Mao's Great Famine (6 page)

To increase the political pressure on the top echelon, the Chairman also presided over a shift in power from the centre to the provinces. Nanning was the first in a series of impromptu conferences called by Mao, who strictly controlled the list of participants, set the agendas and dominated the proceedings, allowing him to cajole his followers towards the Great Leap Forward. He brought the secretariat to the provinces, rather than summon the provinces to come to the more formal sessions of established bodies like the State Council in Beijing.
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By so doing he tapped into a deep current of dissatisfaction among provincial leaders. Tao Lujia, first secretary of Shanxi, spoke for many local cadres when he expressed his impatience with the country’s widespread poverty.
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Mao’s vision of a China which was ‘poor and blank’ resonated with idealists who believed in the party’s capacity to catapult the country ahead of its rivals. ‘When you are poor you are inclined to be revolutionary. Blank paper is ideal for writing.’
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Radical provincial leaders lapped up their leader’s vision. Wu Zhipu, leader of Henan, heralded a ‘continuous revolution’ to crush rightist opponents and leap forward. Zeng Xisheng, long-term veteran of the People’s Liberation Army and leader of Anhui, provided the slogan ‘Battle Hard for Three Years to Change the Face of China’. But most of all, having witnessed the ritual abasement of their superiors on their own turf, the provinces were encouraged to launch their own witch-hunts, as a wind of persecution blew through the country.

Mao could be cryptic, leaving his colleagues guessing at the nature of his message, but this time there was plenty of pressure from Beijing concerning the right direction. To make sure that the purges against rightist elements were carried out thoroughly, Mao sent his bull terrier Deng Xiaoping to a series of regional meetings. Instructions were clear. In Gansu, Deng explained, the struggle against vice-governors Sun Diancai, Chen Chengyi and Liang Dajun had to be unequivocal.
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Gansu boss Zhang Zhongliang wasted no time, and a few weeks later he announced that an anti-party clique had been uncovered inside the party provincial committee. Coincidentally, its leaders were Sun Diancai, Chen Chengyi and Liang Dajun: they were accused of denying the achievements of the Socialist High Tide in 1956, attacking the party, denigrating socialism and promoting capitalism – among other heinous crimes.
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These were powerful leaders toppled with the support of Beijing. The purges, however, were carried out at all levels of the party, silencing most critical voices. Few dared to oppose the party line. In parts of Gansu, a poor province near the deserts of Inner Mongolia, any critical comment about grain procurement or excessive quotas simply became unthinkable. The message to party members concerned about the crop was blunt: ‘You should consider carefully whether or not you are rightists.’
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In Lanzhou University, located in the capital city of Gansu, up to half of all students were given a white flag, the sign of a politically conservative laggard. Some had a note pinned on their back: ‘Your father is a white flag.’ Others were beaten. Those who took a neutral stand were denounced as reactionaries.
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The purge continued for as long as Zhang Zhongliang remained in power. By March 1960, some 190,000 people had been denounced and humiliated in public meetings, and 40,000 cadres were expelled from the party, including 150 top provincial officials.
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Similar purges took place throughout the country, as radical leaders seized the opportunity to get rid of their more timorous rivals. From December 1957 onwards, the southern province of Yunnan was in the grip of an anti-rightist purge that reached from party seniors down to village cadres. In April 1958 the tough local boss Xie Fuzhi, a short man with a double chin, announced the overthrow of the leaders of an ‘anti-party clique’: Zheng Dun and Wang Jing, the heads of the Organisation Department, were guilty of ‘localism’, ‘revisionism’, advocating capitalism, attempting to overthrow the party’s leadership and opposing the socialist revolution.
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By the summer of 1958 the inquisition had resulted in the removal of some 2,000 party members. One in fifteen top leaders were fired, including more than 150 powerful cadres working at the county level or higher up in one of the province’s dozen administrative regions. A further 9,000 party members were labelled as rightists as the campaign unfolded.
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‘Anti-party’ cliques were uncovered almost everywhere. Mao prodded the provincial leaders on. ‘Better me than you as dictator,’ he declared in March 1958, invoking words from Lenin. ‘It’s similar in the provinces: is it going to be Jiang Hua or Sha Wenhan as dictator?’
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In Zhejiang Sha Wenhan was hounded by Jiang Hua, and similar battles took place in Guangdong, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Anhui, Liaoning, Hebei and Yunnan, among other provinces.
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In Henan, one of the provinces that would be most affected by famine, a moderate leader called Pan Fusheng was swept aside by Wu Zhipu, a zealous follower of Mao. Pan had painted a grim picture of collectivisation during the Socialist High Tide. ‘The peasants . . . are the same as beasts of burden today. Yellow oxen are tied up in the house and human beings are harnessed in the field. Girls and women pull ploughs and harrows, with their wombs hanging out. Co-operation is transformed into the exploitation of human strength.’
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Here, it seemed, was a blatant case of a retreat to capitalism, and all of Pan’s followers were hunted down, dividing party and village. Scarecrows with slogans appeared along dusty roadsides, reading ‘Down with Pan Fusheng’ or ‘Down with Wu Zhipu’. Most local cadres could see which way the wind was blowing, and fell in line behind Wu Zhipu.
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But, however great the pressure, there were always choices to be made. When Mao toured Jiangsu and asked the local leader whether they were fighting the rightists, Jiang Weiqing gathered up his courage and told the Chairman that if there were any bad elements he would have to be counted as their leader. The party should get rid of him first. Mao laughed: ‘You don’t fear being cut in pieces for pulling the emperor off his horse! Well, just leave it then . . .’
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As a result, fewer cadres were denounced in Jiangsu than elsewhere.

