The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (36 page)

Despite popular resistance, expressed by slaughtering cattle, hiding or destroying assets and slacking at work, the speed with which villages were transformed into co-operatives was stunning. It was driven by political imperatives, as party officials of all levels were keen to take a lead, hoping to be rewarded by a good word from the Chairman. In Jilin province, for instance, fewer than 6 per cent of all farmers belonged to a co-operative in 1953. A year later a third had been enrolled, causing what one report referred to as ‘chaos’. Everywhere cadres forced farmers into co-operatives. In 1953 there were only about 100,000 of them. By 1955 more than 600,000 were spread across the country, locking in 40 per cent of all villagers.
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The most damaging change to the countryside was the introduction of a monopoly on grain by the end of 1953. The state decreed that cultivators must sell all surplus grain to the state at prices determined by the state and in co-operatives run by the state. This was the third stage of collectivisation.

The aim behind this momentous shift was to stabilise the price of grain across the country, eliminate speculation and guarantee the grain needed to feed the urban population and fuel industrial expansion. As famine spread in 1953, the state discovered that private merchants spiked the price of food. They hoarded rice and wheat in the hope of making a higher profit. It was a phenomenon common in all agrarian societies in times of crisis, but in this case the situation was made worse by the existence of co-operatives. Not only did farmers slaughter their cattle in defiance of collectivisation, but they also hid their grain. And when they went to market to sell their crop, they often preferred to turn to private merchants rather than to the state co-operatives charged with collecting the crop. The co-operatives adhered rigidly to a set of opening hours which took no account of farmers’ working schedules, whereas private shops welcomed customers at any time of day. The co-operatives themselves did such a poor job that many preferred to delegate the task to independent grain traders. Everywhere, it seemed to the leadership, capitalist practices were subverting the socialisation of the countryside.
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Private merchants, of course, were a convenient scapegoat for the famine. There was another, more pressing reason why the state introduced a monopoly on grain. The reality was that the economy was a disaster. Land reform had failed to usher the country into an era of prosperity. Trade was in dire straits. The state was running a huge deficit, with its expenditure twice as big as its income. When the leaders convened in July 1953 to scrutinise the finances, they were staring at a black hole of 2.4 billion yuan.
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One cause of the deficit was foreign trade. Since Beijing dramatically oriented its exports away from the West towards the Soviet Union, it had become dependent on Stalin to earn foreign currency. China tried relentlessly to sell more goods to its reluctant partner. By the admission of the leaders responsible for foreign trade, they constantly pestered and harassed their Soviet counterparts. But in 1953 the Soviet Union only took 81 per cent of a proposed list of items for export, falling far short of expectations.
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To add insult to injury, Stalin sharply reduced the amount of aid he was willing to commit to China’s first Five-Year Plan, due to begin in 1953. When Zhou Enlai met the Soviet boss in September 1952, he asked for a loan of 4 billion rubles. Stalin replied that the Soviet Union ‘will have to give something, although the exact amount must be calculated. We cannot give 4 billion.’ And Stalin made numerous demands in return, asking, for instance, for large amounts of natural rubber – ‘at least 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes each year’. When Zhou demurred, Stalin threatened to cut the number of lorries that China had requested. He wanted more rare-earth metals, including lead, tungsten, tin and antimony. And he insisted on foreign currency to cover the costs of the trade imbalance between China and the Soviet Union.
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This meeting was followed by endless others, as Li Fuchun, a bookish man with a self-effacing air who was in charge of the negotiations, spent ten months in Moscow bickering and wrangling for more concessions. Stalin died in March 1953, but he and his successors forced Beijing to accept deep cuts. The rate of growth that China wanted to pursue, Stalin said, was ‘rash’: he cut it from 20 per cent down to 15 per cent. He reduced the number of industrial complexes built with Soviet assistance from 150 to 91. He vetoed several projects related to military defence. As Li put it, ‘We just asked for everything we wanted, and we wanted too much, too fast.’ Mao and his colleagues had little choice but to accept a watered-down deal in June 1953.
