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Author : Jasper Becker
AFTERWORD
This book has tried to establish what happened during a famine but
it also describes what happens when a country and its leader
descend into total madness. China was gripped by what Carl Jung
once termed a 'psychic epidemic', when all rational behaviour is
abandoned. The absolute power which Mao achieved engendered a
collective escape into a world of utter delusion. All that
mattered to the millions in the Party was to pander to the
fantasies of its leader. Many knew they were telling lies and that
the truth was that the country was starving. Even Mao, at the apex
of these lies, was not deluded. As his doctor Li Zhisui recounts,
'Mao knew the peasants were dying by the million. He did not
care.' What Mao wanted from his followers, argues Dr Li, was proof
of absolute and undivided loyalty: 'Mao was the centre around which
everyone else revolved. His will reigned supreme. Loyalty, rather
than principle, was the paramount virtue.'
In Grass Soup, one of the fellow prisoners of Zhang Xianliang is a
Muslim, Ma Weixiao, who suggests that Mao intentionally used the
famine to enforce the absolute and unquestioning servitude that he
craved: 'Even the illiterate have to eat. Only by making the
people endure hunger can you make them submit to you, to worship
you. So you see, don't let Chinese people have full stomachs -
keep them hungry and in a few years not just people, even dogs,
will be reformed. Every one of them will be as obedient as can be:
whatever Chairman Mao says will be right. Not one will dare refuse
to prostrate himself before Chairman Mao.'
Yet Mao had won power by espousing a philosophy based on
rationalism and modern Western thought. In place of the millennia
of feudal emperor-worship, he promised democratic and scientific
Marxism-Leninism. He was genuinely convinced that scientific
farming and collectivization could transform both Chinese
agriculture, the basis of the country's economy, and the lives of
the vast majority of Chinese. After all, in the Soviet Union Lenin
and Stalin had used the same methods and had created a superpower
which had defeated Nazi Germany, built the nuclear bomb and, in the
1950s, launched the first satellite into space. It was strong and
disciplined, modern and scientific: China could be the same. Even
if Mao and his colleagues knew the terrible cost in human lives
which Lenin and Stalin had paid, they might have considered this a
sacrifice worth making. Yet Mao not only deluded himself about the
supposed success of collectivization in the Soviet Union, he also
refused to accept the evidence that these ideas were creating a
catastrophe in China.
Listening to accounts from all over the country about the failure
of the Great Leap Forward, it sometimes seemed to me as if the
extreme violence it unleashed may have derived from this
fundamental lack of comprehension of and frustration with an alien
way of thought. Much in the same way that a child might vent his
rage and smash a toy because he cannot get it to work, Mao could
not accept that his peasants would not behave as he thought they
ought to if the country was to jettison its legacy of feudal habits
and beliefs. Mao wanted to modernize China but could not grasp the
basis of modern thought, the scientific method: that the way in
which the natural universe behaves can be proved or disproved by
objective tests, independent of ideology or individual will. So
instead of becoming 'new men', Mao and his followers lapsed into a
pattern of behaviour established 2,000 years earlier by the first
Emperor Qlnshihuangdi, perhaps the greatest tyrant in Chinese
history.
Yet if one accepts this as an explanation for Mao's behaviour, it
still does not explain why so many others were willing to torture
large numbers to death to deliver grain which they did not and
could not have possessed. This deliberate and senseless cruelty
has few parallels in history. These peasants were, after all, not
the conquered slaves of some alien power but supposedly the
beneficiaries of the revolution. I Perhaps the answer lies in the
early history of the Chinese Communist Party. At least some of its
members, such as Kang Sheng, had endorsed the use of unqualified
violence against the peasants right from the beginning. Not only
was no mercy shown to landlords, but rich and middle peasants, a
much larger group, were treated with equal brutality. Those
labelled as the enemy were beyond redemption. By the beginning of
the Great Leap Forward officials are recorded in Party documents as
saying that the peasants must be regarded as the enemy since they
stand in the way of progress. This readiness to strip villagers of
all their rights was allied to a general contempt for the peasants
which may date back still further, to Confucius. He had described
them as 'inferior beings' who, since they cannot be educated, must
be exploited.
But during the Great Leap Forward local officials, often peasants
themselves, saw their own kith and kin starve to death before their
very eyes. Why did the peasants not rise up in mass revolt?
When the dissident Wei Jingsheng spent time in the county side of
Anhui and heard stories of the famine, he began to ponder this
question, concluding that it was just because of class warfare that
Mao retained his power: 'Mao used class struggle to divide people
into imaginary interest groups, rendering them incapable of
discerning their true interests. Thus, he was able to incite
people to engage in mutual killing or goals that were, in fact,
detrimental to their own interests. It was precisely through this
technique that he fooled and oppressed millions and manipulated
them into supporting him. It was precisely for this reason that he
was able to conceal his real face and masquerade as the people's
leader.'
Many interviewees also claimed that the peasants had developed such
a deep trust in the Party that they were reluctant to act. In the
opera Huang Huo by Du Xi, one of the characters, Zhang Sun, the
Party Secretary of a production brigade, says: 'Even though the
grain has been taken away, let us wait and see. The Communist
Party will not let people starve to death ... If the sky falls it
will strike us all. Is it only our village which is starving? Let
us wait a while and we will see more clearly. After all, the
Communist Party would never let the masses starve to death.'
