A History of the World (86 page)

But the failure to build a single effective modern system of money, taxation or communications, or military power, left the people of China at the mercy of local landlords and bandits, foreign invaders, religious extremists; and with little or no support when famines came or warlords rampaged. The death-tolls during the last years of the Qing dynasty and in China’s forty years of non-Communist republican government are impossible to be precise about, but the figures are estimated to be very large. In one of the few villages that survived the annihilation of custom and tradition at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, there stands a watchtower used by the villagers to scour the countryside for bandits. It was built in 1918.

None of this was new to the Chinese. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64, launched by quasi-Christian zealots who seized much of southern and central China, had resulted in an estimated twenty million deaths, making it one of the most catastrophic episodes in world history. The Boxer Rising of 1898–1901 was a military disaster that showed the world just how weak Qing China really was. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria and its invasions of northern and coastal China resulted in massacre after massacre, among which the Rape of Nanking in 1938, when around 200,000 civilians were murdered and up to 80,000 women were raped, is only the most notorious. The Chinese death-toll in the chaotic fighting of the Second World War has been estimated at around twenty million, outstripping by far every other nation except the Soviet Union.

Around these grim statistical peaks are the jagged mountains of innumerable local rebellions by religious and secret societies, Muslim generals and regional warlords; add to this decades during which the notion of a single China was only cultural and linguistic (and that, only just) rather than political. The first-hand accounts of starvation resulting in cannibalism, of villages empty of children and animals, and the remorseless trail of grainy photographs showing the beheadings of wretched rebels or of captured government troops – never mind the vengeance wreaked by outsiders in the shape of burned-down temples and shattered city centres – add more unpleasant detail than most readers will want to dwell on.

So while the rule of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party after 1949 produced the greatest human catastrophe of the twentieth century, it cannot be understood without remembering what had come first. The Chinese yearning for unity and order is not an obscure political shibboleth. The greater the population, the more sprawling and varied the terrain, the harder unity and order are to impose. Since the Manchu had overturned the Ming dynasty in 1644, China’s rulers not only had the huge heartland of the country to think about, with its immensely long coastline, but vast northern and eastern territories occupied by Mongols, Tibetans and Muslims. Currencies, languages, swamps and mountains produced internal divisions that even a modest-sized country would have struggled to overcome.

Though Japan eventually came to a sticky end too, having confronted, unsuccessfully, the rising superpower of the United States, her rapid advance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the Meiji emperors showed what could be done in a comparatively small and united nation with strong central authority. Like the Japanese, the Chinese had tried to import Western military techniques, to build or buy new iron-clad warships, modernize their bureaucracy and open up their education system. But the Chinese leaders – whether imperial or republican – simply did not have the grip or the authority to make things happen. Again and again they were shamed by outside leaders who did.

This produced a manic impatience among Chinese intellectuals, particularly on the left, which was finally expressed in the rule of Mao, with his lurching directives for breakneck industrialization. China’s rulers had never been in touch with the people. There were, and are, too many of them, spread across too wide a terrain. Both emperors and Marxists, having locked themselves away behind high walls in Beijing, would have had to work very hard to see the consequences of their policies on the real China. In 1901 the dowager empress Cixi, an extraordinary woman who was the real power in the country for nearly half a century, came face to face with real China when she was fleeing Beijing, about to be invaded by Western armies. How were they doing, her people? She found famine victims who had eaten everything, dogs, cats, leaves and bark, and were now eating each other.
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The difference was that when Mao eventually saw the results
of his famines, more widespread by far than the one that killed around two million in Cixi’s time, he was delighted.

Mao’s China has obvious parallels with the story of the early Soviet Union, also embracing a vast and divided area with a weak centre. Mao, like Stalin, arrived in power armed with a doctrine, Marxism-Leninism, which promised a classless heaven-on-earth once enough bourgeois enemies had been killed. This was a philosophical weapon without a moral safety-catch.

