by Jung Chang
Worse, Mao wanted to destroy existing cities on a massive scale and build industrial centers on the ruins. In 1958 the regime did a survey of historic monuments in Peking. It listed 8,000—and decided to keep seventy-eight. Everyone who heard of the scheme, from the mayor down, pleaded against this level of destruction. Eventually, the order was not carried out so drastically — for a while. But at Mao’s insistence, the centuries-old city walls and gates were mostly razed to the ground, and the earth used to fill in a beautiful lake in the city. “I am delighted that city walls in Nanjing, Jinan, and so on, are [also] torn down,” Mao said. He was fond of mocking cultural figures who shed tears of anguish at such senseless destruction, and intellectuals were deliberately made to work on the wrecking crews. Many of the visible signs of Chinese civilization disappeared forever from the face of the earth.
Time and again, Mao expressed his loathing for Chinese architecture, while praising European and Japanese buildings, which he saw as representing the achievements of militaristic states. “I can’t stand the houses in Peking and Kaifeng [old capitals]. I much prefer the ones in Qingdao and Changchun,” he remarked to his inner circle in January 1958. Qingdao was a former German colony, while Changchun had been built by the Japanese as the capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Mao repeatedly called these two cities “the best.”
Mao permitted few things with a Chinese character to be built. In the early years of his rule, some buildings in old Chinese style had been put up, but these were soon denounced for their traditional design. When new edifices were put up to mark the tenth anniversary of the regime in 1959, they were built in the Soviet style. They were actually the only Mao-era buildings with even a nod to aesthetics. The rest were factories and utilitarian, gray concrete matchbox blocks.
The best-known of the new buildings was the Great Hall of the People, in central Peking. This was where Mao intended to hold large prestigious meetings, and he specifically ordered the auditorium to be designed to hold as many as 10,000 people. The Great Hall itself, 171,800 square meters in area, was erected on one side of Tiananmen Square in front of the old imperial palace, the Forbidden City. Determined to outdo other totalitarian rulers in gigantism, Mao gave orders to make the Square into “the biggest square in the world, capable of holding a rally of one million people.” What had been a square of 11 hectares, with great character, was quadrupled in size, destroying large swaths of the old city. The result was a vast concrete space devoid of human warmth, the dehumanized heart of Mao’s regime.
PEOPLE STARVED in the cities too, although death tolls were much lower than in the countryside. Nonetheless, most urban dwellers could barely survive on the rations they got. “Life seemed to proceed in slow motion,” a Polish witness observed in Peking. “Rickshaw drivers barely able to pedal … tens of thousands of comatose cyclists … dejection stared out of the eyes of passersby.” The urban meat ration declined annually from 5.1 kg per person in 1957 to an all-time low of just over 1.5 kg in 1960. People were told to eat “food substitutes.” One was a green roe-like substance called chlorella, which grew in urine and contained some protein. After Chou En-lai tasted and approved this disgusting stuff, it soon provided a high proportion of the urban population’s protein.
This famine, which was nationwide, started in 1958 and lasted through 1961, peaking in 1960. That year, the regime’s own statistics recorded, average daily calorie intake fell to 1,534.8. According to a major apologist for the regime, Han Suyin, urban housewives were getting a maximum 1,200 calories a day in 1960. At Auschwitz, slave-laborers got between 1,300 and 1,700 calories per day. They were worked about eleven hours a day, and most who did not find extra food died within several months.
During the famine, some resorted to cannibalism. One post-Mao study (promptly suppressed), of Fengyang county in Anhui province, recorded sixty-three cases of cannibalism in the spring of 1960 alone, including that of a couple who strangled and ate their eight-year-old son. And Fengyang was probably not the worst. In one county in Gansu where one-third of the population died, cannibalism was rife. One village cadre, whose wife, sister and children all died then, later told journalists: “So many people in the village have eaten human flesh … See those people squatting outside the commune office sunning themselves? Some of them ate human flesh … People were just driven crazy by hunger.”