But rare were those who had the conviction, the courage or the inclination to swim against the tide. The purges percolated down the ranks of the party. Just as Mao imposed his will in Beijing, local overlords laid down the law in their own provinces, denouncing any opposition as ‘conservative rightism’. And just as provincial capitals had their hegemons, county leaders and their cronies used the purge to eliminate their rivals. They turned a blind eye on local bullies. On the ground, a world far removed from the utopia envisaged on paper started to emerge.

An early warning sign came in the summer of 1958, as a report circulating among the top brass showed how violence had become the norm during the anti-rightist campaign in Fengxian county, just south of Shanghai. A hundred people committed suicide, many others being worked to death in the fields. Wang Wenzhong, county leader, set the example with a motto that compared ‘the masses’ to dogs intimidated only by the sight of a stick in a cadre’s hands. Thousands of villagers were accused of being ‘landlords’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in public meetings that punctuated daily life for months on end. Many were routinely beaten, tied up and tortured, some being carried away to special labour camps set up throughout the county.
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Fengxian was a dire warning of the darkness to come. At the top, however, floating far above the ground, faith in the ability of the people to change heaven and earth was boundless. In December 1957 Chen Zhengren, one of Mao’s most trusted colleagues, attacked the conservatism of ‘rightists’ who hampered the enthusiasm of the masses in the water-conservancy campaign. This was the rallying cry of the Great Leap Forward.
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4

Bugle Call

A muddy river runs through the heart of China, flowing some 5,500 kilometres from the barren mountains in Qinghai to empty in the Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea near Beijing. The upper reaches of the river flow through mountain valleys where the water is clear, but after a series of steep cliffs and gorges it meanders through the dusty loess plateau, picking up the soft, silty sediment left behind over time by wind storms. As mud and sand are further discharged into the river, it turns into a dirty ochre colour. The loess is deposited in the slower sections downstream, causing the river bed to rise. By the time it passes the ancient city of Kaifeng, the river bed runs ten metres above the surrounding fields. When the banks burst, the flat, northern plain is easily inundated, turning the river into one of the most perilous natural hazards on record. Kaifeng itself was flooded, abandoned and rebuilt several times. Ditches and embankments were traditionally used as flood defences but they had little effect, the river carrying an estimated 1.6 billion tonnes of silt annually. ‘When the Yellow River flows clear’, in Chinese, is the equivalent of the expression ‘when pigs fly’.

