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The Red Gaurd poster reads:
"Destroy the Old World"
The Communists took power in China on October 1, 1949. They ended the hyperinflation that Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had created, and they launched a land reform program with the slogan "Land to the Tiller!" About thirty percent of the tillable land was in the hands of a small minority of landlords, and the Communist Party aimed at reducing the individual landlord's share of land to equal that of the common peasants - which would destroy the old gentry-landlords as a class of people and, they hoped, reduce the possibility of counter revolution.
The Communist Party leadership wanted this transition to be as little disruptive as possible and wanted to avoid the excesses they had experienced in land reform in areas they controlled before the revolution. The Party had widespread support among the peasantry (which was eighty percent of China's population) and the common peasant supported ridding themselves of the gentry-landlords. But rather than a smooth transition, the land reform program became tumultuous and bloody. Many hotheaded peasants sought retribution from the landlords, and over-zealous Communist cadres joined in the passion and committed excesses. Estimates are that more than a million died. And, in early 1950, those believed to have been overly zealous in leading local land reform were removed from the Party.
The size of farms was not yet completely equal, with farming still largely a family enterprise. Each family owned the land they worked, and now no farming family was burdened by mortgages, high interest rates and rents. But farmers were selling their crops to the government at fixed low prices, and the government was taxing the farmers about thirty percent of their income. As in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, China's Communist regime wished to use wealth created by farming to advance industrialization.
The Communist Party wanted order for China and a restoration of the economy. China had been disrupted by more than ten years of war, first against the Japanese and then civil war, and in the years 1950-53 China was involved in the Korean war. But from 1950 to 1952 farm production in China averaged a growth of fifteen percent per year - an advance helped by new irrigation and flood projects.
China population in the countryside was four-times larger than was the Soviet Union's in the late 1920s, but China's agricultural production was only about twenty percent what the Soviet Union's had been at this time - less agricultural wealth that could be transformed into investments in industry. But with this wealth, the Communists, in 1953, launched their first five-year plan for industry.
In 1953 and 1954, nature intervened and China had poor harvests. People migrated to the cities to escape hunger. The Korean War had just ended, and many young men were being demobilized. Unemployment was rising in China's cities. Moreover, the chairman of China's Communist Party, Mao Zedong, and some other Party members were disturbed by the sight of some family farmers being more successful than other farmers and by the sight of some of these more successful farmers lending money to the less fortunate. And the same debate arose among the Communists in China that had arisen among the Communists in the Soviet Union in the twenties: how far should they go in accommodating free enterprise as opposed to building socialism.
The Communist Party decided to launch a new program of collectivizing farming. China's peasantry saw Chairman Mao and the Communist Party as heroic much more than Russia's peasantry had seen Stalin and the Bolsheviks as heroes, and through 1956 the peasantry cooperated with the Party. There was none of the resistance and warfare that had accompanied the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union.
By the end of the summer of 1956 nearly ninety percent of China's farmers had joined a collective farm. The average collective consisted of around 170 families. The family unit remained, each family eating and living together under the same roof. And each family was allowed their own small plot of land and to sell the produce from these private plots as they pleased. Free enterprise remained, but it had been reduced, and socialism had been advanced.
Meanwhile, the birth rate among people in the countryside remained high, and people were still migrating from the countryside into the cities, where unemployment was growing. Peasant income remained low, which provided little in revenues for the government to invest in industrialization, and little with which to repay debts for loans from the Soviet Union. Manufacturing in 1956 and 1957 in China grew at an annual rate of four percent, and Party strategists wished for more spectacular gains. They estimated that because of China's poverty several years might pass before a more impressive rate in gains could be achieved. Seeing the growth in agricultural production as a part of the problem, the government sought to increase peasant incentives to grow by reducing taxes to twenty-five percent of their income.
Mao was an egalitarian, with little respect for intellectuals and the educated. He had called intellectuals the most ignorant of people, and he had described China's common folk the fount of wisdom and the hope of the future. Mao wanted no elite in China - no elite outside of the Communist Party, and he was not enthusiastic about an elite within the Party. Party people, he believed, should learn from the masses.
