Violence during the Great Leap Famine
Once the CCP regime had completed or achieved its initial goals of Land Reform, the suppression of counter-revolutionaries and the initial stage of collectivisation through terror, the system quickly turned not only against its stated enemies, but against much wider sections of the population.
From the end of 1957, as Mao and the top leadership pushed for the Great Leap Forward, the CCP inaugurated radical collectivisation in the Chinese countryside. Terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward. In the People's Commune, the new and the highest form of administrative, economic and political organisation in rural China created to lead rural China into a ‘communist paradise', terror, repression and violence were used directly against the Chinese peasantry, who had been among the CCP's most loyal supporters before its claim to power. Organised violence was practised as a means of total control. The aim was to ‘kill one in order to deter one hundred', or, as a Chinese proverb says, ‘Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.'From its outset, Mao conceived of the People's Commune as an environment without legal safeguards, which operated strictly as a military organisation, meaning that violence could be practised with impunity. At the CCP ‘Enlarged Politburo Conference' in August 1958, Mao urged his colleagues that ‘we must re-establish our military tradition. It is Marxist tradition. Being boorish is a good thing. It shows we are sincere. Bourgeois politeness is deceitful... an orderly society is built on discipline... We don't rely on civil or criminal law to ensure public order... The Soviet Union used force to collect grain. We have twenty-two years of military tradition.'[748]
Echoing the chairman, Tan Zhenlin, the minister of agriculture, reminded provincial leaders that ‘last year we achieved high yield by giving forceful orders...
This year, we need to pay more attention. We must fight with peasants. Cadres should continue giving forceful orders. The practice of giving forceful orders will continue for the next ten thousand years... this is not the best method, but it's necessary.'[749]Violence quickly turned into normal practice in the People's Commune. As it permeated every aspect of daily life in the People's Commune, for some the practice of violence became habituated, or indeed for some an ‘addiction'. Once made into a habit, the act of violence no longer needed any intellectual rationale. In Guangdong province's Huaiji County, for example, within four days one commune party secretary physically assaulted eleven people. Villagers called him the ‘tiger'. In their eyes, he no longer acted as a human but had turned into a beast.[750] Endless ‘struggle' meetings provided opportunities for venting personal revenge. Local cadres used their positions of power to extract as much benefit for themselves as possible, while punishing anyone they disliked or with whom they disagreed. Villagers were also encouraged to ‘struggle' against each other, and in some cases even family members fought one another. In Guangdong province in southern China, the practice of violence had reached an unprecedented level. As mentioned earlier, Guangdong has a long revolutionary tradition. The CCP was extremely active there from its earliest days, and in 1927 China's first rural Soviet base was established in Haifeng and Lufeng counties in eastern Guangdong. One legacy of Guangdong's revolutionary culture was a propensity for political violence. With the People's Communes, the region's military tradition was restored by Mao's order; oppressive control was revived. Violence became a routine practice. Local cadres as well as villagers were coordinated to take up violence against fellow villagers. Most communes set up their own prisons or labour camps. These were called ‘little prisons'.
Commune or brigade officials, as well as villagers, could arrest anyone they disliked by labelling them potential ‘saboteurs' and put them in these little prisons. They needed no warrants. They only had to frame it as if they were supporting the party ‘general line' or the People's Commune. In Taishan County, one woman in her sixties suffered poor health. When she asked for permission to be absent from a commune's celebration meeting, the local cadre forcefully brought her to the meeting, where she came close to death spitting blood. In one commune, more than seventy villagers were locked up in the commune labour camp. Their crimes were that they were ‘disobedient' and ‘wilful'. When the number of arrests had become so extensive that there was no longer any room to accommodate them, they were crowded into village toilets. Those under arrest were routinely tortured, beaten and hanged. Common methods of torture included whipping with sticks; administering electric shocks; pouring boiling water over their heads; using red-hot metal to burn faces or bodies; forcing prisoners to kneel for long hours; mutilation such as scalping or chopping off ears; medieval style humiliations such as tattooing. In one commune in Luoding County, nearly a hundred villagers were clubbed to death.[751]As the People's Commune, the CCP's so called ‘bridge to communist paradise', descended into the ‘people's hell', grain production plummeted. As of spring 1959 a severe famine took hold across rural China. The procurement system for the acquisition of grain and other agricultural products broke down across large sections of the country. But crop failure and famine conflicted with the state's utopian vision of abundance. Mao and many top CCP leaders determined to win ‘the war'. On 22 February 1959, in a letter to provincial leaders, Mao suggested that the food shortage was a conspiracy: the peasants were hiding grain and this was due to corruption at the local level. To ‘take back the countryside' and to ‘educate the peasants', he gave orders for the launch of the ‘Anti-Hiding Campaign'.
