Mao: The Unknown Story

While the nation was told, vaguely, that the goal of the Leap was for China to “overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time, and become one of the richest, most advanced and powerful countries in the world,” Mao spelled out to small audiences, and strictly confidentially, just what he meant to do once the Leap was completed. On 28 June, he told an elite army group: “Now the Pacific Ocean is not peaceful. It can only be peaceful when we take it over.” At this point Lin Biao interjected: “We must build big ships, and be prepared to land [sc. militarily] in Japan, the Philippines and San Francisco.” Mao continued: “How many years before we can build such ships? In 1962, when we have xx — xx tons of steel [figures concealed in original] …” On 19 August, Mao told select provincial chiefs: “In the future we will set up the Earth Control Committee, and make a uniform plan for the Earth.” Mao dominated China. He intended to dominate the world.

For the Chinese population, the Great Leap was indeed an enormous jump — but in the amount of food extracted. This was calculated on the basis, not of what the peasants could afford, but of what was needed for Mao’s Program. Mao proceeded by simply asserting that there was going to be an enormous increase in the harvest, and got the provincial chiefs to proclaim that their area would produce an astronomical output. When harvest time came, the chiefs got selected lackeys down at the grassroots to declare that their areas had indeed produced fantastic crops. Mao’s propaganda machine then publicized these claims with great fanfare. The stratospheric harvests and other sky-high claims were called “sputniks,” reflecting Mao’s obsession with the Russian satellite. On 12 June People’s Daily reported that in Henan, Mao’s No. 1 model province, a “Sputnik Cooperative” had produced 1.8 tons of wheat on one mu (1/6th acre) — more than ten times the norm. Claims in this vein were not, as official Chinese history would have us believe, the result of spontaneous boasting by local cadres and peasants. The press was Mao’s voice, not the public’s.

“Sputnik fields” mushroomed. They were usually created by transplanting ripe crops from a number of fields into a single artificial plot. These were the Maoist equivalent of Potemkin fields — with the key difference that Mao’s plots were not intended to fool the ruler, but instead produced by the ruler for the eyes of his distant underlings, grassroots cadres from other collective farms. These cadres were most important to Mao, as they were the people immediately in charge of physically handing over the harvests to the state. Mao wanted them to see these Sputnik fields and then go back and make similar claims, so that the state could say: since you’ve produced more, we can take more. Cadres who declined to go along were condemned and replaced with others who would. Charades of sky-high yields filled the press, though Peking eventually quietly stopped the transplanting theater, as it caused big losses.

By late July, People’s Daily was declaring that “we can produce as much food as we want,” setting the stage for Mao to assert publicly on 4 August: “We must consider what to do with all this surplus food.” This claim about there being surplus food was one that Mao himself could not possibly have believed. Barely six months before, on 28 January, he had acknowledged to the Supreme Council that there was a shortage of food: “What are we going to do as there isn’t enough food to eat?” he had asked. His solution was as follows: “No worse than eat less … Oriental style … It’s good for health. Westerners have a lot of fat in their food; the further west one goes the more fat they eat. I say that Western meat-eaters are contemptible.” “I think it is good to eat less. What’s the point of eating a lot and growing a big stomach, like the foreign capitalists in cartoons?” These airy remarks might well apply to Mao, who had a paunch, but they were irrelevant to famished peasants. In January, Mao had been saying: There isn’t enough food, but people can eat less. Six months later, he was saying: There is too much food. Both of these contradictory remarks had the same purpose: to gouge more food out of the peasants.

In September, People’s Daily reported that “the biggest rice sputnik” yet had produced over 70 tons from less than 1/5th of an acre, which was hundreds of times the norm. This sputnik field was faked by an ambitious new county boss in Guangxi. At the end of the year, his county reported a grain output that was over three times the true figure. The state then demanded an impossible 4.8 times what it had taken the year before.