Mao saw what he believed to be arrogant Party cadres lording it over people. He responded by supporting a new freedom of expression, a campaign in 1956 with a slogan that referred to ideas as flowers: "Let a Hundred Flowers bloom!" The Party launched the campaign believing that love of the Party and its ideas was sufficiently secure among the masses. By mid-1957 the Party withdrew the campaign. Criticism was too strong for Mao and other Party members, and in the place of the Hundred Flowers campaign came a new campaign advocating class struggle against "Rightists." Discipline was to be maintained in the dissemination of ideas. Mao did not want bad ideas to spread and demoralize the masses in which he had placed his hopes. He did not want the fountainhead of the masses to become polluted.
Mao remained concerned about the rise of an educated elite: specialists in technology, engineers and economists. And he remained concerned about a bureaucratic elite that included Party members. Mao was concerned also about the drift of people from the countryside into the cities - which he saw taking place also outside China. Mao wanted order and economic advancement superior to what was taking place in other less-developed nations, and he believed he could accomplish this by turning the economy over to the spontaneity of the masses. To jump-start this spontaneity Mao developed a new program, and he called his program the "Great Leap Forward."
The Great Leap Forward was advertised as a technological revolution - as the proletarianization of the economy preceding mechanization of the economy. Developing agriculture was to have priority, and in place of creating heavy industry, light industry was to be dispersed across the land. Relying on the masses, the government dismissed its economists and centralized economic planning. The government would continue to collect taxes and requisition grain, but the masses would mobilize themselves and run things spontaneously at the local level.
Mao wanted to move faster in the direction of the communism of which Marx had spoken, with an abolition of differences between rich and poor and abolition of divisions in labor. Mao wanted everyone to become an economic and managerial expert. He looked forward to a new generation of cultured laborers and people who had acquired skills in a variety of trades.
Mao spoke of China achieving communism sooner than the Soviet Union. He had been displeased in 1956 when the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin - the Chinese Communists having praised Stalin to their nation. Mao characterized Khrushchev as a "revisionist" - in other words, deviating from Marxism. He saw the Soviet Union as having become a bureaucratic state. Mao's supporters claimed that China was pursuing Marxism and the Soviet Union was not.
Khrushchev, on the other hand, believed that Mao was having romantic delusions. Khrushchev believed that the Soviet Union was building socialism. He believed it was necessary for the Soviet Union to educate specialists - engineers, teachers et cetera. He saw Marx's communism, including the end to divisions in labor, as something far off in the future.
The ideological split between Mao and Khrushchev was aggravated by their different approaches to the power of the United States, the atomic bomb and provocations from Taiwan. Mao disliked Khrushchev's attempt at détente with the United States. Taiwan had set up military outposts on the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, each just a few miles off China's coast, and Mao wanted to stand up to Chiang Kai-shek's regime and to the U.S. Mao spoke of his being unafraid of nuclear bombs, and he asked that the Soviet Union help China develop such bombs. Khrushchev refused, telling Mao that China had no need for nuclear bombs because the Soviet Union had them and was China's protector.
Khrushchev was not only trying to develop better relations with the United States, he wished above all to avoid a nuclear war. He opposed China's bombing of Quemoy and Ma-tsu. Mao responded by announcing that what China did regarding Ma-tsu and Quemoy was an internal matter, and Khrushchev saw this as stupid because China and the Soviet Union were allies and what China did regarding Quemoy and Matsu could have grave consequences for both powers.
At the heart of the Great Leap Forward was replacing collective farms with People's Communes. Each commune consisted of from ten to twenty thousand people - around twice the size of the collective farms. In the communes, peasants ate in mess halls. They surrendered their tools and farm animals to the commune and much of their personal property, including furniture and chickens. Women were encouraged to leave wifely duties and join the work brigades. Brigades had been working at irrigation and water conservation projects, and with the communes these projects were expanded in addition to brigade work at farming. From sunrise to sunset, large brigades toiled - to the Western World a vision of ants.
