Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

by Jasper Becker

  In implementing their own land reform decrees, the Nationalists were hamstrung by their dependency on warlords who controlled many parts of the country and who in turn drew their support from the local landlords and gentry. Yet those with property, even if they were nothing more than peasant smallholders, were horrified by the violent redistribution of wealth that the Communists enforced. In the Red soviets that the Party established, landlords and their families were brutally murdered and all that they owned was distributed among the have-nots.

  Most rural Chinese were neither rich nor landless but subsisted in a series of subtle gradations of poverty. However, Marxist theory held that there were three distinct classes of peasants: rich, middle and poor. For the Chinese Communists operating in the countryside, the key question was what to do about the middle peasants. They might be led to think they would gain from a redistribution of property. Or, since they possessed some property, they might support the Nationalists if they feared it would be taken away, and if they believed that the Nationalists would provide stable government. On this issue the Communists were fortunate because the Republic’s authorities manifestly failed to carry out the duties expected in a society with an intensely paternalistic tradition of government. After the fall of the Manchus, the state granaries were neglected or closed and the grain sold for money which was pocketed by the warlords. So there were no reserves in times of famine. The authorities also failed to remit taxes when harvests failed, as tradition dictated, and the taxes raised were not spent on maintaining dykes and embankments. The Nationalists thus broke a social contract between the peasants and their rulers that dated back to the earliest dynasties, thereby sowing the seeds of their eventual defeat.

  Yet the Communists had no intention of re-establishing a feudal dynasty: they wanted to create something new. The Chinese Communist Party was controlled by leaders and advisers who were largely trained in Moscow and who wanted to implement the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.4 In the Communist Manifesto, Marx had not envisaged a country of peasant smallholders but rather an agricultural system modelled on factories. He wrote of ‘the abolition of property in land... the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. The establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. The combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country.’

  When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia after 1917, they divided up the land but then soon set about taking it away again to create the giant factory-farms which Marx had proposed. Some were state farms and some were huge collectives called kolkhozi. Knowing that the peasants wanted their own land and had no desire to be part of some Utopian scheme, the Russian revolutionaries despised them. The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, described the Russian peasants as ‘barbarian tillers of the soil, cruel and merciless, beasts of burden whose life provided no opportunity for the luxury of thought’, and Maxim Gorky, a writer much favoured by the Bolsheviks, accused the peasants of an ‘animal-like individualism’ and an ‘almost total lack of social consciousness’. Lenin himself liked to quote Marx on the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and said that the peasant, ‘far from being an instinctive or traditional collectivist, is in fact meanly and fiercely individualistic’. Indeed, he believed the peasant smallholder was inherently and irredeemably capitalist, that ‘day by day, hour by hour, small scale [agricultural] production is engendering capitalism’. The peasants might be useful at an initial stage – after all Marx had said that a proletarian revolution might be supported by a new version of the sixteenth-century German peasant wars – but their interests were different. In 1905, Lenin wrote in Two Tactics for Democracy that though initially there would be a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ this was no more than a tactical move. Later it would be ‘ridiculous to speak of unity of will of the proletariat and peasantry, of democratic rule; then we shall have to think of the socialist, of the proletarian dictatorship.’

  The theories that the Chinese Communists learned in Moscow and from advisers such as Borodin and Otto Braun were based on an analysis of feudalism which existed in Europe and Russia in the last century. When the future leaders of China, men such as Deng Xiaoping or Liu Shaoqi, studied at the ‘University of the Toilers of the East’, their textbooks referred to the liberation of the serfs, the overthrow of the landed aristocracy and the break-up of vast feudal estates in Germany, France or Russia. China was quite different, as both eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries and scholars such as R. H. Tawney, writing in the 1920s, pointed out.5 There was no landed aristocracy, no dominant clan of Junkers or squires, no feudal land law, no great estates worked by corvée labour. And, unlike in Europe, there were no commons, pastures or forests in public hands. Ministry of Agriculture statistics produced in 1918 showed that in China there was a higher percentage of peasant proprietors in the farming population than in Germany, Japan or the United States. In China, 51.6 per cent were owner-occupiers and a further 22.8 per cent owned part of their farmland while renting the remainder.

  Again and again observers stressed the attachment of the Chinese peasantry to the land they owned. A German count travelling in China in the last century wrote: ‘There is no other peasantry in the world which gives such an impression of absolute genuineness and of belonging so much to the soil. Here the whole of life and the whole of death takes place on the inherited ground. Man belongs to the soil, not the soil to man; it will never let its children go.’6 The Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong, writing in the late 1930s, further observed: ‘Honour, ambition, devotion, social approval are all thus linked up with the land. The villagers judge a person as good or bad according to his industry in working the land. A badly weeded farm, for instance, will give a bad reputation to the owner. The incentive to work is thus deeper than hunger.’ As long as a peasant owned his land he felt secure: ‘The relative inexhaustibility of the land gives people a relative security. Although there are bad years, the land never disillusions the people completely, since hope for plenty in the future remains and is not infrequently realised.’7

  In Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, the central figure Wang Lung finds it incomprehensible that anyone, however destitute, should think of leaving the land. ‘“Sell their land!” repeated Wang Lung, convinced. “Then indeed are they growing poor. Land is one’s flesh and blood.”’

