Mao's Great Famine (17 page)

Ke Qingshi, the party boss in Shanghai, was so incensed by Zhang Wentian’s talk that he approached Mao and urged him to take on his enemies then and there. Li Jingquan also spoke with Mao. Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai conferred with the Chairman on the evening of 22 July, although the details of what was said that evening are not known.
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In a rather disingenuous but clever way that implicated Liu Shaoqi, Mao would claim a few weeks later that he had been puzzled by requests for greater freedom of speech by some comrades: Liu was the one who had pointed out to him that these were not isolated voices but a faction fighting the party line.
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On 23 July Mao gave a long and rambling speech lasting three hours in which obscure metaphors were mixed with blunt threats aimed at frightening his opponents. He opened his speech thus: ‘You have spoken at great length, so how about you allow me to say a few words – what do you think?’ He then rebutted Peng Dehuai’s letter, reviewed all the attacks on the party since its foundation and cautioned leaders not to waver in a moment of crisis – some comrades were a mere thirty kilometres away from being rightists. He repeated the threat he had made at a party meeting three months earlier: ‘If you don’t attack me, I won’t attack you, but if you attack me I for sure will attack you.’ If every little problem in every brigade was to be reported in the
People’s Daily
at the expense of any other news, he said, it would take at least a year to appear in print. And what would be the result? The country would collapse, the leadership would be overthrown. ‘If we deserve to perish, I will go to the countryside to lead the peasants and overthrow the government. If the People’s Liberation Army won’t follow me, I will then go to find a Red Army. But I think that the Liberation Army will follow me.’ Mao admitted overall responsibility for the Great Leap Forward, but he also implicated a string of colleagues, from Ke Qingshi, the Shanghai boss who had first proposed a steel campaign, Li Fuchun who was in charge of overall planning, Tan Zhenlin and Lu Liaoyan who together oversaw agriculture, to the provincial leaders he labelled leftist, whether the province be Yunnan, Henan, Sichuan or Hubei. Mao delivered an ultimatum: leaders would have to choose between Peng and himself, and the wrong choice would bring about enormous political consequences for the party.
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His audience was shell-shocked. As Mao walked out with his doctor, he bumped into Peng Dehuai. ‘Minister Peng, let’s have a talk,’ Mao suggested.

Peng Dehuai was livid. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. No more talk,’ he answered, cutting through the air by bringing down his right hand in a chopping motion.
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On 2 August, Mao opened the plenum of the central committee in a short but fierce speech which set the tone for the following two weeks. ‘When we first arrived in Lushan there was something in the air, as some people said that there was no freedom to speak openly, there was pressure. At the time I did not quite understand what this was all about. I could not make head or tail of it and did not see why they said there was not enough freedom. Indeed, the first two weeks felt like a meeting of immortals and there was no tension. Only later did it become tense, as some people wanted freedom of speech. Tension appeared because they wanted the freedom to criticise the general line, freedom to destroy the general line. They criticised what we did last year, and they criticised this year’s work, saying that everything we did last year was bad, fundamentally bad . . . What problems do we have now? Today, the only problem is the rightist opportunists launching a furious attack on the party, the people and the great and dynamic socialist enterprise.’ Mao warned his colleagues that there was a stark choice to be made. ‘You either want unity or you want to split the party.’
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The following week small working groups were charged with grilling Peng Dehuai, Zhang Wentian, Huang Kecheng, Zhou Xiaozhou and others on every detail of their plot against the party. In a series of tense confrontations and cross-examinations, the ‘anti-party clique’ had to subject themselves to ever more detailed self-criticisms in which every aspect of their pasts, their meetings and their talks was scrutinised. Allegations about famine had cast a shadow over provincial bosses such as Li Jingquan, Zeng Xisheng, Wang Renzhong and Zhang Zhongliang, and they needed no encouragement to attack the men who had undermined their credibility. Lin Biao proved just as ferocious. A gaunt, balding general who had destroyed the best Guomindang divisions in Manchuria in the civil war, Lin had been quietly promoted by Mao to one of the vice-chairmanships of the party a few months earlier. Suffering from all sorts of phobias about water, wind and cold, he often called in sick, living a mole-like existence, but at Lushan he rallied to the Chairman’s defence, accusing Peng Dehuai of being overly ‘ambitious, conspiratorial and hypocritical’. In his shrill voice he crowed that ‘Only Mao is a great hero, a role to which no one else should dare to aspire. We all lag very far behind him, so don’t even think about it!’
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Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai also had their parts to play. Both had a lot to lose, and either one could be blamed for what had gone wrong in the country if Mao decided to retreat. Liu Shaoqi had enthusiastically backed the Great Leap Forward and been rewarded for his loyalty with a promotion to head of state in April. He also viewed himself as the potential inheritor of the party’s leadership and had no desire to rock the boat. After Mao’s outburst Liu became so nervous that he increased his use of sleeping tablets. At one point he overdosed and collapsed in the toilet.
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But he pulled himself together, and on 17 August, the last day of the meeting, he gave a display of fawning flattery, extolling Mao’s many qualities.
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Zhou Enlai, as premier, had been involved in the day-to-day running of the country and would have had to account for the disastrous turn of events if Peng Dehuai had had his way. He also had personal reasons to feel threatened by the old marshal. Huang Kecheng, during one of the grilling sessions, revealed that years earlier Peng had described Zhou as a weak politician who should step down from all important posts.
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But most of all Zhou backed Mao because he had made a decision long ago never to cross the Chairman: loyalty to Mao, as he had discovered over decades of fierce political infighting, was the key to staying in power. His position had already been weakened after Mao’s withering attack on him at Nanning over a year ago and he had no desire to incur the Chairman’s wrath again. Mao was thus the centre of an uneasy coalition of leaders who felt threatened by Peng Dehuai. Without their support the Chairman might not have prevailed.

