The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (17 page)

The doors of those who had been arrested were sealed with a large red paper X, meaning that the belongings of the occupant were not to be disturbed until the police had investigated them. So many red crosses appeared on doors that the Shanghai police took over public buildings as prisons. The raid had been well prepared. For weeks before the night of the arrests the Public Security Bureau had requested all those who had worked for the nationalists to register. The stated purpose was to give those who had made ‘political mistakes’ a chance to ‘start life anew’. Autobiographies had to be submitted and details of every known person had to be provided, whether family, friend or associate. With every full confession came the promise of lenient treatment.

Public executions followed. ‘One of the execution grounds was near the university. Every day we would see truckloads of prisoners. While we were in our classes we would hear the terrible shooting. The lorries carrying away the corpses dripped blood onto the road that ran past the university buildings.’ Robert Loh, like others across the country, was forced to attend more than one shooting. The stated purpose was to educate the people, although he left more terrorised and sickened than enlightened.

I remember especially the trial of a factory foreman who had extorted money from his employees and had seduced women workers under him. When found guilty, he was shoved off the platform. He rolled grotesquely because of his tied hands. While he was still on the ground, a policeman shot him through the head. I was about ten paces away. I saw the splatter of the victim’s brains, and the obscene twitching of his body.
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With the executions came a wave of suicides, as desperate people threw themselves from tall buildings along the Bund. The police soon erected nets which jutted out from windows on the first floor. Instead of leaping from windows, candidates for death now took running jumps from the roof. One man landed on a rickshaw, killing himself, the puller and his passenger. After the police and the military had started guarding all tall buildings, corpses appeared daily in the rivers of Shanghai.
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Mass executions were held in every city. In Beijing they were chaired by the mayor. Peng Zhen shouted at a mass meeting in Beijing: ‘How should we deal with this herd of beastly tyrants, bandits, traitors and spies who are guilty of the most heinous crimes?’

Answered a crowd of followers: ‘Execute them by firing squad!’

Peng: ‘We have already disposed of a number of counter-revolutionaries, but there are still some in prison. Besides, there are still spies and special agents hiding in Beijing. What shall we do with them?’

The crowd: ‘Suppress the counter-revolutionaries resolutely!’

Peng: ‘Among the accused today there are despots in the markets, among fishmongers, real-estate brokers, water carriers and nightsoil scavengers. How should we cope with these feudal remnants?’

The crowd: ‘Execute them by firing squad!’
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The large gatherings in stadiums in Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing were carefully orchestrated, from speeches scripted in advance to ritual denunciations of victims on stage. But smaller batches were executed in front of party activists as a way of testing their resolve, determination and loyalty to the cause. Esther Cheo, who was being groomed for promotion to cadre, had to attend a mass execution in Beijing: ‘We were taken in a lorry to the place of execution, near the famous tourist spot, the Temple of Heaven. The victims were kneeling down beside cheap coffins, their hands tied behind their backs with wire. About six security police moved nonchalantly along shooting them in the back of the head. As they fell, some of their heads split open, some just fell with a neat little hole, while others had their brains splattered all over the dusty ground and on to the clothes of the next victims.’ As she turned away in revulsion, a cadre grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Take a good look!’ he shouted. ‘This is what the revolution is all about!’ She screamed and wanted to hide her face, but he held her tight and forced her head around to make her look. She saw her companions running over the bodies, cheering.
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Few victims ever spoke out. The cadres in charge had honed their skills in mass rallies during land reform, and they knew how to prevent a last-ditch attempt by the condemned to proclaim their innocence or shout anti-communist slogans. Threats of retaliation against family members were very effective. Other measures were used. As one organiser explained: ‘We put a wire ring around every accused person. If he tries to struggle or resist, the soldiers have only to pull the wire back against his windpipe and choke him.’ Sometimes local authorities mandated a rope instead of wire.
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There were fewer slippages in the cities, where it is unlikely that more than one per thousand of the population was killed. Mao thought that fewer would be acceptable in order not to antagonise the public. He calculated in April 1951: ‘So in Beijing, with its population of about 2 million, over 10,000 have already been arrested and 700 of these have been killed, while another batch of 700 is scheduled for execution. Killing roughly 1,400 should be enough.’
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The campaign of terror was over by the end of 1951, but the killings never really stopped. With each new wave, ever larger sections of the population were brought into the fold. In Zhejiang, one of the smallest and most densely populated provinces, with valleys and plains along its coastline and mountain ranges covering most of its interior, a quarter of a million militia mounted guard along all the major roads at the peak of the campaign. Few enemies of the regime managed to escape from this tight network, and many died of hunger and cold in the mountains.
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But along Zhejiang’s ragged coast were several thousand islands where the hand of the state barely reached. A huge waterland covered south China, veined with canals, guttered and bankless meandering rivers, fields flooded in terraces and lakes both natural and artificial. Even as most cities built asphalt, concrete and macadam roads for modern transportation, water travel continued to be popular. All along China’s busy coast, freighters, tankers and ferries plied their trade next to fishing trawlers and traditional junks. The navigable rivers also swarmed with traffic, ranging from lorchas with batten lug sails to modern motor ships.

