The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (44 page)

Comparisons with the years before liberation are fraught with difficulty, if only because so few detailed studies based on archival evidence are available. But the regime itself was keen to compare itself with its predecessor, and it enrolled its statisticians to come up with detailed, inflation-adjusted studies that went back to 1937, the peak of the nationalist era just before the onset of the Japanese invasion. Most were never published, and for good reason. They showed that in many cases life had been better two decades earlier. Workers in the Shenxin Textile Factory in Hankou, for instance, saw a steep decline in the amount of grain, pork and oil they could consume as well as the quantity of cloth they could buy after the revolution. By 1957, on average, a worker had an extra 6 kilos of grain per year, but almost half less pork, a third less edible oil and a fifth less cloth when compared with 1937. Many were malnourished. As Table 2 shows, the situation was hardly unique to that single factory, as workers were badly fed, badly clothed and badly housed, often in conditions not even equivalent to 1948, the height of the civil war.

Table 2: Average Annual Consumption and Living Space for Workers in Wuhan, 1937–57

Source: Hubei, 28 March 1958, SZ44-2-158, pp. 24, 38, 47 and 59

Even when by 1952 workers had witnessed some improvements, conditions invariably went downhill in the following five years. But these statistics mentioned only consumption, not the overall cost of living. From 1952 to 1957 living expenses went resolutely upwards. For the workers in the Shenxin Textile Factory mentioned above, the rent increased from 88 yuan a year in 1952 to 400 yuan five years later. In every factory surveyed by the Bureau for Statistics the trend was clear: average living space shrank while the rent crept up. In the Wuchang Shipyard, included in Table 2, rent rose from 271 yuan in 1948 to 361 yuan in 1952, then doubled to 721 yuan in 1955 and reached a phenomenal 990 yuan in 1957.
20

Malnourishment and poor health were also common in schools. The Youth League, after a wide-ranging survey of middle-school students, declared that ‘their health is very bad’. In Wuhan, each received 300 grams of vegetables and 150 grams of bean products a month. Rough grains and sweet potatoes constituted the rest of the diet. In the entire province of Henan, no vegetables were served for a full month, with the food consisting of nothing but noodles. In Mianyang, Sichuan, students captured their diet in a popular ditty: ‘Rice is rare, it’s soup we get, the more you eat, the slimmer you get, the food is bad, the taste the same, there is no salt and there is no oil.’ In Liaoning province, one in three students was undernourished. In Yingkou, the busy port where the province’s maize, soybeans, apples and pears left by sea, students would regularly faint with hunger in physical education classes. Strict rationing was justified in the name of morality, as ‘eating too much grain is wasteful and lacking in communist virtue’. Those who went hungry were told to drink water: ‘boiled water also contains calories’. In Xinmin, a city just outside the provincial capital Shenyang, four out of ten students suffered from night blindness, a condition caused by malnutrition, in particular lack of vitamin A found in fish oils and dairy products. Some classes were held in temples or abandoned churches, although there never seemed to be enough light. Even in daytime, it could be ‘as dark as in a prison’.
21

There were other setbacks. The regime was determined to eradicate disease and eliminate all pests, but this laudable goal was not always well served by mass campaigns that mobilised millions across the country. When people were given a quota of rat tails to be delivered to the authorities, they started breeding the rodents. The whole idea of a military campaign against epidemics, in which people were deployed in battalions, banners unfurled and bugles blaring, ran against common medical practice. This was the case with the drive to eliminate schistosomiasis. The number of people infected by the parasite increased every year after liberation, especially in parts of east China. The leadership ignored the issue. They were more interested in fighting the wasps and butterflies suspected of being infected with germs by enemy agents during the Korean War. Only after the Chairman had been shown the debilitating effects of schistosomiasis during a visit to Zhejiang province in November 1955 did the disease finally win attention from the party. Mao wrote a poem, grandly titled ‘Farewell to the Plague Spirit’, and in February 1956 he gave the order to start a mass campaign: ‘Schistosomiasis must be eliminated!’
22

