In 1848, commenting on the quashing of the Viennese popular uprising against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Karl Marx predicted the only way the ‘bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, [would be through] revolutionary terror'.1

Marx's pessimistic words evoking the Terror of 1793-4, with its mass executions across France, took on new meaning in twentieth-century China. After a long civil war, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated the Nationalist army and estab­lished the People's Republic of China (PRC) in autumn 1949.

After the CCP seized power in 1949, remnants of the Nationalist army as well as hostile local forces staged fierce resistance across the country. For the new and fragile CCP regime, repression and terror were essential instru­ments to guard their newly gained power while at the same time, to destroy the ‘old' and to make a ‘new' society free of the ‘evil remnants' of the past. Together with the counter-revolutionary as well as the ‘bad' elements, land­lords and rich peasants were classified as enemies of the people. They were to be eliminated at any cost. ‘Be ruthless and be tough'; ‘To strive one must kill'; for Mao there was no middle ground. Common people were encouraged to take up violence against their fellow countrymen.

1 Karl Marx, ‘The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna', Neue Rheinische Zeitung (November 1848), quoted in Michael Evans, KarlMarx (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 127.

Between 1950 and 1953, the CCP launched the Land Reform in the Chinese countryside and the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries throughout China.

In rural China, Land Reform provided villagers with the context to overthrow the landlords and take over their properties. The sins of the landlords, as well as of the rich peasants, were not merely being counter­revolutionary but also being rich. Once the Confucian moral framework was removed (a common moral and cultural heritage shared by the major­ity of the population living in China), rural Chinese villages quickly turned into what Hannah Arendt called ‘the atmosphere of disintegration'.^[729] All of a sudden, the old rule of the world had ceased to apply. Gone with it was the moral balance between right and wrong and between good and evil. Some interpreted revolution in their own light. In many areas, the Land Reform turned out to be an exercise in looting others. Hatred began to play a central role in everyday human interaction as well as in public affairs. Everyone was pitted against everybody else, most of all against their next-door neighbours, their fellow villagers. Many villagers took up violence in almost medieval fashion. In central and south China, for example, under the disguise of revolution or the Land Reform, the bloody feudal style of clan fighting was rife. Hundreds, indeed thousands, were brutally murdered as a result. Protected by the local command of the Public Security Police or village militia, known as the Peasant Association (nonghui), villagers of one clan openly robbed fellow villagers from another.^[730] In addition to landlords and rich peasants, many middle-level peasants were also targeted.

For some local officials, the use of violence also became a habit, an obligation or a pathway to promotion.

We will have remorse later.' As a result, the majority of villagers lived in fear and horror. ‘What kind of revolution is that?', this student asked.^[735]

As landlords were being killed or arrested, their properties were to be ‘distributed'. Villagers, encouraged by local officials, rushed to chop down trees as they now belonged to the public. The logs were sold for profit to boost local funds. The authority tried to stop the unrestricted logging, leading to violent clashes with villagers. In addition, villagers from different villages fought each other to secure more logs, thus more profits. This often led to further bloodshed.1^[736]

Such violence was ubiquitous in regions of mixed populations such as in Gansu and Ningxia, where since the Manchu conquest in the eighteenth century the ethnic Hui and the Han lived next door to each other under imperial rule. On the eve of Communist Liberation, their fragile or (perhaps) artificial sense of solidarity - ‘All under the Heaven' as it was labelled in imperial China - evaporated. As happened with Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, ethnic hatred and violence soon fol­lowed. This quickly escalated into spontaneous pogroms. In Gansu pro­vince's Linxia region in the north-west, the local authority fell into the hands of Han officials who were seconded here from other parts of China. The local Public Security office too was dominated by the Han.