While all this was happening, there was plenty of food in state granaries, which were guarded by the army. Some food was simply allowed to rot. A Polish student saw fruit “rotting by the ton” in southeast China in summer — autumn 1959. But the order from above was: “Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation” (e-si bu-kai-cang).
CLOSE TO 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward and the famine, which lasted four years. The figure is confirmed by Mao’s No. 2, Liu Shao-chi himself. Even before the famine had ended, he told Soviet ambassador Stepan Chervonenko that 30 million had already died.
This was the greatest famine of the twentieth century — and of all recorded human history. Mao knowingly starved and worked these tens of millions of people to death. During the two critical years 1958–59, grain exports alone, almost exactly 7 million tons, would have provided the equivalent of over 840 calories per day for 38 million people — the difference between life and death. And this was only grain; it does not include the meat, cooking oil, eggs and other foodstuffs that were exported in very large quantities. Had this food not been exported (and instead distributed according to humane criteria), very probably not a single person in China would have had to die of hunger.
Mao had actually allowed for many more deaths. Although slaughter was not his purpose with the Leap, he was more than ready for myriad deaths to result, and had hinted to his top echelon that they should not be too shocked if they happened. At the May 1958 congress that kicked off the Leap, he told his audience they should not only not fear, but should actively welcome, people dying as a result of their Party’s policy. “Wouldn’t it be disastrous if Confucius were still alive today?” he said. The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, he said, “was right to lounge and sing when his wife died. There should be celebration rallies when people die.” Death, said Mao, “is indeed to be rejoiced over … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.”
This airy yet ghoulish “philosophy” was relayed down to grassroots officials. In Fengyang county in Anhui, when one cadre was shown the corpses of people who had died from starvation and overwork, he repeated almost word for word what Mao had said: “If people don’t die, the earth won’t be able to hold them! People live and people die. Who doesn’t die?” Even wearing mourning was forbidden; even shedding tears — since Mao said that death should be celebrated.
Mao saw practical advantage in massive deaths. “Deaths have benefits,” he told the top echelon on 9 December 1958. “They can fertilise the ground.” Peasants were therefore ordered to plant crops over burial plots, which caused intense anguish.
We can now say with assurance how many people Mao was ready to dispense with. When he was in Moscow in 1957, he had said: “We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.” That was about half the population of China then. Indeed, Mao told the Party congress on 17 May 1958: “Don’t make a fuss about a world war. At most, people die … Half the population wiped out — this happened quite a few times in Chinese history … It’s best if half the population is left, next best one-third …”
Nor was Mao just thinking about a war situation. On 21 November 1958, talking to his inner circle about the labor-intensive projects like waterworks and making “steel,” and tacitly, almost casually, assuming a context where peasants had too little to eat and were being worked to exhaustion, Mao said: “Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one-third, or one-tenth—50 million — die.” Aware that these remarks might sound too shocking, he tried to shirk hi
s own responsibility. “Fifty million deaths,” he went on, “I could be fired, and I might even lose my head … but if you insist, I’ll just have to let you do it, and you can’t blame me when people die.”
North Korea’s Kim Il Sung turned out to be less stupid than Mao on this issue. Mao had pressed him to emulate China’s anti-sparrow campaign. To humor Mao, Kim drafted a “3-Year Plan for Punishing Sparrows,” but then did nothing while he watched to see how Mao’s campaign turned out.
This figure is based on the following calculation. Chinese demographers have concluded that death rates in the four years 1958–61 were 1.20 percent, 1.45 percent, 4.34 percent and 2.83 percent, respectively. The average death rate in the three years immediately before and after the famine was 1.03 percent (1957: 1.08 percent; 1962: 1 percent; and 1963:1 percent). The death rates over and above this average could only have been caused by starvation and overwork during the famine. The “extra” death figure comes to 37.67 million, based on population figures of 646.53, 659.94, 666.71, and 651.71 million for 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960. The official statistics published in 1983 are recognized as partly defective, because local policemen understated the number of deaths in the years 1959–61 after some were purged for “over-reporting deaths.”
