Mao: The Unknown Story

As the canteens were sometimes hours’ walk away from where people lived or worked, many tended to move to the site of the canteen. There, men, women, children and old people lived like animals, crammed into whatever space was available, with no privacy or family life. This also hugely increased the incidence of disease. Meanwhile, many of their own homes, which were often made of mud and bamboo, collapsed from neglect, in addition to all those torn down to make fertilizer, or to feed the backyard furnaces as fuel. When Liu Shao-chi inspected one area near his home village in spring 1961, of the previous 1,415 abodes, only 621 decrepit huts remained.

Mao’s claim about there being “too much food” contributed in another way to increasing the peasants’ misery. When the canteens were first set up, many cadres allowed the hungry peasants to fill their stomachs. This spree only lasted a couple of months, but it hastened the onset of famine — and wholesale deaths — in many areas before the end of 1958. Three years later, Mao reluctantly agreed to abandon canteens. Yet closing down the canteens, though hugely popular in itself, was almost as painful as their opening had been, as the many peasants who had gone to live where the canteens were located now had no home to return to. Even when their dwellings had survived, their stoves and their woks had not.

UNDERNOURISHMENT and overwork quickly reduced tens of millions of peasants to a state where they were simply too enfeebled to work. When he found out that one county was doling out food to those too ill to work, Mao’s response was: “This won’t do. Give them this amount and they don’t work. Best halve the basic ration, so if they’re hungry they have to try harder.”

The people who drove the peasants on were the commune cadres, who were Party men. These were the resident slave-drivers. Knowing that if they failed to do their job, they and their families would swiftly join the ranks of the starving, many adopted the attitude articulated by one man: people were “slaves who have to be beaten, abused, or have their food suspended to get them to work.”

These cadres doubled as jailers, keeping the peasants penned inside their villages. On 19 August 1958, Mao clamped down even further on anyone moving without authorization, what he called “people roaming around uncontrolled.” The traditional possibility of escaping a famine by fleeing to a place where there was food, which had long been made illegal, was now blocked off. One peasant described the situation as worse than under the Japanese occupation: “Even when the Japanese came,” he said, “we could run away. This year [1960] … we are simply shut in to die at home. My family had six members and four have died …”

The cadres’ other job was to stop peasants “stealing” their own harvest. Horrific punishments were widespread: some people were buried alive, others strangled with ropes, others had their noses cut off. In one village, four terrorized young children were saved from being buried alive for taking some food only when the earth was at their waists, after desperate pleas from their parents. In another village, a child had four fingers chopped off for trying to steal a scrap of unripe food; in another, two children who tried to steal food had wires run through their ears, and were then hung up by the wire from a wall. Brutality of this kind crops up in virtually every account of this period, nationwide.

AS PART OF his Leap, in 1958 Mao also tried to turn the cities into slave-labor camps by organizing urban communes. His plan was to abolish wages and put the whole society on a non-cash barracks system. This did not work out, as the slave system could not be made to fit onto modern cities, where life had more complex dimensions.

But this failure did not mean that Mao left the cities unravaged. His guideline for them was “Production first, Life takes second place.” His ideal city was a purely industrial center. Standing on Tiananmen Gate and looking out over the gorgeous palaces and temples and pagodas which in those days decorated Peking’s skyline, he told the mayor: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!”