The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  VII

  Between 1958 and 1959, as part of China’s utopian ‘Great Leap Forward’ into modernity, a grand architectural project was completed – Beijing’s ‘Ten Great Buildings’. Five of them were museums and exhibition halls; the other five included Beijing’s railway station and government hotels and guest-houses. Even though this was five years after Stalin’s death and the Soviet bloc had embraced modernism, the style adopted in Beijing was unashamedly Stalinist – though leavened with Chinese features such as pagoda roofs. These, though, were not the elaborate wedding-cake buildings of 1950s Stalinism, but were closer to the more austere Soviet architecture of the mid-1930s – more like the 1937 Paris pavilion.68 As in architecture, so in politics: whilst the Chinese rejected the rigid hierarchies of the late-Stalinist style, they were closer to the Radical Marxism of the early Stalin.

  Mao was ambivalent about Khrushchev’s act of parricide. On the one hand, he disliked the paternalistic culture of High Stalinism as much as Khrushchev did. Relations between the Soviet Union and China, Mao complained, had been akin to those of ‘father and son, cat and mouse’;69 Stalin had behaved like an old-style Confucian ‘mandarin’ and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech was like a ‘liberation movement’. Mao also at first liked the forthright Khrushchev, recognizing in him a fellow rough-and-ready Marxist from the provinces. It was good, Mao asserted, when comrades from the localities replaced comrades from the centre, because ‘at the local level the class struggle is more acute, closer to natural struggle, closer to the masses’.70 However, as this observation revealed, he had fundamentally misunderstood Khrushchev. Khrushchev may have been a radical, but he had abjured class struggle, whilst Mao most certainly had not. Mao’s view of Stalin, though critical, was never as harsh as that of the Soviet leadership. In February 1957 Mao formulated a more favourable – and remarkably precise – assessment of Stalin: he was 70 per cent a Marxist, 30 per cent not a Marxist. Moreover, Mao was not pleased that Khrushchev had embarked on his act of parricide alone, without consulting the fraternal parties. Khrushchev himself, he concluded, was adopting the arrogant, imperial mantle of the old patriarch.

  In the mid-1950s all was set fair for the Chinese Communists. The party had its enemies, but it also attracted wide support as a force for justice and economic development. The political situation was stable; the USSR was helping its younger brother. Soviet aid, which had been relatively modest under Stalin, had swelled, and in 1959 it amounted to an extraordinary 7 per cent of Soviet national income.71 Mao showed his continuing vigour – despite his sixty-two years – by taking three well-publicized long-distance swims in the Yangtze River.

  Something, though, had to be done to flatten the old hierarchies inherent within High Stalinism. Mao looked anxiously at the rebellions sweeping Eastern Europe between 1953 and 1956, and was determined that they should not erupt in China. He and other Chinese Communist radicals had been unhappy about emerging inequalities for some time. The transformation from a guerrilla to a professional army was particularly galling. Army officers were behaving like petty feudal lords, using their soldiers as servants and even exercising droit de seigneur over local women. Mao’s solution was to bring soldiers closer to local peasant communities by, for example, donating their excrement to the villages for fertilizer, or helping them in pest-eradication efforts. Naturally, professional, technically proficient officers found this political interference and slanting of military priorities deeply irritating.

  Mao’s general approach, though, was closer to Khrushchev’s, or even Malenkov’s – at least initially. The party, he concluded, needed to be ‘rectified’ but this was not to be an old-style class struggle, for that might undermine the pace of economic development. Rather, this was to be a ‘liberal’ purge. Bourgeois intellectuals, rather than the ‘red’ classes – workers, peasants and party activists – would be invited to offer their criticisms. And it would not be done through abrasive and confrontational ‘struggle sessions’, but ‘as gently as a breeze or mild rain’. Officials would be cut down to size, but every attempt would be made to avoid a revival of Communist puritanism and dogmatism, as had happened in Yan’an in 1943. A ‘hundred flowers’ were to bloom in culture and ‘a hundred schools of thought contend’ in science.72

