The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (40 page)

Mao left, promising to give serious thought to their opinions. But he warned them that he would have to consider carefully their best interests before deciding to accelerate the pace of nationalisation. A few weeks after the meeting, the authorities announced that the transformation to socialism was to be accomplished not in six years, as most had anticipated, but in a mere six days. Shock teams were sent around the city to nationalise all industry, forcing businessmen to give up their enterprises and become members of the Federation of Industry and Commerce. Most did so out of fear, but they had to demonstrate wild enthusiasm in public. The reason for this was simple. Every entrepreneur knew that, once his property had been handed over to the state, his only means of livelihood would depend on the whim of the party. And many remembered the brutality of the campaign against them in 1952. This time an impression of joy was created: ‘When we found that in the campaign we were to be heroes instead of victims, we were almost dizzy with relief. Thus some of our joy was genuine, although none of it came from “entering socialism” as the propaganda claimed.’
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A parade was staged, with banners, bands, drums, gongs, firecrackers and large crowds. ‘Encouragement stations’ were placed along the route of the march. As the entrepreneurs approached the Sino-Soviet Friendship Hall, the crowd started shouting slogans such as ‘Salute the Patriotic National Capitalists Who are Marching Bravely towards Socialism’ or ‘Welcome our National Capitalist Friends to Join our Socialist Family’. Young girls gave them flowers and refreshments. The entrepreneurs carried stacks of large red envelopes which contained their formal applications for full nationalisation. After they had presented these to Chen Yi, the mayor of Shanghai, delegations representing workers, peasants and students burst into the hall to congratulate the business community.

The vast fortunes that some families had accumulated over many generations vanished overnight. Small shopowners also lost everything, as they were organised into co-operatives. Throughout the country more than 800,000 owners of private enterprises, big or small, were voluntarily stripped of their property rights. All commerce and industry became functions of the state.

The government expropriated private enterprise under a so-called ‘redemption-purchase policy’, although the policy entailed neither purchase nor redemption. Only token compensation was offered, often about one-fifth of the real value of each property. Each owner was also to be credited 5 per cent per year of the assessed value of the property, although this interest would be paid for seven years only. Even this promise would not last.

Small shopowners were ruined. Many used their business premises as living quarters for themselves and their families, paying for their living expenses out of the till. But now their personal possessions were taken away by the state, sometimes down to their pots and pans and even the baby’s crib. The compensation was barely sufficient to pay for cigarettes. Those who were lucky were allowed to continue running their shops as state employees at 20 yuan a month. But many now faced starvation. If they tried to find a job elsewhere, they discovered that they were classified as capitalists, meaning that they were denied the benefits that gave ordinary workers some semblance of security. As in 1952, a wave of suicides followed, although this time the authorities intervened quickly. Many younger entrepreneurs were taken from their families and sent to the border wastelands to work on socialist projects. Older men received some financial assistance from a mutual fund, set up with the money from the more solvent firms. Many of the wealthier businessmen were paid in government bonds. They were non-negotiable, and when they became due, the principal and accrued interest were reinvested in more bonds.

But in most cases the owners of big industries were not concerned with compensation. They wanted a job from the state. Many were relatively well off, and some even retained their titles as managers or department heads. A select few fared particularly well, having courted the leadership and taken the lead in offering their holdings to the state. They were appointed to prestigious committees, sometimes even sent to serve in the capital. One such was Rong Yiren, who had publicly donated his whole enterprise to the state. Soon Mao promoted him to become deputy mayor of Shanghai. Although the regime would catch up with most of them during the Cultural Revolution, Rong survived the tumult thanks to the protection of Zhou Enlai, living in Zhongnanhai as an adviser to the textile ministry.
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12

The Gulag

The lives of millions were swallowed up by a vast array of prison camps scattered across the length and breadth of the country. This network is sometimes referred to as the
laogai
, an abbreviation for
laodong gaizao
, or ‘reform through labour’. Its origins date back to the early days of the communist party, when prisoners were put to work to help meet the cost of their incarceration. Like everyone else, they were also supposed to reform themselves through endless study sessions and indoctrination meetings.

