Jung Chang - Mao - The Unknown Story

In spite of the vast profits it was making from tungsten and other exports, the regime never relaxed its schemes to extract the maximum from the local population. Although peasants now got their own land, and ground rent was abolished, they were in general worse off than before. Prior to this, most people had some possessions beyond those needed for sheer survival; now these extras were taken away, under various ruses. One was to coerce people to buy “revolutionary war bonds.” To pay for these, women were made to cut their hair so that they would hand over their silver hairpins, together with their last bit of jewelry — traditionally their life savings. The fact that people had such jewelry in pre-Communist days was a telling indication that their standard of living had been higher then. After people bought the war bonds, there would be “return bonds campaigns,” to browbeat purchasers to give back the bonds for nothing. The upshot was, as some daring inhabitants bemoaned, that “the Communists’ bonds are worse than the Nationalists’ taxes.”

The method was the same with food. After paying grain tax, peasants were pressured to lend more grain to the state, in drives with slogans like “Revolutionary masses, lend grain to the Red Army!” But the food “lent” was never returned. It was in fact food on which peasants depended for survival. Mao simply ordered them to cut down on their already meager consumption.

Most men of working age were drafted into the army or as conscript labor. After three years of Communist rule, there were hardly any men left in the villages aged between their early teens and fifty.

Women became the main labor force. Traditionally, women had done only fairly light work in the fields, as their bound and crippled feet meant that heavy manual labor caused great pain. Now they had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and mending clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves — no small extra burden. Mao, who had thought since his youth that women were capable of doing as much heavy labor as men, was the strongest advocate of this policy. He decreed: “Rely overwhelmingly on women to do farm work.”

The welfare of the locals was simply not on the agenda (contrary to the myth Mao fed to his American spokesman Edgar Snow). In some villages, peasants were not allowed any days off at all. Instead they got meetings, the Communists’ great control mechanism. “The average person has the equivalent of five whole days of meetings per month,” Mao observed, “and these are very good rest time for them.”

Standards of health did not improve either. There was a former British missionary hospital in Tingzhou which treated ordinary people. After Mao stayed there and liked it, he had it dismantled and relocated in Ruijin, and reserved it for the Communist elite. Mao himself was very careful about his health, always traveling with his own mug, which he used whenever he was offered a cup of tea. At one point he stayed in a village called Sand Islet, where the only drinking water came from a stagnant pond. To make sure he did not catch anything, he ordered a well to be dug. As a result, the villagers had clean drinking water for the first time. After this, Communist offices began to have wells dug where they were billeted, but there was no effort to provide the locals with clean water.

Education, Mao claimed via Snow, had brought about higher literacy rates in some counties “than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.” In fact, education under the Reds was reduced to primary schools, called “Lenin schools,” where children were taught to read and write to a level at which they could take in basic propaganda. Secondary schools were mostly closed down, and commandeered as quarters for the leaders and venues for meetings. Children were used as sentries, and formed into harassment squads, called “humiliation teams,” to hound people into joining the army and to pressure deserters to return. Teenagers were sometimes encouraged to serve as executioners of “class enemies.”

ONE OF MAO’S main contributions to the running of the Red state was to start a campaign in February 1933 to squeeze out more from the population. He told grassroots cadres to uncover “hidden landlords and kulaks.” As the Reds had been targeting these “class enemies” for years, it was inconceivable that any such species could have remained undetected.

Mao was not a fanatic, searching for more enemies out of ideological fervor. His was a practical operation whose goal was to designate targets to be shaken down, and to create enemies who could be “legitimately,” according to Communist doctrine, dispossessed and worked to death — what Mao himself termed “to do limitless forced labour.” The other point was to scare the rest of the population into coughing up whatever the regime demanded.

Mao’s order to cadres was to “confiscate every last single thing” from those picked out as victims. Often whole families were turned out of their homes, and had to go and live in buffalo sheds, niu-peng . It was during this era that the miserable dwellings into which outcasts were suddenly pitched came to receive this name. Over thirty years later, in the Cultural Revolution, the term was widely used for detention, even though at that time people were not usually detained in rural outhouses, but in places like toilets, classrooms and cinemas.

Mao’s campaign produced many tens of thousands of slave laborers, but it turned up little for the state coffers, as peasants genuinely had nothing left to disgorge. The authorities reported that only two out of twelve counties in Jiangxi were able to produce any “fines” and “donations” at all, and the total amount was a fraction of the target set by Mao.

The plight of the victims was vividly portrayed by a Red Army officer called Gong Chu, who described passing by a place called Gong Mill near Ruijin, inhabited by people with the same family name as his, which meant they might share ancestors with him.

I went into a big black-tiled bungalow … I was struck by a tremendous air of sadness and desolation. There was no furniture at all, only one broken table and a bench. There were two middle-aged women and an old woman, plus three young children, all in rags, and looking famished. When they saw me come in with four bodyguards wearing pistols, they went into a tremendous panic …

Then they heard Gong Chu’s name, and they “went down on their knees in front of me, and begged me to save their lives.”

Between sobs the old woman said: “My old man had read some books [which meant the family had been relatively well off], and so had my two sons. We had over ten mu of land and my two sons tilled it … my old man and two sons were all arrested … and were beaten and hung up, and 250 yuan was demanded from us. We did all we could to make up 120 yuan, and also gave them all the women’s jewelery … But … my old man was still left there hanging till he died, and my two sons were killed as well. Now they are forcing us to pay another 500 yuan, otherwise all six of us will be imprisoned. Commander! We hardly have anything to eat, where can we find the 500 yuan? Please, think of our common ancestry and put in a fair word for us.”

The woman told Gong Chu her husband had wanted to go and look for him. But the authorities

“forbade us from setting one step outside the village. Today Heaven really opened its eyes, that you should have come into our family. Please Commander, save us!” After these words, she banged her head on the ground non-stop. Her two daughters-in-law and the children were all kowtowing and crying.

Gong Chu promised to help, but ultimately did nothing — as he knew that intervening could easily make things worse. Some months before, when he had tried to help a doctor in a similar situation, vengeful grassroots cadres had waited till he left and then “killed the doctor and confiscated his medicine shop. His widow and children became beggars.” It was events like these that drove Gong Chu to reject communism and flee at the first opportunity.