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400 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2013
Soon even the continued use of English on electricity bills in Shanghai was stridently denounced as betraying ‘a strong sense of colonial influence’.
Missionaries were also present, as early as 1919, in all but a hundred of the 1,704 counties in China and Manchuria, many speaking the local dialect and living in close contact with the local population
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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 bulk of the evidence presented in this book comes from party archives in China. Over the past few years vast amounts of material have become available, and I draw on hundreds of previously classified documents, including secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of important leadership speeches, confessions extracted during thought-reform campaigns, inquiries into rebellions in the countryside, detailed statistics on the victims of the Great Terror, surveys of working conditions in factories and workshops, letters of complaint written by ordinary people, and much more.
Other sources include personal memoirs, letters and diaries, as well as eyewitness accounts from people who lived through the revolution. Sympathisers of the regime have unjustly discarded many of the claims of these earlier eyewitnesses, but these can now be corroborated by archival evidence, giving them a new lease of life.
Taken as a whole, these sources offer us an unprecedented opportunity to probe beyond the shiny surface of propaganda and retrieve the stories of the ordinary men and women who were both the main protagonists and the main victims of the revolution..."
"...By the end of June, some 30,000 people were caught in the area between the communists, who would not allow them to pass, and the nationalists, who refused to let them back into the city. Hundreds died every day.
Two months later, more than 150,000 civilians were pressed inside the death zone, reduced to eating grass and leaves, doomed to slow starvation. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere, their bellies bloated in the scorching sun. ‘The pungent stench of decomposition was everywhere,’ remembered one survivor..."
"...Soon the nationalist soldiers turned on the civilians, stealing their food at gunpoint. They slaughtered all the army horses, then dogs, cats and birds. Ordinary people ate rotten sorghum and corncobs before stripping the bark from trees. Others ate insects or leather belts. A few turned to human flesh, sold at $1.20 a pound on the black market.8
Cases of collective suicide occurred all the time. Entire families killed themselves to escape from the misery. Dozens died by the roadside every day.
‘We were just lying in bed starving to death,’ said Zhang Yinghua when interviewed about the famine that claimed the lives of her brother, her sister and most of her neighbours. ‘We couldn’t even crawl..."
"...Like steel production or grain output, death came with a quota mandated from above. Luo Ruiqing could not possibly oversee the arrest, trial and disposal of the many millions who became the targets of terror, so instead Mao handed down a killing quota as a rough guide for action. The norm, he felt, was one per thousand, a ratio he was willing to adjust to the particular circumstances of each region.
His subordinates kept track of local killing rates like bean counters, occasionally negotiating for a higher quota. In May 1951 Guangxi province, for instance, was told to kill more, even though a rate of 1.63 per thousand had already been achieved. Guizhou province, destabilised by popular uprisings, requested permission to kill three per thousand, and the Liuzhou region five per thousand. ‘The provincial party committee of Guizhou requests a target of three per thousand, that too is too much, I feel. This is how I look at it: we can go over one per thousand, but not by too much.’
Once a death rate of two per thousand had been achieved, the Chairman opined, people should be sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to work in labour camps..."