41. DEFENSE MINISTER PENG’S LONELY BATTLE (1958–59 AGE 64–65)
IN THE FIRST two years of the Great Leap Forward, most of Mao’s colleagues went along with him. Only one man in the Politburo, Marshal Peng De-huai, the defense minister, had the courage to dissent.
Peng had stayed close to his poverty-stricken peasant roots. In an account of his life written later while imprisoned by Mao he recorded that he often reminded himself of his famished childhood to avoid “becoming corrupt, or callous about the lives of the poor.” In the 1950s he spoke up among the top echelon about Mao’s corrupt lifestyle: the villas all over China, and the procurement of pretty girls, which Peng described as “selecting imperial concubines.”
Peng had crossed swords with Mao over the years. In the 1930s he had criticized Mao’s vicious treatment of other military commanders. On the Long March he had challenged Mao for the military leadership when Mao was dragging the Red Army to near-ruin for his personal goals. In the 1940s, when Mao began his personality cult during the Yenan Terror, Peng had raised objections to rituals like shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and singing the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red.” Once Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Peng spoke out more forcefully against the personality cult, and even advocated changing the oath that servicemen took, from one that pledged allegiance to Mao personally, to one that pledged allegiance to the nation, arguing that “Our army belongs to the nation.”
This was guaranteed to rile Mao. Besides, Mao loathed the fact that Peng had not only expressed esteem for Khrushchev over de-Stalinization, but had also urged that spending on defense industries in peacetime “must be compatible with people’s standard of living.”
Peng had often voiced independent, unorthodox views. He openly admired the concepts of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” which Mao denounced as “anti-Marxist.” Peng also advocated observing traditional Chinese ethical codes like “A prince and the man in the street are equal before the law” and “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to yourself.” My “principle,” Mao said, “is exactly the opposite: Do to others precisely what I don’t want done to myself.”
Peng had been a thorn in Mao’s side for three decades, although he had also cooperated with Mao at certain key moments, like going into Korea in 1950. It was as a result of this that Mao made him defense minister in 1954—reluctantly, as Mao himself revealed later. Throughout Peng’s tenure, Mao undermined him by creating competing chains of command. Still, Peng retained a fearlessness vis-à-vis Mao that was unique among top leaders.
WHEN HE LAUNCHED the Leap in May 1958, Mao plunged Peng and some 1,500 senior army officers into daily “criticism and self-criticism” meetings, at which they were made to attack each other for weeks on end. Such sessions, which had become a Maoist staple since the Yenan Terror, were full of bitter character-assassination, and were emotionally utterly draining. Peng felt so demoralized that he offered to resign, an offer Mao rejected because he wanted to purge Peng. Meanwhile, he elevated his crony Marshal Lin Biao to be a vice-chairman of the Party, which put Lin above Peng, in the army as well as the Party.
These upheavals consumed Peng’s time and energy until late July, when the criticism meetings were brought to a close. Only then was he able to start taking stock of the fearsome panorama around him. He could see that Mao was fixated on acquiring an absolutely gigantic strike force — no fewer than 200–300 nuclear submarines, as Mao had insisted to the Russians, and every other state-of-the art weapon Russia possessed — and that Mao would go to any lengths to achieve this goal. One step towards this end was to shell the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy in August, with the aim of triggering nuclear threats from America in order to put pressure on Khrushchev. (Peng was deliberately excluded from this exercise, even though he was the army chief.) Then there was the flood of bogus harvest figures, which could only mean one thing: that Mao was aiming to squeeze out far greater quantities of food to pay for the enormous amount of hardware he was acquiring from Russia.
On the evening of 3 September, shortly after the shelling of Quemoy had started, Peng disappeared while at the seaside resort of Beidaihe for a round of meetings. Eventually, after a long search, the Praetorian Guard found him pacing a remote stretch of beach in the moonlight, alone. With a darkened face, he returned to his villa, where he lay awake all night.