  At first, intellectuals sensibly kept quiet. They feared retribution from party bosses if they spoke openly. Mao, though, eventually persuaded them he was serious. For a five-week period from May Day 1957, they obeyed Mao’s calls for frank and open criticism. Mao, predictably, did not like what he heard. The criticisms were vitriolic. Corruption, rigged elections and party arrogance were all targets, as expected, but so was collectivization, the party’s monopoly of power and slavish emulation of the Soviet Union. In Peking University a ‘Democracy Wall’ was plastered with posters attacking the party. Mao soon realized that his liberalizing revolution had got out of control and was undermining the legitimacy of the party itself. He soon performed an abrupt volte-face and launched a brutal attack on ‘rightists’. Over 300,000 intellectuals fell victim to censure, their careers ended.

  Mao was never again to follow Khrushchev’s strategy of controlled liberalization; indeed, it was only to be repeated after his death. From thence forward, as far as Mao was concerned, intellectuals were irredeemably anti-Communist. Nevertheless, he continued to look for an alternative to what he saw as the Stalinist order now embedding itself in China. He found it by going back to the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an and in radical class struggle.

  The drawbacks of the old Stalinist model were particularly glaring in the economy. How was China to overcome the disparities with the West – and indeed with the USSR? On his second trip to the USSR in 1957 Mao had been deeply impressed by the Moscow University building, but Stalinist methods seemed unlikely to help China reach those heights of wealth and culture.73 Stalin’s strategy had involved squeezing the rural sector (and workers) and pouring these resources into heavy industry. But there was a problem applying this to China. Chinese agriculture was much poorer and less productive than the USSR’s had been in 1928, when Stalin began his economic transformation. In truth, there was not much of a surplus to extract. How was the state to pay for industrialization?

  Mao’s solution was the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1958. This campaign was even more utopian than Stalin’s ‘Great Break’, though it did have a certain logic to it. China was abundant in one resource only – peasant labour – and Mao was determined to exploit it to the absolute limit. The theory of the Great Leap was that the peasantry would achieve huge productivity improvements in agriculture by, for example, building irrigation systems, whilst simultaneously constructing industry. Unlike most models of development, industrialization was to happen not in towns, but in the countryside. Peasants were to achieve these ambitious feats as part of revolutionary armies led by party activists. The hope was that the self-sacrificing spirit of the revolutionary war could be reignited and transferred to the economy. At the same time the use of guerrilla-style work brigades would dissolve the political inequalities of ‘feudalism’ and Stalinism. As Mao explained:

  Our revolutions follow each other, one after another… After a victory, we must at once put forward a new task. In this way, cadres and the masses will forever be filled with revolutionary fervour, instead of conceit. Indeed, they have no time for conceit, even if they like to feel conceited.74

  This rhetoric was, of course, eerily familiar; indeed it echoed Stalin’s in the late 1920s: willpower could achieve anything when properly mobilized; there was no fortress the Bolsheviks could not storm. But Mao’s ambitions were far in excess of anything even Stalin could have imagined. The British economy, it was announced, would be surpassed in fifteen years, and as enthusiasm intensified this timetable was compressed. In September 1958, Mao claimed that China would catch up with Britain the very next year.75 Moreover, Mao asserted, China was on the threshold of full Communism.

  In the cities, the Great Leap took the form of a more utopian and
participatory version of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. It was a time of ‘democracy’: criticisms of managers and specialists by party activists were energetically encouraged. Expertise was no longer privileged; everybody, from the poorest peasant to the highest academician, could be a specialist – or in the regime’s famous slogan, both ‘red’ and ‘expert’. But the real focus of the Great Leap was the countryside. ‘People’s Communes’, created out of groups of villages, were charged with organizing the peasants for the great tasks Mao had set them. More than 100 million men and women were mobilized in semi-military units to work on irrigation, reforestation and anti-flood projects, often far from home. Peasants were also encouraged to build industry in the countryside, constructing small steel-furnaces. Bu Yulong, a rural official from Henan province, who volunteered to build steel furnaces some distance to the south of his village, remembered the martial atmosphere:

  We were divided into companies of 180 people, like a military company. Indeed, everything was a copy of the military system. We were soon given green military uniforms and the running of daily life was also militarized. Every morning, a bugle blew to rouse everyone.76

  All able-bodied people were expected to participate, and this raised the question of who was to look after children, cook and perform domestic tasks. Here again the Communes stepped in. Nurseries and schools were built on the assumption that the promised rise in productivity would pay for them. Food was free, and everybody ate in public dining halls. Wage-rates were flat, no longer linked to productivity; self-sacrifice, not money-grubbing, would motivate the heroic Chinese people. The Great Leap was not just to be economic, but cultural as well. Theatres for the performance of regional opera sprang up, and millions of men and women were encouraged to write poetry and so break the stranglehold of the old elite on culture; state scribes travelled the country to collect this new people’s literature.

  To begin with, the Great Leap Forward had some support in the countryside. One villager from Zengbu village in Guangdong, Southern China, recalled the altruism of the time:

  The people’s consciousness was so high at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward that we wanted to do everything in a collective manner. There was no need even for shop-assistants in the shops because people could be trusted to leave the correct amount for the goods they had taken.77

  Bu Yulong also found the collectivism of the era exhilarating:

  I’ll never forget the excitement when I saw my first furnace… Our output was hardly high, yet a big celebration took place in Zhugou. Firecrackers were let off and drums beaten. Some read out their poems:

  Our spirits rise higher than the rockets;

  Our will is stronger than the iron and steel;

  We are counting the limited days until we overtake Britain and America.78

  But rapidly disillusionment set in. So many were working on irrigation projects and steel production, there were not enough hands to bring the harvest in. Meanwhile, free dining in communal halls contributed to food shortages. Also the backyard steel-furnaces produced sub-standard steel, and targets were only fulfilled by confiscating pots and shovels and melting them down. This was only one symptom of the effect Mao’s wild optimism was having. Party bosses had come under intense pressure to promise the earth, lie about their achievements and cover up failures. Mao seems to have fallen for all this fraudulent activity. His doctor, Li Zhisui, recalls how they both took a train trip into the Hebei countryside and marvelled at the transformation they saw. Peasant women, dressed in colourful clothes, were at work tending luxuriant crops, whilst everywhere they looked steel furnaces lit up the skies. But Dr Li soon realized that this was a giant Potemkin village – the furnaces, it transpired, had been specially constructed along the route, whilst rice had been brought from distant fields and temporarily replanted to give an impression of abundance. Paddy-fields were so over-planted that electric fans had to be brought in to keep the air moving through the rice and stop it from rotting. As Li commented bitterly, ‘all China was a stage, all the people performers in an extravaganza for Mao’.79

  Most of Mao’s colleagues went along with the Great Leap, convinced by the vastly inflated successes reported by local officials. But by early 1959 doubts were setting in, and even Mao was worried. When he visited Shaoshan, the village of his birth, he was saddened to discover that the local Buddhist shrine – much visited by his mother – had been destroyed: the bricks had been taken to build a backyard furnace and the wood used as fuel.80 Mao made some adjustments in May; the communal dining halls, for instance, were no longer compulsory. Nevertheless, the Leap continued, and when the head of the army, Marshal Peng Dehuai, called for a retreat in July 1959, Mao, stung by the criticism, insisted on re-radicalizing it. Peng was condemned for ‘rightism’, and officials were again pressured to open communal dining halls. The waste therefore continued, and at the same time the peasants were forced to pay taxes levied on falsely inflated production figures.81 Huge resources were now being extracted from agriculture: industrial investment soared from 38 per cent in 1956 to a massive 56 per cent in 1958, much of it at the expense of the peasantry. The result was a catastrophic famine: according to some estimates, between 20 and 30 million people died between 1958 and 1961 – one of the most devastating famines in modern history.82