At first, the peasants also did not believe that they would starve
because after all the grain was there, it existed. With cunning
they might get it back from the state. In the opera the central
character, Li Baisuo, resorts to one such subterfuge. He offers to
'launch a sputnik' and, by promising to close-plant 330 lbs of
seeds per mu, ten times the normal amount, hopes to get enough seed
grain to feed the village through the winter. When an inspection
team arrives, he organizes the villagers into staging a charade of
sowing the grain which succeeds in convincing the inspectors. The
stratagem only fails because the brigade chief, Zhang Sun, is too
honest and loyal to the Party. He feels compelled to reveal the
truth and so Li is arrested and struggled as a 'right opportunist'
and then beaten and paraded around the villages wearing a cloth
bearing the character 'right'.
Many interviewees also blamed the honesty of the peasants - in the
Henan countryside people took pride in saying 'It is better to
starve to death than beg or steal.' At the climax of Du Xi's opera,
when all is lost, the villagers debate whether they should attack
the state granary but some protest: 'Even though we are starving to
death, we cannot take that road! ... Without the government's
permission, we cannot touch a single grain from the state granary.'
Many also retained a belief that Mao would save them. In some
places I was told that peasants dragged themselves to the top of
the nearest mountain, faced the direction of Beijing and called out
aloud for Mao to help them. At the end of Huang Huo, the hero, Li,
decides on a desperate course of action. He will go to Beijing and
petition Chairman Mao. He declares that Mao will support him and
prevent cruel local officials from oppressing the peasantry, and
adds: 'This is not the same as [the] 1942 [famine]. For generation
after generation, the years were poor, the harvests thin. This
time there is only a temporary shortage of food.' After this
speech, the brigade chief Zhang drags him off to be punished at the
Party headquarters but Zhang's wife shows her anger at this by
committing suicide. Zhang repents, confesses he has let the Party
down, and allows Li to escape and, in the final scene, board a
train to Beijing.
On the other hand, starving peasants had risen in revolt before in
Chinese history: indeed much of China's dynastic history appears to
have been propelled by such uprisings, not least that led by Mao
himself. Yet never before had China been governed by such a
ruthless and efficient police state. There was simply nowhere to
go to escape the grip of Mao's control. In the opera, the villagers
consider fleeing to beg for food elsewhere but abandon the plan
because they realize they would soon be caught by the militia and
sent back. Throughout China, millions of others reached the same
conclusion. Unable to leave their villages, they had little chance
of organizing themselves in sufficient numbers to challenge the
army or even the militia unless they too were starving. And in
many cases, by the time the peasants had realized that the state
would not save them, they were usually already half dead with
hunger and too weak to take any effective action.
Many Chinese have blamed the tragedy of the famine not so much on
Mao as on Chinese culture, claiming that both subjects and ruler
were powerless to break patterns of behaviour enforced over 5,000
years. China is the world's oldest continuous civilization and the
Chinese still use the same hieroglyphic characters as their distant
ancestors and speak recognizably the same language. In the late
1950s, it was as if the slaves of the Pharaohs had somehow stumbled
into the twentieth century. The peasants' way of life, their huts
and tools, were little different from those of their forebears in
the Shang dynasty. In the famine their moral code was still ordered
by the injunction of the first Han Emperor who 2,200 years earlier
had authorized them to eat their children if there was no other
choice. Perhaps, too, they felt as powerless before the arbitrary
will of the Emperor as had their ancestors. As the Shang dynasty
inscription puts it: 'Why are there disasters? It is because the
Emperor wants to punish mankind.'
Blaming the past for the Great Leap Forward may partly explain the
psychology of both Mao and the peasants but it seems to ignore the
singularity of what occurred. Mao could not be brought down
because he had created a world in which all beliefs and judgements
were suspended. No one dared move or act according to what he knew
to be true. Instead, even the highest-ranking officials moved in a
secretive society paralysed by an all-pervasive network of
informers and spies. In a world of distorting mirrors, it became
hard to grasp that such senseless cruelty could really be taking
place. The grotesque efforts that some officials made to deceive
leaders such as Liu Shaoqi almost defies imagination. Who could
believe that Party officials would plaster and paint trees stripped
of their bark by starving peasants to hide a famine from the
country's President?
The bizarre nature of so much of what happened inspires a feeling
of deep shame which still makes many Chinese reluctant to discuss
the circumstances of the famine. For the absurdly triumphant
claims of miracle harvests and the mass starvation that followed
reflect badly not just on the Communist Party but on the entire
nation. But what if Liu and others had conspired to overthrow Mao
during the famine or afterwards? Mao had threatened to start a
civil war and could indeed have led his followers to the hills and
there held out as guerrillas. China might then have ended up like
Cambodia, only on a far greater scale. Other powers, the Soviet
Union, the United States and Taiwan, would soon have been sucked
into backing different factions. Perhaps an intractable civil war
with tens of millions of refugees might have been still worse than
simply waiting and trying to persuade Mao to come to his senses.
All this is only speculation, though, for we are unlikely ever to
know what passed through the minds of the leadership during this
darkest period. The files may never be opened as they were in
Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion. There will be no museums
devoted to the victims of the famine. The dead seem destined to
remain hungry ghosts unplacated by any memorial or apology, and it
is almost too late to charge those responsible with crimes against
humanity. In China, Mao's reputation, tarnished though it is,
cannot be completely destroyed without calling into question the
whole edifice of Communist rule in China. And yet, if the Chinese
are kept in ignorance of what happened, that would be another kind
of tragedy. If the famine remains a secret, the country will draw
no lessons from its past nor learn that only in a secretive society
could so many have starved to death.
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