As the meetings progressed and the criticisms escalated, the men who had spoken out against Mao were gradually broken down until full confessions were obtained. Peng admitted that his letter and the comments he had made in the early sessions were not isolated incidents, but ‘anti-party, anti-people, anti-socialist mistakes of a rightist opportunist nature’.
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Mao spoke again on 11 August, singling out Peng Dehuai: ‘You said that at the North China meeting I fucked your mother for forty days, and here at Lushan you only fucked my mother for twenty days, so I still owe you twenty days. Now we indulge your desire, and I even added five days on top of the forty we have had so far so that you can insult us as much as you want, otherwise we would owe you.’ In the more standard jargon of socialism, Mao claimed that Peng and his supporters were ‘bourgeois democrats’ who had little in common with the proletarian socialist revolution, thereby stripping them of their positions and casting them into the ranks of the bourgeoisie.
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At the closing meeting of the conference five days later a resolution was adopted in which Mao’s opponents were found guilty of having conspired against party, state and people.
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The next few months would unleash a nationwide witch-hunt against ‘rightist’ elements.

13

Repression

The army was purged. Lin Biao, who could be depended on to ferret out any ideological opposition among the military, was rewarded for his performance at Lushan with Peng Dehuai’s job. Lin knew that speaking the truth about conditions in the countryside was a naive approach bound to fail, and he showered the Chairman with flattery instead. But in private he was much more critical than Peng, confiding in his private diary – unearthed by Red Guards years later – that the Great Leap Forward was ‘based on fantasy, and a total mess’.
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Rarely was the distance between a leader’s inner thoughts and his public statements so vast, but all over the country party officials scrambled to prove their allegiance to the Chairman and the Great Leap Forward as a new purge unfolded.