  By 1960, the party leadership, including Mao, had accepted that the Great Leap had been a disastrous failure. And a further blow was delivered to Mao’s prestige by the break with the USSR (and with it Khrushchev’s withdrawal of financial and technical help). Mao’s guerrilla radicalism made Khrushchev look like an arch-reactionary, especially in foreign policy. Mao berated Khrushchev for his doctrine of ‘peaceful competition’ with the West, and for his willingness to ally himself with non-Communist Third World leaders, like Nehru in India. Chinese forces shelled the island of Quemoy, occupied by Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists, and Mao even declared that full-scale nuclear war would not be such a disaster; socialism would rise from the rubble; the Americans’ bomb was a ‘paper tiger’. Alarmed by Mao’s recklessness, Khrushchev refused to assist him in a nuclear weapons programme. By 1961 the Communist bloc was irrevocably split.

  Mao’s position after the end of the ‘Great Leap’ in 1960–1 resembled Stalin’s after the ‘Great Break’ in 1931–3. He realized that his vaulting ambitions and populism had caused chaos. He also accepted that ‘retreat’ from Radicalism towards a more technocratic form of Communism was necessary. The Great Leap was abandoned. Most of the backyard steel furnaces were dismantled and 6 per cent of the land was given back to peasants for cultivation as private plots. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai – more Modernist Marxists – took control, whilst Mao lost both face and influence. The new collective leadership’s main objective was to restore order after the chaos of the Leap. Democracy campaigns were abandoned; piece rates returned; expertise was valued again; and old elites were re-established in the countryside. The inequalities that Mao had inveighed against crept back.

  Local bosses reasserted their authority much as their Soviet predecessors had done in the mid-1930s: with police and paper. Passports, identity cards and files recorded details of every individual, including those essential pieces of information – class and political background. Since the revolution, people had been categorized as members of the ‘five red types’ (workers, poor and lower-middle-class peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary soldiers and dependents of revolutionary martyrs), or of the ‘five black elements’ (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists – plus, implicitly, intellectuals). When, from the mid-1960s, local parties began to take more control of the economy, these categories began to matter a great deal. A university education, a good industrial job, or the risk of being ‘sent down’ from the town to the countryside to work as a peasant all depended on which of these categories one occupied. The Chinese leadership was inadvertently creating a new Communist ancien régime where everybody was allocated an unchangeable status
– with the ‘proletariat’ at the top and the ‘black elements’ at the bottom – at least in the towns.

  Class discrimination happened to some extent everywhere in the Communist world in the early phases of the regimes, but it was more systematic in China than in the Soviet bloc. This was because both Communists and society differed in each region. Lineage, clan and patronage were more dominant in China than in the USSR, and Communist leaders, many of them former members of the anti-patriarchal May 4th movement, believed these traditions were at the root of China’s backwardness. They therefore used rigorously imposed class labels as a way of breaking the old order. But once they became the rulers, ‘red’ clans emerged, and used the class-label system to entrench their power.

  But as the ancien régimes often discovered, fixed, inherited status hierarchies fuelled resentment. All those who were excluded from the ‘red’ establishment – whether people with a bad class background or the migrant workers who lacked the secure jobs and welfare benefits of tenured workers – had reason to feel angry with a rigid system they could not change. The Chinese Communist Party was paradoxically creating a new alliance of revolutionary groups that had every reason to stage a revolution against the new Communist ‘class’; and the leader of that revolution was to be none other than Mao himself.

  By the mid-1960s, Mao had become deeply unhappy about the policies of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. These leaders were, he believed, presiding over new inequalities based on class inheritance, differential wages and educational merit. Mao, in contrast, never abandoned his guerrilla socialism and his belief that China could only be revived by altruism and self-sacrifice. Mao identified his legacy with equality in China, and became more radical with age. What, he fretted, would happen after his death? Would the Communism he had created be hijacked by right-wing ‘revisionists’ within the party, as had happened in Germany in the 1890s or the USSR after Stalin? As he said to Ho Chi Minh in 1966, ‘We are both more than seventy, and will be called by Marx [i.e. die] someday. Who our successors will be – Bernstein, Kautsky, or Khrushchev – we can’t know. But there’s still time to prepare.’83