The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (2 page)

The bulk of the evidence presented in this book comes from party archives in China. Over the past few years vast amounts of material have become available, and I draw on hundreds of previously classified documents, including secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of important leadership speeches, confessions extracted during thought-reform campaigns, inquiries into rebellions in the countryside, detailed statistics on the victims of the Great Terror, surveys of working conditions in factories and workshops, letters of complaint written by ordinary people, and much more. Other sources include personal memoirs, letters and diaries, as well as eyewitness accounts from people who lived through the revolution. Sympathisers of the regime have unjustly discarded many of the claims of these earlier eyewitnesses, but these can now be corroborated by archival evidence, giving them a new lease of life. Taken as a whole, these sources offer us an unprecedented opportunity to probe beyond the shiny surface of propaganda and retrieve the stories of the ordinary men and women who were both the main protagonists and the main victims of the revolution.

The Tragedy of Liberation
is the second volume of the
People’s Trilogy
. It precedes chronologically an earlier volume,
Mao’s Great Famine
, which looks at the man-made catastrophe that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962. A third and final volume on the Cultural Revolution will follow in due course. The nature of the archival evidence that underpins the
People’s Trilogy
is explained in greater detail in an essay on the sources in
Mao’s Great Famine
.

Chronology

6 and 9 August 1945:

Atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

8 August 1945:

Stalin declares war on Japan and Soviet troops invade Manchuria.

21 August 1945:

A formal surrender ceremony between China and Japan concludes the Second World War in the Pacific.

April 1946:

Soviet troops withdraw from Manchuria after allowing the communists to take over the countryside.

May 1946:

Mao calls for radical land distribution and all-out class struggle in the countryside.

June 1946:

The nationalists pursue the communists all the way to the northern border of Manchuria, but are forced to halt their advance as George Marshall, President Truman’s envoy, imposes a ceasefire. The communist troops regroup and are trained by the Soviets.

September 1946–July 1947:

Truman imposes an arms embargo.

December 1946–December 1947:

The nationalists keep on pouring their best troops into Manchuria, which turns into a death trap.

December 1947–November 1948:

The communists win the battle of Manchuria after blockading all major cities.

22 January 1949:

Beijing surrenders to the communists after a forty-day siege.

November 1948–January 1949:

The nationalists lose the battle of Xuzhou in central China, opening up the Yangzi Valley and all of the south to communist conquest.

April–May 1949:

Nanjing, the nationalist capital on the south bank of the Yangzi, falls to the communists. After a protracted siege, the communists conquer Shanghai.

30 June 1949:

On the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao announces that China should ‘lean to one side’ and embrace the Soviet Union.

1 October 1949:

Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

10 December 1949:

After the fall of Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek abandons China and flees to Taiwan.

December 1949–January 1950:

Mao is in Moscow to obtain recognition and help from Stalin. On 14 February 1950 China signs a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union.

June 1950–October 1952:

The communists implement land reform in the south.

25 June 1950:

North Korea invades South Korea, drawing condemnation from the United Nations Security Council and a counter-offensive under General Douglas MacArthur.

7 October 1950:

The People’s Liberation Army invades Tibet.

10 October 1950–October 1951:

A Great Terror unfolds, called the ‘Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries’.

18 October 1950:

China enters the Korean War.

November 1950:

Start of a campaign to ‘Resist America, Aid Korea’.

1951–1953:

Once the land has been redistributed, villagers are pooled into ‘mutual-aid teams’ in which they have to share their tools, working animals and labour.

October 1951–June 1952:

A ‘Three-Anti Campaign’ aims to purge the ranks of the government.

October 1951:

Start of a thought-reform campaign designed to regiment and absorb the educated elite into the state bureaucracy.

January–June 1952:

Mao declares war on the private sector in a campaign known as the ‘Five-Anti Campaign’.

February–April 1952:

Beijing alleges that the United States is waging germ warfare.

5 March 1953:

Stalin dies.

27 July 1953:

A ceasefire brings an end to the Korean War.

November 1953:

Introduction of a state monopoly over grain, as cultivators are forced to sell all ‘surplus’ grain to the state at prices determined by the state.

1953–1955:

The mutual-aid teams are turned into co-operatives, with tools, working animals and labour now shared on a permanent basis and the land pooled.

February 1954–May 1955:

Gao Gang and other senior leaders are purged for ‘treachery’ and ‘splitting the party’.

April–December 1955:

Hu Feng and other intellectuals are denounced for heading a ‘counter-revolutionary’ clique. More than 770,000 people are arrested in a campaign against counter-revolutionaries.

June 1955:

A household-registration system restricts the movement of people in the countryside.