The tone was set at the top. In language auguring the Cultural Revolution, Peng Zhen beat the drum for a purge of the ranks: ‘The struggle should be profound, and should be carried out according to our principles, whether it is against old comrades-in-arms, colleagues or even husbands and wives.’ Tan Zhenlin, the zealous vice-premier overseeing agriculture, pointed out that enemies were entrenched at the very top: ‘this struggle should separate us from some of our old comrades-in-arms!’
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In Beijing alone thousands of top officials were targeted by the end of 1959, including almost 300 up to the level of central committee member, or 10 per cent of the top echelon. More than sixty were branded as rightists. Many were old veterans, but as the leadership explained they had to be smashed resolutely or else the ‘construction of socialism’ would be imperilled.
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Across the country anybody who had expressed reservations about the Great Leap Forward was hunted down. In Gansu this struggle started as soon as Zhang Zhongliang returned to Lanzhou. Huo Weide, Song Liangcheng and others who had ‘shot a poisoned arrow at Lushan’ were denounced as members of an ‘anti-party clique’. Well over 10,000 cadres were hounded throughout the province.
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Where his rivals had revealed widespread famine in a letter of denunciation to Beijing, Zhang wrote instead to the Chairman: ‘Work in every department is surging ahead in our province, the changes are momentous, including those concerning grain. We are looking at a bumper harvest across the province.’
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Then, as his realm turned into a living hell in 1960, he wrote again to explain deaths by starvation, blaming them on Huo Weide, the leader of the anti-party clique. Zhang minimised what would later be revealed to be death on a massive scale by again calling it a problem of ‘one finger out of ten’.
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Anybody who had stood in the path of the Great Leap Forward was removed. In Yunnan, the deputy of the Bureau for Commerce was dismissed for having made critical comments about food shortages and the people’s communes – and for having snored while recordings of the Chairman’s speeches were being played.
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In Hebei, the vice-director of the Bureau for Water Conservancy was purged for having expressed doubts about the wisdom of dismantling central-heating systems during the steel campaign.
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County leaders who had started to close some of the canteens were persecuted for abandoning socialism and ‘reverting to a go-it-alone policy’.
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In Anhui vice-governor Zhang Kaifan and some of his allies were sacked, as Mao suspected that ‘such people are speculators who sneaked into the party . . . They scheme to sabotage the proletarian dictatorship, split the party and organise factions.’
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Similar high-level dismissals also occurred in Fujian, Qinghai, Heilongjiang and Liaoning, among other provinces.

Provincial leaders who had managed to soften the impact of the Great Leap Forward were removed. Under constant fire from Mao and his acolytes for his caution, Zhou Xiaozhou, the reluctant leader of Hunan province, had relented and inflated the crop projections in 1958. But he rarely lost an opportunity to put a damper on the enthusiasm of local cadres during inspection trips. In Changde he had openly scoffed at all the bragging about grain output. He questioned the supply system. Approached by a woman who complained about the local canteen, he had suggested that she simply walk out and cook a meal back home. He had refused point-blank to have anybody in Hunan follow the example set by Macheng, seeing the sputnik fields as a dangerous diversion from pressing agricultural tasks. In Ningxiang, where he had discovered that only women were working in the fields, he had demanded that the menfolk be recalled from the backyard furnaces. His response to the work–study programme requiring all students in primary schools to participate in productive labour had been a mere expletive: ‘Rubbish!’
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Despite his best efforts, many local cadres had forged ahead, embracing the Leap Forward through a mixture of conviction and ambition, leading to the same kind of abuses on the ground as could be found elsewhere.

But, all in all, Hunan was in better shape than its neighbour Hubei, run by Mao’s sycophant Wang Renzhong. When Mao’s special train had stopped in Wuchang in May 1959, just before the Lushan meeting, the city was in a terrible state. Even in the guesthouse set aside for Mao, there was no meat, no cigarettes and few vegetables. Changsha, in Mao’s home province of Hunan, was different, with open-air restaurants still serving customers. Zhou Xiaozhou was all too conscious of the contrast, prodding his rival Wang, who was accompanying Mao to Changsha: ‘Hunan was criticised for not having worked as hard. Now look at Hubei. You don’t even have stale cigarettes or tea. You used up all your reserves last year. Today, we may be poor, but at least we have supplies in storage.’
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With hindsight, maybe Zhou had made too many enemies to survive in the fierce environment of a one-party regime. As a key member of the ‘anti-party clique’ he was purged immediately after the Lushan plenum, paving the way for leaders like Zhang Pinghua who were willing to follow Mao’s every dictate – and starve the local population as a result.