The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (41 page)

Their experiences varied enormously, if only because the sprawling gulag itself was so diverse, but by all accounts the inmates lived in fear of violence. Next to the wooden cage used to lock up Quentin Huang was a pile of ropes, shackles and handcuffs. Some victims spent years in chains, for instance Duan Kewen and Harriet Mills. Many tightening devices were also very heavy, digging into the skin and lacerating the flesh. Beatings were common, administered with bamboo sticks, leather belts, heavy clubs or bare knuckles. Sleep deprivation was widely used. Other forms of torture were more ingenious, and came with poetic titles drawn from traditional literature. ‘Dipping the Duckling into the Water’ meant suspending a victim upside down with bound hands. ‘Sitting on the Tiger Bench’ consisted of fastening somebody’s knees to a small iron bench with his hands cuffed behind the back. Bricks were inserted under the tied legs, causing them to bend unnaturally, eventually breaking at the knees. There was an extensive repertoire of torture methods, as ever more ingenious ways of degrading other human beings were developed. In Beijing some victims had their feet shackled to the window until they fainted. Salt was rubbed into their wounds. Some had to squat on the bucket used for excrement and hold a spittoon for hours without moving. Others were sodomised. In the south the guards sometimes built crude electric machines with a battery in a wooden box and a wheel on the outside. Two cords were attached to the victim’s hands or other body parts and then the wheel was turned to generate an electric shock.
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The list could go on. But by all accounts the most dreaded aspect of incarceration was not the frequent beatings, the hard labour or even the grinding hunger. It was thought reform, referred to by one victim as a ‘carefully cultivated Auschwitz of the mind’. As Robert Ford, an English radio operator, put it after a four-year spell in prison, ‘When you’re being beaten up, you can turn into yourself and find a corner of your mind in which to fight the pain. But when you’re being spiritually tortured by thought reform, there’s nowhere you can go. It affects you at the most profound, deepest levels and attacks your very identity.’ The self-criticism and indoctrination meetings lasted for hours on end, day in, day out, year after year. And unlike those on the outside, once the group discussions were over, the others were still in the same cell. They were encouraged to examine, question and denounce each other. Sometimes they had to take part in brutal struggle meetings, proving on whose side they stood by beating a suspect. ‘By the time you got through such a meeting you would, if you were a conscientious person at all, suffer terribly mentally and groan for days. Silence and distress were the outcome.’ Every bit of human dignity was stripped away as victims tried to survive by killing their former selves. Wang Tsunming, a nationalist officer captured in 1949, came to the conclusion that thought reform was nothing less than the ‘physical and mental liquidation of oneself by oneself’. Those who resisted the process committed suicide. Those who survived it renounced being themselves.
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While the total population in the gulag stood at roughly 2 million in the early years of the regime, it ballooned in 1955. That year another purge of counter-revolutionaries was launched, reaching far beyond the Hu Feng case. More than 770,000 people found themselves under arrest. It was more than the existing labour camps could bear. A whole new dimension was added to the world of incarceration, swallowing up 300,000 new inmates. It was called ‘re-education through labour’, or
laojiao
. In contrast to ‘reform through labour’, or
laogai
, it dispensed with judicial procedures altogether, holding any undesirable element indefinitely – until deemed fully ‘re-educated’. These camps were organised not by the Ministry of Public Security, but by the police and even the local militia. This shadow world formally received the seal of approval in January 1956 and was designed for those who did not qualify for a term of hard labour yet were not deemed worthy of liberty either. People could now be arrested and disappear without any form of trial. Its use would expand dramatically after August 1957.
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Not every suspect was sent to the gulag. One response to prison congestion was to place convicts under the ‘supervision of the masses’ (
guanzhi
). This meant being at the beck and call of local cadres, who controlled every aspect of the lives of these victims. They served as scapegoats and were paraded through the villages during every major campaign, in some cases as many as two or three hundred times even before the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. They were forced to carry out the most demeaning jobs, from carrying manure to working on public roads. They were fed scraps of food or mere leftovers.

