The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (77 page)

Great Leap Forward

Beginning in 1958, Mao tried to instantly overtake the industrial output of the rest of the world by fiat. He assured worried advisers that China had enough food—more than enough—too much, really—so peasants could easily be reassigned to work in the factories.

Communist theory didn’t trust peasants. They were considered too backward to understand the historic forces at work in a revolution, and too timid to throw off their chains. Turning them into proper industrial proles would deepen the revolution.

Mao consolidated farming villages into giant communes. All private land, animals, houses, and trees had to be surrendered to the commune. A family’s house could be dismantled for parts if necessary. Residents had to eat in communal canteens rather than at home. The entire population of China was made to wear the drab, baggy Mao uniforms that hid all individuality. For a while, Mao tried to break up families and make the whole nation live in barracks sorted by age and gender.

Because Mao believed that iron and steel production figures were the true measure of a nation’s strength, he decreed that all of the people should make steel and double the national output in a year. If there was no factory on hand, they should smelt metal at home. To meet arbitrary quotas of steel production, communes gathered metal tools, cooking utensils, hair clips, and door handles to be melted down. By this massive effort, steel production was pushed up from 5.3 million tons to 10.7 million tons for one year, but only the steel mills already in existence had produced anything that could be put to use. Three million tons of the new homemade steel was unusable.
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This massive urbanization pulled 90 million peasants off the farms, stripping the land not just of its workforce but also of its experience and folk wisdom.
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Generations of learning how to work the land disappeared, while ideologues in Beijing dictated farm policy. The amount of acreage under cultivation fell along with the number of farmers. Then a drought hit.

The combination created the worst famine in history, in which tens of millions of people died. Grain production dropped from 200 million tons in 1958 to 144 million in 1960. The number of pigs fell by 48 percent between 1957 and 1961. People scrounged meals from apricot pits, rice husks, and corn cobs, while Beijing refused to admit that anything was wrong. To prove to the world that the Great Leap was a success, China exported almost 5 million tons of grain in 1959.
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Was the famine really Mao’s fault? Was it malice, hard-hearted negligence, or just carelessness that killed 30 million people? Admittedly, none of these reasons will earn him a satisfactory job performance evaluation, but it makes a difference as to whether historians list him among the ten most evil people of history, or merely among the ten most incompetent.

Maurice Meisner: “Mao Zedong, the main author of the Great Leap, obviously bears the greatest moral and social responsibility for the human disaster from the adventure. But this does not make Mao a mass murderer on the order of Hitler and Stalin, as it is now the fashion to portray him. . . . There is a vast moral difference between unintended and unforeseen consequences of political actions . . . and deliberate and willful genocide.”
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Amartya Sen: “The particular fact that China . . . experienced a gigantic famine during 1958-61 . . . had a good deal to do with the lack of press freedom and the absence of a political opposition. The disastrous policies that had paved the way of the famine were not changed for three years as the famine raged on, and this was made possible by the near total suppression of news about the famine and the total absence of media criticism of what was then happening in China.”
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Jung Chang and John Halliday: “The four-year Leap was a monumental waste of both natural resources and human effort, unique in scale in the history of the world. One big difference between other wasteful and inefficient regimes and Mao’s is that most predatory regimes have robbed their populations after relatively low-intensity labour, and less systematically, but Mao first worked everyone to the bone unrelentingly, then took everything—and then squandered it.”
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The shoddiness of the Great Leap Forward continued to kill many years after it was stopped. A massive network of poorly planned and badly built dams and reservoirs was thrown together on the rivers in Henan Province in 1961. An engineer who criticized the design and construction of this system was purged as a “right-wing opportunist.” Then in August 1975, heavy rains overflowed the two principal reservoirs. As the rising waters rushed along the river channel, the entire network of sixty-two dams failed. Either 85,000 (officially) or 230,000 (unofficially) people died in this disaster.
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Tibet

Although the former nation of Tibet had been occupied immediately after the Chinese Civil War in 1950, the native culture was left largely untouched until March 1959, when the famine and confiscations during the Great Leap Forward sparked nationalist riots in the capital city of Lhasa. The Chinese troops who moved in to crush the insurgents had orders to eradicate any focus of Tibetan nationalism. The Chinese demolished countless temples and systematically destroyed statues, paintings, and books.

Many centuries of pristine history were erased in just a few years. Of the 2,500 monasteries in Tibet before 1959, only 70 were left two years later. The number of monks and nuns fell from 100,000 to 7,000, but only 10,000 of the missing escaped safely abroad. As resistance was ground down, countless thousands of Tibetans died at Chinese hands.
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The population of Tibet plunged from 2.8 million in 1953 to 2.5 million in 1964.
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Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

The failure of the Great Leap Forward broke Mao’s iron grip on the government and dealt the moderates a stronger hand. Mao was eased out of real power and into a figurehead position, while the important posts were divvied out to various moderates. Liu Shaoqi became head of state, and Deng Xiaoping, party chairman. Rather than accept this uninvited retirement, Mao used the one weapon still left to him—his spiritual hold over the Chinese people. Unleashing a new wave of revolutionary enthusiasm could drive the moderates from power. Because the main centers of power had turned against him, he relied on his fourth and final wife, Jiang Qing, and her circle of friends. Among the most important was Lin Biao, head of the army.
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The opening shot of the Cultural Revolution was small and tentative. In November 1965, a literary critic trashed a popular play that contained an obvious satire of Mao in the guise of a Ming emperor.
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Within six months wall posters in the big cities had denounced all of the major moderates in China. With the party apparatus in the hands of the moderates, Mao stirred up ideological cadres of students to do his dirty work. He himself stayed aloof from the struggles.

