The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (20 page)

For instance, in Beidaihe, a luxury resort with rocky headlands and sandy beaches, hundreds of foreign organisations such as embassies and missions owned beautifully designed houses overlooking the Bohai Gulf. After English railway engineers had linked the fishing village to Tianjin and Beijing in the late nineteenth century, Beidaihe rapidly became a popular destination for wealthy elites and foreign diplomats seeking shelter from the summer heat. The Second World War and the civil war forced many to leave China without being able to sell. By September 1952 the only foreigner left was a certain Mr Baldwin, who led ‘a tranquil but rather melancholy life’, fishing for bass and cultivating his fruit trees. Most of the properties had been converted into Rest and Recuperation Centres for party officials. After Mao had written a poem about the resort in 1954 it became a favourite retreat for the party leadership.
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On 25 July 1951 came a sweep of all foreigners, part of the build-up towards the public execution of Antonio Riva and Ruichi Yamaguchi. In Beijing the police handcuffed and hauled away dozens of priests, nuns, students, professors, merchants and doctors of different nationalities. Many vanished without trace, as foreigners by now led isolated lives cut off from the outside world. Harriet Mills, the daughter of Presbyterian parents who was researching the essayist and writer Lu Xun on a Fulbright Fellowship, spent nearly two years in chains for possessing an ex-army wireless set and for having been in touch with Yamaguchi. Allyn and Adele Rickett, also Fulbright Fellows, were arrested the same evening as they were having dinner with Harriet Mills. They too spent several years in prison, subjected so often to thought-reform sessions that they themselves ended up believing that they were spies.
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On 2 August 1951, Beijing secretly passed a new resolution ordering the expulsion of all foreigners except for those under arrest. By the end of the summer the foreign community had no illusions left. The only place where foreigners could still be seen in significant numbers was Tianjin. The once thriving port of northern China had become the only official exit for foreigners leaving the country. Even residents of Shanghai now first had to take a train to Tianjin before boarding a ship. The city was crowded with people waiting for transportation. Once glamorous hotels stood as forlorn remnants of decayed glory, their rooms occupied by a few anxious foreigners. In one of these, an abandoned red-and-gold ballroom led to a smaller dining room with dying flowers on the tables. Strips of paper that had been glued on the windows as a precaution against air raids during the civil war had not yet been removed.
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Shanghai had been emptied of its foreign population by the end of 1951. In Beijing too, a once thriving foreign community was broken and destroyed. When thirty-six people convened for Christmas dinner at the British embassy, the gathering included not only all diplomatic staff, but the entire British community in the region.
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Two years later came the turn of other foreign population groups. First some 25,000 Japanese held since the end of the war were repatriated. Then came 12,000 White Russians. Many were reduced to complete destitution and ‘died as a result of the bitter cold, hunger and sickness’. Their mass expulsion started at the end of the year.
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In 1926 an ominous shadow was cast over the Christian churches during the unrest in the Hunanese countryside. Thrilled by the revolutionary violence, a young Mao Zedong reported how local pastors were paraded through the streets, churches looted and foreign missionaries silenced. Although the unrest soon abated, foreign missionaries continued to be targets in communist-controlled areas in the 1930s and early 1940s. During the civil war, advancing communist troops confiscated church property, closed down mission schools and persecuted or killed dozens of local and foreign believers.

In July 1947 guerrilla fighters seized a Trappist monastery in Yangjiaping, a remote valley north of Beijing, burning down the cloister and interrogating, torturing and sequestering its resident monks. In January 1948, in the middle of the winter, six of the monks were handcuffed, chained and escorted on to a makeshift platform, their white habits infested with lice and encrusted with blood. A frenzied crowd surged forward as the victims were jostled to their knees. A local cadre read out the verdict: death, to be carried out immediately. One by one, as the shots rang out, they collapsed next to each other. ‘Their lifeless bodies were dragged to a nearby sewage ditch and dumped into a heap, one on top of the other.’ A few months later twenty-seven other monks, most but not all local, had died of maltreatment. Nobody knows how many Protestant and Catholic missionaries were killed in China between 1946 and 1948, but estimates range up to a hundred.
