The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (29 page)

Combined with the attack on the bourgeoisie, this resulted in the paralysis of commerce and industry. From managers down to workers, everyone was apparently tied up in denunciation meetings. Industrial output plummeted, trade ground to a halt. In Shanghai goods accumulated uncollected in temporary sheds pitched out in the open. Imported cotton had to be kept on board ships as the millhands were too busy denouncing their owners. In Tianjin, the Number One Cotton Mill worked at only a third of its capacity. Stoppages were everywhere: knitwear production fell by half, and freight transportation plummeted by 40 per cent compared to the months prior to the campaign. In some sectors workers saw their earnings slashed by two-thirds. Banks in the city stopped making loans. Tax income collapsed.
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The situation was similar elsewhere. In Zhejiang province, traditionally dominated by trade, the business community lost a third of its capital, with ruinous consequences for the local economy. In the capital Hangzhou, half the profits made in the previous year had to be withdrawn from banks to meet back taxes, refunds and fines imposed for ‘corruption’ – not including a standard tax at 23 per cent as well as other contributions, donations and incentives. Further south, across Guangdong the volume of trade was down by 7 per cent in 1952 compared with the previous year. In some cities, for instance Foshan, famed for its ceramic art, it was down by 28 per cent, in large part due to punitive measures imposed on private business.
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Small enterprises could no longer pay their employees. Unemployment rocketed. The number of workers who lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the campaign against the bourgeoisie amounted to 80,000 in Shanghai, 10,000 in Jinan and 10,000 in the region around Suzhou, an old commercial city along the Yangzi where the wealth of its former merchants was displayed in whitewashed houses with dark-grey tiles, stone bridges, ancient pagodas and secluded gardens. In Yangzhou, enriched by centuries of trade in salt, rice and silk, the turmoil caused by the campaign was so great that workers started turning on each other. Further inland, in the city of Wuhan, once described as the Chicago of the East, 24,000 workers lost their jobs as trade dwindled to a mere 30 per cent of its level the previous quarter. Railway transportation and tax collection came to a standstill. The whole city was a scene of desolation. In Chongqing, Sichuan, 20,000 people were without work thanks to the campaign, and many families had to survive on less than half a kilo of grain a day. Some ate the husks of corn or hunted wild dogs to stave off hunger. Discontent was brewing, with slogans such as ‘rebel against the campaign’ doing the rounds among disgruntled employees.
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The countryside, still linked to the cities through a network of traders, merchants and suppliers, also suffered. In the south, basic items of trade such as oil, tea and tobacco leaves remained uncollected, hurting the farmers who depended on them for their livelihoods. In the region around Shanghai, prices of agricultural goods imploded, robbing the farmers of the capital necessary for spring ploughing. And even if they had enough seeds to plant the next crop, cadres from north to south refused to give any lead, awaiting an official end to the purge inside the ranks. This was true of Jilin, up in Manchuria, where the campaign under Gao Gang was so severe that village leaders spent all their time in meetings, fearful of denunciation as rightists. The fields lay bare. In the south, agriculture also came to a halt in large parts of the countryside. In Jiangshan county, Zhejiang, a mere quarter of all villagers were at work. Most of them just sat back, waiting for orders. And all this occurred, of course, in the middle of the Korean War, when crushing requisitions to feed the soldiers at the front had already reduced large parts of the countryside in Manchuria and Sichuan to man-made starvation.
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9

Thought Reform

Like pilgrims visiting a holy site, busloads of tourists regularly wander over the yellow loess hills of Yan’an, the heart of the communist revolution. In groups wearing identical tour caps or colour-coded shirts, they file into the cave where Mao once lived and worked, respectfully admiring his spartan, whitewashed bedroom furnished with a bed, a deckchair and a wooden bath. A family portrait hangs on one wall, showing the Chairman with his fourth wife and one of his children. Outside the cave, carved out of the brittle hillside, tourists pose for group photographs.
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More than seventy years earlier, tens of thousands of young volunteers had poured into Yan’an to join the communist party. Students, teachers, artists, writers and journalists, they were disenchanted with the nationalists and eager to dedicate their lives to the revolution. Many were so excited after days on the road that they wept when they saw the heights of Yan’an in the distance. Others cheered from the backs of their lorries, singing the ‘Internationale’ and the Soviet Union’s ‘Motherland March’. They were full of idealism, embracing liberty, equality, democracy and other liberal values that had become popular in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.