A month later, at a top CCP leaders' meeting in Shanghai (25 March to 1 April), Mao again urged the leadership to ‘be relentless' towards the peasants and to procure ‘a third' of the total crop produced.[752]The nationwide Anti-Hiding Campaign soon turned into another crusade against peasants. Under pressure from their superiors, provincial leaders turned on those at the level immediately below them. As the popular Chinese saying goes, ‘The big fish eats the small fish, the small fish eats the little shrimp, and the little shrimp eats nothing but sand.' At the local level, cadres made up false production figures showing praiseworthy success. This led to the ever-increasing procurement quotas based on the false figures. When they failed to procure the projected amounts, local cadres forced starving peasants to hand over their very last kernels of grain and to work day and night in scorching summer and freezing winter. Anyone who did not follow orders was severely punished. Many were tortured or starved to death. In some counties in Shandong province, villagers caught hiding grain were treated as saboteurs or ‘American devils'. In Dan County, more than one third of the families were looted. Local villagers commented that the CCP policy was worse than the wartime Japanese army's Three All Policy (burn all, kill all and loot all). In Juye County, when one female villager asked for leave to take care of her sick child, the brigade head refused by saying: ‘If he dies we could save 180 kg of grain, and his corpse could be used as fertiliser.'[753]
In the aftermath of the CCP's Lushan Plenum in late July and early August 1959, Mao silenced the critical voices of the Great Leap Forward within the CCP leadership, and pushed the campaign even harder. Violence intensified across the countryside. At the local level, public meetings became the platform for the promotion of terror and the site for decisions about its execution. A mass campaign, engineered by the Party under the Three Red Banners (Socialist Construction, the Great Leap Forward and the People's Commune), turned into a ‘beating frenzy'.
It spread across the country at terrifying speed. Sichuan province, the proverbial land of abundance, was led by the provincial Party boss Li Jingquan, whom Mao once called more ruthless than even the earlier regional warlords. Having reached his position by being brutal, Li was keen to take up the public practice of mass violence for his own career interests. Early in the spring in 1959, serious food shortages afflicted the Sichuan countryside. But Li was only interested in receiving continuous praise from top CCP leaders in Beijing for Sichuan's steadfast and generous provision of grain to the rest of country. He launched a ‘Balance the Books Campaign' in March to achieve unrealistically high procurement quotas. This was part of the nationwide Anti-Hiding Campaign, accompanied by the ‘Rectification Campaign'. Rectification, however, did not clean up corruption among the cadres. It enabled open looting of peasants' homes and the theft of the very last reserves of food they possessed. When no grain was found, peasants were physically tortured or were punished by total food deprivation. In eastern Sichuan's Shizhu County, a county not far from prosperous Chongqing, more than 70 per cent of the local population in the Xianfeng Big Brigade of the county's model Huaban commune were battered during the ‘Balance the Books Campaign'. Here local cadres took pride in beating villagers up. Indeed special ‘people-beating squads' were set up. Local cadres even encouraged children to attack other children. Between mid 1959 and mid 1961, Shizhu County had an average death rate as high as 60 per cent. While the majority of those who died did so as the result of starvation, many were also beaten to death. In nearby Fuling County the situation was no better. Take the Baozi Commune, for example. This was once considered Fuling's granary. With its lush green terraced fields, the area had produced such an abundance of food that over 2.5 million kg of grain were sent to the state granary in 1958. But in 1959 and the first half of i960, the death rate there was as high as 29 per cent. By January 1961 the population had dropped by 46 per cent compared to 1957. The majority were either beaten to death or died of food deprivation during the Anti-Hiding Campaign. In Qinglong Big Brigade, in December 1959, the Anti-Hiding activists meeting lasted for six days and nights. During this protracted public ordeal villagers were repeatedly beaten. Some were clubbed to death in the meeting and many more were severely injured as a result. One former village cadre, an opponent of the acting brigade head, was so brutally tortured that he was driven completely insane.[754] In Youyang County, an official estimate found that 359 people had been beaten to death in less than a year during the AntiHiding Campaign. In Youyang's Longtan district, the local party secretary knocked out the teeth of more than eighty villagers, and beat one four-year- old child to death for having eaten a small amount of sweet potato. A government investigative report shows that he had beaten every child in the district during the campaign.[755]Humiliation inflicted as much pain as torture. In traditional China, public humiliation was used as a form of punishment. Under the Maoist regime it was an essential tool for carrying out political violence and it was widely practised in the People's Commune. In the name of Anti-Hiding, women in Shandong's Juye County were regularly raped or publicly humiliated by being forced to stand naked if they were suspected of hiding grain or could not work in the fields due to menstruation.[756]
