It was not just in sub-Saharan Africa that Mao’s communes were admired and imitated. Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and Libya all tried various forms of collective agriculture. Some writers have argued that in Iran the Shah lost the support of the peasantry when he began forcing them out of their villages into ‘agro-business units’. However, Chinese influence was most evident in North Vietnam and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was taken to Dazhai and when he won power he set out to imitate China’s perceived success. Determined to restore Khmer pride, he tried to outdo Mao in his zeal to establish collective agriculture. The entire population was sent to the countryside and forced to labour night and day on massive irrigation schemes which the Party promised would create huge wealth. The canals and dams were built without expertise or learning, which the Khmer Rouge held in contempt, and, as in China, they soon collapsed. Haing Ngor, the Cambodian doctor who won an Oscar for playing Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields, writes in his autobiography:
Except for their dark skins, everything about the Khmer Rouge was alien, from China. They had borrowed their ideology from Mao... like the concept of the Great Leap Forward. Sending the intellectuals to the countryside to learn from the peasants was an idea of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Their AK-47s and their olive green caps and their trucks were Chinese. Even the music they played from the loudspeakers was Chinese, with Khmer words.
As Haing Ngor points out, it was ignorance of what had really happened in China which gave Pol Pot the overweening confidence to think he could take a war-torn, bankrupt agricultural country and turn it into an industrial power. He believed that Mao had exploited the latent energies of the people by freeing them from cooking meals or raising children and channelling them into backbreaking manual labour.
Unfortunately Pol Pot the maker of policy was the same Saloth Sar the mediocre student. He did not realise that Mao’s Cultural Revolution was already a disaster and that Stalin’s attempts had set the Soviet economy back by decades. He did not examine the idea to see if it was practical. It was senseless to build huge canal systems and dams without using engineers, but then Pol Pot was like that. He tried to make reality fit politics instead of the other way round.30
Pol Pot’s guilt for the terrible disaster which overtook Cambodia, where one in eight may have died in the space of four years, is beyond doubt. Yet some responsibility must also be apportioned to those in the West who shared his belief that politics could change reality.
Afterword
This book has tried to establish what happened during a famine but it also describes what happens when a country and its leader descend into total madness. China was gripped by what Carl Jung once termed a ‘psychic epidemic’, when all rational behaviour is abandoned. The absolute power which Mao achieved engendered a collective escape into a world of utter delusion. All that mattered to the millions in the Party was to pander to the fantasies of its leader. Many knew they were telling lies and that the truth was that the country was starving. Even Mao, at the apex of these lies, was not deluded. As his doctor Li Zhisui recounts, ‘Mao knew the peasants were dying by the million. He did not care.’ What Mao wanted from his followers, argues Dr Li, was proof of absolute and undivided loyalty: ‘Mao was the centre around which everyone else revolved. His will reigned supreme. Loyalty, rather than principle, was the paramount virtue.’
In Grass Soup, one of the fellow prisoners of Zhang Xianliang is a Muslim, Ma Weixiao, who suggests that Mao intentionally used the famine to enforce the absolute and unquestioning servitude that he craved: ‘Even the illiterate have to eat. Only by making the people endure hunger can you make them submit to you, to worship you. So you see, don’t let Chinese people have full stomachs – keep them hungry and in a few years not just people, even dogs, will be reformed. Every one of them will be as obedient as can be: whatever Chairman Mao says will be right. Not one will dare refuse to prostrate himself before Chairman Mao.’
Yet Mao had won power by espousing a philosophy based on rationalism and modern Western thought. In place of the millennia of feudal emperor-worship, he promised democratic and scientific Marxism-Leninism. He was genuinely convinced that scientific farming and collectivization could transform both Chinese agriculture, the basis of the country’s economy, and the lives of the vast majority of Chinese. After all, in the Soviet Union Lenin and Stalin had used the same methods and had created a superpower which had defeated Nazi Germany, built the nuclear bomb and, in the 1950s, launched the first satellite into space. It was strong and disciplined, modern and scientific: China could be the same. Even if Mao and his colleagues knew the terrible cost in human lives which Lenin and Stalin had paid, they might have considered this a sacrifice worth making. Yet Mao not only deluded himself about the supposed success of collectivization in the Soviet Union, he also refused to accept the evidence that these ideas were creating a catastrophe in China.
