Nearly all of the stories of 1950s Communist China told to me were those of my eldest relatives, an aunt and uncle who, not even teenagers at the time, were left in Guangzhou in the care of a no-show teenage cousin while my popo/grandmother, then pregnant with my mother, escaped to Hong Kong. At the time, it was extremely difficult to leave China. If you had the chance, you took it. And the first family member granted paperwork was ah baak 阿伯, my maternal grandfather's mother who left for Hong Kong with my second uncle, my grandfather leaving later, in 1952, to establish the family. Young children at the time, my aunt and uncle watched as neighbors thought it better to leap to their deaths from apartment windows to avoid being paraded out by Red Guards looking for 'landlords' and counter-revolutionaries. Those unlucky enough enough to be taken then subjected to public struggle sessions 批鬥大會 were made to kneel on broken brick or glass and, as a particularly sickening humiliation, were made to receive sewage with open mouth. It is inconceivable for a child to be made to witness the depraved violence and hateful absurdity, let alone shoulder the stress of fending for themselves. So it was both heart-wrenching and startingly cathartic to read almost identical accounts in Dikötter: "The victims were then beaten, span upon and had excrement poured over them"; and "With the executions came a wave of suicides, as desparate people threw themselves from tall buildings". Almost inconceivably, this book steadily ratchets up the horror, page by page, each chapter recounting incidents more terrible than the one before.
Over many years growing up in Hong Kong, my family rented a number of houses in Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, and it always seemed like a novelty that we would pass Deng Xiaoping's house (of how many, who knows) along Clearwater Bay Road, the only route in or out. The West's idea of Deng has always been of the reformer, the architect of Modern China, sitting across from Kissinger, Carter, or Margaret Thatcher. So it was surprising to learn the level to which he was involved in the atrocities under the banner of liberation.
Deng Xiaoping's role in Communist 'Liberation':
Of land reform in Anhui, quoted: "In one place in western Anhui the masses hated several landlords and demanded that they be killed, so we followed their wishes and killed them. After they had been killed, the masses feraed reprisals from the relatives of the victims, so they drew up an even longer list of names, saying that if they could also be killed everything would be fine. So again we followed their wishes and killed those people. After they had been killed, the masses thought that even more people would seek revenge, so again they came up with a list of names. And again we killed according to their wishes. We kept on killing, and the masses kept on feeling more and more insecure, taking fright and fleeing. In the end we killed two hundred people, and all the work we did in twelve villages was ruined."
And more of the same: "Throughout the south-west, the region under Deng Xiaoping's purview, ruthless house searches left their owners with just enough food to last for three days. In Sichuan, farmers were beaten, hung up and had smoke blown into their eyes or alcohol forced down their noses when they refused to hand over their crop. A bulletin reserved for the eyes of the top leadership noted that pregnant women were 'frequently' beaten so badly that they miscarried. Whole families swallowed poison in an attempt to find in death an escape from the tax inspectors."
"On 21 April 1951, provincial head Li Jingquan ordered that 6,000 landlords, several thousand of them lingering in prison, be paraded and executed in west Sichuan in order to give land reform greater momentum: 'In land reform we should arrest those who lie low, link up with foreign powers and commit counter-revolutionary crimes: we should kill half of them, or about four thousand, in addition to some one or two thousand currently in gaol who still need to be executed. If we follow this plan we will execute five to six thousand of them, which corresponds roughly to the principle of killing a small batch in land reform.' His report was endorsed in Chongqing by his superior Deng Xiaoping, the man in charge of the south-west of China"
"By May 1951 the situation was slipping out of control in those regions of south China controlled by Deng Zihui and Deng Xiaoping. The Chairman intervened, ordering that authority to kill must be transferred one level up, removing the intiative from the counties. A frenzy of killing ensued, as party officials hurried to eliminate their targets as fast as possible before the impending deadline. In the Fuling region, made up of some ten counties with terraced fields along the Yangzi River in Sichuan, they disposed of 2,676 suspects in ten days. A further 500 were executed in the two days following the deadline, by which time 8,500 people had been killed in little more than two months."
And callousness of the calculated rates of death are some of the most surprising: "The provinces under Deng Xiaoping, namely Guizhou, Sichaun and Yunnan, are unlikely to have had killing rates below two per thousand." Perhaps the political pressure was too great to do anything but. If that were to have been the case, even Deng's rates exceeded expectations from above. "Mao handed down a killing quota as a rough guide for action. The norm, he felt, was one per thousand, a ratio he was willing to adjust to the particular circumstances of each region. His subordinates kept track of local killing rates like bean counters, occasionally negotiating for a higher quota." Deng seems to have been a particularly fastidious bean counter.
While Deng was a prominent figure, he was certainly not an exception. And he was unquestionably following orders from Mao. Of Beijing, Mao seems to have done the back-of-envelope math himself: "[Mao] calculated in April 1951: 'So in Beijing, with its population of about 2 million, over 10,000 have already been arrested and 700 of these have been killed, while another batch of 700 is scheduled for execution. Killing roughly 1,400 should be enough." And this was the expected norm. "As a party official enjoined: 'You must hate even if you feel no hatred, you mush kill even if you do not wish to kill.' Thousands were silently executed in order to fulfil and surpass the quota."
The period of 1945 through 1957 almost exactly covers the time of my aunt and uncle's births to a year after their arrival in Hong Kong. To think that Dikötter's account of China describes their experience is heartbreaking.
There is no doubt that the Great Leap Forward was one of the most flagrantly disastrous examples of state inflicted impoverishment of its own people. And the bloodthirsty travesty of the Cultural Revolution received a mea culpa in 1981, three years into Deng Xiaoping's tenure as paramount leader. Dikötter erases what remains of the myth of a golden age during the period leading up to the Great Leap Forward.
Collected notes:
Destruction of cultural artifacts:
"
Cultural artifacts:
Many of the people targeted during the campaign were hardly better of than their neighbours, but across the country there were also families who had accumulated considerable material wealth. Whether scholars, merchants or politicians, many were committed collectors of art objects, sometimes just a few small curios, inkstones, water droppers or figurines to decorate a desk or complement a study, sometimes more extensive collections of rare manuscripts, bronze coins, wooden furniture or ink paintings. In fact, such was the respect for high culture in a country governed for centuries by scholar officials that few households thta could afford it lived without some token of the past. Some of this was distributed during land reform, but much was destroyed, to the point where in June 1951 the Ministry of Culture ordered all antiques and rare books confiscated during land reform to be collected and inventoried. In many cases it was too late. In Shandong, for instance, most of the antiques had already been burned or consigned to the scrap heap, recycled as so many relics of an exploitative past."
Imprisonment (in Yulin):
"Over 10,000 were sent to prison, where many died of starvation and sickness."
Calculated killing:
Family timeline
- 1952, ah gong leaves for HK
- ? ah po moves to Guangzhou (yi po's apt)
- 1955, mom born
- 1955-11 or 12, ah po went back to get dai yi ma and kau fu (Nov. according to dai yi ma, ah po told mom Dec.)
- 1958-62, Great Leap Forward
- 1976, Mao dies
Further reading
- Remaining two books in Dikotter series
- Cambridge History, Vol. 14
- Black Country to Red China, Esther Cheo Ying