Already during the civil war, as huge stretches of the countryside were liberated, there were too few prisons to keep up with a swelling number of convicts. Temples, guilds, schools and factories were requisitioned. Chain gangs were used on public works, from road maintenance to dyke construction. Large labour camps, many of them holding thousands of inmates, sprang up across the countryside. In the areas of Shandong controlled by the communist party, almost every district boasted a camp, each holding up to 3,000 inhabitants. The prisoners were made to reclaim wasteland, grow wheat, extract minerals or make bricks. Many did not have shoes, even in the depth of winter, while hunger was pervasive. Those who tilled the fields supplemented their diet with weeds like dandelions, while a few lucky ones caught frogs.
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The fall of the cities did nothing to alleviate the pressure. The nationalists had a sophisticated network of prisons, many built and run according to the highest standards current in Europe and the United States at the time. But they never had more than 90,000 convicts, as they used fines, short sentences, general amnesties, remission of sentence and parole to keep people out of gaol. An extra 120 penitentiaries formerly run by the nationalists barely dented the shortfall in prison capacity.
2

Unlike its predecessors, the new regime did not hesitate to imprison people for a very long time, often for the slightest misdemeanour. Su Wencheng was sentenced to fifteen years in Beijing for robbing graves in December 1949. Others in the capital faced a spell of five to ten years for stealing a pair of trousers or a bicycle. These were common criminals, but there was a growing list of political crimes which seemed to warrant a term of ten years or more. The catch-all term of ‘counter-revolutionary’ was common, covering just about anything from listening to foreign radio to slacking at work, but other charges included having worked for military organisations or civil organisations in the previous regime and betraying the nation or the party.
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The prison population reached crisis point soon after the Great Terror was launched in October 1950. Within half a year well over a million people were languishing in gaol. A whole new incarceration system had to be devised. In Hubei, where tens of thousands were held, progressively larger camps appeared at every level of the administrative hierarchy, stretching from 150 inmates in each county and 500 in each large city to a thousand for entire regions, while at the top the provincial security bureau ‘administers ten labour camps for more than 10,000 inmates’. In Guangxi, where a ferocious campaign unfolded, more than 80,000 people were behind bars. So crowded was the county gaol in Xingye that the standard width of an inmate’s sleeping space was no more than 20 centimetres. In Pingnan they were not allowed to wash more than once a week, despite soaring temperatures and high humidity. The stench was repulsive. Nine out of ten inmates suffered from skin disease. Over a hundred died each month.
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So dire were the facilities in some improvised gaols in Sichuan that prisoners excreted in their trousers, their bottoms covered in maggots. In the county prison in Chongqing, a fifth of the inmates died within half a year. Most of the others were sick. The head of the Public Security Bureau refused to improve the situation. His motto was that ‘it is better for prisoners to die than for them to flee’. All over south-west China thousands of prisoners were buried every month. In the north, which had been under communist control for much longer, the situation was no better. In Cangxian county, Hebei, a third of all inmates were sick, leading to dozens of deaths. Scabies, lice and cockroaches were common. Here too the air was so rank that guards refused to approach the prisoners. Quentin Huang, a bishop who refused to relinquish his faith, was locked up in a wooden cage with eighteen other convicts. It had bars about 10 centimetres in diameter each and about 5 centimetres apart. The door was locked and chained. The cage was about 2 by 2.5 metres in dimension, situated at the dark, damp end of a long room. The other end of the room was used as quarters for the guards who watched the prisoners. ‘Neglect and delay, particularly with diarrhoea cases, soon turned a part of the wooden cage into a natural latrine, filthy and foul smelling with lice, fleas, and hungry rats, both big and small, running hither and thither even in the daytime, from the farther corners of the muddy walls just next to the wooden cage.’
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In the spring of 1951 the leadership decided to alleviate the pressure by putting more prisoners to work, using them to build roads, dig reservoirs or bring fallow land under cultivation. Mao even opined that if the executions stopped at two per thousand and everyone above that quota were sentenced to a life of hard labour, this would amount to a formidable workforce. ‘But of course it is troublesome to carry out these ideas in practice, it is not quite as straightforward as killing the lot,’ he mused. Nonetheless, taking the Soviet Union as his inspiration, he proposed a quota of 0.5 per thousand, or 300,000 prisoners.
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Luo Ruiqing, as head of public security, was tasked with the logistics of the operation. It soon ran into difficulties. Transporting a third of a million people all over the country was no small feat, even for a one-party state. And once they arrived at their respective destinations, often by lorry, sometimes by train, the inmates had to be housed, fed and clothed. Of the 60,000 victims earmarked for hard labour in the ore, coal and tin mines spread across the mountains in Yunnan, barely 3,000 could be accommodated. Plans to deploy a docile labour force of 200,000 on irrigation projects were even more challenging, as very few inmates could be effectively supervised in the open.
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But the new regime was not one to abandon a plan that looked good on paper merely because it ran into difficulties on the ground, so a constellation of labour camps, stretching across the country’s most inhospitable border regions, began taking shape. In Manchuria there existed a vast, swampy expanse infected with mosquitoes called the Great Northern Wilderness. Further west, in Qinghai, labour camps appeared in a bleak expanse pockmarked by salt marshes and surrounded by arid mountains. In the south there was a string of salt, tin and uranium mines, while brick factories, state farms and irrigation projects appeared almost everywhere. By the end of 1951 more than 670,000 people had been sent to these camps (by now the total prison population had doubled to 2 million). Many inmates were exhausted even before they arrived. Hard labour finished off many of them. In a salt mine in Hebei, prisoners slept on rough mats strewn directly on a humid floor. There was not even enough water to drink, let alone food, and a hundred died each month, many from dysentery. Elsewhere prisoners died of cold. In Sichuan the inmates worked along the railway without any trousers in the middle of the winter. Fourteen from a unit of 300 froze to death. In Yan’an, the erstwhile red capital, close to 200 died of cold. In the tin mines of Lianxian, Guangdong, prisoners were so badly treated that one in three committed suicide or died of disease within a year. And despite all the work they were forced to perform, each prisoner still cost the state far more than the centrally allocated quota had anticipated. On top of this, more than 1.2 million inmates did not contribute to their own upkeep.
8