The inhabitants of this water world engaged in fishing and marine farming. Some were sea nomads, traditionally treated like outcasts and long barred from living on shore or marrying land people. Living in the Pearl River delta in south China, the Tanka viewed water as the safe element, land being fraught with danger. They spoke their own dialect, mooring their sailing junks and shrimping vessels side by side to form vast flotillas which even had their own floating temples and religious boats. Many fled after liberation, taking their boats and families to Hong Kong, where they joined immense floating cities of up to 60,000 people near Aberdeen and Yaumatei.

Other groups thrived on the water. Generations of boatmen worked and lived on board large cargo-carrying vessels along the Grand Canal, an ancient waterway completed in the seventh century to haul the grain tribute from the south to the imperial capital in the north. Flower boats, often decorated in a riot of colours, carried the nightsoil that fertilised the fields in the provinces along the coast. Coal barges and grain boats cruised on the many waterways of Shandong, where the Yellow River intersected with the Grand Canal. On the Yangzi, the riverfront of Shashi was crowded with junks anchored side by side. Further upriver, a floating population of trackers waited to be hired to haul ships through the shoals and gorges of the Yangzi.

This watery world had always attracted smugglers, drifters and outcasts. The party saw it as the last refuge of counter-revolutionaries. In the ports along the Guangdong coast, the authorities believed, up to half of the population smuggled contraband goods and harboured enemy agents. Further north, on the islands along Fujian and Zhejiang, some were secretly in touch with the nationalists in Taiwan. The vice-minister of communications Wang Shoudao described the water population as a troublesome shadow world of 4 million people, steeped in feudal customs and riddled with gangsters who controlled the ports along the coast. One out of every fifty was a counter-revolutionary, he calculated.
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Luo Ruiqing agreed. In December 1952 he set a killing quota for people living on the water of one per thousand. Nine times as many were to be deported to labour camps. Thousands were executed in the following year. Many more were taken from their boats and sent away to do hard labour, as the revolution finally moved from the land to the water.
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No one will ever know how many people were killed at the height of the Great Terror. The way statistics were gathered varied widely from one place to another and, more importantly, almost everywhere secret killings took place which were rarely reported. The most complete set of available figures are for the provinces under the leadership of Deng Zihui from October 1950 to November 1951. The total reached over 300,000 victims, or 1.7 per thousand of the local population (see Table 1, p. 100). And as Luo Ruiqing cautioned in his report on these provinces, a further 51,800 executions were earmarked to take place over the following months, most in Guangdong.
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The provinces under Deng Xiaoping, namely Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan, are unlikely to have had killing rates below two per thousand. In the entire region of Fuling, composed of ten counties, the rate was 3.1 per thousand. Elsewhere in Sichuan the rate was as high as four per thousand. In the entire province of Guizhou, as we have seen, the rate was three per thousand. In an oral report to Deng Xiaoping the figure of 150,000 executions for all three provinces was mentioned in November 1951.
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In east China, as early as April 1951 the reported killing rates already stood at more than two per thousand in Fujian and Zhejiang. They were lower in Shandong, but even before the summer began the region as a whole claimed over 109,000 executions.
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In the north, the situation was more complex because so many killings had already taken place before the campaign was launched on 10 October 1950. In Hebei, for instance, 12,700 victims were executed in 1951, but in the year leading up to October 1950 more than 20,000 had already been killed.
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All of the north-west, from Gansu to Xinjiang and Tibet, remains difficult to assess in the absence of reliable archival material. On the other hand, in Manchuria, already bloodied by the civil war, the killing rate was lowered to 0.5 per thousand in May 1951.
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Table 1: Total Executions Reported in Six Provinces, October 1950–November 1951

Source: Report by Luo Ruiqing, Shaanxi, 23 Aug. 1952, 123-25-2, p. 357

The only total aggregate from the archives to date is Liu Shaoqi’s figure of 710,000 provided at a top party convention in 1954, a figure Mao repeated two years later.
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In a total population of approximately 550 million at the time, this can only have represented the lowest possible estimate, equivalent to a national killing rate of 1.2 per thousand. Liu was, no doubt, willing to present the party only with a politically acceptable figure, one far removed from the evidence contained in the reports filed at the time. A more plausible estimate comes from Bo Yibo, who in the autumn of 1952 mentioned more than 2 million victims. Although this figure cannot be verified, on balance it is the most likely estimate if both reported and secret killings of counter-revolutionaries from 1950 to the end of 1952 are taken into account.
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Several million people were sent to labour camps or subjected to surveillance by the local militia. Countless more became outcasts. As the politics of hatred tore apart the social fabric of community life, tens of millions of people were permanently branded as ‘landlords’, ‘rich farmers’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘criminals’. These were the black classes, who stood in opposition to the vanguard of the revolution, called red classes. But the label was inherited, meaning that the offspring of outcasts were also subjected to constant persecution and discrimination, all sanctioned by the party. These children would be singled out by teachers and bullied at school, sometimes attacked by followers of the Youth League on their way back home. The adults became the targets of every subsequent political campaign, some of them paraded, shouted at and spat upon in denunciation meetings no fewer than 300 times – before the Cultural Revolution even started in 1966. They were the scapegoats of revolution, maintained alive in a permanent class struggle as a reminder to all of the fate awaiting those found to be on the wrong side of the party.
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