Another traditional saying heralds the advent of a miraculous leader: ‘When a great man emerges, the Yellow River will run clear.’ Could Chairman Mao tame the river that flooded so often that it had earned the name ‘China’s sorrow’? Early propaganda posters showed him sitting pensively on a rock overlooking the river, perhaps pondering ways to clear the water.
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In 1952, when these photos were taken, Mao had toured the river and uttered a single, somewhat cryptic line: ‘Work on the Yellow River must be carried out well.’
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Heated debates about the scheme ensued among engineers while Mao remained on the sidelines, and a faction in favour of a large dam finally prevailed. Soviet experts, themselves enamoured with gigantic projects, surveyed the lower reach and identified the Three Gate Gorge in Henan as a suitable site. A design for a dam setting the normal pool water at 360 metres was delivered in April 1956, meaning that close to a million people would have to be relocated as some 220,000 hectares of land would be submerged. The project was officially launched in April 1957, despite the reservations of several hydraulic engineers. Huang Wanli, an American-trained geologist who had visited every major dam in the United States, argued that dire consequences would follow from the attempt to clear the river of sediment. Blocking dirt and loess behind a giant dam would limit the reservoir’s lifespan and eventually lead to disaster. Then Mao intervened. ‘What is this trash?’ was the angry headline of his editorial published in June 1957 by the
People’s Daily
. The article listed a series of charges against Huang, alleging, among other things, that he had attacked the Chairman, harmed the party, propagated bourgeois democracy and admired foreign cultures.
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All criticism of the Three Gate Gorge Dam was brushed aside.

By the end of 1958 the Yellow River was blocked. Some 6 million square metres of earth had been moved in a pharaonic enterprise involving the labour of tens of thousands of villagers. A year later the dam was ready. The water was clear. But the initial design had provided for several outlets and tubes, allowing accumulated sediment to be flushed through the dam. These had been blocked by reinforced concrete in the haste to complete the project on schedule. Within a year the sediment started inching upstream, raising the waters and threatening to flood the industrial centre of Xi’an. Extensive rebuilding was required to purge the sediment, which in turn caused a drop in the pool level. With a lower waterline the 150,000 kilowatt turbines, installed at great cost, became completely useless and had to be removed to another site. The water was no longer clear. By 1961 the amount of silt carried by the Yellow River had doubled, Zhou Enlai himself admitted. Up to 95 per cent of a section of the Yellow River west of Zhengzhou consisted of mud.
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A few years later the area was so silted up that foreigners were banned from visiting the dam.
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The term ‘Great Leap Forward’ was first used in the context of the water-conservancy drive launched towards the end of 1957. Determined to overtake Britain in fifteen years, Mao saw a key to rapid industrialisation in the substitution of labour for capital. The masses were the country’s real wealth, and they should be mobilised during the slack winter season, before the spring ploughing, to transform the countryside. If water could be diverted to irrigate the thin topsoil of the many impoverished villages strewn across the arid north, if floods could be contained with giant dykes and reservoirs in the subtropical south, the yield of grain would jump. All over China tens of millions of farmers joined irrigation projects: collectively, so the propaganda went, they could accomplish in a matter of months what their forefathers had done in thousands of years. Some 30 million people were recruited in October 1957. By January one in six people was digging earth in China. More than 580 million cubic metres of rocks and soil were moved before the end of the year.
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Henan, where the Three Gate Gorge Dam was being built, took the lead, as local boss Wu Zhipu ruthlessly pushed the labour force into grandiose projects designed to impress Beijing. In the region bordering Henan and Anhui, centre of an ambitious ‘Harness the Huai River’ campaign which would unfold for several decades, more than a hundred dams and reservoirs were built between 1957 and 1959.
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In a country in the grip of gigantism, massive irrigation schemes appeared everywhere, although the leadership gave special emphasis to the north-west. Critical voices were few and far between. Mao distrusted intellectuals, and in the summer of 1957 persecuted hundreds of thousands of those who had dared to voice a critical opinion during the Hundred Flowers. But as we have seen in the previous chapter, the purge of party leaders in the anti-rightist campaign from late 1957 onwards was even more effective in removing opposition to the Great Leap Forward.