Over the following years the overall population in the gulag did not increase substantially, hovering around 2 million, although an ever greater proportion of prisoners was forced to work. For every man or woman who died of disease or maltreatment, another one entered a camp. By 1955 more than 1.3 million people were at work, contributing over 700 million yuan in industrial products as well as 350,000 tons of grain to the state. They came from all walks of life, as the gulag became a microcosm of the wider population outside the camps. On the lowest rung of the social hierarchy were poor farmers, sent to the gulag because they could not repay their loans to the state. At the top were more than 3,000 doctors, engineers and technical experts, rounded up in 1955 as part of the hunt for counter-revolutionary cliques. In between were priests, monks, teachers, students, journalists, entrepreneurs, clerks, pedlars, fishermen, musicians, bankers, prostitutes and soldiers.
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Nine out of ten were political prisoners. Many were not formally sentenced for several years after their arrest. The case of Duan Kewen, who had worked for the nationalists, took two years. He wore chains for five years, even as he worked in a brick factory. He was hardly unique. By 1953 roughly 300,000 new cases were brought every year, even though there were only 7,000 judges in the whole country. The backlog amounted to an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 cases. This did not include many farmers who were sent to prison without a trial at the village level. And when a court hearing came, the hastily convened People’s Tribunals dispensed rough justice. A powerful inspectorate, set up by the party, examined thousands of cases and concluded that only 90 per cent were ‘correct’. Tens of thousands of victims ended up in the gulag for no reason, even by the standards of the regime itself, as ‘innocent people are arrested, imprisoned or shot, families are broken up and lives are destroyed’. In some counties where random checks were carried out, for instance in Gansu and Ningxia provinces, as many as 28 per cent of inmates had been wrongly accused of a crime.
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