Mao: The Unknown Story

These upheavals consumed Peng’s time and energy until late July, when the criticism meetings were brought to a close. Only then was he able to start taking stock of the fearsome panorama around him. He could see that Mao was fixated on acquiring an absolutely gigantic strike force — no fewer than 200–300 nuclear submarines, as Mao had insisted to the Russians, and every other state-of-the art weapon Russia possessed — and that Mao would go to any lengths to achieve this goal. One step towards this end was to shell the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy in August, with the aim of triggering nuclear threats from America in order to put pressure on Khrushchev. (Peng was deliberately excluded from this exercise, even though he was the army chief.) Then there was the flood of bogus harvest figures, which could only mean one thing: that Mao was aiming to squeeze out far greater quantities of food to pay for the enormous amount of hardware he was acquiring from Russia.

On the evening of 3 September, shortly after the shelling of Quemoy had started, Peng disappeared while at the seaside resort of Beidaihe for a round of meetings. Eventually, after a long search, the Praetorian Guard found him pacing a remote stretch of beach in the moonlight, alone. With a darkened face, he returned to his villa, where he lay awake all night.

Afterwards, he set off on an inspection tour of northern China, during which he learned that the crop figures were indeed inflated, and that peasants were dying of starvation. He saw for the first time the disastrous impact of Mao’s pet obsession, the backyard furnaces. Passing through Henan, Mao’s model province, he saw the furnaces getting denser, with crowds and carts and shovels and ladders and baskets, and flames stretching out like a blazing sea to the horizon. Gazing out of the train window, he turned to his aide-de-camp and shook his head: “These fires are going to burn up everything we have.”

At the beginning of December, at a conference in Wuhan, Peng heard Mao announce that the harvest figure for 1958 was more than double 1957’s, which had been a very good year. Peng said that this was impossible, but Mao’s agriculture chiefs shut him up with what amounted to “We know better than you.”

Peng decided to go back to his home area in Hunan, which was in the same county as Mao’s home village, to find out what was really happening. There, he got confirmation that the harvest figures were false. Peasants had had their homes torn down to feed the backyard furnaces; they were being worked to the point of collapse; and grassroots cadres were using violence to force them to work. “In some areas, it has become common practice to beat people up,” Peng wrote. “People are beaten up when they can’t fulfill their work quota, beaten up when they are late going out to work, beaten up even for saying things some don’t like.” Peng also registered the special misery that Mao’s slave-driving was inflicting on women: overwork, he noted, had caused “many women to suffer prolapses of the womb, or premature stoppage of menstruation.”

Peng’s childhood friends had famished, waxen faces. They showed him their canteen wok, which contained only vegetable leaves and a few grains of rice, with no oil. Their beds were just cold bamboo mats with flimsy quilts, in freezing December. As his coevals were sixty-ish, they were living in the commune’s quarters for the old, called the “Happiness Court.” “What sort of Happiness is this?” Peng exploded. The beds in the kindergarten had only thin rags. Many children were ill. Peng gave the kindergarten 200 yuan out of his own pocket, and left another 200 yuan to buy bedding for the old. A Red Army veteran who had been disabled in the 1930s tucked a piece of paper into his palm. It was an entreaty for Peng to “cry out for us.”

On 18 December, Peng met one of the top economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, and told him Mao’s figure for the grain harvest was unreal, and that they must not collect food on the basis of this exaggeration. Bo agreed with him. In fact, all Mao’s economic managers, as well as Politburo members, knew the truth. But when Peng suggested that he and Bo send a joint telegram to Mao, Bo declined. So Peng cabled Mao on his own, urging that food collection be reduced. There was no response.

Peng knew his report was not news to Mao, who had reprised his offhand views about death at Wuhan earlier that month: “A few children die in the kindergarten, a few old men die in the Happiness Court … If there’s no death, human beings can’t exist. From Confucius to now, it would be disastrous if people didn’t die.”

How could Mao be stopped? Even though he was defense minister, Peng had little power — nothing like the power which defense ministers had in other countries. The army was completely controlled by Mao, and Peng could not move troops without Mao’s explicit permission. Peng began to contemplate seeking help from the only possible source — abroad.