A History of China (80 page)

Yet China would not be totally isolated, especially in the pivotal year of 1956. In February, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), startled the communist world, particularly the Chinese, with a secret speech (which was eventually leaked to the world) condemning the crimes of the Stalin era. From the “liquidation” of the “kulaks” (or rich peasants) to the Moscow trials of the 1930s and ending with the post-Second World War purges, he enumerated Stalin’s murderous and paranoid policies. These accusations reverberated first in Eastern Europe and contributed to disturbances and even revolutions in East Berlin, Poland, and Hungary. Shocked by the speech and what they ­perceived to be its repercussions, the Chinese communists and, in particular, Mao Zedong, were concerned about these rumblings in the Soviet bloc. In part, they blamed Khrushchev for precipitating the calls for change and the resulting violence in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, they were also aware that overwhelming repression had generated the outbreaks in Eastern Europe. Even more important, they recognized that intellectuals and professionals ­frequently took the lead in challenging the communist governments.

Mao responded with a speech in 1956 (published in February of 1957) directed mostly at intellectuals, who could be disruptive but also had skills required for Chinese development. He urged them to make public their complaints and their critiques of the Communist Party and the government. Such dialogues and conversations would permit “one hundred flowers” to bloom. Here Mao referred to the Warring States period of the Zhou dynasty, when a hundred schools of thought and a hundred flowers had allegedly bloomed. Mao often used historical references to bolster his views, offering him a legitimacy associated with the Chinese tradition. However, the campaign did not develop as planned. Intellectuals criticized the limits imposed upon them, the ignorance of cadres, and the government’s economic failures. They went way beyond what Mao had anticipated. Some of the most celebrated intellectuals participated in the Hundred Flowers campaign. Ding Ling (1904–1986), a pseudonym of Jiang Bingzhi, the most renowned Chinese woman novelist, who had received the Stalin Prize from the USSR in 1951 for her novels, including
The Sun Shines Over the Sangkan River
(
Taiyang zhaozai sanggan heshang
), was outspoken in her espousal of greater freedom for writers. Other writers and academics were similarly candid. A few trained in the West – ­especially the distinguished anthropologist Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), who had trained at the London School of Economics, had written
Peasant Life in China
, and had been an advocate for rural industry – were particularly critical of restraints on basic freedoms, and especially concerned by the party’s ban on the discipline of sociology. By June, the Communist Party, concerned about the intensity and scope of criticism, had initiated a propaganda effort, labeled the Anti-rightist Campaign, against the more vociferous critics, who were labeled “anticommunists” and “rightists.” It compelled many intellectuals to engage in “self-criticism,” renouncing their earlier views about the party, its cadres, and its policies. Ding Ling and her husband were exiled to labor in a bitterly cold region of what was formerly known as Manchuria and her works were banned. Fei was sent to the countryside and assigned to do manual labor. Many less renowned or prominent individuals were effectively silenced or imprisoned or assigned to hard labor in remote regions. This attack on intellectuals, technocrats, and professionals was counterproductive, for it deprived the educational system, public institutions, and the economy of skilled and intelligent men and women.

Some leading intellectuals survived, even though they had been critical of the party and government. Ba Jin, the formerly anarchist novelist who wrote the semiautobiographical
Family
, was criticized but did not, at this time, endure any hardships. Ma Yinchu (1882–1982), the president of Beijing University, who had been educated at Yale and Columbia universities as an economist, had been a thorn in the side of the orthodox Marxists but he ­managed to retain his position. Distressed by China’s high population figures (as revealed in the 1953 census) and the continued rate of growth, Ma warned that overpopulation would undercut economic development, as profits would need to be plowed back into production for the immediate consumption of the increasing number of people. It would also impinge upon accumulation of capital for industrialization and would ultimately lower living standards. He noted that, without a birth-control policy, China could not expect dramatic economic growth. Orthodox Marxists accused him of echoing the retrograde economic views of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), the nineteenth-century advocate of classical economics who feared population growth. Yet he retained his position during the disruptive aftermath of the Hundred Flowers movement and resigned only in April of 1960.

The turbulent reaction to the Hundred Flowers campaign had been ­terminated by the end of 1957, but the following year the government initiated policies that were even more radical. Part of the explanation for these extreme policies was Chinese estrangement from much of the rest of the world. The Chinese communists’ campaign against dissenting intellectuals aroused even greater concerns and condemnations from foreign countries, which led to a relationship of foreign embargos, radical policies, and Chinese and foreign ­belligerence.

The year 1958 posed what the Chinese government perceived of as a threat. In October of the previous year, the USA had provided advanced missiles to Taiwan and repeatedly insisted that it would defend the island against attacks. Quemoy and Matsu, two islands that were very close to the mainland but were occupied by Guomindang troops, continued to be contested, and in the summer of 1958 troops on each side kept bombarding the other. The USA moved part of its fleet to the Taiwan Straits, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994) threatened the massive use of force to defend the islands. Hoping to counter this threat, Mao sought help from Khrushchev to develop nuclear weapons. China and the USSR had signed an agreement in October of 1957 to share nuclear information, but Khrushchev renounced it during the Quemoy and Matsu crisis. Mao now believed that China was on its own and realized that the USSR would not be a reliable partner. On the other hand, Khrushchev considered the Chinese government to be overly radical and “adventurist” and did not trust it to be a responsible nuclear power. The USSR leader had ­proposed a thaw in the Cold War with the West and was eager to establish ­traditional diplomatic relations with other states. China’s “adventurism” threatened Khrushchev’s policy. Mao, already critical of Khrushchev’s secret speech exposing the crimes of the Stalin era, began to think that the USSR had adopted a rightist position in line with the capitalist West.