  Yet Lenin and Stalin had developed a theory of rural class struggle which the Chinese Communists were also to adopt and which ignored this relationship to the land in China. The rich and successful Russian peasants, the kulaks, were accused of exploiting the labour of others and of lending money at extortionate rates. The Russian Communists tried to enlist the poor peasants to overcome the kulaks who were the most influential group in the countryside and whose opposition to collectivization was the strongest. In May 1918 the Central Executive Committee in Russia considered that ‘We must place before ourselves most seriously the problem of dividing the village by classes. Of creating in it two opposite hostile camps, setting the poorest layers of the population against the kulak elements. Only if we are able to split the village into two camps, to arouse there the same class war as in the cities, only then will we achieve in the villages what we have achieved in the cities.’

  The Russian Communists launched a ‘merciless war’ against the kulaks that culminated in their eradication during Stalin’s first five-year plan (1928-33) when the entire peasantry was collectivized. In December 1929 Stalin ordered the liquidation of the kulaks as a class and millions were killed or sent to labour camps. Such a policy was difficult to implement in China and was the subject of furious arguments among the Chinese Communist leadership. It was easy enough to enlist the most desperate and impoverished peasantry but who exactly were the middle peasants and the rich peasants? Did the Party need the support of the rich peasants or should they be dealt with later?

  The Russians had found it hard enough to make clear distinction
s and in China the issue was even more problematic during the 1930s. First, the Chinese Communists only controlled small regions and wanted the support of the entire rural population. Second, as Sun Yat-sen had said, all the peasants were poor and there was barely a distinction to be made between them. Before 1949, absentee landlords and landless peasants accounted for less than 10 per cent of the rural population, and tenants and hired labour accounted for only a small part of the rural labour force.8 Moreover, in many villages everyone belonged to the same one or two extended families or clans. Often the whole village shared the same family name. The clan patriarch usually had the most land and helped his relatives with credit or hired their sons when extra help was needed at harvest time. So an attack on the village clan chief risked turning the entire village against the Communists.

  In Communist-controlled regions, Party officials set about categorizing each peasant household, designating them poor, middle or rich depending on how they were faring that year. The Party defined ‘landlords’ as the largest landowners, who rented out a significant proportion of their land and might also hire labourers to work the fields. A rich peasant worked part of his land himself but also hired labour. These two classes were labelled as members of the exploiting classes whose ill-gotten wealth was taken from the labour of tenants and hired labourers. A middle peasant had some land but also worked on the land of others. Poor peasants included those who owned and cultivated very small holdings as well as tenant farmers and part tenants.9 Once fixed, these labels could not be changed and were passed down to the next generation. In 1931, while Mao and other Communist leaders were based in the mountains of Jiangxi province, they issued a land reform law which was ruthless though not quite as tough as that in the Soviet Union. Middle peasants could keep their own land but rich peasants would have theirs taken away and substituted with inferior land. Later, in drought-stricken and impoverished Yanan where under Mao’s leadership the Communists established a new base after 1935, Mao also insisted that Stalin’s ideas on class warfare should be embraced. Over the next fourteen years as the Party extended its power and influence to more and more areas, it enforced the same policies. The peasants were classified and often the clan chief or largest landowner was humiliated or murdered in a rally organized by Party cadres.

  What is unclear from many historical accounts of the Party in these decades is whether class warfare was pursued in the villages with the same fanaticism and brutality as in the Soviet Union. Writers such as Edgar Snow, who visited Mao in Yanan, were sympathetic to the Party’s efforts to help the poor peasants. Others, such as William Hinton who wrote the history of a village in Shanxi province and Han Suyin, also tended to present a largely positive picture of land reform under the Communists. They convey the impression that any excesses in land reform were spontaneous episodes that were regrettable but understandable given the justified anger of the peasants.

  However, a number of Chinese histories of early land reform have appeared in recent years which claim that it was always designed to be a brutal campaign of terror targeting anyone with property.10 In his 1927 report on the Hunan peasant movement, Mao explicitly said: ‘We must create a short reign of terror in all parts of the countryside. A revolution is not like a dinner party, or composing an article, or doing embroidery, a revolution is an uprising.’ Even in this early period, Party leaders ordered cadres to murder landlords and their supporters and to encourage looting and burning. And in a recent publication, History of Land Reform in China, 1921-1949 by Zhao Xiaomin, it is claimed that ‘some cadres who failed to carry out this policy resolutely were also killed’. According to the author, the policies of the Chinese Communists in 1931 were as brutal as those of Stalin in the Soviet Union, if not more so:

  From 1931 they obeyed the instructions of the Comintern that landlords should not be allowed any land but should just sit and wait for death. In China some were sent to do hard labour, some expelled from the area under Party control and some were killed. Just as in the USSR, kulaks were killed and all their property confiscated. The slogan was ‘Kill all the rich peasants’.

