The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (11 page)

As Mariano Ezpeleta noted, they insisted on calling everybody ‘comrade’, but there was nothing comradely about their behaviour.
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Distance was maintained not only with foreigners and business leaders, seen as spies in an imperialist lair, but also with other sectors of the population. By the middle of 1949 some 38,000 cadres from the north had entered the region immediately south of the Yangzi River. Many never became accustomed to the food, the climate and the local language. Only a few managed to settle down. In Hangzhou, Ningbo and Wenzhou, the commercial centres of Zhejiang, cadres vented their hatred in consultation meetings with representatives of trade and industry that degenerated into ‘struggle sessions’ where people were mocked, humiliated and beaten. Soon nobody dared say a word. Shaoxing, a beautiful city of gardens and canals famed for its rice wine, was run as if the party was still fighting a guerrilla war.
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Within a matter of months, bustling Shanghai was a dying city. Tianjin slipped into slow decay. Guangzhou almost went bankrupt. Factories were idle, trade ceased. Many firms, small and big alike, were driven into the red. The high end of the luxury market suffered first. In the once thriving jewellery stores on Nanking Road in Shanghai, where gold ornaments competed for attention with finely wrought jade pieces, merchants started selling soap, DDT, medicines, towels and underwear. Where 136 factories had once made cosmetics, only thirty remained in operation, most of them producing toothpaste. In Shanghai’s outdoor bazaar at Yuyuan Garden, where curios, crafts and antiques were sold, dispirited merchants sat beside their stalls looking bored or perusing the papers.
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Other branches of industry followed. Hundreds of factories making paper, matches, rubber and cotton textiles closed down. Contemporary observers in Hong Kong estimated that about 4,000 concerns in Shanghai, including 2,000 commercial companies and 1,000 factories, went bankrupt. Of some 500 banks in the city, fewer than a hundred were still open, and half of these petitioned the government for permission to wind up their operations. Many of the city’s foreign-owned transit and power companies were forced to finance operational deficits by borrowing heavily from the People’s Bank, placing them virtually in the hands of the government.

Shopping centres in most big cities now seemed lifeless and deserted. Observed one trader in Shanghai: ‘Between the Bund and the Park Hotel the windows of all stores – including the big proud ones like Wing On, Sincere, Sun Sun and the Sun – are plastered with posters which shout: “We Reduce Prices with Pain!”, “Shop Closing Down”, “Prices Falling Below Cost”.’ In Wuhan, the inland port once called the Chicago of the East, more than 500 shops went bust, while hundreds of factories closed their doors. In Wuxi, the industrial city north of Shanghai where steam whistles, electric sirens and hooters had once competed for attention, silence prevailed, as hundreds of shops were boarded up. In Songjiang only one of the eighteen cotton mills that had made the reputation of the town managed to remain in business.
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Unemployment rocketed. By December 1949 Beijing had 54,000 unemployed people in a population of 2 million. Four years later the population had increased by half, but the number of jobless people had trebled – despite all the successive waves of vagrants, paupers, soldiers, refugees, pedlars and other ‘undesirable elements’ cleansed from the streets since liberation. Unemployment also increased in Shanghai. In the summer of 1950, a report compiled by the party itself deplored ‘incessant’ cases of suicide and the sale of children due to joblessness among 150,000 people.
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In south China too, many of the unemployed sold their children or killed themselves. Some starved to death. In Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province just opposite Taiwan, more than 100,000 people were out of work in a city of less than half a million. According to a restricted news bulletin for the leadership, the only help came from the nationalists, who flew over the distressed regions and parachuted down bags of rice. So great was the popular discontent that in Changsha, on six occasions, unemployed workers surrounded the Workers’ Union and demonstrated against the communist party. Calls for blood could be heard from the crowd. Similar protests also rocked Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, where by the summer of 1950 one in three workers was jobless. In Zhengzhou, one of China’s railway hubs, hundreds of porters assaulted the municipal freight office, beat the men in charge and smashed doors, windows and furniture to protest against the low rates they were paid. In Nanjing, where industrial workers had to make do with fewer benefits and less pay than before liberation, complaints were ‘ceaseless’ and ‘reactionary’ slogans were scribbled on walls along offices and factories ‘everywhere’. In Shanghai, as mayor Chen Yi reported directly to the Chairman, disenchantment was so intense that members left the party in droves while ordinary people petitioned the government and tore down posters of Mao Zedong.
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People were told to practise thrift and frugality. Production was extolled, consumption denounced. Ideological purity went hand in hand with economic decline to transform once bustling metropoles into drab zones of conformity. Within months of the revolution, the pursuit of pleasure was frowned upon as a sign of bourgeois frivolity. In Shanghai, as elsewhere, cafés and dance halls were closed down. Clandestine gambling casinos broke up without police intervention. The hotels that had once sealed the city’s world-class reputation such as the Cathay (renamed the Peace Hotel), the Palace Hotel and the Park Hotel, had so few guests that some of them offered monthly rates of $25 to $50. The Shanghai Club, reputedly boasting the longest bar in the world, attracted few customers. Even tea rooms closed their doors. The Race Course at Nanking Road became a military barracks. Nightlife was negligible, as shops were shuttered at six in the evening and clubs a few hours later. Those who ventured out at night were accosted by young communists demanding to see residence certificates and other papers. Fewer rickshaws, buses and pedicabs were seen on the streets. Cars were mostly official, as the cost of petrol became prohibitive. Thousands of vehicles vanished from the streets every month. An unused Buick, less than a year old, was on sale for $500 in June 1950 but found no buyers.
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English was no longer the language of international business but a manifestation of imperialist exploitation. No transactions in English were tolerated, and soon foreigners on official business – all channelled through a Foreign Affairs Office – were required to bring along their own translators. ‘The talks were formal, carefully uninformative, and recorded by a stenographer,’ reported Randall Gould, who worked for the
Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury
. Then the transmission of cables and telegrams in foreign languages was prohibited, except when accompanied by a translation judged to be satisfactory. ‘Neon lights and other public advertisements in English were brought down or changed into Chinese. English and French plaques in public parks and gardens were taken down.’ The pressure extended to cinemas and eating places, where foreign names became taboo. In the erstwhile French Concession of Shanghai, streets and boulevards were renamed for the most part after local cities and provinces rather than priests, dignitaries, consuls and writers from France. Everywhere the hammer and sickle or the red star went up: they could be seen on trams, buildings, banners and flags, and invariably adorned the badges worn by state employees. Paintings of Chinese and Soviet leaders were hung prominently in public places, in bookshops, in railway stations, in factories, schools and offices, on the gateway to the Forbidden City. And from the very beginning the communists guarded themselves more closely than their predecessors, as sentries kept strict watch at every communist office, even in places where the old regime had none.
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The press was brought into line almost immediately. In Beijing, besides the official paper, by February 1949 only one single-sheet newspaper out of twenty-odd daily publications was still in business. In Shanghai two of the four English-language newspapers, both under Chinese ownership, were closed within days. Of the hundreds of different publications several months later only a few remained, all of them printing the same news. There was only one source of foreign information, namely the Soviet TASS Agency. Here too, rather than imposing censorship from above, the authorities relied on self-censorship – which was surprisingly effective once journalists and editors had gone through re-education. As one journalist noted, a party hack nudged them in the right direction: ‘The slightest mistake calls down a rebuke, and in each editorial office a few trusty Communists inspect all copy.’ The result was absolute conformity. As one student of propaganda noted at the time, ‘The Communists’ newspaper propaganda technique might be described as the “sledge-hammer type”. There is very little subtlety involved. Good and bad, friend and foe, are defined in terms of black and white. Everything is reduced to simple slogans or formulae, and all channels (the radio as well as the press) concentrate simultaneously on pounding them in.’
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The way people dressed changed seemingly overnight. Jewellery was seen as bourgeois, as was anything ostentatious. Lipstick and make-up vanished. Young girls cut their curls. Men and women removed their rings. Expensive straps on watches were replaced by a piece of leather or string. ‘The fashion was simplicity almost to the point of rags,’ noted one woman who had just joined the party. Li Zhisui, arriving from Australia after an absence of seventeen years, was struck by how dreary men and women looked, as most of Beijing was clad in a standard blue or grey cotton that faded almost completely after frequent washing. The same black cotton-cloth shoes were common, and even hairstyles were identical – crewcuts for men and short bobs for women. ‘With my Western-style suit and tie, leather shoes, and hair that suddenly seemed long, I felt like a foreigner.’ His wife, in her colourful dress and high-heeled shoes, her stylish hair freshly permed, looked completely out of place. Both quickly borrowed more subdued clothes. But they were thrilled nonetheless by the changes taking place. ‘When I saw glimmerings that the party was not all I believed it to be, I dismissed them as trivial exceptions to the rule.’
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4