Listening to accounts from all over the country about the failure of the Great Leap Forward, it sometimes seemed to me as if the extreme violence it unleashed may have derived from this fundamental lack of comprehension of and frustration with an alien way of thought. Much in the same way that a child might vent his rage and smash a toy because he cannot get it to work, Mao could not accept that his peasants would not behave as he thought they ought to if the country was to jettison its legacy of feudal habits and beliefs. Mao wanted to modernize China but could not grasp the basis of modern thought, the scientific method: that the way in which the natural universe behaves can be proved or disproved by objective tests, independent of ideology or individual will. So instead of becoming ‘new men’, Mao and his followers lapsed into a pattern of behaviour established 2,000 years earlier by the first Emperor Qinshihuangdi, perhaps the greatest tyrant in Chinese history.
Yet if one accepts this as an explanation for Mao’s behaviour, it still does not explain why so many others were willing to torture large numbers to death to deliver grain which they did not and could not have possessed. This deliberate and senseless cruelty has few parallels in history. These peasants were, after all, not the conquered slaves of some alien power but supposedly the beneficiaries of the revolution.
Perhaps the answer lies in the early history of the Chinese Communist Party. At least some of its members, such as Kang Sheng, had endorsed the use of unqualified violence against the peasants right from the beginning. Not only was no mercy shown to landlords, but rich and middle peasants, a much larger group, were treated with equal brutality. Those labelled as the enemy were beyond redemption. By the beginning of the Great Leap Forward officials are recorded in Party documents as saying that the peasants must be regarded as the enemy since they stand in the way of progress. This readiness to strip villagers of all their rights was allied to a general contempt for the peasants which may date back still further, to Confucius. He had described them as ‘inferior beings’ who, since they cannot be educated, must be exploited.
But during the Great Leap Forward local officials, often peasants themselves, saw their own kith and kin starve to death before their very eyes. Why did the peasants not rise up in mass revolt?
When the dissident Wei Jingsheng spent time in the countryside of Anhui and heard stories of the famine, he began to ponder this question, concluding that it was just because of class warfare that Mao retained his power: ‘Mao used class struggle to divide people into imaginary interest groups, rendering them incapable of discerning their true interests. Thus, he was able to incite people to engage in mutual killing or goals that were, in fact, detrimental to their own interests. It was precisely through this technique that he fooled and oppressed millions and manipulated them into supporting him. It was precisely for this reason that he was able to conceal his real face and masquerade as the people’s leader.’
Many interviewees also claimed that the peasants had developed such a deep trust in the Party that they were reluctant to act. In the opera Huang Huo by Du Xi, one of the characters, Zhang Sun, the Party Secret
ary of a production brigade, says: ‘Even though the grain has been taken away, let us wait and see. The Communist Party will not let people starve to death... If the sky falls it will strike us all. Is it only our village which is starving? Let us wait a while and we will see more clearly. After all, the Communist Party would never let the masses starve to death.’
At first, the peasants also did not believe that they would starve because after all the grain was there, it existed. With cunning they might get it back from the state. In the opera the central character, Li Baisuo, resorts to one such subterfuge.
He offers to ‘launch a sputnik’ and, by promising to close-plant 330 lbs of seeds per mu, ten times the normal amount, hopes to get enough seed grain to feed the village through the winter. When an inspection team arrives, he organizes the villagers into staging a charade of sowing the grain which succeeds in convincing the inspectors. The stratagem only fails because the brigade chief, Zhang Sun, is too honest and loyal to the Party. He feels compelled to reveal the truth and so Li is arrested and struggled as a ‘right opportunist’ and then beaten and paraded around the villages wearing a cloth bearing the character ‘right’.