Millions of farmers were taken to lakes, crawling through the mud to catch the snails which transmitted the infection. But, all along, leading medical authorities had warned that any attempt to eradicate the disease simply by collecting snails was hopeless. The snails were merely the host of shistosome worms invisible to the human eye. Farmers and cattle who came into contact with the worms were at risk of infection, as the worms propagated themselves in the veins and liver of a parasitised body. Human and animal waste laden with worm eggs was then released back into the lakes, where the cycle was completed as the eggs hatched inside the bodies of the snails. The advice of experts was dismissed at best, denounced as bourgeois at worst. Snails were dug out and collected by hand by whole platoons of villagers. New irrigation canals were opened up in order to block existing ones and bury the snails. The campaign relied on huge manpower, but as soon as it came to an end people were sent back to work in infected lakes to cut grass or collect reeds.
23

This happened in Hubei, a central province along the Yangzi studded with a thousand lakes with dabbling ducks, lotus and water chestnuts. A third of the population there remained at risk. Despite glowing reports from local cadres bidding farewell to the plague spirit, more than 1.5 million people were still infected. In Hanchuan county, some 700 cases were cured during the campaign, but over a thousand new cases appeared immediately afterwards. In other provinces too, the archives show that the campaign barely dented the incidence of schistosomiasis. This was a country run by slogans and quotas, with one campaign following on the heels of another. There was little room for patient work in controlling the many dimensions of the disease, including better disposal of human waste. Collectivisation did not help, as people in co-operatives tended to care less for animals that did not belong to them, including the proper disposal of manure. Traditional rules of hygiene, including drinking boiled water and eating hot food, also suffered when people lived at the beck and call of party officials.
24

In some cases a more frightening gap appeared between the world of propaganda and the reality on the ground. The People’s Republic enacted a stream of praiseworthy policies for the victims of leprosy, including the provision of leper colonies fitted with every possible amenity. Eliminating leprosy would have been an enormously complex task for any government at the time, all the more so since lepers were widely stigmatised. But in the People’s Republic local cadres could barely feed their own workforce. They had many other priorities, lowest among which were disfigured people suffering from a disease erroneously thought to be highly infectious. Prejudice was rampant, and a few educational pamphlets on the disease, distributed by the health authorities, were not about to change that situation overnight. A great deal of evidence buried in the party archives suggests that the situation actually became worse in the years following liberation, if only because the one-party state vested so much more power in local cadres than would ever have been possible in the past.

As missionaries were forced out of the country, sometimes existing leper colonies found themselves cut off from foreign funds. In Moxi, a deprived area high up in the mountains in Sichuan, they abandoned not only a church that proudly displayed its colourful bell tower, but also a leper colony with 160 patients, who were left to fend for themselves. Nobody came to their rescue, despite pleas for help. Soon some patients started leaving the colony to beg along the twisted, rutted mountain roads. Few were welcome. Some were hounded and beaten by frightened villagers. Several were buried alive. A report from the provincial health authorities stated: ‘Again one leper was buried alive in the summer of 1954 in Yongding county; similar circumstances also appeared in other counties.’ This was not confined to Sichuan alone. In neighbouring Guizhou, often rocked by rebellions from the minority people who lived in the hills and highlands that dominate the province, the number of infections increased sharply after liberation. As panic spread through the villages, some of the local cadres decided to burn the victims to death. This occurred on more than one occasion, one of the worst cases being a village where eight lepers perished at the stake. In some cases the militia acted on the orders of the local authorities: ‘The militia tied up a leper and burned him to death. His parents cried all day and night.’
25

But the worst episode was probably in Yongren county, Yunnan, where a hundred lepers were set alight in June 1951. The idea was first proposed in a conference held by the county party committee a month earlier. Ma Xueshou, a high-ranking cadre in charge of rural affairs, proposed: ‘The lepers from the hospital in the fourth district often come out to wash and run about, it creates a bad impression among the masses, and they demand that they be burned.’ ‘We cannot burn them,’ answered the county party secretary. But Ma insisted, and a month later he volunteered to take full responsibility: ‘If the masses want to burn them, then let’s burn them, we should do it for the masses, it is their request, just do it and I will assume responsibility.’ Several others agreed. So the militia assembled all the lepers, locked them in the hospital and set the building on fire. The victims screamed for help, to no avail. Only six of 110 victims survived.
26