In time of scarcity, food was a more powerful weapon than torture. Food deprivation was a common method used by local cadres to force villagers to work harder or to extract more food. While the total number of people who died of food deprivation during the Great Leap Famine is a statistic hard to obtain due to the continuing restricted access to archival material, from those examples gathered from local archives we learn this was a widespread problem. Take eastern Sichuan, for example, between 1959 and 1961: in one commune in Hechuan County 496 people died an abnormal death. Of these, forty-two were hanged or buried alive or frightened to death and sixty-two were beaten to death, while 392 died of food deprivation.[757]
What makes the Great Leap Famine in Mao's China different from famines in late imperial China and the brief period of the Chinese Republic is the extraordinary level of violence that was meted out during this period. In the pursuit of the CCP's utopian vision to transform the Chinese countryside into a communist paradise, it is estimated that 2-3 million people were tortured to death or deliberately killed between 1958 and 1961.[758] Some of these were buried alive; others were beaten to death; even more were starved to death by deliberate food deprivation. As with the earlier campaigns, the majority of those victims had done nothing wrong: some happened to have been born into the ‘wrong class', and others simply fell victim to a lawless environment where privilege and cronyism were the only ways to survive. For most of the local cadres who committed violent crimes, there was often no ideological conviction or specifically evil motive. As Hannah Arendt famously argued, ‘the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil'. When the practice of violence became a habit in the People's Commune, it needed no intellectual or moral justification. Like all habits, it could be learnt over time.
Once they had been deprived of their dignity as well as their rights to live a human life, some began to live as criminals or indeed even as savages. The Chinese countryside turned into an even more violent world. Robbery, theft, murder and cannibalism were regularly reported between 1959 and 1961. According to an incomplete estimate by the Ministry of Public Security, from September i960 to 25 January 1961, there were 30,000 incidents of gang robbery from state granaries in twenty-three different provinces and regions throughout China. Railways across the country had become the main battlefield. Train robbery became a ‘weapon of the weak', a survival strategy in time of famine. Starving villagers carrying knives routinely robbed passing trains carrying grain and goods. In Gansu alone, the Public Security reported more than 500 incidents of train robbery.[759] In Shandong province, famous for the Boxer sectarian violence at the turn of the twentieth century, sectarian groups were active again. They put out slogans such as: ‘To have enough to eat, we must unite together to kill cadres and rob granaries.' Southern and south-western China also saw a revival of sectarian activities. There were regular reports of sectarian followers storming the local Public Security and furnishing themselves with weapons. Many villagers saw the famine as a sign that the CCP had lost the ‘Mandate of Heaven', the right to rule. They killed local CCP officials and declared they would take over Beijing and overthrow the CCP rule. To suppress these ‘counter-revolutionary sabotages' led to many violent clashes between the PLA soldiers and followers of sectarian groups.[760] In parts of the country, cannibalism became widespread. In Linxia autonomous region in Gansu province, for instance, where there had been violent clashes between Chinese officials and the Hui ethnic group during which thousands were massacred (as mentioned earlier), more than fifty instances of cannibalism were uncovered in one municipality between late 1959 and the following summer. While the majority consumed the flesh of villagers who had died as a result of starvation, five villagers murdered victims before consuming their flesh. One even killed his own younger brother and ate his flesh. Far away from Gansu, in Sichuan's Fuling region as well as in parts of Guizhou in south-west China, cannibalism was regularly reported. Here again, it was often children who became victims of human scavengers. On one occasion, a desperate mother strangled her own son to death and consumed his flesh.[761] In Henan's Xinyang region, China's agricultural heartland and the birthplace of the People's Commune, villagers in Guanshan County told me that every village had cases of cannibalism.[762]
The systematic violence that haunted the PRC during the Mao era was not merely the result of a series of unplanned and disconnected events. Violence was a state weapon used to implement radical political changes aiming towards a perfect, utopian state that would be free of mass violence. Once such practices were built into the system, violence became habituated, and therefore beyond any justification. Before modern times, Chinese society had been constrained by Confucian ideals, which also limited the ability of the state to inflict random violence against individuals. This broke down over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the decline of imperial and then Republican rule (and the emergence of local warlords). This meant that it became easier and easier to instrumentalise violence for a wide range of purposes, both public and private, under Mao's leadership. Thus, violence in the PRC took a wide range of forms and was not necessarily ‘top-down'. From torture and beatings to public humiliation and starvation, violence became the common coin of human interaction in the PRC. It became a vocabulary through which state policy was seen as validated and thus also became simultaneously a means by which individual interests and desires could be fulfilled. The PRC under Mao's leadership became defined by violence at every level, well exceeding Marx's pessimistic view of the nature of revolution in 1848.