Many interviewees also blamed the honesty of the peasants – in the Henan countryside people took pride in saying ‘It is better to starve to death than beg or steal.’ At the climax of Du Xi’s opera, when all is lost, the villagers debate whether they should attack the state granary but some protest: ‘Even though we are starving to death, we cannot take that road!... Without the government’s permission, we cannot touch a single grain from the state granary.’
Many also retained a belief that Mao would save them. In some places I was told that peasants dragged themselves to the top of the nearest mountain, faced the direction of Beijing and called out aloud for Mao to help them. At the end of Huang Huo, the hero, Li, decides on a desperate course of action. He will go to Beijing and petition Chairman Mao. He declares that Mao will support him and prevent cruel local officials from oppressing the peasantry, and adds: ‘This is not the same as [the] 1942 [famine]. For generation after generation, the years were poor, the harvests thin. This time there is only a temporary shortage of food.’ After this speech, the brigade chief Zhang drags him off to be punished at the Party headquarters but Zhang’s wife shows her anger at this by committing suicide. Zhang repents, confesses he has let the Party down, and allows Li to escape and, in the final scene, board a train to Beijing.
On the other hand, starving peasants had risen in revolt before in Chinese history: indeed much of China’s dynastic history appears to have been propelled by such uprisings, not least that led by Mao himself. Yet never before had China been governed by such a ruthless and efficient police state. There was simply nowhere to go to escape the grip of Mao’s control.
In the opera, the villagers consider fleeing to beg for food elsewhere but abandon the plan because they realize they would soon be caught by the militia and sent back. Throughout China, millions of others reached the same conclusion. Unable to leave their villages, they had little chance of organizing themselves in sufficient numbers to challenge the army or even the militia unless they too were starving. And in many cases, by the -time the peasants had realized that the state would not save them, they were usually already half dead with hunger and too weak to take any effective action.
Many Chinese have blamed the tragedy of the famine not so much on Mao as on Chinese culture, claiming that both subjects and ruler were powerless to break patterns of behaviour enforced over 5,000 years. China is the world’s oldest continuous civilization and the Chinese still use the same hieroglyphic characters as their distant ancestors and speak recognizably the same language. In the late 1950s, it was as if the slaves of the Pharaohs had somehow stumbled into the twentieth century. The peasants’ way of life, their huts and tools, were little different from those of their forebears in the Shang dynasty. In the famine their moral code was still ordered by the injunction of the first Han Emperor who 2,200 years earlier had authorized them to eat their children if there was no other choice. Perhaps, too, they felt as powerless before the arbitrary will of the Emperor as had their ancestors. As the Shang dynasty inscription puts it: ‘Why are there disasters? It is because the Emperor wants to punish mankind.’
Blaming the past for the Great Leap Forward may partly explain the psychology of both Mao and the peasants but it seems to ignore the singularity of what occurred. Mao could not be brought down because he had created a world in which all beliefs and judgements were suspended. No one dared move or act according to what he knew to be true. Instead, even the highest-ranking officials moved in a secretive society paralysed by an all-pervasive network of informers and spies. In a world of distorting mirrors, it became hard to grasp that such senseless cruelty could really be taking place. The grotesque efforts that some officials made to deceive leaders such as Liu Shaoqi almost defies imagination. Who could believe that Party officials would plaster and paint trees stripped of their bark by starving peasants to hide a famine from the country’s President?
The bizarre nature of so much of what happened inspires a feeling of deep shame which still makes many Chinese reluctant to discuss the circumstances of the famine. For the absurdly triumphant claims of miracle harvests and the mass starvation that followed reflect badly not just on the Communist Party but on the entire nation. But what if Liu and others had conspired to overthrow Mao during the famine or afterwards? Mao had threatened to start a civil war and could indeed have led his followers to the hills and there held out as guerrillas. China might then have ended up like Cambodia, only on a far greater scale. Other powers, the Soviet Union, the United States and Taiwan, would soon have been sucked into backing different factions. Perhaps an intractable civil war with tens of millions of refugees might have been still worse than simply waiting and trying to persuade Mao to come to his senses.