Summer 1955–spring 1956:

As part of a push to accelerate the collectivisation of the countryside, called the ‘Socialist High Tide’, farmers are herded into collectives in which they no longer own the land. In the cities most industry and commerce are nationalised.

February 1956:

Khrushchev denounces Stalin and the cult of personality in a secret speech in Moscow. Criticism of Stalin’s disastrous campaign of collectivisation strengthens the position of those opposed to the Socialist High Tide in China. Mao perceives deStalinisation as a challenge to his own authority.

September 1956:

A reference to ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ is removed from the party constitution, the principle of collective leadership is lauded and the cult of personality is decried. The Socialist High Tide is abandoned.

October 1956:

Encouraged by deStalinisation, people in Hungary revolt against their own government, prompting Soviet forces to invade the country, crush all opposition and install a new regime with Moscow’s backing.

Winter 1956–spring 1957:

Mao, overriding most of his colleagues, encourages a more open political climate with the ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign to avoid the social unrest that led to the invasion of Hungary. Students and workers demonstrate, protest and strike across the country.

Summer 1957:

The campaign backfires as a mounting barrage of criticism questions the very right of the party to rule. Mao changes tack and accuses these critical voices of being ‘bad elements’ bent on destroying the party. He puts Deng Xiaoping in charge of an anti-rightist campaign, which persecutes half a million people – many of them students and intellectuals deported to remote areas to do hard labour. The party finds unity behind its Chairman, who unleashes the ‘Great Leap Forward’ a few months later.

MAP

Part One

Conquest (1945–49)

1

Siege

When workers in Changchun started digging trenches for a new irrigation system in the summer of 2006, they made a gruesome discovery. The rich black soil was clogged with human remains. Below a metre of earth were thousands of skeletons closely packed together. When they dug deeper, the workers found several more layers of bones, stacked up like firewood. A crowd of local residents, gathered around the excavated area, was taken aback by the sheer size of the burial site. Some thought that the bodies belonged to victims of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War. Nobody except an elderly man realised that they had just stumbled on remnants of the civil war that had resumed after 1945 between Mao Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists.

In 1948 the communists had laid siege to Changchun for five months, starving out a nationalist garrison stationed inside the city walls. Victory came at a heavy cost. At least 160,000 civilians died of hunger during the blockade. After liberation the communist troops buried many of the bodies in mass graves without so much as a tombstone, a name plate or even a simple marker. After decades of propaganda about the peaceful liberation of China, few people remember the victims of the communist party’s rise to power.
1

Changchun, in the middle of the vast Manchurian plain north of the Great Wall of China, was a minor trading town before the arrival of the railway in 1898. It developed rapidly as the junction between the South Manchurian Railway, run by the Japanese, and the Chinese Eastern Railway, owned by the Russians. In 1932 Changchun became the capital of Manchukuo, a puppet state of imperial Japan, which installed Henry Puyi, later known as the last emperor, as its Manchu ruler. The Japanese transformed the city into a modern, wheel-shaped city with broad avenues, shade trees and public works. Large, cream-coloured buildings for the imperial bureaucracy appeared beside spacious parks, while elegant villas were built for local collaborators and their Japanese advisers.

In August 1945, the Soviet army took over the city and, so far as they could, dismantled the factories, machines and materials, sending the war booty back by the trainload to the Soviet Union. Industrial installations were demolished, and many of the formerly handsome houses were stripped bare. The Soviets stayed until April 1946, when the nationalist army took over the city. Two months later, the civil war began, and Manchuria once again became a battlefield. The communist armies had the initiative and moved down from the north, cutting the railway that connected Changchun with nationalist strongholds further south.

In April 1948, the communists advanced towards Changchun itself. Led by Lin Biao, a gaunt man who had trained at the Whampoa Military Academy, they laid siege to the city. Lin was considered one of the best battlefield commanders and a brilliant strategist. He was also ruthless. When he realised that Zheng Dongguo, the defending commander in Changchun, would not capitulate, he ordered the city to be starved into surrender. On 30 May 1948 came his command: ‘Turn Changchun into a city of death.’
2

Inside Changchun were some 500,000 civilians, many of them refugees who had fled the communist advance and were trapped in their journey south to Beijing after the railway lines had been cut. A hundred thousand nationalist troops were also garrisoned inside the city. Curfew was imposed almost immediately, keeping people indoors from eight at night to five in the morning. All able-bodied men were made to dig trenches. Nobody was allowed to leave. People who refused to be searched by sentries were liable to be shot on the spot. Yet an air of goodwill still prevailed in the first weeks of the siege, as emergency supplies were dropped by air. Some of the well-to-do even established a Changchun Mobilisation Committee, supplying sweets and cigarettes, comforting the wounded and setting up tea stalls for the men.
3