They were quickly disillusioned. Instead of equality, they found a rigid hierarchy. Every organisation had three different kitchens, the best food being reserved for the senior leaders. From the amount of grain, sugar, cooking oil, meat and fruit to the quality of health care and access to information, one’s position in the party hierarchy determined everything. Even the quality of tobacco and writing paper varied according to rank. Medicine was scarce for those on the lower rungs of the ladder, although leading cadres had personal doctors and sent their children to Moscow. At the apex of the party stood Mao, who was driven around in the only car in Yan’an and lived in a large mansion with heating especially installed for his comfort.
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In February 1942, Mao asked the young volunteers to attack ‘dogmatism’ and its alleged practitioners, namely his rival Wang Ming and other Soviet-trained leaders. Soon the criticisms that he unleashed went too far. Instead of following the Chairman’s cue, several critics expressed discontent with the way the red capital was run. A young writer called Wang Shiwei, who worked for the
Liberation Daily
, wrote an essay denouncing the arrogance of the ‘big shots’ who were ‘indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks’, while the sick could not even ‘have a sip of noodle soup’.
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After two months, Mao changed tack and angrily condemned Wang Shiwei as a ‘Trotskyist’ (Wang had translated Engels and Trotsky). He also turned against Wang’s supporters, determined to stamp out any lingering influence of free thinking among the young volunteers. Just as the rank and file were investigated in a witch-hunt for spies and undercover agents, they were interrogated in front of large crowds shouting slogans, made to confess in endless indoctrination meetings and forced to denounce each other in a bid to save themselves. Some were locked up in caves, others taken to mock executions. For month after month, life in Yan’an was nothing but a relentless succession of interrogations and rallies, feeding fear, suspicion and betrayal. All communications with areas under nationalist control were cut off, and any attempt to contact the outside world was viewed as evidence of espionage. The pressure was too much for some, as they broke down, lost their minds or committed suicide. Mao demanded absolute loyalty from intellectuals, who had to reform themselves ideologically by continuously studying and discussing essays by him, Stalin and others. When Mao brought the Rectification Campaign to an end in 1945, he apologised for their maltreatment and pointed the finger at his underlings. The victims saw him as their saviour and accepted their own sacrifices during the campaign as an exercise in purification necessary to enter the inner circle. They embraced their mission, ready to save China by serving the party. Wang Shiwei was killed in 1947, reportedly chopped to pieces and thrown into a well.
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In August 1949, two months before the People’s Republic was founded, Mao published an editorial entitled ‘Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle’. He denounced Hu Shi, Qian Mu and Fu Sinian, three leading university professors who had fled south with the nationalists, as ‘running dogs’ of imperialism. He put the educated elite on notice. ‘Part of the intellectuals still want to wait and see,’ he observed. They were ‘middle-of-the-roaders’ who still harboured illusions about ‘democratic individualism’. The Chairman urged them to unite with progressive revolutionary forces.
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With liberation, millions of students, teachers, professors, scientists and writers – in communist jargon termed ‘intellectuals’ – found themselves forced to prove their allegiance to the new regime. They were joined by compatriots who had returned from overseas to answer the call to serve the motherland. Like everybody else, they attended endless indoctrination classes to learn the new orthodoxy, studying official pamphlets, newspapers and textbooks. And like everyone else, they soon had to write their own confessions, making a clean breast of the past by ‘laying their hearts on the table’. They were asked to re-educate themselves, becoming New People willing to serve the New China.

Many did so with relish. For years they had seen the decay and corruption of the nationalist regime, helpless to remedy these, while underground propaganda had done much to portray the party as the only true force for change. ‘You know, for honest young people, the ideals propagated by the communist party were really attractive. Democracy, equality, everybody enjoying the fullest freedom: is there anything more meaningful for a young man than to allow this world to change for the better?’ remembered Cheng Yuan, then a quiet but determined student from a respected family of scholars in Chongqing. His two elder brothers were highly placed officials in the nationalist party, but Cheng had already been won over by an underground cell in high school. A student of physics at Peking University during liberation, he embraced the new learning, plunging into the classics of Marxism to seek self-improvement.
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Some viewed the party almost as a surrogate family. Liu Xiaoyu, born in an impoverished and broken home, abused and beaten by her foster parents, was a student at the Ginling Women’s College, a Christian university in Nanjing, when she joined the underground movement. She was never so happy as in the first year of liberation, taking classes in a military school: ‘Many students joined, as we got up together and studied historical materialism and the history of social development. It was a tough life, but in my heart I was happy: this was the new life.’
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She was not the only one. Within months the new regime made the study of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought compulsory at all levels, but even senior academics did not wait for the call to set up study groups. Jin Yuelin, a philosopher and logician born in 1895, took the lead by teaching Marxist philosophy at Tsinghua University and taking classes in Russian. He published an article denouncing his own work as the product of a bourgeois mind. Feng Youlan, a leading philosopher trained at Columbia University, boarded a ship back to the motherland in 1948, full of anticipation. So confident was he that the new regime would be a resounding success that on leaving the United States he surrendered his visa, which was valid for life. Back in Beijing he repeatedly distanced himself from his own landlord background, taking up the study of Marxism with the zeal of a new convert. In July 1949 he opened a conference in Beijing to ‘propagate Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought’. He corresponded with Mao, announcing his determination to reform himself and selflessly serve the new society. ‘It is very good for someone like yourself, who has committed errors in the past,’ answered the Chairman, ‘to be prepared to correct them now, if this can indeed be carried out in practice.’ A month later Feng publicly repudiated his earlier philosophical musings, which spanned several decades. He would spend the next thirty years rewriting his work, constantly trying to conform with the latest dogma.
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But Mao was deeply suspicious of educated people, and wanted them to demonstrate their mettle. Book learning was out, practical experience was in (‘only social practice can be the criterion of truth’, the Chairman opined). Already in 1927, when he had compared the peasants to a hurricane, he had hinted that everybody would be put to the test: ‘There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticising? Or to stand in their way and oppose them?’
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To prove their commitment to the new order, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were sent to the countryside as part of the work teams tasked with carrying out land reform. They had to dirty their hands, living and working alongside poor farmers for several months, helping the cadres to make a class analysis of each village. Then they had to bloody their hands, participating in the denunciation meetings during which some of the traditional leaders were accused of being landlords, traitors or tyrants.

For many it was a baptism of fire. Some had never set foot in the countryside, and few had ever spent much time working with their hands – traditionally taboo in a society run by scholars. Liu Yufen, who had just turned twenty at the time and was freshly graduated from a party school, remembered: ‘I visited the poorest home in the village, it had no bed, no sheets or blankets, just an old man wearing old cotton clothes made of rags held together by a few threads. I was completely shaken by seeing such conditions.’ Cut off from all modern amenities, living in rough, cramped huts where whole families huddled together with their livestock, then rising at the crack of dawn to haul manure or dig earth all day long, many experienced culture shock. They overcame it quickly, often through a combination of necessity, fear and conviction, assisted by daily study sessions in which their peers assessed and criticised their performance.
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