The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (37 page)

Now the state took over, and at great expense. The farmers, pedlars, handlers, traders, millers and others who had made a profession out of looking after the grain were pushed aside as so many speculators and capitalists. And not only did state employees increasingly look after the grain, but they also had to expand the volume of storage dramatically. Even when grain was kept for local consumption, the monopoly mandated that farmers sell it first to the state, which could sell it back to them later if they could afford it. Not surprisingly, the state suffered from a shortage of storage facilities that would last for decades. The cost was prohibitive. In 1956, according to one expert, ‘the costs to the state of storing grain for more than three years were equal to the value of the grain itself’.
35

As larger state-controlled concerns replaced small, individual or family-run facilities, many of the perennial problems that had plagued grain storage spiralled out of control. In January 1954, for instance, every province in east China reported a large increase in food that was overheating and becoming damp. In Shanghai alone 40,000 tonnes developed mildew. The problem was compounded by local cadres, who cared more about quantity than quality: their job was to demonstrate to their superiors how much they had procured, not how well they performed this task. In some cases they deliberately allowed high humidity to increase the overall weight. A few even bulked up the volume by adding water. Here is the scene that met one visitor when the doors of a warehouse opened in south China:

Moths and beetles swarmed out, and I saw several rats as big as young rabbits scurrying across the floor. Different kinds of containers were haphazardly stacked on the slab-stone floor. There were also torn sacks of various sizes, along with earthenware jars and wooden casks. In one corner were huge reed-mat bins into which flour was dumped. I recoiled at the sight of insects buzzing and flitting around, not to mention the worms in the bins. The flour in one bin was covered with a blue mould that smelled awful.
36

Thanks to its monopoly on grain, in 1954 the state took in more than ever before, in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the overall crop. In Shandong the amount procured jumped from 2 million tonnes in 1953 to just under 3 million in 1954. Even when the increase was relatively modest it could be devastating: in Hebei it went from 1.9 million tonnes to 2.08 million, which represented a shift from 23.5 per cent up to 25.9 per cent of the harvest. In Shaanxi the overall proportion of food taken away increased from 19.5 per cent to 25.5 per cent in 1954. One of the highest proportions of all was in Jilin, where 50.7 per cent of all the grain was hauled away, even though the crop that year shrank to 5.31 million tonnes. It left the villagers with an average of 145 kilos a year.
37

Deng Zihui, the man who oversaw work in the countryside from Beijing, put it in a nutshell. In July 1954, ten months after the monopoly had come into effect, he admitted that before liberation on average a villager had about 300 kilos set aside for food each year. Now that amount was reduced for every one of them, from north to south, to just about half a kilo a day, or a third less. And other foodstuffs were also lacking. Most people outside the cities never received more than 3 kilos of edible oil a year. Deng called the monopoly on grain ‘the only way when there is no way’, and that way was to ‘spread the pain evenly’. He would soon pay the price for his frankness.
38

Evenly spread pain meant starvation, which was widespread in 1954, coming right on the heels of the famine in 1953. Already on 2 January 1954 the Central Committee warned that farmers were being driven to their deaths due to the state monopoly. In Henan and in Jiangxi, 4.5 million people were in dire straits. In Hunan up to one in every six villagers went hungry. Three million lacked food in Shandong. In Guizhou and Sichuan, where up to a quarter of the population in mountainous areas did not have enough to eat, people sold their clothes, their land and their homes. Across the country people sold their children. In the single county of Ji’an, Jiangxi, thirty-two were sold within two months. This happened even in subtropical Guangdong. In a village in Puning county, Zhang Delai sold his offspring for 50 yuan. It was enough to buy rice and see him through the famine. In Anhui hordes of up to 200 beggars roamed the countryside. Some froze to death. In Linxia, Gansu, some of the victims were too weak even to walk down the road to the next village. ‘The main reason’, explained the inspectors dispatched by the provincial government, ‘is that local cadres have not paid sufficient attention to the conditions of the crop last year and have committed serious errors in carrying out the unified sale and purchase system.’
39

Most of these reports pointed out how much of the starvation was man-made. But in August the Central Committee decided to ascribe the worst famine since 1949 to ‘natural disasters’. Instead of helping people in the countryside, it stressed how vital it was to procure the state-mandated amounts of grain, oil and cotton, all of which were essential to ‘industrial production in the cities and the socialist reform of industry and commerce in the countryside’. A year later, as the telltale signs of famine appeared again in the spring of 1955, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai approved a directive explaining that ‘among those who shout loudly about grain shortages, the absolute majority in fact do not lack grain at all’. Zhou Enlai, as head of the State Council, merely tinkered with the numbers, concluding that the monopoly worked rather well. It worked so well that already in November 1953 and September 1954 it had been extended to oil crops and cotton respectively. Soon it covered all major foodstuffs and agricultural raw materials.
40

One response to collectivisation was to leave the countryside. Villagers had always supplemented their income by going to the city in the slack season, working in factories or peddling goods. Sometimes they would stay away for years on end, sending remittances back home to support their families. In Raoyang county, Hubei, a quarter of all men from the countryside worked in the cities during the winter months in the early 1950s. But the state did not encourage rural mobility. Soon after liberation it sent millions of refugees, unemployed, demobilised soldiers and other undesirable elements to the countryside. They kept on coming back. Despite state efforts to reverse the flow, there were close to 20 million rural migrants, often relegated to dirty, arduous and sometimes dangerous jobs on the margins of the urban landscape. As in the old days, they came in search of new opportunities and a better life, but other motivations also drove migration. As the state curtailed private commerce, pedlars, traders and merchants left the countryside in droves, seeking better pastures.

