Alexandru's Reviews > The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

"We know, of course, that there is no freedom of speech, Hu Shi responded from New York. "But few persons realise that there is no freedom of silence, either. Residents of a communist state are required to make positive statements of belief and loyalty"

The Tragedy of Liberation is one of the most harrowing books I have ever read. The barbarity, cruelty and carnage of the Chinese Revolution exceeds by far all of the other communist takeovers in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia. Frank Dikotter is a professor at the University of Hong Kong and has written several books about the history of Communist China. I am honestly surprised that he has managed to maintain his teaching post and has not been silenced by the increasingly authoritarian regime.

The book is split into several parts: the first part covers the civil war period between the end of world war 2 in 1945 and the ultimate Communist victory in 1949, the second part deals with the take over of power, the third part with the institution of the terror state and the last part with the popular backlash against the regime.

The author uses primary sources in Chinese including documents and also eye witness testimony from the time of the Revolution. The most interesting testimonies are of the true Communist believers that describe how they were so hopeful at the beginning but then grew more and more disillusioned with the regime.

The military victory of the Communists was followed by a gradual taking control of the country. Dikotter excellently explains how Mao planned the takeover slowly in order to not panic the people and also to keep an international appearance of liberation. Bit by bit the screws tightened and the true face of the regime came to be known. By that time it was already too late for many people.

The calculated mass murder of the Mao regime can be read cynically from the historical archives where killing quotas were given to various provinces:

for having killed 12,000 counter-revolutionaries, as the province steeled itself for liquidating another batch of 20,000 in the spring, bringing the total to about 32,000. 'In a province of 30 million that is a good number.' But figures were merely a guide, he warned,as more might have to be killed. Mao emphasised that the terror should be' stable' (wen), 'precise' (zhun) and 'ruthless' (hen): the campaign should be carried out with surgical precision, without any slippage into random slaughter, which would undermine the standing of the party. 'But before anything else, the term "ruthless" has to be emphasised.' Perusing the reports he was handed by Luo Ruiqing, he nudged the country further: 'In provinces where few have been killed a large batch should be killed; the killings can absolutely not be allowed to stop top early.

Dikotter aptly describes the breakdown of society as the police state is introduced where people are encouraged to report on each other and the traditional Chinese system of trust and family is crushed.

a breakdown in normal human relationships was noticeable. As Robert Loh observed: During the persecution, friend had been made to betray friend; family members had been forced to denounce each other. The traditional warm hospitality of the Chinese, therefore, disappeared. We learned that the more friends we had, the more insecure our position.

The paranoia and repression of the regime was so extreme that even children could be considered counter-revolutionaries and could suffer horrible consequences from this:

In Yanxing county, over 100 middle school students were arrested and tortured in April 1951 after an anonymous  denunciation reached the local party headquarters. Wu Liening, ten years old was hung from a beam and beaten. Ma Silie, aged eight, was tied up on a cross in a kneeling position. A wooden pole was placed across his thighs and pressed down by two of his tormentors, crushing his legs and knees on the concrete floor. Even Liu Wendi, aged six, was accused of being the head of as pying squad. Two of the children were tortured to death. This was not an isolated example. A team of militia in Sichuan also tried to uncover counter-revolutionaries among schoolchildren.

People could fall foul of the regime for the most simple of things:

One young woman aged seventeen was packed off to the gulag for displaying 'blind faith in foreign imperialist things': she had praised shoe polish made in the United States.

The saying that revolutions eat their own children was never truer then in the case of the Chinese revolution. Mao regularly organised purges of his underlings, starting even during the civil war and world war 2 before taking over power. Time and time again committed Communists were purged, demoted, sent to the wastes and even executed for real or imagined ideological crimes.

"This she demonstrated by ordering a landowner to be placed in a vat of freezing water overnight. She felt cruel happiness on hearing the man scream in pain...'Seeing them die this way, I felt as proud and happy as the people who had directly suffered under them'. She was barely twenty.
Lin Zhao, like so many others, later became a victim of the regime. Arrested as a counter-revolutionary in 1960, she was secretly executed eight years later after writing hundreds of pages critical of Mao Zedong in prison, some of them inher own blood.

The economic and social impact of the Communist takeover were devastating to the Chinese economy. The Communists took over factories, industries and all agricultural land but it did not have the expertise or the capacity to actually manage it. As such, factory output collapsed and so did the agricultural output. Peasants stopped caring about their land, their animals or their tools because they knew the state would come take it all away.

The effects of collectivisation on the economy were devastating. The total cropping area for food was reduced by 3 to 4 million hectares. Grain output failed to keep up with population growth.

The Tragedy of Liberation is a must read for anyone interested in modern Chinese history. It is an eye opening recount of the tragedy suffered by the Chinese people after the horrible years of World War II. The book is part of a trilogy that focuses on the post World War II Chinese Communist history. I will surely read the other books about the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. But I am wary of the horrors that will be told in those books as well!