Mao: The Unknown Story

In contrast, spending on education, culture and health combined was a miserable 8.2 percent, and there was no private sector to fall back on when the state failed to provide. Education and health care were never free, except in the case of epidemics, and often not available, for either the peasants or the urban underclass. In order to save money on health, the regime resorted to schemes like hygiene drives, which called for killing not only flies and rats, but in some areas also cats and dogs, although, curiously, it never extended to cleaning up China’s stinking, and pestiferous, toilets, which survived uncleansed throughout Mao’s reign.

The Chinese people were told, vaguely but deliberately, that equipment from the USSR used in China’s industrialization was “Soviet aid,” implying that the “aid” was a gift. But it was not. Everything had to be paid for — and that meant mainly with food, a fact that was strictly concealed from the Chinese people, and still largely is. China in those days had little else to sell. Trade with Russia, Chou told a small circle, “boils down to us selling agricultural products to buy machines.” Throughout the 1950s, “the main exports were rice, soybeans, vegetable oil, pigs’ bristles, sausage skins, raw silk, pork, cashmere, tea and eggs,” according to today’s official statistics. In this period Mao told the Indonesian President Sukarno, almost flippantly: “Frankly speaking, we haven’t got a lot of things [for export] apart from some apples, peanuts, pig bristles, soybeans.”

What China was exporting to Russia, and its satellites, consisted overwhelmingly of items that were basic essentials for its own people, and included all the main products on which China’s own population depended for protein: soybeans, vegetable oil, eggs and pork, which were always in extremely short supply. With only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, and 22 percent of its population, land was too precious to raise livestock in most places, so most Chinese had no dairy products and very little meat. Even grain, the staple, was on Mao’s export list, while China’s grain production was woefully inadequate, and the country had traditionally been a large importer of grain.

Mao was ready to deprive his people of food so that he could export it. One instruction to the Foreign Trade Ministry in October 1953 read:

Regarding commodities that are crucial to the survival of the nation (e.g., grain, soybeans and vegetable oil), it is true we need to supply the Chinese population, but we cannot only stress this … We must think of every way to squeeze them out for export [our italics] … As for commodities (such as meats, peanuts) that are less essential to the survival of the population, we have all the more reason to cut down on consumption inside China, to satisfy the need for export.

Another order in July 1954 read:

For commodities like meats, the internal market should be reduced and shrunk to guarantee exports. Other commodities like fruits, teas … should be exported as much as possible, and should only supply the internal market if there is anything left … [our italics]

The main impact fell on the peasants. Policy was to guarantee basic food to the urban population, with strict rationing, and leave the peasants to starve when the inevitable food shortages struck. Anyone registered as a peasant at the time Mao took power was forbidden to move into urban areas or to change their status. Peasants were not even allowed to move to another village except with special permission (e.g., if they got married). Otherwise, they were nailed to their village for life. And so were their children and grandchildren. This total immobility was something new in China. Traditionally, peasants had always been able to move geographically as well as socially. They had been able to aspire to fame and fortune — as Mao had done. If there was a famine, they had been able to flee into towns or other regions and at least try their luck. Now, even at the best of times, they could never hope to improve their lot, except when the government enrolled them into the army, or into a factory. And when disaster struck, they would starve or die in their villages.

Once, as he was promising to send East Germany more soybeans, Chou En-lai told his German interlocutors: “If people starve here it will be in the countryside not in the cities, the way it is with you.” In other words: our starving won’t be seen.

The peasants had to produce the food for export with virtually no help from the state, a fact confirmed to the rubber-stamp Supreme Council on 27 February 1957 by Premier Chou when he said bluntly: “Nothing to agriculture.” For raising output, Mao’s agriculture chief spelled out to his staff, “we depend on the peasants” two shoulders and one bottom”—i.e., manual labor and excrement used as manure.