But most of all, people took to the roads because they wanted to escape from famine. After the state imposed a monopoly on grain, many villagers voted with their feet and joined a massive exodus from the countryside. In March 1954, over 50,000 villagers poured into Jinan, the capital of Shandong. In Port Arthur, more than 19,000 of them overwhelmed the small city in the autumn of 1953. They begged the Soviet troops for help. Eight thousand farmers were looking for work in Anshan, the site of a sprawling steel and iron complex in Manchuria. In the streets of Wuhan, the industrial city on the Yangzi, hundreds of impoverished villagers could be seen, many of them begging for food. Some had sold all their clothes; a few tried to commit suicide, possibly disappointed by the reality of the city that had been a beacon of hope. Some protested in front of government offices, screaming, crying, a few waiting to die. But the biggest magnet was Shanghai. In the summer of 1954, around 2,000 refugees came by train every single day. Hundreds also arrived by boat, some of them too poor to buy a ticket.
41

In April 1953 the State Council had already passed a directive seeking to persuade hundreds of thousands of farmers in search of work to return to their villages. The attempt failed to stem the flow. In March 1954 even more stringent regulations were put on the books, curtailing the recruitment of workers from the countryside. In the following months the public security organs were beefed up, and substations were established everywhere to control the movement of people and guard the cities against a rural influx. Then, on 22 June 1955, Zhou Enlai signed a directive introducing the household-registration system, used in the cities since 1951, to the countryside.

It was the rough equivalent of the internal passport instituted decades earlier in the Soviet Union. Food was rationed from August 1955 onwards, and its distribution closely tied to the number of people registered in each household. The ration cards had to be presented at local grain stores, thus preventing the large-scale movement of people. But while the subsistence of urban residents was guaranteed by the state, rural residents had to feed themselves. From retirement benefits to health care, education and subsidised housing, the state looked after many of its employees in the cities, while letting people registered as ‘peasants’ (
nongmin
) fend for themselves. This status was inherited through the mother, meaning that even if a village girl married a man from the city, she and her children remained ‘peasants’, deprived of the same entitlements accorded urban residents.

The household-registration system also carefully monitored the movements of people, even within the countryside, as a migration certificate was required for anybody thinking of changing residence. No government in China had ever restricted freedom of residence or prevented migration, except in contested zones during wartime. But in 1955 the freedom of domicile and freedom of movement came to an end for people in the countryside. Those who moved in search of a better life were now called
mangliu
, or ‘blind migrants’. It was a reverse homophone of
liumang
, meaning hooligan.
42

The household-registration system tied the cultivator to the land, making sure that cheap labour was available in the co-operatives. This was the fourth stage of collectivisation. A mere step now separated villagers from serfdom, namely the ownership of the land.

11

High Tide

A solar eclipse was always a bad omen in traditional China, but New Year’s Day was the worst time for one to occur. On 14 February 1953, the first day of the lunar calendar, the moon partially blocked the sun, casting a dark shadow over the earth. Less than three weeks later Stalin died. In China flags stood at half-mast, with strips of black cloth flying on top. Public buildings in the capital were draped with black. At the Soviet embassy, the queue of mourners was four deep and so long that some streets had to be temporarily closed to traffic. People wore black armbands distributed by party activists standing on street corners. Further towards Tiananmen Square, in front of the entrance of the Forbidden City, a huge red platform was piled high with artificial wreaths and paper flowers. A portrait of Stalin towered above it. Loudspeakers alternated between funeral music and instructions to the crowd on how to behave. ‘Don’t sing – don’t laugh – don’t walk aimlessly – don’t shout – keep order – behave as you were instructed in the newspaper.’ The crowd was silent.
1

The Chairman bowed before the portrait and laid a wreath. But he did not give a speech. For the previous thirty years he had followed Stalin’s advice, sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly. Even in the midst of civil war, as his troops were gaining the upper hand, he continued to look to Moscow for advice and guidance. He was a faithful follower of Stalin and took pains to prove his loyalty by declaring that China would ‘lean to one side’ in 1949. After liberation the flow of telegrams between Beijing and Moscow increased even further, as the Chairman requested Stalin’s advice on seemingly every matter. 

Mao was a loyal student of Stalin, but even so the relationship had never been an easy one. Mao held many grudges against his mentor, who had humiliated him in Moscow only three years earlier. And he deeply resented the presence of Soviet troops in Manchuria. But most of all Mao wanted to be more Stalinist than Stalin would allow. In November 1947 the Chairman had written to Moscow to explain that he intended to eliminate all rival political parties: ‘In the period of the final victory of the Chinese revolution – as was the case in the USSR and Yugoslavia – all political parties except the CCP will have to withdraw from the political scene.’ But Stalin disagreed, telling him that the opposition parties in China would have to be included as part of a New Democracy for many years to come. ‘After the victory,’ Stalin explained, ‘the Chinese government will be a national revolutionary and democratic government, rather than a Communist one.’ Mao demurred, maintaining the pretence of democracy even as he set out to build a totalitarian state. Then, in February 1950, Stalin urged the Chairman to pursue a milder approach to land distribution, sparing the rich peasants who could help the country recover after years of warfare. A few months later Mao published a Land Reform Law which promised a less divisive policy even as violence tore the countryside apart. And in 1952, only months before he was felled by a stroke, Stalin had whittled down funding for China’s first Five-Year Plan, warning the Chinese leadership that they were requesting too much, too soon.
2

Stalin’s death was Mao’s liberation. The Chairman was at last free from the restraining influence of Moscow. No longer were there any major constraints on his political vision. Of course, he continued to submit his views to the Kremlin, as telegraph wires continued to hum between the two red capitals, but no Soviet leader commanded as much respect as Mao, who had brought a second October Revolution to a quarter of the world, and fought the United States to a standstill during the Korean War. Soon the Chairman began to distance himself from the Soviet leadership.