During the 1920s Moscow was trying to foment world revolution, and saw the chaos of China as very promising territory. The Nationalist Kuomintang (in power during 1927–45) were sufficiently left-wing in their rhetoric and large enough in support to be the Russians’ favoured partner; so for many years the still-tiny Chinese Communist Party was ordered to cooperate with, and infiltrate, the Nationalists. Kuomintang leaders went to listen and learn in Moscow. When, however, Chiang Kai-shek turned to the right in the late 1920s and began to go after the Communists, they were forced to retreat north-west, to the wild country near the Russian border. The Kuomintang forced them further and further back until, in 1934, a key Communist army was hemmed in and on the edge of annihilation.

The desperate retreat across inhospitable terrain, to link up with other Red forces, became known as the ‘Long March’. It was really a series of marches, a retreat from the Nationalist army. Its biggest political impact was to elevate Mao, who had fallen from favour, as the de facto leader of China’s Communists. It has been used ever since as a Maoist foundation myth, a story of hillside hideouts, heroic river crossings and desperate mountain battles, one whose details are probably buried for ever under an avalanche of posters, films and wishful thinking. China’s National Museum at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, just opposite Mao’s mausoleum, has at its centre a room of epic paintings about the Long March. Technically at least, some of them are rather good.

Stalin had had his eye on Mao from his early days as a Communist guerrilla leader in Shanghai, but for a long time hedged his bets. He not only backed Chiang Kai-shek, but kept Chiang’s son in Moscow as a hostage. When Chiang was kidnapped by a rival and Mao wanted him killed, Stalin intervened to save him. Once the Japanese attacked
China in 1937, it was strongly in Stalin’s interest that both Communists and Nationalists forget their differences and unite against the invaders. Mao, however, playing a ruthlessly cold game, kept his distance. With a smaller and worse-trained army than his rivals and ruling by terror and purge, Mao carefully built up his position, strengthening his base in the north-west of China, while the invaders and the Nationalists fought across the coastline and plains.

Though nearly destroyed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Chinese Communist armies had survived to win Stalin’s support. Their involvement in the anti-Japanese struggle came late; Mao had always intended to finish off Chiang Kai-shek, only once he had been sufficiently weakened by the Japanese. Now hundreds of aircraft, tanks and artillery pieces, and hundreds of thousands of machine-guns and rifles, all from captured Japanese and German stocks, were handed over to Mao by the Russians. Military training – some of it, apparently, by former Japanese soldiers – came as part of the package, as did Korean troops and Chinese soldiers who had been on the Japanese side in Manchuria. The Russians also helped repair Chinese railways and bridges.

In return, Mao sent food to Russia. In an eerie echo of Stalin’s decision in the 1930s to export grain to the West to buy industrial plant, thereby contributing to the terrible Russian famines, Mao’s food-for-industry deal triggered famine in his own territories. When the full-scale war was joined with Chiang’s forces in 1947–8, the Communists owed a huge amount to the Russians, something Mao never publicly acknowledged.
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The Nationalists eventually fell because of bad generalship, widespread corruption, and the exhaustion of a movement that had been fighting the Japanese for ten long years. Mao’s men used terror tactics, including the deliberate starvation of the people of the city of Changchun, where around three hundred thousand are thought to have died, to force surrender. Chiang Kaishek retreated to the island of Taiwan, where his successors continue, at least in theory, to regard themselves as the rightful government of all China.

The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China by Mao Zedong on 1 October 1949 made him the ruler of around 550 million people. While the West was well on the way to recovery from the war, and Europe and America luxuriated in a material plenty and a personal
freedom that humankind had never before known, the Chinese were enduring terror and hunger. This state of affairs ended not in a new cataclysm, but instead in a swerve towards compromise, which eventually created the economic giant of today’s China. Why this happened is a complicated and tragic story, with glints of heroism.

The man more responsible for China’s escape from Maoism than any other was Mao’s diminutive and gritty one-time follower, Deng Xiaoping. Considering the impact of the country that he created, Deng has a good case to be considered the most influential single human being of the latter part of the twentieth century. But before we discuss where he led China to, and how he made the great switch, we need to understand where he led China from.

