Mao: The Unknown Story

Some courageous individuals petitioned Mao. One prominent fellow traveler wrote to Mao that he had received many letters saying that peasants did not have enough energy to work because they were left too little food. Mao summed up: “10,000 reports [‘10,000’ expresses hugeness] about deaths of humans, deaths of animals, about people raiding granaries: 10,000 reports of darkness …” But Mao was completely unmoved. He would punish the fellow traveler with what he disdainfully called “a good bit of persecution.” He was given to say airily that people were “not without food all the year round — only six … or four months” [sic]. Senior officials who invoked the traditional concept of conscience (liang-xin) to beg him to go easy found themselves being slapped down with remarks like: “You’d better have less conscience. Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means they are not so Marxist.” “On this matter,” Mao said, “we indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal.”

Mao turned the screw even tighter from mid-1955 by forcing the entire countryside into collective farms. This was to make it easier to enforce requisitioning. Previously, peasants could harvest their own crops and bring them home before handing over the state’s “share.” To Mao, this left a loophole: peasants could underreport the harvest and hide some of it, and checking nearly a hundred million households was not easy. With collectivization, however, the whole harvest went straight from the fields into the state’s hands, giving the regime complete control over how it was allocated. As one peasant said: “Once you join the collective, you only get food the government doles out to you.”

The other huge advantage of collectivization for Mao was that it made it much easier to keep the peasants under surveillance when they were working. With collectivization came slave-driving. Henceforth, the state dictated what hours peasants worked, and how hard. A People’s Daily editorial on New Year’s Day 1956 made it clear that the aim was to get peasants to double their working hours. Mao especially targeted women; those who used not to work in the fields would do so now.

To stifle resistance to both requisitioning and collectivization, Mao wielded his old panacea: terror. In May 1955 he talked about another “Five-Year Plan,” this time for suppression: “We must arrest 1.5 million counter-revolutionaries in five years … I am all for more arrests … Our emphasis is: arrest in a big way, a giant way …” Using the scatological language of which he was enamored, Mao added: “My farts [i.e., orders] are socialist farts, they have to be fragrant,” i.e., obeyed. Anyone resisting food confiscation or collectivization, and any official sympathetic to them, was termed a criminal, and notices announcing their sentences were plastered up across the country.

Collectivization of agriculture marked a big stride towards making China even more totalitarian. At the same time, Mao ordered the nationalization of industry and commerce in urban areas, to channel every single resource into the Superpower Program. However, businessmen were not persecuted like rural landlords, for pragmatic reasons. “The bourgeoisie,” Mao said, “are much more useful than … landlords. They have technical know-how and management skills.” Though he then proceeded to squander these managerial and technical talents spectacularly. In addition, China’s glorious handicrafts withered over the coming years. Repair and maintenance shops would dwindle in number, greatly increasing the misery of everyday life. “We started socialism, and everything disappears,” Liu Shao-chi remarked pithily.

To scare state employees into conforming, Mao launched a purge campaign in which no fewer than 14.3 million men and women on the state payroll were put through terrifying vetting that involved “confessions and informing,” frequent public denunciation meetings, and physical abuse. Offices and residential buildings were turned into detention centers, as were sports halls and university dormitories. Mao decreed that “Counter-revolutionaries … make up … around 5 percent” of those vetted, which would mean that 715,000 people were condemned and received various punishments, including execution. In fact, Mao indicated that more people than this could be done in, as one of his instructions reads: “Whenever this figure [5 percent] is exceeded, authorization should be obtained.”