The Hurricane

For years Mao Zedong groped to find his way as a young man, first as a scholar, then as a publisher, finally as a labour activist. In the countryside, five years after joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, he finally discovered his calling. Still a young man of thirty-three, tall, lean and handsome, he was enthralled by the peasant violence that had erupted in the countryside after the nationalists had launched a military campaign from their base in Guangzhou to seize power from local warlords and unify the country. Russian advisers accompanied the nationalist army, as Chiang Kai-shek, at this stage, was still collaborating closely with Stalin. In Mao’s home province of Hunan, the nationalist authorities followed Russian instructions in funding peasant associations and fomenting a Soviet-style revolution. Social order broke down. In Changsha, the provincial capital, victims were paraded in tall conical hats of mockery. Children scampered down the streets singing, ‘Down with the [imperialist] powers and eliminate the warlords.’ Workers armed with bamboo sticks picketed the offices of foreign companies. Public utilities were wrecked.
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In the countryside, the poorest of the villagers took control of the peasant associations and turned the world upside down. They were now the masters, choosing their targets at random, striking down the wealthy and powerful, creating a reign of terror. Some victims were knifed, a few decapitated. Chinese pastors were paraded through the streets as ‘running dogs of imperialism’, their hands bound behind their backs and a rope around their necks. Churches were looted. Mao admired the audacity and violence of the rebels. He was attracted by the slogans they coined: ‘Anyone who has land is a tyrant, and all gentry are bad.’ He went to the countryside to investigate the uprisings. ‘They strike the gentry to the ground,’ Mao wrote in his report on the peasant movement. ‘People swarm into the houses of local tyrants and evil gentry who are against the peasant association, slaughter their pigs and consume their grain. They even loll for a minute or two on the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the households of the local tyrants and evil gentry. At the slightest provocation they make arrests, crown the arrested with tall paper hats, and parade them through the villages.’ Mao was so taken with the violence that he felt ‘thrilled as never before’.
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Mao predicted that a hurricane would destroy the existing order:

In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.
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The violence in the countryside repelled the nationalists, as many of their officers came from prosperous families, and soon they turned away from the Soviet model. A year later, after his troops had entered Shanghai in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek launched a bloody purge in which 300 communists were dragged through the streets and executed. Many thousands were arrested. The Chinese Communist Party went underground. Mao led a motley army of 1,300 men into the mountains, in search of the peasants who would propel him to power.