Mao’s land seizures and political purges in the early 1950s killed up to three million people. Many were driven to suicide – in the city of Shanghai so many flung themselves from the roofs of tall buildings they were known locally as ‘parachutes’.
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But this was only the start. Two authors, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, argue that the system of prisons and work-to-death camps that Mao established, in imitation of the Soviet gulag system, may well have killed twenty-seven million. Unlike in the Soviet Union, however, Mao’s killers liked the terror to be seen and heard. Many of the executions were carried out in public in front of crowds dragooned to watch: the psychological effect of Mao on the Chinese was surely even greater than that of Stalin on the Russian psyche.

Mao’s greater ambition was to make China a world superpower, indeed
the
world superpower. To do this he would have to turn a nation of peasant farmers into an industrial giant. He intended to do this within just a few years by taking ever larger amounts of food away from the peasantry and swapping it for Soviet know-how; and by creating grandiose industrial and irrigation systems. None of this was original; it too was borrowed from Stalin. But by 1950 Stalin had the atomic bomb, as well as the status of a Soviet emperor and world-war victor. Mao decided that to overtake Stalin, he had to copy him on a larger scale and at an even more breakneck speed.

The results were on a larger scale, certainly. The so-called Great Leap Forward, which partly created and partly coincided with four years of famine, from 1958 to 1961, killed an estimated thirty-eight million people, the worst cull in history. Mao showed absolutely no
pity or even much interest. He certainly knew what was going on, because even subservient party officials reported back. The peasant landholdings were collectivized so the state could keep more of the food. Again and again, he mocked the peasants as greedy and idle and suggested cutting their rations further. He said the corpses would be useful for fertilizing the ground.

The people were told to melt down all their metal so as to make, then feed, back-yard furnaces. Giant canals, dams and reservoirs were constructed without planning, and so badly built that many later collapsed, causing human and environmental disasters. One of Mao’s madder ideas was to cut down on food waste by destroying all the sparrows in China. This was to be done by getting everyone to make so much noise that the birds would not be able to land and would die of exhaustion in the sky. It worked well enough to cause a plague of some of the pests that the sparrows fed on.

These spasms of frenzied mass activity were being ordered because Mao always had his eye on making China all-powerful. First, he said, she would control the Pacific with a huge new navy, and then eventually the world. He had planetary ambitions. Mao spoke of setting up an ‘earth control committee’ with a single uniform Maoist plan for all humanity; what this would imply for the Chinese themselves was irrelevant. Chang and Halliday quote him saying in Moscow in 1957 that he was prepared to sacrifice three hundred million Chinese – about half the population at the time – for the victory of world revolution. His keenness to help the North Koreans in the war against the West in that country, when he threw tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers into battle, and his enthusiasm for using nuclear weapons both suggest this was no joke.

May 1968 was a month of turbulence. Across the West the hippy revolution, the era of ‘peace and love’ and ‘flower power’, was being challenged by student revolts. In Beijing lived Deng Pufang, twenty-five years old, a brilliant physics student. His life had been unusually blessed. As the older son of one of Communist China’s leaders, he had been brought up in the beautiful, exclusive area of Zhongnanhai in the centre of the capital, next door to the Forbidden City. This was where Mao Zedong and the other top Communists lived, in what has been described as ‘a hidden fairyland of lakes, parks and palaces where
Marco Polo strolled and Kublai Khan built his pleasure dome; where emperors and empresses, concubines and eunuchs, took their leisure’.
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But Deng Pufang was in a terrible state. He had been beaten to a bloody pulp by self-declared ‘Red Guards’. His father was now denounced as a ‘capitalist roader’, and his children had already been forced to denounce him publicly. The young man was lying in pools of blood on the concrete floor of a stripped-out former university dormitory, four floors up. The window had been torn out. Deng Pufang was told he would never leave the room alive – the only way out for him was through the window.