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

In this book, Dikotter tries to prosecute a case. He argues that the period of the so-called Chinese Liberation under the Communists was actually an brutal and unmitigated disaster. Far from a peaceful interregnum between the Civil War and the Great Famine, Dikotter posits that the horrors in this period were every bit as stark as these other catastrophes, which only exceeded it in scale, not in scope. Furthermore, just as in his book on the Famine, Dikotter tries to show that this fiasco was not the outcome of confusion, chaos, or, that perennial Communist favorite, bad weather, but of the Communist Party's ideological madness and urge to terrorize the populace. One leaves the book convinced that Dikotter is unquestionably correct, but wondering also if framing the book so clearly as an indictment detracts from the history.

Two themes seem to emerge perpetually in Dikotter's account: quotas and suicides. As with many Communists, Mao and his Politburo had an obsession with quotas; from grain procurement, to the executions of counter-revolutionaries, every Communist cadre knew to do his utmost to fulfill his quotas as they were delivered from on high. In the "Great Terror" beginning in October 1950, Mao insisted that about 1 per 1000 was the right number of executions of counter-revolutionaries nationwide, and local leaders worked like diligent accountants to measure their progress to this goal. Yet, in typical Communist fashion, the quota was seen as a floor not a ceiling, and ambitious cadres knew they needed to exceed it to demonstrate revolutionary fervor. Guizhou province asked to be allowed to kill three per thousand, Liuzhou five, and others even more. Mao was deliberately vague about how far his underlings could go, which allowed him to posture as the voice of moderation even while urging more death (for Guizhou he suggested two executions per thousand would do, any number over that number should be sent to labor camps). In a typical ambiguous fashion, Mao began to publicly question the extent of the slaughter, and finally suggested that authority to fulfill the quotas should be transferred away from local counties and given to supposedly more responsible provinces, but only after a delay. The county leaders knew this was their last chance and rushed to kill tens of thousands before the deadline. It was all the strange result of killing by numbers.

Many of those executed first had to endure days-long "struggle sessions" about their crimes, during which the local populace would be whipped into a homicidal frenzy, each individual competing to show his or her loyalty to the new Communist overlords by further excoriating these enemies of the people. Time and again those targeted would kill themselves rather than endure any more abuse, and these enforced suicides were a constant in the so-called "campaigns" of the era. The struggle sessions and suicides occurred in every walk of life. During the land reform, the fake class of "landlords" (dizhu), a concept foreign to a Chinese economy with few tenants, was invented so as to find an excuse to redistribute land and terrorize wealthier peasants. In the course of the reform, peasants were encouraged and incentivized to denounce and beat former friends and neighbors, as part of the "speak bitterness campaign," often leading to the "landlord's" suicide. (Soon this redistributed land was taken away from those same peasants and collectivized under the state.) During the "Five Antis" campaign against the bourgeois, former factory owners and shopkeepers competed with each other in popular struggle sessions to renounce their former exploitations and pledge undying fealty to the party, often to no avail. In the thought reform campaigns, intellectuals and students who disagreed with the "General Line" had to submit endless written and public confessions of their crimes, until one was finally accepted, but that rarely ended the struggle sessions and the ultimate suicides. The goal was not so much to convince those who remained alive, but to create a society of constant self-doubt and internalized fear. Survivors talked about the process of having their personality hollowed out, so only the concerns and fears of the Party could dominate their thoughts (in classic cultish fashion, loudspeakers blaring propaganda and patriotic songs appeared everywhere).

All of this madness should have been obvious both East and West, but the Mao regime found surprising friends everywhere. China's choreographed tourism (after almost all actual foreigners had been expelled as part of the "Bamboo Curtain") convinced many this was a free and prosperous society, and outsiders like India's Jawaharlal Nehru often celebrated China's economic and social achievements. Yet Mao had publicly engaged in such totalitarian quotas and "Rectification Campaigns" long before he had assumed power, and even internal Communist reports time and again showed that collective farms and shops were performing worse than their private progenitors. Even as outsiders praised China's achievements, internal studies proved that the average Chinese farmer and worker was poorer than he was before "Liberation."

Dikotter estimates that this economically devastated and internally terrorized society was purchased at the cost of over 4 million lives, with at least 2 million more being sent to brutal bamboo gulags. I wish Dikotter had done a better job comparing the Communist record with the failures of the previous Nationalist regime (minor as they were in comparison) and providing a more even-handed look at general Communist policy, but one leaves this book convinced that maybe a heartrending cri de couer is appropriate in recounting the savage history of the Party that still rules over the country.