Mao's Great Famine (9 page)

Most villagers, having witnessed a series of anti-rightist campaigns since 1957, were too wily ever to object in public. Every survivor who was interviewed for this book told a similar story: ‘We knew about the situation, but no one dared to say anything. If you said anything, they would beat you up. What could we do?’
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Another explained: ‘Whatever the government said, we had to follow. If I said something wrong, if what I said was against the general line, then I would be labelled as a rightist. No one dared to say anything.’
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What happened in a village in Quxian county, Zhejiang, provides a good example: large cauldrons of gruel were set up in the fields, and nobody was allowed to leave, be they pregnant mothers who needed to feed their children or elderly people wishing to take a rest. People had to slog throughout the night, since cadres had blocked off all exits back to the village. Those who objected to close planting were beaten by party activists. One stubborn old man who somehow failed to show enough enthusiasm was yanked by his hair and pushed face down into the ditch. Then the villagers were ordered to pull out the seedlings and start all over again.
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Visits were carefully stage-managed. In Macheng, villagers were warned never to say a bad word about the Great Leap Forward in front of visitors. As provincial leader Wang Renzhong inspected the fields, he saw farmers tucking into mounds of rice, carefully laid out for his visit.
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In Xushui, Zhang Guozhong, a military man, ruthlessly ensured that the image presented to the outside world was flawless: undesirable elements disappeared into an elaborate labour-camp system, extending from the county down to every commune, brigade and production team. In order to ‘stimulate production’, laggards were paraded before being locked up, some 7,000 people being rounded up between 1958 and 1960.
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In Luoding, Guangdong, inspection committees visiting Liantan commune in late 1958 were welcomed by a posse of young girls, expensive perfumes, white towels and a lavish banquet with sixteen dishes. Dozens of farmers worked for days on end to carve a huge slogan praising the communes into the mountainside.
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Li Zhisui, who accompanied Mao on his visits, was told that farmers had been ordered to transplant rice plants along the Chairman’s route to give the impression of a bumper harvest. The doctor commented that ‘All of China was a stage, all the people performers in an extravaganza for Mao.’
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But in reality a dictatorship never has one dictator only, as many people become willing to scramble for power over the next person above them. The country was full of local hegemons, each trying to deceive the next one up into believing that their achievements were genuine.

Mao was delighted. As reports came in from all over the country about new records in cotton, rice, wheat or peanut production, he started wondering what to do with all the surplus food. On 4 August 1958 in Xushui, flanked by Zhang Guozhong, surrounded by journalists, plodding through the fields in straw hat and cotton shoes, he beamed: ‘How are you going to eat so much grain? What are you going to do with the surplus?’

‘We can exchange it for machinery,’ Zhang responded after a pause for thought.

‘But you are not the only one to have a surplus, others too have too much grain! Nobody will want your grain!’ Mao shot back with a benevolent smile.

‘We can make spirits out of taro,’ suggested another cadre.

‘But every county will make spirits! How many tonnes of spirits do we need?’ Mao mused. ‘With so much grain, in future you should plant less, work half time and spend the rest of your time on culture and leisurely pursuits, open schools and a university, don’t you think? . . . You should eat more. Even five meals a day is fine!’
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At long last, China had found a way out of grinding poverty, solving the problem of hunger and producing more food than the people could possibly eat. As reports came in from all over the country pointing at a bumper harvest twice the size of the previous year, other leaders joined in the chorus. Tan Zhenlin, in charge of agriculture, toured the provinces to galvanise the local leadership. He shared Mao’s vision of a communist cornucopia in which farmers dined on delicacies like swallows’ nests, wore silk, satin and fox furs, and lived in skyscrapers with piped water and television. Every county would have an airport.
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Tan even explained how China had managed to leave the Soviet Union in the dust: ‘Some comrades will wonder how we manage to be so fast, since the Soviet Union is still practising socialism instead of communism. The difference is that we have a “continuous revolution”. The Soviet Union doesn’t have one, or follows it loosely . . . Communisation
is
the communist revolution!’
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Chen Yi, on the other hand, opined that since enough grain could be stored over the next couple of years, farmers should then stop growing crops for two seasons and devote their time instead to building villas with all modern amenities.
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Local leaders were just as enthusiastic. In January 1959 the State Council had to put a stop to the deluge of people, letters and gifts sent by communes to Beijing to testify to new records set in agriculture. The Chairman was inundated.
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6

Let the Shelling Begin

The remains of Laika, the stray dog catapulted into orbit days before the celebration marking the October Revolution, were burned up as
Sputnik II
disintegrated on re-entering the atmosphere in April 1958. As the space coffin circled the earth, the world below it changed. Fired by the missile gap the Russians had exposed, President Eisenhower sent ballistic missiles to Great Britain, Italy and Turkey. Khrushchev responded with submarines carrying nuclear missiles. But, for his threat to be credible, a submarine base in the Pacific Ocean was needed, which in turn required a radio transmitter station. Moscow approached Beijing with a proposal to build long-wave radio stations on the Chinese coast, suggesting that they might serve a joint submarine fleet.