  Another recent book, Land Revolution Report, 1927-1937 by Tong Yingming, argues that the Chinese Communists had from the start tried to go further than the Russians. The author writes that after 1929 ‘when carrying out the collective farming system, the Chinese Communist Party tried to be more progressive than the Soviet Union. They opposed all private ownership of land, banned the sale of land and the hiring of labour, and opposed peasants and soldiers who wanted to own land.’ He and others claim that even in the 1930s the land of the middle peasant was also redistributed but that the policies were softened when the Communists joined the war against the Japanese after 1937 and tried to form a united front with the Nationalists against the invaders. Landlords’ property was no longer confiscated although money-lending rates were reduced.

  After 1946, it was official policy to protect the rich and middle peasants when an area came under Communist control. A provisional law on land reform which was passed that year was moderate in theory but not in practice. Even those who worked their own land were often labelled as landlords. Those whose parents or grandparents were considered to have been landlords were killed, their ancestors’ tombs dug up and their relatives tortured to discover if the family had hidden gold or silver. The Land Law formally adopted in 1948 appeared to protect the interests of middle peasants but in practice priority was given to satisfying the demands of poor peasants for more land as well as for possessions such as donkeys and carts.

  Those who were to form the nucleus around Mao during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had always been prominent in waging class warfare. Chen Boda, one of Mao’s key advisers in both periods, carried out a study of land rent in 1945 entitled Chinese Agriculture and the Classes in the Chinese Countryside. It set out to justify the harsh measures employed by proving that exploitation of peasants by landlords and kulaks was rife.

  Another key figure, Kang Sheng, who in the Cultural Revolution during the late 1960s would mastermind Mao’s destruction of his opponents in the Party, took the lead in trying to exterminate the rich peasants. A biography of Kang, Claws of the Dragon, based on an internal Party document, describes a visit he paid to Gansu province in 1946 to inspect its land reform. He accused the provincial leadership there of ‘right deviation’ and on his return to Yanan gave a series of speeches at the central Party school decrying the tendency to be lenient towards landlords. The authors of the biography claim that ‘Kang’s formula translated into countless acts of revenge at village level. Instead of merely confiscating the landlords’ houses and goods and dividing their land among the peasants and retainers, in the name of social justice, he encouraged the peasants to settle scores by killing landlords and rich peasants.’11

  Kang then spent four months in a county in Shaanxi province where he also reviewed land reform and insisted that landlords be murdered as part of the programme. Such ruthlessness extended to Party supporters and Party cadres. In Lin county two wealthy landowners who had supported the Communists in the fight against the Japanese were subjected to brutal struggle sessions. Kang ordered that one of them called Niu (meaning cow) should have an iron ring put through his nose and be led on a rope through the streets by his son. At the same time, local Party members were investigated and those not of peasant or proletarian birth were abused and beaten in mass struggle sessions. Kang even insisted that any cadre of slightly better social origins than the rest must be made to eat at a separate table.

  Official policy was to judge a landowner according to his record in exploiting hired labourers or poor peasants but Kang thought that this was too moderate. He declared that three other factors should be taken into consideration – ‘history, life and political attitudes’. So broad were these criteria that they could be used to target anyone. In one village in this county, of the 552 households, 124 were classified as those of rich peasants. The victims had their land taken away and were publ
icly humiliated and beaten. Some were shot, beheaded or buried alive.

  Although in public Mao argued against Kang’s excesses, elsewhere he singled him out for praise for having overcome the ‘right deviations’ in this district. At a high-level Party conference on land reform held just before the Communist victory of 1949, Kang delivered a report urging a policy of ‘thoroughly equal land distribution’ that would reduce the land holdings of middle-class peasants. The conference approved a much tougher line than that taken during the partnership with the Nationalists against the Japanese and during the civil war. Kang was then assigned to inspect land reform in his native Shandong province and there too he discovered that the local Party represented a ‘landlord and rich peasant Party’. The leading cadres were imprisoned and the Party secretary Li Yu was accused of following the ‘rich peasant line’ and detained for six months before being transferred to another, lowlier job.

  In many places, rural reform consisted of gangs drawn from the dregs of village society who were organized to incite the peasants at mass meetings which ended with the land reform team leading shouts of ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ or ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ The brutality of the campaign was described in an American report drawn up by the Consul-General in Hong Kong which recounted what had happened in villages in Henan province in 1949. Those categorized as landlords were shot, hanged, beheaded, battered to death, nailed to the walls of buildings or buried alive. Sometimes, in winter, the victim was dressed in a thin cotton garment and water was poured over him while he stood outside in sub-zero temperatures. This method of death was called ‘wearing glass clothes’. Burying victims alive in the snow was called ‘refrigeration’. A third method was dubbed ‘opening the flower’. The victim was buried in a pit with only his head exposed which was then smashed, laying open his brains.12