Mao: The Unknown Story

Funding for education was already minuscule. Now it was to be cut back even further. Mao’s approach was not to raise the general standard of education in society as a whole, but to focus on a small elite, predominantly in science and other “useful” subjects, and leave the rest of the population to be illiterate or semi-illiterate slave-laborers. What funds were allotted to education went mainly to the cities; village schools received no funding, and schools in small towns very little. As a result, only tiny numbers of rural youth were able to go on to higher education.

Even in the cities, young people’s chances of education were drastically slashed in 1957, when 80 percent of the 5 million urban elementary school leavers (i.e., 4 million people) and 800,000 of 1 million middle-school leavers were told that they could not continue their education. There had been widespread discontent in the cities, and the executions of the teachers in the “Little Hungary” case were a warning to urbanites too.

Execution was not the only cause of death in this campaign: suicides were rife among those condemned as “Rightists.” In the Summer Palace in Peking, early morning exercise-takers frequently encountered corpses hanging from trees, and feet sticking out of the lake.

Most of those branded as “Rightists” were put through hellish, though largely non-violent, denunciation meetings. Their families became outcasts, their spouses were shunted to undesirable jobs, and their children lost all hope of a decent education. To protect their children — and themselves — many people divorced their spouses when they were labeled as Rightists. Numerous families were broken up, causing lifelong tragedy to children and parents alike.

After they were denounced, most Rightists were deported to do hard labor in remote areas. Mao needed labor, particularly to open up virgin lands. A journalist called Dai Huang described how deportees were just dumped in places like the far north of Manchuria, known as “the Great Northern Wilderness,” and had to rig up a shelter “in a hurry, using wheat stems to make a roof” in a temperature of–38 °C. Even with a fire, “it was still a dozen or so degrees below zero …”

The grass and beaten earth huts we lived in had wind coming in from all sides … there were hardly any vegetables or meat … We got up … just after 4 at dawn, and did not stop until 7 or 8 in the evening … In these 15–16 hours … we basically worked non-stop … in summer … We had to get up at 2 am … We had at most three hours’ sleep.

While being subjected to ceaseless, relentless harangues—“You’re here to redeem your crime! Don’t dare to make trouble, or look for ways to be lazy!”—the deportees had to work on less than subsistence-level rations. Many died from malnutrition, illness, cold, overwork and in accidents doing unfamiliar jobs like felling trees.

This journalist, Dai, had actually spoken up after he knew that Mao had set a trap. He wrote a petition to Mao, objecting to “the new ruling class” holding sumptuous “receptions and banquets,” while “tens of thousands of people … are chewing grass roots or tree bark.” He even took a swipe at Mao’s personality cult. “A chef cooking a good meal is said to be ‘thanks to Chairman Mao’s leadership.’ ” “Don’t think you are a wise god,” he warned Mao.

Dai Huang’s wife divorced him, and his relatives suffered discrimination. A schoolteacher nephew was denied funds for a life-saving operation because of the family connection. Dai himself barely survived the Northern Wilderness, from which many were never to return.

HAVING SUPPRESSED dissent among the educated in general, starting in 1958, immediately after returning from the Moscow summit, Mao moved to strike fear into his top echelon by threatening to label as “Rightists” any of them who opposed the relaunch of the Superpower Program. His main concern was with his Nos. 2 and 3, Liu Shao-chi and Chou En-lai, who had championed the cuts in the Program in 1956.

The tactic Mao chose this time was new — to abase his most senior colleagues in front of dozens of provincial chiefs. This was the first time that Mao involved these second-rank officials in directly attacking his top colleagues and their own superiors. It was a means both of humiliating Chou and Liu, and of putting pressure on them; especially as Mao personally delivered stinging assaults on his two colleagues in front of their subordinates. Bringing in these provincial chiefs to witness the working of power at the very top — and the humiliation of the regime’s Nos. 2 and 3—was also a way for Mao to empower the men responsible for supervising the actual collection of the food.