The first recorded death by torture was on August 5, 1966. A swarm of students denounced and set upon the headmistress of a prestigious girls school for important government daughters. They kicked and trampled her, forced her to carry bricks until she collapsed, and finally beat her with belts and sticks as she lay dying.
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Two weeks later, Mao dressed in his army uniform for the first time since the civil war and stood atop Tiananmen gate to review a parade of the new organization of enthusiastic students, the Red Guards. Later that week, the Red Guards hauled thirty of the nation’s best-known writers, musicians, and artists into a library to scold and beat them while books, art, and other cultural artifacts were burned in a bonfire.

In Beijing alone, during August and September, thirty-four thousand homes were raided. Old manuscripts were burned, paintings slashed, musical instruments smashed. Some 1,800 people were beaten or tortured to death, and before it was all over, five thousand of the city’s seven thousand registered historical monuments were destroyed.
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The Red Guards were encouraged to run amok during the Cultural Revolution, destroying all vestiges of the forbidden past, waving the little red book of Mao’s quotations that everyone in China was required to buy. Wrong thinkers were dragged out and paraded through the streets in dunce caps. Any trace of Western influence or Confucian tradition was to be eradicated.
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Men were beaten for merely owning neckties.
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In January 1967, the minister of coal became the first senior official in China to be tortured to death. He was sliced, beaten, and smashed against a concrete floor. China’s head of state, Liu Shaoqi, and his wife were publicly beaten and tortured in an auditorium full of screaming Red Guards, and later the husband was killed in prison. Two of their children were also killed. Deng Xiaoping was sent to a labor camp. Zhou Enlai survived the purges only because he had remained friends with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, when she was out of favor in the 1950s.
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In the south Chinese province of Guangxi, fanatic mobs tore apart and ate at least a hundred enemies of the state. Cafeterias displayed bodies on meat hooks and fed them to workers. Students killed, cooked, and ate their principals.
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One study has suggested that the most fanatic Red Guards were the children of previously purged middle-class parents. Whether they were trying to prove their loyalty or to get some payback is anyone’s guess—probably a little of both. As a rule, however, entire families were dragged out and punished for any crimes pinned on the head of the household.

Mao began to rein in the forces of destruction after 1968. As with so many of his schemes, it became obvious after a couple of years that the Cultural Revolution was undermining China’s viability. Because most of China’s schools were shut down during the Cultural Revolution, an entire generation would enter adulthood distinctly undereducated. Now that the Red Guards had successfully broken the moderates, it was time to break the Red Guards. They were dispersed into the countryside, to work on the farms and reinvigorate their working-class identities. It was a successful cover story that served to dilute the concentrated power of the guards. Red Guards who tried to stay behind in the cities were then hunted down and killed by Lin Biao’s soldiers.
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Sunset

Although Lin Biao was acknowledged to be Mao’s eventual successor, there came a time in the early 1970s when outside observers realized that they hadn’t seen him in a while. It was nearly a year before the Chinese government offered a terse explanation and a few unhelpful photographs.

Apparently Mao felt that Lin was becoming a bit impatient about waiting for him to die of natural causes. Mutual mistrust escalated, and by 1971, Lin sensed that the boss was about to tack right again. He planned a coup, but the plot was discovered—possibly by Mao’s wife, a prominent radical who moved in the same circles as Lin but stood to lose her privileges if her husband were deposed. As Lin was trying to flee to Russia, his plane crashed before he got there, conveniently killing his entire family and entourage.
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Maybe it was an accident; maybe not.

With the radical faction tarnished by Lin’s treachery, Zhou Enlai’s moderates made a comeback. The surviving moderates were gradually released from their labor camps, washed off, fattened up, and returned to positions of power. The most notable among them was Deng Xiaoping, who would eventually become leader of China during its de-Communization phase in the 1980s and 1990s. The radical faction, now under the leadership of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, lost its primacy, but they were still safe as long as Mao was alive. Shortly after his death, however, they would be jailed as the notorious Gang of Four.

By the early 1970s, old age had caught up with Mao. During his dotage, he withdrew from the public eye, and his very existence came to be doubted unless he was periodically hauled out and displayed for the cameras. His regime coasted along for a couple of years waiting for him to die. He finally obliged in 1976.

Death Toll

No one will know for sure until the People’s Republic falls and its archives become available, but the consensus is that Mao’s rule was responsible for tens of millions of deaths. The 1971 Walker Report to the U.S. Congress guessed that some 32 to 59.5 million people were killed under the People’s Republic.
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In 1997, the
Black Book of Communism
estimated 65 million deaths under Mao.
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In
Mao: The Unknown Story
, Jung Chang and John Halliday put the total at 70 million.
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Mao’s defenders (and he has them) will point out that these three sources are hardly unbiased, which is true, but obviously many reasonable people consider high death tolls quite plausible.