At the same time, Mao was disappointed both in China’s economic performance and in his people’s lack of ideological fervor. He recognized that China was way behind the world’s great powers. Increases in agricultural production had not achieved the results he had anticipated, limiting the capital available for industrialization. Thus, mechanization had been similarly limited. Mao’s solution was to focus on China’s sizable population, allegedly its most important asset. He would develop policies that emphasized labor rather than machines as the engine for economic growth. The lack of ideological purity also concerned Mao. He found it disconcerting that cadres and ordinary people had lost some of the ideological fervor of the revolution. Some cadres, he noted, seemed more interested in climbing the bureaucratic ladder than in implementing policy. Many falsified economic statistics for their own and their areas’ benefit. Mao also recognized that communist policies had favored workers and had alienated peasants and the rural areas. Nonetheless, blaming the cadres, he labeled them “corrupt” or “rightists.”

Mao decided that China needed a sense of urgency to cope with these problems. He proposed a Great Leap Forward to raise production at least to the level of the lesser industrialized nations, promising to outstrip the United Kingdom within fifteen years. He was sufficiently realistic to acknowledge that China could not match the economies of the USA, the USSR, and the other great powers. Yet he was not pragmatic enough to recognize that some of his specific proposals would wind up badly. One of the most disastrous was encouraging the population to build furnaces “in their backyards” to produce steel. He assumed that the steel would not be of the highest quality but still would be usable for ordinary purposes such as pots and pans. It turned out that nearly all the steel in the approximately 500,000 backyard furnaces was useless. Even worse, considerable timber was cut to provide fuel for the furnaces. More successful was the recruitment of large groups of people for sizable infrastructure projects. Masses of people were galvanized to construct or repair (with scant employment of tools or machinery) dams, irrigation works, and public buildings. Many of the dams were badly built and collapsed. Nonetheless, a considerable number of such projects were finished in record time. Like the USSR, communist China praised Stakhanovite workers – that is, laborers who, through incredible hard work and will power, produced an abundance of goods. The media, as part of mass campaigns, virtually deified such model heroes and heroines. Their achievements and behavior ­heralded the development of a “New Man” or “New Woman” whose values coincided with the Communist Party’s message and who thought almost exclusively of the reputed “public good.” Imaginative literature written and published during this time reinforced this image of the New Man and New Woman who devoted themselves to the cause of the Chinese people and communism above all else, including family relations.

Figure 12.1
A dam built with little mechanical equipment in the Great Leap Forward era. Photo: Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

State-sponsored culture emphasized the values of the New Man and New Woman. Painting broke away from traditional-style ink painting, characterized by landscapes or portraits that sometimes illustrated Confucian, Buddhist, or Daoist precepts but were also concerned with line, form, calligraphy, and color. The new socialist art emphasized content over form, barred abstractions, and often depicted the human figure in the form of the peasant, worker, or Mao or other celebrated leaders. Realism dominated, and poster art was especially popular, as it often accompanied such mass campaigns as the Anti-Three or Anti-Five movements, which have already been described. Bright colors rather than the often discreet black of ink painting were favored. Critical to the art were depictions of heroic figures who embodied the attitudes of the New Man or New Woman.

The Great Leap Forward in agriculture demonstrated the new values Mao wished to inculcate. Land was collectivized, and about twenty-six thousand so-called people’s communes were organized throughout the country. Communes now owned nearly all the land, although peasants were granted small private plots in which they could grow food or supplies for their own consumption. Commune managers, most often party cadres rather than ­individual peasants, decided upon crops to be grown, assigned commune members to specific types of labor, provided taxes and production statistics to the government, and policed member activities. Members were enjoined to work for the common good rather than for their own or perhaps selfish desires. Many communes established mess halls where members ate their meals, and thus gained control over food. Communes organized crèches, nurseries, and primary schools to free women from child care so that they could join the labor force. The large-scale infrastructure projects and the decision to base economic growth on the large labor pools meant that female workers were essential, and the communes needed to provide facilities to permit women to work.

In the Great Leap Forward, Mao was counting on spectacular successes in grain production to promote industrialization. The greater the produce from agriculture, the more China could trade for heavy machinery from the USSR. Despite the innovation of the communes, China still relied on the Soviet model of economic development. Such a policy dictated extraction of as much ­revenue as possible from agriculture to fuel the development of industry. The organization of such larger and presumably more efficient entities as the communes appeared to be the optimal means of increasing agricultural ­production, but this assumption proved to be illusory.

Commune managers had to fulfill specific norms. Knowing that increases were the key both to retaining their positions and being considered for promotion, they had an incentive to match or exceed these quotas. Thus, when they sent reports to the central government, many falsified production figures. Some of the figures they cited were patently absurd but were accepted as legitimate by planners in the government. Based on these statistics, government tax collectors extracted more produce from the communes. Inexperienced cadres, many of whom were not experts in agronomy, had specific political agendas, which exacerbated these difficulties. As managers, they had the power to determine the crops to be grown and to countermand the views of experienced peasants, and often demanded deep plowing and close planting, exhausting the soil. Recognizing that their superiors in the government would appreciate an increase in cash crops to be traded with the USSR and the Soviet bloc, they could, on occasion, convert land designed to produce grain for local consumption to such specialty crops as tea and fruits meant for trade and export. They also adopted Mao’s directives to plant rice stalks closer together and to cross-breed various animals, which both turned out to be disastrous.