All this is only speculation, though, for we are unlikely ever to know what passed through the minds of the leadership during this darkest period. The files may never be opened as they were in Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion. There will be no museums devoted to the victims of the famine. The dead seem destined to remain hungry ghosts unplacated by any memorial or apology, and it is almost too late to charge those responsible with crimes against humanity. In China, Mao’s reputation, tarnished though it is, cannot be completely destroyed without calling into question the whole edifice of Communist rule in China. And yet, if the Chinese are kept in ignorance of what happened, that would be another kind of tragedy. If the famine remains a secret, the country will draw no lessons from its past nor learn that only in a secretive society could so many have starved to death.
Appendix: Biographical Sketches
Chen Boda (1904-89): from a rich landlord’s family, Chen was born in Fujian and attended Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University in 1927. One of Mao’s personal secretaries and the editor of Red Flag, he held extreme left-wing views and was very influential during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He fell from power in 1970 and subsequently spent years in prison.
Chen Yun (1905-95): joined the CCP in 1925. In the 1950s Chen was one of the top seven leaders of the country and designed the first five-year plans. He opposed the Great Leap Forward and helped restore the economy in 1961-2 but afterwards withdrew from power. After 1979 he was one of the main architects of reform and a rival to Deng Xiaoping.
Chiang Kai-Shek (1887-1975): born in Zhejiang province, Chiang took over the leadership of the KMT after 1924. He lost the civil war and in 1949 retreated to Taiwan.
Deng Tuo (1912-66): born in Fujian, Deng joined the CCP in 1930, became editor of a CCP newspaper in 1937 and after 1949 rose to be chief editor of the People’s Daily and secretary of the Beijing Party committee secretariat. He wrote a history of famine in 1937, and in 1961 strongly attacked Mao. Deng was one of the first victims of the Cultural Revolution.
Deng Xiaoping (1904— ): born in Guang’an, Sichuan, Deng studied in F
rance and Moscow and joined the CCP in 1924. As General Secretary of the CCP he led the anti-rightist campaign and was a leading light in the Great Leap Forward. At the end of 1960, he withdrew his support for Mao’s policies and favoured the dismantling of the communes. After 1978, he instigated the contract responsibility system.
Gao Feng (1914-76): born in Shaanxi, Gao joined the CCP in 1933. After 1949, he became Party Secretary of the Xinjiang autonomous region and then moved to Qinghai where he was also political commissar of the Qinghai military zone. As Party Secretary of Qinghai, he was responsible for 900,000 deaths. After 1961, he was dismissed and sent to Jilin as deputy director of the local Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee.
Hu Yaobang (1915-89): the son of a Hunanese rich peasant, Hu joined the Communists as a ‘red devil’ or child soldier and later rose to the leadership of the Party’s Youth League. He supported Mao during the famine and was rewarded with senior posts in Hunan. Subsequently he became a protégé of Deng Xiaoping. After 1979, Deng made him General Secretary of the CCP. He was responsible for the liberalization of the rural economy but was toppled after student demonstrations in 1987 for being too liberal on ideological issues. His death in 1989 triggered the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.
Hua Guofeng (1921–): bora in Shaanxi, Hua joined the CCP in 1940 and became Party Secretary of Xiangtan prefecture, Hunan, where Mao’s home village is located. He solidly backed Mao during the Great Leap Forward by denying that a famine was taking place. He became Party Secretary of Hunan in 1970. In 1976 he succeeded Mao and became Prime Minister but was brought down in 1979. Mao had appointed him as his successor with a note saying ‘With you in charge my heart is at ease’.
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