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Half of the more than 4,000 Protestant missionaries evacuated their stations before liberation. Some had spent years of internment in Japanese concentration camps and were wary of the communists. Others left due to poor health and old age. But well over 3,000 Roman Catholic missionaries were ordered to stay at their posts. Missionaries held extremely diverse views, from the austere and solitary Trappists who eschewed material possessions and avoided all idle talk to the more reform-minded members of the YMCA, involved in welfare activities in the cities. Hopes of working alongside the communists sustained a few. Others viewed any such co-operation as ‘compromising with the Devil’.
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For about a year the decision to remain in China seemed justified. Foreigners were registered, schools infiltrated, hospitals inspected, religion denounced and Christians interrogated, although many missionaries remained optimistic. Nevertheless the signs were not good, even though the pressures were far from uniform. ‘The coils are tightening daily,’ noted Bishop John O’Shea half a year after the communists entered his diocese in south Jiangxi. Like other foreigners, missionaries were subjected to all sorts of restrictions. Some became virtual prisoners in their own missions, forbidden to leave the compound. And increasingly the communists took over these buildings for quartering military troops, storing grain or holding public meetings, step by step squeezing many missionaries out of their premises.
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Economic pressures were also applied in the form of rent, taxes and fines, an experience missionaries shared with other foreigners. The government was ‘taxing them on a ruinous scale’, wrote the Vatican of its missions in mid-1950. One by one they had to close their doors.
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Then came the Korean War. A month after China had entered the conflict in October 1950, arrests of foreign missionaries began. In mass trials and frenzied demonstrations they were accused of espionage and subversive activity. Protestant missionaries left in droves. By the end of 1951 no more than a hundred remained in China.
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But the Roman Catholics, who received their orders from the Vatican, were enjoined by the apostolic delegate, Antonio Riberi, to resist at all costs. Despite the trials, parades and denunciations, over 2,000 missionaries kept their ranks closed to any form of official infiltration. The arrest of the Italian bishop Tarcisio Martina in September 1950 for involvement in the plot to kill Mao Zedong was used as a pretext to banish the Holy See from China. Even before Martina had been thrown in gaol for life, Riberi was placed under house arrest, subjected to nightly visits and frequent interrogations by the police for several months. In September 1951 he was expelled for ‘espionage activities’. Communist soldiers escorted him from Nanjing to the Hong Kong border. Throughout the journey vociferous campaigns were organised, with loudspeakers placed at street corners and railway stations, in hotels and restaurants – all blaring out propaganda denouncing the papal delegate as a ‘lackey of foreign imperialism’.
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Mao himself was intrigued by the Vatican, especially its ability to command allegiance across national boundaries. The tenacity of the Catholics perturbed him. But even more suspect was the Legion of Mary, known in Chinese as the ‘Army of Mary’ (
Shengmujun
), prompting the communists to fear that it might be a military formation. Many of their members, threatened with imprisonment, steadfastly refused to sign confessions renouncing alleged ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities. On 14 August 1951 the Public Security Bureau ordered the organisation to be destroyed ‘within a year’.
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Two days after Riberi had been paraded in Shanghai on his way to Hong Kong, a squad of eleven police officers with sub-machine guns arrested Aedan McGrath, the envoy of the Legion of Mary. Before McGrath was locked up, his watch, rosary beads and religious medals were confiscated. The laces of his shoes and the buttons on his trousers were removed. He was forced to stand naked for hours on end. Several months later he was transferred to Ward Road Prison, a solid gaol built by the British in 1901 where his cell had no bed, no chair, no window, nothing at all except a bucket. Food was slopped into a ?lthy square tin and passed through the bars twice a day. He endured countless interrogations, accompanied by sleep deprivation and naked exposure to the biting cold of winter. After thirty-two months he was finally brought before a tribunal where his crimes were read out to him. Two days later he was released, escorted on to a train and expelled from China.