In Gansu province's Guiyuan, now under the administration of Ningxia Hui autonomous region, ethnic conflicts dated back to the warlord era (1916­28). After the communist Liberation, to reduce financial and administration burdens, the region was forced to become integrated with another nearby region. The majority of the local population, both the Han and the Hui, refused the amalgamation. A major revolt broke out. The populace tried to disarm the People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers. In the chaos that followed, some PLA soldiers killed one of the civilians. This stirred up further violence. The civilians turned on the regional CCP head. After repeatedly kicking and beating him, they tied him up and used him as a bargaining chip to deal with the authorities. When the authorities refused to listen to their appeal, they turned on each other: the Huis took up violence against the Hans, and the Hans seized weapons to kill the Huis.^[738]

In China's far south-west, prior to the communist Liberation, Xikang province, now part of Sichuan, had been the territory controlled by the warlord Liu Wenhui. Historically on the periphery between the Chinese empire and the Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, the region was of strategic importance both militarily and commercially. In the eighteenth century the Manchu had conquered and pacified these regions. After the end of imperial rule, it fell into the iron grip of the warlord. During the Manchu rule, as under the warlord, the Han Chinese and the Tibetans as well as some nomadic tribes were integrated. They traded with each other as well as married each other. Prior to any substantial settlement, the nomadic Lolo tribes had been moving back and forth in these regions, and occupied different hills. Trade in merchant goods as well as opium allowed settlements to flourish. The Lolo tribes soon learnt that they could make a living from the Han and Tibetan merchants, as the caravans had to pass through their hills. From the late nineteenth century, an increasing number of Han villagers moved there to cultivate the cash-rich opium crops, as the Manchu government imposed a ban on opium in the Chinese heartland. These Han villagers rented hills from the Lolo tribes on which to grow opium, and in return they paid the Lolos in silver, food and sometimes weapons. This was not without conflict, but there was a general understanding and agreement between all groups that as long as the Han and the Tibetans kept the Lolo supplied with silver, food and weapons, the Tibetans and the Han were allowed to trade and the latter to grow their opium. This continued to be the case after the warlord Liu Wenhui took over the region. Liu was one of the ‘opium lords', who profited greatly from the illicit drug trade. Under him opium became the major life blood for the region.

The communist Liberation, however, broke down the existing harmony resulting from the economic system in the region. The new freedom became an open invitation to violence. As soon as the former ruler - the warlord - was obliterated, so too were the old rules. Now the warlord was gone, lawlessness prevailed. Bandits - many of them opium lords - as well as remnants of the Nationalist army took advantage of the situation, threatening the CCP authority as well as the civilian population. To rid the region of bandits was also interpreted as a call to rid the area of opium, suppressing the opium trade. As the opium fields were wiped out, the new communist authority also hunted down all opium farmers and traders. The Lolo, who were the previous posses­sors of the hills and had weapons, were classified either as landlords or as counter-revolutionary bandits. To start with, the Lolo understood this as mean­ing that the Han had broken the rules governing their relationship. In response, they blocked trading routes, looted caravans carrying essential supplies and massacred the Han villagers. Fearing for their lives, and in panic, the remaining Han population began to flee. Zhaojue, the capital of Xikang, turned to total chaos. Instead of mediating between these different groups, the CCP officials, most of them Han from elsewhere in China, began treating all of the Lolo tribal chiefs as bandits.^[739] As these tribal chiefs were arrested or beheaded, the different Lolo tribes were reorganised into one single group with the new ethnic label ‘Yi'. As Yi, these different tribes came under the new leadership of the CCP, with Mao as their supreme head. Ethnic hatred, previously unknown in the region, became a living reality. The chaos soon spread across Xikang. It continued into the late 1950s. Although Xikang was merged to become part of Sichuan province after 1955, it took nearly ten years for the CCP finally to consolidate its rule in the region. In the process, the CCP authority gradually isolated the Yi population into the hills around Zhaojue. The Lolos, the former possessors of a range of different hills, had since been turned into a permanent underclass with their new ethnic label Yi.

