Mao: The Unknown Story

By the end of 1958, the number of large arms-centered industrial projects that were under construction had reached a staggering 1,639—yet only 28 had been completed and were producing anything at all. Many were never finished, because of a lack of basic materials like steel, cement, coal and electricity. The regime itself called these “greybeard projects.” Mao was the only ruler in history to produce a rust-bowl at the start of industrialization rather than at its end.

All this was destructive to Mao’s own dreams. The breakneck speed he imposed sabotaged quality and created a long-term problem that was to plague arms production throughout his reign. China ended up with planes that could not fly, tanks that would not go in a straight line (on one occasion a tank swerved round and charged at watching VIPs), and ships that were almost a greater hazard to those who sailed in them than to China’s enemies. When Mao decided to give Ho Chi Minh a helicopter, the manufacturers were so scared it might crash that they detained it at the border.

The four-year Leap was a monumental waste of both natural resources and human effort, unique in scale in the history of the world. One big difference between other wasteful and inefficient regimes and Mao’s is that most predatory regimes have robbed their populations after relatively low-intensity labor, and less systematically, but Mao first worked everyone to the bone unrelentingly, then took everything — and then squandered it.

Mao demanded a fever pitch of work, using non-stop “emulation” drives to make people vie with each other. Undernourished and exhausted men, women and children were made to move soil at the double, often having to run while carrying extremely heavy loads, and in all weathers, from blazing sun to freezing cold. They had to trot for kilometers along mountain paths carrying water for the fields, from dawn till dusk. They had to stay up all night to keep the useless “backyard furnaces” going. Mao called this way of working “Communist spirit.” In one of his many bits of theater, on 6 November 1958 he first asserted that peasants refused to take breaks (“even if you want them to rest, they won’t”), and then played magnanimous and codified his optimal day: “Change from 1 January next year: guarantee 8 hours sleep, 4 hours eating and breaks, 2 hours studies [i.e., indoctrination] … 8–4–2–10,” with the “10” referring to the hours of work. In the same generous tone, he bestowed a few days off: two a month, and five for women (up from the three he had originally contemplated).

In fact, these tiny concessions resulted in part from reports of epidemics, which Mao took seriously, not least because they affected the workforce. One account that startled Mao involved a typhoid epidemic near Peking. He called for “greatly reducing diseases” so that people “can go labouring every day.”

IN SUMMER 1958 Mao pitchforked the entire rural population into new and larger units called “People’s Communes.” The aim was to make slave-driving more efficient. He himself said that by concentrating the peasants into fewer units—26,000-plus in the whole of China—“it’s easier to control.” The first commune, “Chayashan Sputnik,” was set up in his model province, Henan. Its charter, which Mao edited, and touted as “a great treasure,” laid down that every aspect of its members’ lives was to be controlled by the commune. All the 9,369 households had to “hand over entirely their private plots … their houses, animals and trees.” They had to live in dormitories, “in accordance with the principles of benefiting production and control”; and the charter actually stipulated that their homes were to be “dismantled” “if the commune needs the bricks, tiles or timber.” Every peasant’s life must revolve around “labour.” All members were to be treated as though in the army, with a three-tier regimentation system: commune, brigade, production team (usually a village). Peasants were allowed negligible amounts of cash. The communes were de facto camps for slave-laborers.

Mao even toyed with getting rid of people’s names and replacing them with numbers. In Henan and other model areas, people worked in the fields with a number sewn on their backs. Mao’s aim was to dehumanize China’s 550 million peasants and turn them into the human equivalent of draft animals.

As befitted the labor-camp culture, inmates had to eat in canteens. Peasants were not only banned from eating at home, their woks and stoves were smashed. Total control over food gave the state a terrifying weapon, and withholding food became a commonplace form of “light” punishment, which grassroots officials could deploy against anyone they felt like.