Mao: The Unknown Story

FROM AUTUMN 1953, nationwide requisitioning was imposed, in order to extract more food to pay for the Superpower Program. The system followed that of a labor camp: leave the population just enough to keep them alive, and take all the rest. The regime decided that what constituted subsistence was an amount of food equivalent to 200 kg of processed grain per year, and this was called “basic food.”

But this figure was rarely achieved under Mao. In 1976, the year he died, after twenty-seven years in power, the average figure nationwide was only 190 kg. As city-dwellers got more, the average peasant’s consumption was considerably lower than 190 kg.

Mao wanted the peasants to have far less than this. They “only need 140 kg of grain, and some only need 110,” he declared. This latter figure was barely half the amount needed for mere subsistence. Even though Mao’s chosen minimum was not enforced at this stage, the results of his “squeeze-all” approach were painfully spelled out by some peasants to a sympathetic official within a year of the introduction of requisitioning. “Not a family has enough to eat.” “I worked for a year, and in the end I have to starve for a few months … My neighbors are the same.” “The harvest isn’t bad, but what’s the use? No matter how much we get in we don’t have enough to eat anyway …” As for the “basic food,” “no one has had that much.” In theory, anyone starving was supposed to be able to buy some food back, but the amounts were never adequate, and Mao was constantly berating officials that “Too much grain is sold back!” and urging them to slash the amount “enormously.”

Mao’s answer to the peasants’ plight was pitiless. They should eat sweet potato leaves, which were traditionally used only to feed pigs. “Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel,” he instructed. “The State should try its hardest … to prevent peasants eating too much.”

One of Mao’s economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, later acknowledged that under the requisitioning policy, “Most of the food the peasants produced was taken away.” And “force,” he said, was commonplace; people were “driven to death.” This violence was specifically endorsed by Mao, who discussed the consequences of the requisitioning with its architect, Chen Yun, on 1 October 1953. Next day, Mao told the Politburo that they were “at war” with the whole population: “This is a war on food producers — as well as on food consumers,” meaning the urban population who were now subjected to unprecedentedly low rationing. To justify treating peasants as enemies, Mao’s fatuous rationale was that “Marx and Engels never said peasants were all good.” When, days later, Chen Yun conveyed Mao’s instructions to provincial leaders in charge of extracting food, he told them they must be prepared for deaths and riots in 100,000 villages — one-tenth of all the villages in China. But this would not jeopardize Communist rule, he assured them, making a comparison with Manchukuo, where the occupying Japanese had requisitioned large amounts of grain. “Manchukuo,” he said, “would not have fallen if the Soviet Red Army had not come.” In other words, brute force à la japonaise would guarantee that peasants could not endanger the regime, no matter how hard it was squeezing them.

BY EARLY 1955, requisitioning had brought utter misery. Numerous reports reached Mao about peasants having to eat tree bark, and abandoning their babies because they had no food. Mao had installed many channels for gathering feedback at the grassroots, as he needed to keep his ear to the ground to maintain control. One channel was his guards. When they went home for visits that year, he asked them to report back about their villages. The picture they painted was bleak. One wrote that 50 percent of households in his village were short of food, and had had to eat tree leaves that spring. Another reported that people were having to depend on wild herbs for food, and were dying of starvation.

From other channels Mao learned that people were saying things like “What’s so good about socialism? Even now when we’ve just begun we are not allowed cooking oil”; and “The Communist Party is driving people to death!” A then unknown official in Guangdong province called Zhao Zi-yang (who became Party chief in the post-Mao era) reported that cadres were searching houses, tying peasants up and beating them to force them to surrender food, and sealing the houses of those who said they had nothing left. He cited the case of an old woman who hanged herself after being imprisoned inside her house. In one not atypical county, Gaoyao, 110 people were driven to suicide. If this figure is extrapolated to China’s 2,000-plus counties, the number of suicides in rural areas in this short period would be approaching a quarter of a million.