The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (30 page)

But an even greater challenge was to see revolution in action. Few were prepared for the sheer violence of land distribution, as victims were beaten, tortured, hanged and sometimes shot. All had to reconcile the huge gap that existed between the propaganda on the one hand and the reality of revolution on the other. They had to steel themselves, silencing the doubts that welled up when they witnessed physical abuse, constantly reciting the vocabulary of class struggle to justify the violence. A vision of communist plenty for all had to be conjured up to see past the squalor of denunciation rallies and organised plunder. They had to convince themselves that they had seen the New World. Some even had to will their hands to stop shaking when they were asked to pull the trigger. A friend of Liu Yufen trembled so violently when ordered to execute a man condemned as a counter-revolutionary that every one of his shots missed its target: the regular soldiers in the execution squad finished the job for him.
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By no means all passed the test. Some were courageous enough to criticise the violence of land reform. Several members of the Democratic League, co-opted by the communist party as part of the New Democracy, denounced the random torture and killing that was taking place in the countryside, demanding instead that a court of law should deal with landowners who had committed genuine crimes in the past. Others stressed the need to treat everyone humanely, even victims of land reform. A few queried the notion that every landlord was bad to the bone: ‘There are bad farmers too, who like to eat but shirk work, while some landlords work hard and practise thrift their entire lives.’ But few persisted in such views, which were derided as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘humanist’. When Yue Daiyun, a young woman who had joined the underground movement in Beijing before liberation, tried to protect an old and impoverished tailor from the execution squad, her leader denounced her as a bourgeois sentimentalist who could not take a firm class stance. Unlike others, she failed in her attempt to preserve her own fate through self-deception: ‘I tried to use “class” in order to force myself to look past all sorts of inhuman acts of violence. But I saw how so-called class designations were entirely artificial.’ After the tailor had been shot, she felt pain resembling ‘one half of my body being torn from the other’.
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But most decided to ‘march at the head and lead’, in the Chairman’s words. If they wanted a job under the new regime, they had little choice but to become willing accomplices – whether through opportunism, idealism or sheer pragmatism. Many did so with relish. Feng Youlan used the experience to distance himself from his own landlord background and prove his revolutionary credentials. He took a lead in helping farmers outside Beijing confiscate the property of landowners and hailed revolution as a transformative experience. For Wu Jingchao, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University, the most memorable moment of his time in the countryside came when a pauper jumped up from the crowd at a rally, ripped off his shirt and started beating his chest before grabbing a landlord by the collar, angrily waving a finger in his face. Wu enthused about land reform in the
Guangming Daily
: ‘After liberation, we also studied the class viewpoint and the mass viewpoint, but what we learned is nowhere near as profound as a month’s practice.’ Mao approved and wrote to Hu Qiaomu, the head of the propaganda department: ‘This is very well written, please order the
People’s Daily
to reprint it and have the New China News Agency circulate it.’ Wu Jingchao’s career seemed assured.
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Many were genuinely filled with anger towards the old order. Zhu Guangqian, already in his fifties and a founding figure in the study of aesthetics in China, could feel hatred flow through his entire body. ‘When I heard a peasant air his grievances against a landlord, the tears streaming down his cheeks, it seemed as if I myself was transformed into that angry peasant, and I really regretted not being able to step forward and give that landlord a good thrashing.’
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Some went further. Lin Zhao, a headstrong, idealistic young woman who wrote searing denunciations of government corruption before joining the underground movement in 1948, told her classmate that ‘my hatred for the landlords is the same as my love of the country’. This she demonstrated by ordering a landowner to be placed in a vat of freezing water overnight. She felt ‘cruel happiness’ on hearing the man scream in pain, as this meant that the villagers would no longer be afraid of him. After a dozen victims were executed in the wake of a rally she had helped organise, she looked at each of the corpses, one by one. ‘Seeing them die this way, I felt as proud and happy as the people who had directly suffered under them.’ She was barely twenty.
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‘You do not need to be overly anxious about seeing results in haste; you can come around gradually,’ Mao told Feng Youlan in October 1949 after the philosopher had announced his intention to reform himself. But two years later his time was up. As the previous chapter showed, Mao launched a purge of the government and assaulted the business community in the autumn of 1951. He was also ready to expand the model of thought reform, first developed in Yan’an, to the entire country. Willingly or involuntarily, the educated elite were to be regimented and absorbed into the state bureaucracy and have their creative freedom or independent livelihood rooted out.