On 22 July Soviet ambassador Pavel Yudin sounded out the Chairman with a proposal. Mao flew into a rage. During a stormy meeting, he attacked the hapless ambassador, claiming, ‘You just don’t trust the Chinese, you only trust the Russians. Russians are superior beings, and the Chinese are inferior, careless people, that’s why you came up with this proposal. You want joint ownership, you want everything as joint ownership, our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture, education: how about it? Why don’t we hand over our thousands of kilometres of coastline to you, we will just maintain a guerrilla force. You have a few atomic bombs and now you want to control everything, you want to rent and lease. Why else would you come up with this proposal?’ Khrushchev, Mao continued, behaved towards China like a cat playing with a mouse.
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The outburst came like a bolt out of the blue to the Russians: seeing conspiracies everywhere, Mao was convinced that the proposal for a joint fleet was a manoeuvre by Khrushchev to renege on a promise made a year earlier to deliver an atom bomb, and no amount of explaining could allay Mao’s suspicions.
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On 31 July Khrushchev flew to Beijing to save the situation. But whereas lavish hospitality had welcomed Mao in Moscow seven months earlier, the Soviet leader was met with a cool reception at the airport. ‘No red carpet, no guards of honour, and no hugs,’ recalled interpreter Li Yueran, just a stony-faced team including Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
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Khrushchev was relegated to lodgings without air-conditioning up in the hills far out of Beijing. Moving his bed to the terrace to escape the stifling heat, that night he was devoured by swarms of mosquitoes.
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Immediately after Khrushchev’s arrival a long and humiliating meeting was held at Zhongnanhai. The Soviet leader was forced to explain Yudin’s démarche at great length, and took pains to defuse a visibly irritated Mao. Impatient, Mao at one point jumped out of his chair to wave a finger in Khrushchev’s face: ‘I asked you what a common fleet is, you still didn’t answer me!’

Khrushchev became flushed and strained to stay calm.
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‘Do you really think that we are red imperialists?’ he asked in exasperation, to which Mao retorted that ‘there was a man who went by the name of Stalin’ who had turned Xinjiang and Manchuria into semi-colonies. After more squabbling about real or perceived slights, the idea of a joint fleet was finally abandoned.
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More humiliation followed next day, as Mao, clad only in a bathrobe and slippers, received Khrushchev by the side of his swimming pool in Zhongnanhai. Mao realised that Khrushchev did not know how to swim, and put the Soviet leader on the defensive. After spluttering about with a bulky lifebelt in the shallow end, Khrushchev ended up crawling out of the pool and floundered on the edge, clumsily dangling his legs in the water while Mao swam back and forth, showing off different strokes to his guest before turning on to his back and floating comfortably in the water.
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All the while, interpreters scurried about at the side of the pool trying to catch the meaning of the Chairman’s political musings. Later Mao explained to his doctor that this had been his way of ‘sticking a needle up Khrushchev’s arse’.
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Mao had started a bidding war with Khrushchev in Moscow half a year earlier. Now, treading water as his host sat defeated by the side of the pool, the Chairman talked about the success of the Great Leap Forward. ‘We have so much rice that we no longer know what to do with it,’ he bragged, echoing what Liu Shaoqi had told Khrushchev a few days earlier at the airport when reviewing the country’s economy: ‘What we worry about now is not so much lack of food, but rather what to do with the grain surplus.’
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A baffled Khrushchev diplomatically replied that he was unable to help Mao with his predicament. ‘We all work hard yet never manage to build up a good reserve,’ Khrushchev thought. ‘China is hungry but now he tells me there is too much rice!’
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Over the years Mao had taken the measure of Khrushchev. Now he bossed him around, dismissing the need for a submarine base and brushing aside a request for a radio station. The Soviet delegation went home empty-handed. But this was not the end of it, as Mao was determined to take the initiative in world affairs. A few weeks later, on 23 August, without advance warning to Moscow, Mao gave the order to start shelling the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait, controlled by Chiang Kai-shek, triggering an international crisis. The United States responded by reinforcing its naval units and arming a hundred jet fighters in Taiwan with air-to-air missiles. On 8 September Moscow was forced to take sides by throwing its weight behind Beijing, proclaiming that an attack on the People’s Republic of China would be considered an attack on the Soviet Union.
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Mao was jubilant. He had forced Khrushchev to extend the protective mantle of nuclear power to China while at the same time wrecking Moscow’s bid to reduce tensions with Washington. As he put it to his doctor, ‘The islands are two batons that keep Khrushchev and Eisenhower dancing, scurrying this way and that. Don’t you see how wonderful they are?’
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But the real reason for the bombing of the islands had nothing to do with international relations. Mao wanted to create a heightened sense of tension to promote collectivisation: ‘A tense situation helps to mobilise people, in particular those who are backward, those middle-of-the-roaders . . . The people’s communes should organise militias. Everyone in our country is a soldier.’
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The Taiwan Strait crisis provided the final rationale for the entire militarisation of the country. An East German studying in China at the time called it ‘Kasernenkommunismus’, or communism of the barracks, and it found its expression in the people’s communes.
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7

The People’s Communes

A day after the meeting with Khrushchev by the swimming pool, Li Zhisui was summoned by Mao. At three o’clock in the morning, the Chairman wanted an English lesson from the doctor. Later, over breakfast, a relaxed Mao handed him a report about the creation of a people’s commune in his model province, Henan. ‘This is an extraordinary event,’ Mao said excitedly about the fusion of smaller agricultural co-operatives into a giant collective. ‘This term “people’s commune” is great.’
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Could this be the bridge to communism that Stalin had never found?

Soon after the water-conservancy campaign had kicked off in the autumn of 1957, collective farms had started to merge into much larger entities, in particular in regions where large inputs of manpower were required. One of the largest collectives appeared in Chayashan, Henan, where some 9,400 households were fused into a giant administrative unit. But the inspiration behind the people’s communes can be traced back to Xushui county.

Located a hundred kilometres south of Beijing in the dry and dusty countryside of North China, marked by harsh winters, spring floods and an alkaline soil that hardly yielded enough grain for villagers to survive on, Xushui, a small county of some 300,000 people, quickly came to the attention of the Chairman. Its local leader Zhang Guozhong approached the irrigation projects like a field campaign. Conscripting a workforce of 100,000 men, he divided farmers along military lines into battalions, companies and platoons. He cut off links with the villages and had the troops live in the open, sleeping in makeshift barracks and eating in collective canteens.