Mao: The Unknown Story

This figure is based on the following calculation. Chinese demographers have concluded that death rates in the four years 1958–61 were 1.20 percent, 1.45 percent, 4.34 percent and 2.83 percent, respectively. The average death rate in the three years immediately before and after the famine was 1.03 percent (1957: 1.08 percent; 1962: 1 percent; and 1963:1 percent). The death rates over and above this average could only have been caused by starvation and overwork during the famine. The “extra” death figure comes to 37.67 million, based on population figures of 646.53, 659.94, 666.71, and 651.71 million for 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960. The official statistics published in 1983 are recognized as partly defective, because local policemen understated the number of deaths in the years 1959–61 after some were purged for “over-reporting deaths.”

41. DEFENSE MINISTER PENG’S LONELY BATTLE (1958–59 AGE 64–65)

IN THE FIRST two years of the Great Leap Forward, most of Mao’s colleagues went along with him. Only one man in the Politburo, Marshal Peng De-huai, the defense minister, had the courage to dissent.

Peng had stayed close to his poverty-stricken peasant roots. In an account of his life written later while imprisoned by Mao he recorded that he often reminded himself of his famished childhood to avoid “becoming corrupt, or callous about the lives of the poor.” In the 1950s he spoke up among the top echelon about Mao’s corrupt lifestyle: the villas all over China, and the procurement of pretty girls, which Peng described as “selecting imperial concubines.”

Peng had crossed swords with Mao over the years. In the 1930s he had criticized Mao’s vicious treatment of other military commanders. On the Long March he had challenged Mao for the military leadership when Mao was dragging the Red Army to near-ruin for his personal goals. In the 1940s, when Mao began his personality cult during the Yenan Terror, Peng had raised objections to rituals like shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and singing the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red.” Once Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Peng spoke out more forcefully against the personality cult, and even advocated changing the oath that servicemen took, from one that pledged allegiance to Mao personally, to one that pledged allegiance to the nation, arguing that “Our army belongs to the nation.”

This was guaranteed to rile Mao. Besides, Mao loathed the fact that Peng had not only expressed esteem for Khrushchev over de-Stalinization, but had also urged that spending on defense industries in peacetime “must be compatible with people’s standard of living.”

Peng had often voiced independent, unorthodox views. He openly admired the concepts of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” which Mao denounced as “anti-Marxist.” Peng also advocated observing traditional Chinese ethical codes like “A prince and the man in the street are equal before the law” and “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to yourself.” My “principle,” Mao said, “is exactly the opposite: Do to others precisely what I don’t want done to myself.”

Peng had been a thorn in Mao’s side for three decades, although he had also cooperated with Mao at certain key moments, like going into Korea in 1950. It was as a result of this that Mao made him defense minister in 1954—reluctantly, as Mao himself revealed later. Throughout Peng’s tenure, Mao undermined him by creating competing chains of command. Still, Peng retained a fearlessness vis-à-vis Mao that was unique among top leaders.

WHEN HE LAUNCHED the Leap in May 1958, Mao plunged Peng and some 1,500 senior army officers into daily “criticism and self-criticism” meetings, at which they were made to attack each other for weeks on end. Such sessions, which had become a Maoist staple since the Yenan Terror, were full of bitter character-assassination, and were emotionally utterly draining. Peng felt so demoralized that he offered to resign, an offer Mao rejected because he wanted to purge Peng. Meanwhile, he elevated his crony Marshal Lin Biao to be a vice-chairman of the Party, which put Lin above Peng, in the army as well as the Party.