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A few weeks later, Mao asked the Financial Committee to come up with ways of requisitioning more grain. Chen Yun, Bo Yibo and others had already proposed a state monopoly on grain in 1951, but abandoned it after local cadres warned that any attempt to curtail the freedom of farmers to sell their crop in local markets would provoke a backlash. But now the time seemed right. A few leaders still voiced reservations. Deng Zihui, the regional boss of south China who was now in charge of a powerful committee on agriculture, queried the wisdom of taking food without any exemption from those interior provinces where the soil was poor, saline or infertile. Even Chen Yun, one of the architects of the earlier plan, warned of rebellions. But he too sided with Mao.
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The grain monopoly was imposed in November 1953. The system worked as follows. The government estimated what the yield per hectare of any given field would be. This figure was often much higher than the actual yield, and it was sometimes raised again under pressure to produce more. The government also determined the quantity of grain that each person should eat. This was set at roughly 13 to 16 kilos per head each month – a little more than half the required amount of unhusked grain to provide 1,700 to 1,900 calories per day. It was a starvation diet imposed equally on all villagers. This amount, as well as the land tax and the seeds required for the next sowing, was deducted from the estimated yield. What remained was considered surplus. It had to be sold to the state at a price fixed by the state. Extra grain above the basic ration could be bought back from the state by the farmers – if they could afford it, and if there was any grain left after it had been used to feed the cities, fuel industrialisation and pay off foreign debts.

The leadership knew full well that taking control of the harvest was tantamount to declaring war on the countryside. It was so reminiscent of what the Japanese had done in north China during the Second World War that the party leaders agreed to avoid the term ‘procurement’. They used a euphemism instead, calling the monopoly a ‘unified sale and purchase system’ (
tonggou tongxiao
). Among themselves they talked of a ‘yellow bomb’, knowing that villagers would resist and fight the system. But they preferred it to the only other alternative they could envisage, namely a ‘black bomb’, as grain merchants would continue to exploit the market to their own advantage as long as no monopoly was imposed.
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The yellow bomb destroyed the very foundations of village life in China, turning a great proportion of the cultivators into bonded servants of the state. Everywhere there was resistance fuelled by rage against the party, most of it covert, but some of it public. Even some local leaders preferred to side with the villagers, whether out of strategic calculation or genuine concern over their welfare. In parts of Guangdong up to a third of the cadres helped farmers to hide their grain. Public village meetings were held in Zijin to devise ways of holding back some of the food from the grain inspectors. Open resistance was common. In Zhongshan county, not far from Macau, eighteen villages protested for four consecutive days against the grain monopoly. Arson and murder were rife.
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In Jiangxi province some villagers invited themselves into the homes of the cadres, searched the premises and then heartily tucked into the food, leaving behind a token payment in exchange for the meal: ‘In the past, when you were working, you came to my house for a meal and you gave me 0.10 yuan, so now I too give you 0.10 yuan.’ Others took seats and refused to budge, occupying the homes of party officials they disliked. Leaflets appeared seemingly out of nowhere, calling on people to resist state procurements. Bemused grain inspectors came upon teams of children roaming the countryside, loudly cursing Chairman Mao and the government.
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Harking back to a form of resistance that had appeared in 1950, groups of villagers blocked cargo boats in Hubei, adamant that grain should be used to feed the people who had actually produced it. In one village the women took a lead, as a hundred of them blocked access to the local granary. Elsewhere, 300 women armed with sticks and stones cut off access to the cargo boats. A few hurled pots filled with urine towards the agents of the state. In Sichuan, banners and tracts denouncing grain requisitions were unfurled. ‘Down with Mao Zedong!’ or ‘Resolutely Eliminate the People’s Liberation Army’ appeared by roadsides in Hanyuan and Xichang, while elsewhere popular ditties mocked the party.