The numbers were substantial. By 1952, in parts of Sichuan, over 3 per cent of the population ended up under some form of judicial control. This was the case, for instance, for several villages in Qingshen county. The victims included anyone considered to be a social misfit, from opium smokers and petty thieves to mere vagrants passing through. In Shandong up to 1.4 per cent of villagers were placed under supervision, the majority without any form of approval by the Public Security Bureau. In Changwei county, supervision was used ‘randomly and chaotically’. The local militia locked up anybody deemed to be troublesome. One example was a man who made the mistake of talking back to a cadre.

Those caught up in the punitive wheels of the system were routinely tortured. Some were forced to kneel on broken stones, others had to bend forward in the so-called aeroplane position. A few had to go through mock executions. In Yidu entire families were put under surveillance; some of their daughters were raped. Extortion was rife. ‘Similar examples are too numerous to be enumerated,’ concluded the authors of an investigative report. Luo Ruiqing himself wrote of the pain and humiliation with which the system was shot through. In You county, he stressed, every breach of discipline was met with punishment, whether speaking at work or being absent from work for more than an hour. Some were beaten, others were stripped of their trousers, a few were given
yin
and
yang
haircuts, as one half of the head was shaved.
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In the cities too, people could be placed under public supervision, although this was relatively rare. In one case a graduate of Stanford University who worked as dean of a law college in Shanghai was picked up one morning during the Great Terror of 1951. The only charges brought against him were that he was a ‘lackey of the rich and an oppressor of the poor’ and that he had a brother in the Taiwanese government. For this he was sentenced to be kept under surveillance for three years.

He was made into a janitor at the trade association he had previously headed. He was paid 18 yuan a month and could live only by selling his household furnishings. His employers addressed him only to give him orders and wrote weekly reports on his behavior. He himself had to go once a week to the police with a written expression of his gratitude to the party for the leniency of the people’s justice; if his gratitude was not expressed in terms sufficiently abject, he was made to rewrite his paper until it was found acceptable. No one else dared speak to him, let alone try to help or comfort him.