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Others were not so lucky. In December 1951 the sixty-year-old Francis Xavier Ford of the Maryknoll Society, an American Roman Catholic bishop, was accused of ‘espionage’ and ‘possession of weapons’. He was never brought to trial. He was paraded in some of the villages where he had done mission work since 1918, his neck bound with a wet rope that almost choked him as it dried and shrank. The mob beat him with sticks and stones till he was knocked to the ground. He died in prison and was buried on the outskirts of Guangzhou.
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In many cases entire groups of missionaries were arrested in carefully targeted raids. In Qingdao, Shandong, twenty-seven brothers of the Society of the Divine Word were rounded up on 3 August 1951, sent to gaol and expelled two years later. While the missionaries were under investigation, the police carried off their chalices, vestments and other sacred objects. Cemeteries were desecrated, graves opened, altars removed, floors dug up and pillars demolished in the search for hidden weapons and radio transmitters. When nothing was found, pieces of junk, from bits of wire to old rosaries, were collected and presented as evidence of radio equipment. Medicine was called poison. The paranoia was contagious, as some missionaries began losing their bearings after months of harsh imprisonment, ceaseless interrogations and outlandish accusations. In Lanzhou, Father Paul Mueller refused to eat, thinking his food was poisoned, and claimed the guards used death rays against him. He died of an untreated infection in prison.
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Even those who left of their own accord were harassed. When Adolph Buch, a French priest who began his career as a Vincentian missionary in China in 1906, decided to pack his bags and leave in October 1952, he took with him a collection of butterflies he had gathered in his spare time over the years. They were confiscated by customs officials. ‘They accused me of wanting to send my collection to the States, to be sent back laden with germs.’ When the eighty-seven-year-old man shuffled across the Lowu Bridge into Hong Kong, he also came without his hearing aid, as it was illegal to take any mechanical devices out of the country.
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But many allegations were far more sinister. As the regime liquidated hundreds of mission hospitals, some of the foreigners in charge were accused of mistreatment and arrested on trumped-up charges. After a dying woman had been brought to the Luoyang Catholic Hospital, her husband begged the doctor to operate, despite repeated warnings that the operation had little chance of success. Weeks later local cadres pressured the man to bring charges against Father Zotti, the director of the hospital, who was sentenced to one year in prison and a further year under house arrest. Many similar cases followed.
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Wild accusations of wilful murder also accompanied the seizure of over 250 missionary orphanages. After liberation, relatives or strangers brought severely ill children to these homes. The sisters in charge could not save all of them. In December 1951 five nuns were paraded through jeering crowds in the streets of Guangzhou, accused of having murdered over 2,116 children in their care. The court proceedings, held in the red-walled Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, were broadcast for hours on end in five languages. Then the shrill, emotional voice of the prosecutor read the indictment, including charges of inhuman treatment and illegal sale of children. In between inflammatory speeches, several witnesses were brought forward, including children sobbing into the microphones, their words lost in tears and shouts from the crowd. At the climax of the show trial, two of the nuns were condemned to prison, the others to immediate expulsion from China.
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A week later two French nuns and a priest were beaten with sticks as they were forced to dig up the decomposing bodies of babies they were alleged to have killed in another orphanage. The excavation went on for twelve hours a day for twelve days, armed guards making sure that they worked without respite. Further up north, in Nanjing, the Sacred Heart Home for Children had earlier been labelled a ‘Little Buchenwald’, its sisters also accused of deliberately neglecting, starving, torturing children and selling them into slavery. Similar incidents, all carefully orchestrated, also occurred in Beijing, Tianjin and Fuzhou.
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