The ever-growing chaos in Xikang, as well as its geographic position at the periphery of China, provided the authorities with a further con­text for introducing a hard-line approach. In 1954, in two villages in the suburb of Xichang city - the site of the CCP's regional authority headquarters - hundreds of innocent villagers were arrested. They were interrogated and tortured until they were forced to admit they were counter-revolutionary bandits.^[740]

While the chaos in Xikang, coupled with violence, persisted into the late 1950s, for most of the rest of China both the Land Reform and the Campaign to Suppress the Counter-revolutionary had almost come to an end towards the last quarter of 1953. Violence, however, did not cease. On the contrary, as the CCP regime began to introduce the national ‘grain procurement policy' (centralised grain collection system), demanding set quotas of grain collec­tion from across rural China from 1953, violence found a new context. Many local officials, who had become used to the practice of violence during the earlier revolutionary campaigns, took up violence as an instrument to force villagers to hand over ever more grain. On the other side, villagers took to violence as a necessary weapon for self-defence. For example, in China's agricultural heartland, Anhui province, between 1953 and 1955 more than 32.5 per cent of the total number of crimes were ‘crimes of sabotaging' the government's grain procurement policy.1^[741]

Those saboteurs who were caught were charged not according to their supposed crimes but as counter-revolutionaries. The use of violence against them was thus further justified. Looting, physical torture and public humilia­tion were some of the most common methods used. As with the Land Reform, many officials once again used grain procurement as a weapon to attack their rivals or to settle personal scores left over from previous eras. In Xikang province's Huili County, more than half of the homes were looted, and many villagers suffered physical abuse. The methods of torture varied from hanging to beating, suffocation by smoke, and poisoning by forcing villagers to swallow a large dose of hemp. Sometimes, torture sessions would last as long as three days and three nights.^[742]

Direct personal violence and structural violence went hand in hand. As James Gilligan observed, this led to behavioural violence such as suicide.^[743] When the pressure to hand over grain and the fear of physical

torture became too great, when they had been denied human dignity, when they had no one to turn to for their grievances, many villagers turned their anger and sense of helplessness into self-loathing and self­hatred. Some believed it was better to be a criminal than free, as life in prison seemed a better and safer outcome than being constantly abused or being starved to death.^[744] An even greater number were driven to commit suicide. In north-west Anhui's Fuyang region, for example, within less than one month between December 1953 and January 1954, thirty-two villagers committed suicide because they could not endure the public humiliation or physical torture inflicted on them by local officials during the grain procurement campaign.^[745] Suicide was not limited to one or two areas, or to the grain procurement campaign. It had become a widespread phenomenon in the early years of the People's Republic. Between 1954 and 1955, 512 cases of suicides or suicide attempts were reported to the central authority of the CCP. The frequency of suicide among the wider public had alerted the CCP's political centre. Although Lu Dingyi, the man in charge of national political cultural work, who became the PRC's first minister of propa­ganda, admitted that the CCP did not like the fact that so many people had committed suicide, in his address to the meeting of the eighteen provincial leaders that year he insisted that ‘we should not let this hold us back. We must have confidence. We must try to think positively... being petrified, lack of control, as well as lack of confidence are the reasons behind high suicide rates. We must encourage the masses to participate in our national political culture. We must take total control... If we don't win them over, they will join the enemies.' He urged the provincial leaders that ‘to win them over is to educate them over and over again'.^[746]

For the next thirty years, ‘thought reform' dominated the everyday poli­tical culture of the PRC. As Wang Lishi, a survivor of the Great Leap Famine told me during an interview, ‘there were just endless meetings in those days. We used to say that under Chiang Kai-shek there were endless taxes to pay, and under Chairman Mao there were endless meetings to attend... Every night they called us out to meetings. Only one or two nights when there was no campaign meeting could we get some rest. But the peace never lasted long. Soon, another campaign would begin.'^[747]

In the meantime the national grain procurement policy persisted. In 1955, the CCP went ahead and launched the agricultural collectivisation in the Chinese countryside. As with the grain procurement policy, collectivisation was regularly met with contention. Violence was used as a form of ‘power propaganda' to realise the ideological claim in building the new socialist countryside or the future socialist utopia. While not all local officials accepted the CCP's ideological claims, many were intimidated into competing with each other. To outdo others, many local officials used violence to whip unwilling individuals into joining agricultural collectives. By 1956, to Mao's surprise, virtually all agricultural households in China had been organised into farming collectives. The use of violence was thus retrospectively ‘justified'.