Afterwards, he set off on an inspection tour of northern China, during which he learned that the crop figures were indeed inflated, and that peasants were dying of starvation. He saw for the first time the disastrous impact of Mao’s pet obsession, the backyard furnaces. Passing through Henan, Mao’s model province, he saw the furnaces getting denser, with crowds and carts and shovels and ladders and baskets, and flames stretching out like a blazing sea to the horizon. Gazing out of the train window, he turned to his aide-de-camp and shook his head: “These fires are going to burn up everything we have.”
At the beginning of December, at a conference in Wuhan, Peng heard Mao announce that the harvest figure for 1958 was more than double 1957’s, which had been a very good year. Peng said that this was impossible, but Mao’s agriculture chiefs shut him up with what amounted to “We know better than you.”
Peng decided to go back to his home area in Hunan, which was in the same county as Mao’s home village, to find out what was really happening. There, he got confirmation that the harvest figures were false. Peasants had had their homes torn down to feed the backyard furnaces; they were being worked to the point of collapse; and grassroots cadres were using violence to force them to work. “In some areas, it has become common practice to beat people up,” Peng wrote. “People are beaten up when they can’t fulfill their work quota, beaten up when they are late going out to work, beaten up even for saying things some don’t like.” Peng also registered the special misery that Mao’s slave-driving was inflicting on women: overwork, he noted, had caused “many women to suffer prolapses of the womb, or premature stoppage of menstruation.”
Peng’s childhood friends had famished, waxen faces. They showed him their canteen wok, which contained only vegetable leaves and a few grains of rice, with no oil. Their beds were just cold bamboo mats with flimsy quilts, in freezing December. As his coevals were sixty-ish, they were living in the commune’s quarters for the old, called the “Happiness Court.” “What sort of Happiness is this?” Peng exploded. The beds in the kindergarten had only thin rags. Many children were ill. Peng gave the kindergarten 200 yuan out of his own pocket, and left another 200 yuan to buy bedding for the old. A Red Army veteran who had been disabled in the 1930s tucked a piece of paper into his palm. It was an entreaty for Peng to “cry out for us.”
On 18 December, Peng met one of the top economic managers, Bo
Yi-bo, and told him Mao’s figure for the grain harvest was unreal, and that they must not collect food on the basis of this exaggeration. Bo agreed with him. In fact, all Mao’s economic managers, as well as Politburo members, knew the truth. But when Peng suggested that he and Bo send a joint telegram to Mao, Bo declined. So Peng cabled Mao on his own, urging that food collection be reduced. There was no response.
Peng knew his report was not news to Mao, who had reprised his offhand views about death at Wuhan earlier that month: “A few children die in the kindergarten, a few old men die in the Happiness Court … If there’s no death, human beings can’t exist. From Confucius to now, it would be disastrous if people didn’t die.”
How could Mao be stopped? Even though he was defense minister, Peng had little power — nothing like the power which defense ministers had in other countries. The army was completely controlled by Mao, and Peng could not move troops without Mao’s explicit permission. Peng began to contemplate seeking help from the only possible source — abroad.
With no access to the West, Peng’s only hope was Eastern Europe, and Khrushchev. This was an extremely long shot. He decided, it seems, to try and make a sounding, on the off-chance.
PENG HAD long-standing invitations to visit Eastern Europe. Getting there meant passing through Moscow, and Mao had indicated that he was not keen on Peng taking up the invitations. But he agreed on 28 February 1959, after Peng had taken the uncharacteristic step of pressing him for his consent.
The beady Mao guessed Peng was up to something. On 5 April, shortly before Peng’s scheduled departure, Mao exploded to a top Party gathering: “Is comrade Peng De-huai here?… you really hate me to death …” Mao then flew into a temper the like of which those close to him said they had never seen. “We have always been battling each other …” Mao exclaimed. “My principle is: You don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you; but mess with me, and I sure as hell will mess with you!”