After sixteen months he threw himself into a river.
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How many found themselves in a similar situation? Luo Ruiqing estimated that some 740,000 people were under public supervision in 1953, but from his desk in Beijing he could barely capture the extent to which people were detained locally without ever being reported to the higher authorities. A glimpse of this underground world comes from an investigation report on Sichuan filed in 1952. It noted that in four villages in Xinjin county ninety-six people were formally placed under supervision, but a further 279 found themselves in the same type of bonded labour without any form of judicial process. Nobody knows how many other people across the country were detained by local cadres, but the system must have added at least another 1 to 2 million to the captive population.
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With collectivisation in the countryside, the difference between a prisoner sent to a labour camp, a convict placed under supervision and a free farmer tilling his own plot became less and less obvious. This was particularly true with conscripted labour. Right from the start the regime had little hesitation in rounding up villagers to work on large projects carried out for the greater good. And from the beginning this spelt misery for those unfortunate enough to be drafted. In Suqian county in 1950 dozens of ordinary people died of cold, hunger and exhaustion, forced to work outside in subzero temperatures clothed in rags. Hunger was widespread, as they were fed mere scraps.
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These were not the teething pains of a new regime unaccustomed to organising corvée labour. The longer in power, the bigger the vision, as massive projects spread hunger and misery to millions of conscripted labourers. One of the biggest plans was to tame the Huai River, which flowed through the northern plain from south Henan towards north Jiangsu, where it joined the Yangzi River. It was notoriously vulnerable to flooding. By the winter of 1949, hundreds of thousands of paupers were sent to work along the Huai River. Instead of draining the waterlogged areas to make sure that the flow of the river could scour away its load of silt, they were compelled to build dykes and embankments. The plan had been conceived by party officials who had never even set foot in the area. When the snow melted the following spring, the river flooded some 130,000 hectares in the region around Suxian county alone, creating a lot of misery.
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After the flooding had been blamed on nature, Mao announced a programme to ‘Harness the Huai River’ with dams on the upper reaches and upstream reservoirs for storing floodwater. The project would last several decades. People were drafted by the hundreds of thousands, toiling in the icy water bare-legged, or lugging wet sand and earth in baskets suspended on shoulder-poles. They were housed far away from their homes, in tiny sheds built of bamboo, reed or corn stalks. Many had to travel for days to reach the river, carrying with them their own tools, clothes, stoves, quilts and mats. In 1951 the alarm was raised, as local cadres conscripted neighbouring farmers without any regard for agricultural production. When rain followed snow, week after week, food reserves quickly ran out, pushing many of the villages along the Huai River into famine.
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By 1953 the situation was even worse. Few farmers were given adequate food. Many survived on a watery concoction dished out three times a day. Some were fed nothing but sorghum, a monotonous diet that caused excruciating constipation, so much so that ‘blood is everywhere in the toilets’. In Suxian county some young workers lay prostrate on the ground, crying with hunger, while others fought each other for an extra portion. Several wrote letters to their families pleading for help: ‘Think of a way to come and rescue a crowd of hungry ghosts!’ Some hanged themselves in despair. Discipline was relentless, all the more since many of the conscripted villagers were outcasts, classified as family members of ‘landlords’, ‘rich farmers’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘criminals’. Some cadres pinned red and white strips on the workers, distinguishing ‘glorious’ from ‘shameless’ ones. Those who spent more than three minutes in the toilet were punished. Tai Shuyi, a ruthless leader, forced his team to work throughout the night on several occasions. Within three days, over a hundred people were spitting blood. Accidents were common all along the river, as dykes subsided, structures collapsed and dynamite was exploded without proper control, killing hundreds. Tens of thousands were seriously ill but received no medical treatment. Those who could tried to escape. In some places, for instance the reservoir at Nanwan in Henan province, 3,000 of a total labour force of 10,000 managed to abscond.
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The situation was no better elsewhere. In Hubei, the villagers rounded up to work on a dam were not even provided with makeshift huts. They slept outside in the bitterly cold winter. One in twenty became severely ill, some dying as cadres just stood by and seemed ‘not to care’. Up further north in Zhouzhi county, a region of Shaanxi covered in mountain forests, a massive water-conservancy project compelled close to a million people to work for the state in 1953. Poverty was everywhere, forcing some families to give away their children as ‘the majority of workers lack food’. It was a taste of the future. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, villagers would be herded into giant People’s Communes where food was distributed according to merit. Hundreds of millions would be forced to work on giant water-conservancy projects far from home, as the country became one enormous labour camp.
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The boundaries between the free and the unfree were also porous in the most remote border region of the country, namely the north-west. In 1949, as Chapter 3 explained, hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers, petty thieves, beggars, vagrants and prostitutes were sent to help develop and colonise the Muslim belt which ran through Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai and Xinjiang. The trend continued unabated in the following years, as batch after batch of migrants was sent from the interior provinces, often alongside convoys of political prisoners. Migration was supposed to be voluntary, but as with everything else in the People’s Republic, quotas had to be met. All too often tales of piped water, electricity and tables laden with fresh fruit enticed credulous people seeking a better life. The reality was a far cry from the propaganda. After a long train journey followed by several days cramped in the back of a lorry, they were confronted with misery. The first contingents of settlers had to dig holes in the ground and sleep on rough mats on the floor, sheltered from the sand storms by a sheet of tarpaulin. Work consisted of levelling dunes, cutting shrubbery, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. Many escaped and returned home. As rumours spread about the dire conditions in the north-west, the people most at risk of relocation – the poor, the unemployed and the politically undesirable – tried to avoid face-to-face encounters with the cadres in charge of recruitment. In Beijing they placed children at key intersections to warn them of their arrival. Those who genuinely volunteered or could not avoid relocation found themselves in holding centres without beds, sleeping on straw laid over a moist earthen floor. Some cried themselves to sleep, others absconded in the dead of night.
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