Rightist” campaign, Mao proceeded vastly to accelerate his Superpower Program, though he still concealed its military nature. The original 1953 schedule of completing “industrialisation” in “ten to fifteen years” was now shortened to eight, seven, or even five—or possibly three—years. Mao had been informed that acquisitions from Russia could enable him to break into the superpower league in five years. He fancied he could fulfill his ambition in one “big bang,” declaring that “Our nation is like an atom.” He called the process the “Great Leap Forward,” and launched it in May 1958.

  While the nation was told, vaguely, that the goal of the Leap was for China to “overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time, and become one of the richest, most advanced and powerful countries in the world,” Mao spelled out to small audiences, and strictly confidentially, just what he meant to do once the Leap was completed. On 28 June, he told an elite army group: “Now the Pacific Ocean is not peaceful. It can only be peaceful when we take it over.” At this point Lin Biao interjected: “We must build big ships, and be prepared to land [sc. militarily] in Japan, the Philippines and San Francisco.” Mao continued: “How many years before we can build such ships? In 1962, when we have xx — xx tons of steel [figures concealed in original] …” On 19 August, Mao told select provincial chiefs: “In the future we will set up the Earth Control Committee, and make a uniform plan for the Earth.” Mao dominated China. He intended to dominate the world.

  For the Chinese population, the Great Leap was indeed an enormous jump — but in the amount of food extracted. This was calculated on the basis, not of what the peasants could afford, but of what was needed for Mao’s Program. Mao proceeded by simply asserting that there was going to be an enormous increase in the harvest, and got the provincial chiefs to proclaim that their area would produce an astronomical output. When harvest time came, the chiefs got selected lackeys down at the grassroots to declare that their areas had indeed produced fantastic crops. Mao’s propaganda machine then publicized these claims with great fanfare. The stratospheric harvests and other sky-high claims were called “sputniks,” reflecting Mao’s obsession with the Russian satellite. On 12 June People’s Daily reported that in Henan, Mao’s No. 1 model province, a “Sputnik Cooperative” had produced 1.8 tons of wheat on one mu (1/6th acre) — more than ten times the norm. Claims in this vein were not, as official Chinese history would have us believe, the result of spontaneous boasting by local cadres and peasants. The press was Mao’s voice, not the public’s.

  “Sputnik fields” mushroomed. They were usually created by transplanting ripe crops from a number of fields into a single artificial plot. These were the Maoist equivalent of Potemkin fields — with the key difference that Mao’s plots were not intended to fool the ruler, but instead produced by the ruler for the eyes of his distant underlings, grassroots cadres from other collective farms. These cadres were most important to Mao, as they were the people immediately in charge of physically handing over the harvests to the state. Mao wanted them to see these Sputnik fields and then go back and make similar claims, so that the state could say: since you’ve produced more, we can take more. Cadres who declined to go along were condemned and replaced with others who would. Charades of sky-high yields filled the press, though Peking eventually quietly stopped the transplanting theater, as it caused big losses.

  By late July, People’s Daily was declaring that “we can produce as much food as we want,” setting the stage for Mao to assert publicly on 4 August: “We must consider what to do with all this surplus food.” This claim about there being surplus food was one that Mao himself could not possibly have believed. Barely six months before, on 28 January, he had acknowledged to the Supreme Council that there was a shortage of food: “What are we going to do as there isn’t enough food to eat?” he had asked. His solution was as follows: “No worse than eat less … Oriental style … It’s good for health. Westerners have a lot of fat in their food; the further west one goes the more fat they eat. I say that Western meat-eaters are contemptible.” “I think it is good to eat less. What’s the point of eating a lot and growing a big stomach, like the foreign capitalists in cartoons?” These airy remarks might well apply to Mao, who had a paunch, but they were irrelevant to famished peasants. In January, Mao had been saying: There isn’t enough food, but people can eat less. Six months later, he was saying: There is too much food. Both of these contradictory remarks had the same purpose: to gouge more food out of the peasants.

  In September, People’s Daily reported that “the biggest rice sputnik” yet had produced over 70 tons from less than 1/5th of an acre, which was hundreds of times the norm. This sputnik field was faked by an ambitious new county boss in Guangxi. At the end of the year, his county reported a grain output that was over three times the true figure. The state then demanded an impossible 4.8 times what it had taken the year before.

  Grassroots cadres often resorted to brute force. And if they were judged ineffective, armed police were sent in. On 19 August 1958, Mao instructed his provincial chiefs: “When you order things handed over and they are not handed over, back up your orders with force.” Under such pressure, state violence raged across the countryside.

  To produce a “justification,” Mao repeatedly accused peasants and village cadres of hiding grain. On one occasion, on 27 February 1959, he told his top echelon: “All production teams hide their food to divide among themselves. They even hide it in deep secret cellars, and place guards and sentries …” Next day, he asserted again that peasants were “eating carrot leaves during the day, and rice at night …” By this he meant that peasants were pretending they had run out of proper food but in fact had good food, which they consumed in secret. Mao revealed his contempt for the peasantry to his inner circle: “Peasants are hiding food … and are very bad. There is no Communist spirit in them! Peasants are after all peasants. That’s the only way they can behave …”

  Mao knew perfectly well that the peasants had no food to hide. He had an efficient reporting system, and was on top of what was happening daily around the country. On one batch of reports in April 1959 he noted that there was severe starvation in half the country: “a big problem: 15 provinces—25.17 million people no food to eat”; his response was to ask the provinces to “deal with it,” but he did not say how. A report that reached his desk from Yunnan province, dated 18 November 1958, described a wave of deaths from edema — swelling caused by severe malnutrition. Again, Mao’s response was to pass the buck: “This mistake is mainly the fault of county-level cadres.” Mao knew that in many places people were reduced to eating compounds of earth. In some cases, whole villages died as a result, when people’s
intestines became blocked.

  This nationwide squeeze made it possible for Mao to export 4.74 million tons of grain, worth US$935 million, in 1959. Exports of other foods also soared, particularly of pork.

  The claim about China “having too much food” was trundled out to Khrushchev. When he came to Peking in summer 1958, Mao pressed him for help to make nuclear submarines, which were going to be extremely expensive. Khrushchev asked how China was going to pay. Mao’s response was that China had unlimited supplies of food.

  Food was also used as a raw material in the nuclear program, which required high-quality fuel. Grain was turned into the purest alcohol. On 8 September, having claimed that there was food to spare, Mao told the Supreme Council that “we have to find outlets for grain in industries, for example to produce ethyl alcohol for fuel.” Grain was therefore used for missile tests, each of which consumed 10 million kg of grain, enough to radically deplete the food intake of 1–2 million people for a whole year.

  THE PEASANTS WERE now having to work much harder, and much longer hours, than before. As Mao wanted to raise output without spending any money, he latched on to methods that depended on labor, not investment. It was for this reason that he ordered huge drives to build irrigation systems — dams, reservoirs, canals. Over the four years from 1958, about 100 million peasants were coerced into such projects, moving a quantity of earth and masonry equivalent to excavating 950 Suez Canals, mostly using only hammers, picks and shovels, and sometimes even doors and bed planks from their homes to improvise makeshift carts. Peasants corvéed for these projects often had to bring not only their own food but their own tools, and in many cases their own materials to put up shelters.