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The state responded with more violence. As the militia dragged away the grain, some of the poor would break down in tears, crying for fear of hunger. Those who resisted, or failed to meet their quota, were beaten. It was ‘common’, the state Bureau for Grain reported from Guangdong, for recalcitrant elements to be stripped and left standing in the cold for hours on end. All over the province thousands of people were locked up for refusing to sell their grain. Up in the north, in Baoding, Hebei, there were scenes of chaos when the procurement teams entered the village. People hid in the toilets, others pretended to be sick, a few coming out to hurl abuse at the cadres, only to be beaten, some of the elderly women wailing in despair and fear. In the Handan region, cadres were blunt: ‘if you don’t report your excess grain, we will stop sales [of edible oil, salt and other basic items] for ten days’. In twenty-four villages in Yuanshi county, just south of Shijiazhuang, villagers were spat upon, pushed around, tied up and beaten in order to force them to produce the grain. A subsequent investigation revealed that in Yuanshi, violence was used in over half of all the 208 villages. The cadres used torture techniques learned during earlier campaigns. A few openly dismissed the villagers as mere ‘slaves’. Mock executions were held, while one pregnant woman was beaten unconscious. Even children were forced to stand upright for hours on end, a form of punishment that was apparently ‘very common’. Suicides were described as ‘ceaseless’.
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Sometimes pitched battles occurred between the people and the security forces. Luo Ruiqing, the head of security, counted dozens of cases of unrest and open rebellion in the countryside. In Zhongshan county, Guangdong, thousands of villagers rebelled in early 1955 and demanded an end to the grain monopoly. Four companies of public security forces were sent in to quell the unrest. People were killed on both sides of a bloody battle that lasted several days. In the end 300 farmers were dragged away to prison. In Luding, Sichuan, a sacred place in revolutionary mythology where the communists had battled the nationalists over the only suspension bridge spanning the torrential Dadu River in 1935, six riots were reported in a single month. In Miyi, also in Sichuan, people from ten villages seized weapons from the militia and converged on the party headquarters. Until the archives fully open, there is no way of knowing how many people were crushed by the state machinery during these uneven confrontations.
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On a few occasions the state had to give in. In parts of Gansu dominated by the Tibetans – Xiahe, Zhuoni and other counties – procurements came to a complete halt after several regional leaders were shot dead in an ambush. The region was rife with rumours of rebellion. ‘Better rebel than wait for death through starvation’ was one slogan that made the rounds. The party was compelled to fall back, ordering that a steady supply of grain be guaranteed to Tibetans throughout the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan.
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But outside politically sensitive areas the pressure was relentless. Rather predictably, even the basic survival ration that the system was supposed to leave untouched sometimes vanished, leaving villagers with nothing to eat. In Qingyuan, Guangdong, all but two members of an entire co-operative were forced to sell all their food. Sometimes party secretaries took a lead in allowing the state to seize every last kernel of grain. Qiu Sen, a member of a public security committee, sold almost 500 kilos, leaving him and his family of five a mere 110 kilos, barely enough to feed them for two months. And as the situation slipped out of control, some local authorities started reducing the amount of grain that could be sold back to the villagers. They often discriminated against the black classes, those outcasts labelled during land reform as ‘landlords’, ‘rich farmers’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In Yangjiang nobody classified as a landlord was sold any grain at all, whether they had enough to eat or not (they often did not, because their land had been redistributed and their assets confiscated). In Deqing even farmers classified as ‘middle peasants’ were barred from buying grain, regardless of their actual circumstances. In Hainan grain was sold only if a village had suffered from ‘shortages’ for a period of at least three months. In Fengcheng, Jiangxi province, cadres pledged to sell grain only to those households who fulfilled their procurement quota.
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It was not sufficient to collect the grain. It had to be sieved, winnowed, cleaned, milled, stored, transported and sold. Common enemies were birds, rats, weevil or mildew, which had to be kept at bay. Grain had to be dry or it would rot. The most simple containers were wicker baskets, and they were made in a great variety of shapes and sizes. Earthenware jars were used for hulled grain. Granaries also existed, although before liberation most of the grain was consumed where it was produced, meaning that few large storage facilities were needed. The grain could be stored in round bins built of straw and clay, often on a cement or sandrock floor to keep out rodents and ground moisture. More common were burlap sacks, stacked up in a granary or in a simple tarpaulin shed. In Shaanxi caves were sometimes used, while on the loess plateau in the north the grain was sunk into pits lined with wooden boards, dug up to 12 metres deep with a floor of tamped earth. Whatever means had been devised to store the crop, there was one constant: people looked after it because their livelihoods depended on it.
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