In October 1951 Mao announced that ‘Thought reform, especially thought reform of the intellectuals, is one of the most important prerequisites for the realisation of democratic reform and industrialisation.’ Shortly afterwards, Zhou Enlai, dressed in a grey woollen Mao suit, lectured 3,000 eminent teachers in the Huairen Hall in the party headquarters at Zhongnanhai. The premier warned them that they were imbued with the ‘mistaken thoughts of the bourgeois class and the petty bourgeoisie’ and must work hard to ‘establish the correct stand, viewpoint and method of the working class’. The lecture lasted a full seven hours. Wu Ningkun, a scientist educated in America who had only just returned to China, against the advice of his brother in Taiwan and his elder sister in Hong Kong, gave up his perfunctory attempt to take notes after a mere hour. ‘Little did I know that the seven-hour report was nothing less than a declaration of war on the mind and integrity of the intelligentsia for the next forty years!’
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Before boarding the USS
President Cleveland
for his homebound voyage six weeks earlier, Wu Ningkun asked T. D. Lee, a fellow graduate student who later won the Nobel Prize in physics, why he was not coming home to help the new China. His friend answered with a knowing smile that he did not want to have his brain washed. For Wu and countless others, ideological education now became the norm, as sessions of self-criticism, self-condemnation and self-exposure followed one another, day in, day out, until all resistance was crushed and the individual was broken, ready to serve the collective. As in Yan’an a decade earlier, everyone had to name their relatives and friends, and provide details of their political background, their past activities, their every belief, including their innermost thoughts. Even transitory, fleeting impressions were to be captured and scrutinised, as they often revealed the hidden bourgeois underneath a mask of socialist conformity. All this took place under formidable social pressure, before assembled crowds or in study sessions under strict supervision, as other participants tried to find a chink in the armour of every suspect, grinding him down with a barrage of probing queries.
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‘One day we found that the university’s party organization had been suddenly strengthened. A new ruling specified that a member of the party or the Youth League should sit at every table in the dining hall and should occupy a place in every dormitory room. These Communists took notes on the day and night behaviour of every student. Even the words of a student talking in his sleep were recorded and considered for political significance.’ So observed Robert Loh, still working at a university in Shanghai at this time. In Shanghai, in addition to endless group meetings, a lorry was sometimes parked in front of the house of an accused, a loudspeaker pouring out a shrill stream of invective.
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Few of those denounced managed to withstand the pressure for more than a few days, frantically writing confession after confession in a desperate search for something the leading cadre would accept. Stubborn teachers who insisted on their innocence were usually locked up in a room and harassed by relays of cadres until a confession was obtained. In Nanjing, teachers and professors were hauled on to a stage, hung up and beaten. Several committed suicide. ‘We will crush those who resist,’ announced the party secretary of Nanjing, whose report was praised and circulated by Mao. In Chengde, the vast imperial garden city formerly used as the summer residence of the Manchu emperors, some teachers were arrested and killed.
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Many tried to atone for their past misdeeds, whether real or imaginary. Jin Yuelin, the logician who took classes in Russian, wrote twelve confessions before he was considered reformed. Feng Youlan, despite all his best efforts, failed to pass the test. Chen Xujing, a leading sociologist with a degree from the University of Illinois, stood in front of the assembled students and staff of Lingnan University and atoned for a full four hours, reduced to tears: he too failed to appease the authorities.
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In some cases extremely loyal intellectuals were hounded so fiercely that they became alienated from the party. This too served a purpose, as Loh noted in the case of a colleague called Long:

At first, I considered the Communists stupid for alienating Long. After the betrayal, persecution and humiliation he had received from the Communists, he undoubtedly hated them, and they therefore had turned a valuable pro-Communist into an anti-Communist. Only later did I perceive that the Communists had been fully aware of Long’s loyalty to their cause and were equally conscious that after the ‘reform’ he was disaffected. They had succeeded, however, in terrorizing him so thoroughly that henceforth, regardless of what he thought, he spoke and acted during every waking moment exactly as the Communists wanted. In this state, the Communists felt safer and more secure about him.
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Another true believer was Liu Xiaoyu, the young woman who had embraced the communist party as her own family. ‘We all felt fear. We stopped speaking even to those with whom we were normally very close. You did not dare speak with others about what was on your mind, even with those close to you, because it was very likely that they would denounce you. Everybody was denouncing others and was denounced by others. Everybody was living in fear.’ But what ultimately caused her to lose faith in the party was the unprecedented intrusion into her own private life. She had just married, but was now accused of spending too much time with her husband instead of devoting herself to revolution. ‘There were people who lingered around our home, peeping through the windows and the gap in the front door, trying to find out if we were behaving in an intimate manner. They were supervising us around the clock, and if they saw anything suspect they would report it at a public meeting, making you feel really embarrassed.’ She was soon denounced as a servant of imperialism who harboured ulterior motives.
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But not everybody was willing to go along. Gao Chongxi, an expert in the chemical industry at Tsinghua University, committed suicide. At the East China Normal University in Shanghai, Li Pingxin was so viciously denounced that he took an axe and tried to chop off his own head. He bled to death. Eileen Chang, on the other hand, was one of the few who would not even buy into the patriotic rhetoric of the new regime. One of the most talented writers in China, she quietly slipped across the border to Hong Kong under a false name in 1952.
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Thought reform was by no means confined to elite universities. In Zhejiang the campaign extended to students from middle schools, some aged only twelve: they were ordered to cleanse themselves not only of ‘reactionary’ views, but also of ‘extreme selfishness’. In Guangdong too, middle-school students were mobilised to fight counter-revolutionaries hidden in their ranks. In the Luoding Number One Secondary School, for instance, eighty students were arrested. Up in the north-western provinces, sometimes even children in primary schools were berated for harbouring bourgeois thoughts. Soon any form of insubordination was interpreted as a dangerous sign of individual restiveness to be nipped in the bud. In schools throughout Jiangxi province bullying was so intense that ‘student suicides happen incessantly’. In one case a boy suspected of having stolen 15 yuan was put in leg irons and lashed with bamboo whips till he made a full confession. Others were locked up in solitary confinement, a few driven to insanity. Hu Chunfang refused to collect firewood: ‘I came to study technology, not to chop wood.’ For this impertinence he was dragged off to a denunciation meeting. As his school authorities put it: ‘we beat one to scare the many’.
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By the end of 1952 virtually every student or teacher was a loyal servant of the state. The food they received depended on their performance. And like all other government employees, they were required to accept any form of employment to which the party directed them. The state needed millions of young people to help build up the border areas such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Manchuria. It also wanted experts to provide technological advice in the countryside. Thought reform thoroughly crushed any resistance to assignment to a job in a distant and often unappealing place. Socialism lauded the collective, meaning that the government’s needs now took precedence over individual preference. On the other hand, young assistants with more reliable political qualifications replaced foreign-trained professors in the cities. Others with degrees from some of the world’s best universities were sent to such posts as assistant clerk in a village library or cashier in a district bank. ‘None of them received assignments of any real dignity or service,’ to quote Robert Loh.
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