Mao: The Unknown Story

Grassroots cadres often resorted to brute force. And if they were judged ineffective, armed police were sent in. On 19 August 1958, Mao instructed his provincial chiefs: “When you order things handed over and they are not handed over, back up your orders with force.” Under such pressure, state violence raged across the countryside.

To produce a “justification,” Mao repeatedly accused peasants and village cadres of hiding grain. On one occasion, on 27 February 1959, he told his top echelon: “All production teams hide their food to divide among themselves. They even hide it in deep secret cellars, and place guards and sentries …” Next day, he asserted again that peasants were “eating carrot leaves during the day, and rice at night …” By this he meant that peasants were pretending they had run out of proper food but in fact had good food, which they consumed in secret. Mao revealed his contempt for the peasantry to his inner circle: “Peasants are hiding food … and are very bad. There is no Communist spirit in them! Peasants are after all peasants. That’s the only way they can behave …”

Mao knew perfectly well that the peasants had no food to hide. He had an efficient reporting system, and was on top of what was happening daily around the country. On one batch of reports in April 1959 he noted that there was severe starvation in half the country: “a big problem: 15 provinces—25.17 million people no food to eat”; his response was to ask the provinces to “deal with it,” but he did not say how. A report that reached his desk from Yunnan province, dated 18 November 1958, described a wave of deaths from edema — swelling caused by severe malnutrition. Again, Mao’s response was to pass the buck: “This mistake is mainly the fault of county-level cadres.” Mao knew that in many places people were reduced to eating compounds of earth. In some cases, whole villages died as a result, when people’s intestines became blocked.

This nationwide squeeze made it possible for Mao to export 4.74 million tons of grain, worth US$935 million, in 1959. Exports of other foods also soared, particularly of pork.

The claim about China “having too much food” was trundled out to Khrushchev. When he came to Peking in summer 1958, Mao pressed him for help to make nuclear submarines, which were going to be extremely expensive. Khrushchev asked how China was going to pay. Mao’s response was that China had unlimited supplies of food.

Food was also used as a raw material in the nuclear program, which required high-quality fuel. Grain was turned into the purest alcohol. On 8 September, having claimed that there was food to spare, Mao told the Supreme Council that “we have to find outlets for grain in industries, for example to produce ethyl alcohol for fuel.” Grain was therefore used for missile tests, each of which consumed 10 million kg of grain, enough to radically deplete the food intake of 1–2 million people for a whole year.

THE PEASANTS WERE now having to work much harder, and much longer hours, than before. As Mao wanted to raise output without spending any money, he latched on to methods that depended on labor, not investment. It was for this reason that he ordered huge drives to build irrigation systems — dams, reservoirs, canals. Over the four years from 1958, about 100 million peasants were coerced into such projects, moving a quantity of earth and masonry equivalent to excavating 950 Suez Canals, mostly using only hammers, picks and shovels, and sometimes even doors and bed planks from their homes to improvise makeshift carts. Peasants corvéed for these projects often had to bring not only their own food but their own tools, and in many cases their own materials to put up shelters.

In the absence of safety measures and medical care, accidents were frequent, as were deaths, which Mao well knew. His talks with provincial chiefs about these waterworks are littered with mentions of death tolls. In April 1958 he observed that as Henan (his model) had promised to move 30 billion cubic meters that coming winter, “I think 30,000 people will die.” Anhui, another of Mao’s favorite provinces, “said 20 billion cubic metres, and I think 20,000 people will die …” When senior officials in Gansu province appealed against “destroying human lives” in these projects, Mao had them condemned and punished as a “Rightist anti-Party clique.”

Mao wanted instant results, so he promoted a typical slogan: “Survey, Design and Execute Simultaneously,” known as the “Three Simultaneouslys.” Geological surveying was therefore scanty, or non-existent, so a fourth “simultaneous” usually soon had to be added: Revision.