In addition to farming, in 1958 and 1959 new roads were built, new factories were constructed, dams were built, as were dikes, irrigation channels and lakes. Land was reclaimed, and new terraces were carved into mountains, most of it created by hand labor rather than modern earth-working machines. And beginning in July 1958 the "battle for steel" began. A measurement of a nation's industrial strength was the amount of steel it produced, and, in China, primitive backyard furnaces were built. At night, skylines in cities, Shanghai among them, were lit up with spots of red from fires for melting metal. In the countryside, producing steel withdrew labor from growing food, which was to prove disastrous.
No one in the countryside had time to tend his or her own plot of land. These plots had accounted for seven percent of China's crop cultivation and thirty percent of peasant income, and by the end of 1958 they were all but eliminated. It was now the commune that distributed whatever food there was to eat. It was the commune that organized everything, and it was the commune's responsibility to report to the government how much was being produced, to fill production quotas and to send the required percentage of what it produced to the government.
Some in the communes had risen as leaders more by their enthusiasm and patriotism than their management experience or skill. Rather than the communal egalitarianism and spontaneity that Mao had envisioned, leadership developed into regimentation. 1958 was a year of good harvests, but eager leaders, wishing to look good, passed on to the central government inflated figures as to how much food they had produced. Reports that year were that crop production had doubled, and based on these figures, the government set higher production goals and requisitioned more food from the countryside than they should have. Rather than commune leaders confessing their error and refusing to send food that was needed to feed their fellow communards, they distributed the inadequate supplies to those they favored and left others to starve.
By the summer of 1959 much of the enthusiasm for the Great Leap was fading. Mess halls were being abandoned, people who had food to eat preferring to do so in a family setting. The Communes continued to dominate agricultural production, but private plots were making a comeback, and with it so too were meager rural markets. But 1959 was another of those years of bad weather and bad harvests. Again too little food was left for local consumption. And again people starved.
In 1960, unusually dry weather brought drought in the north of China, and unusually wet weather, in the form of typhoons, caused flooding in the south. Agriculture production dropped further. Party leaders in Beijing were only now becoming aware of the breakdown in the economy and extent of the starvation in the countryside. The figure commonly agreed upon is that by the end of 1961 as many as 20 million had died from malnutrition. And China's fertility rate fell about sixty percent between 1957 and 1961, men starving to death not likely to impregnate women and women starving to death not as likely to give birth.
The Communist Party blamed everything on the weather - and on the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had withdrawn all of its technicians and advisors from China, taking their blueprints with them. The failure of backyard steel production needed some other explanation. China had melted down much of its utensils for eating and its pots and woks for cooking, and what it had produced was a metal too poor in quality to be of any use. [READER COMMENT]
Discovering how bad things were, the Communist Party struggled to put things right. China's defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, reported to Mao what the actual conditions in the countryside were, and Mao responded defensively. Peng was a comrade from the days of the Long March and a general in the civil war. As defense minister he had been opposed to Mao's wish to do away with educated experts and his approach to developing the economy. Peng had realized that a modern army needed technical people and heavy industry to develop advanced weaponry. Mao's response to his old comrade was to dismiss him from his position as defense minister, and in Peng's place Mao chose a devoted follower, another old comrade, Lin Biao. As defense minister leader of the People's Liberation Army, Lin Biao began promoting Mao. He put together a little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao, for distribution within the army.
Facing criticism from some others in the Party, Mao stood firm in his beliefs. Debate within the Party was bitter, and those supporting Mao had the upper hand. Mao's prestige was enough for him to maintain Party leadership, driving those who disagreed with Mao to hiding their disagreement and feigning unity with Party opinion. What had been open and honest debates within the Party had come to an end.
Despite Mao maintaining his position within the Party, most high-ranking Party officials swung toward favoring a pragmatic retreat from Mao's Great Leap Forward - not unlike Lenin's retreat from "war-communism" to his New Economic Policy. China's retreat was from collective economics to individuals seeking personal gain. The retreat was meager compared to Lenin's, meager enough that Mao went along with it, but it upset him, Mao seeing the retreat in part at least as a loss of will. And in 1963, at the age of seventy, an unhappy Mao diminished his participation in Party matters, leaving the Party to more pragmatic men.
Industry, large and small, was to remain state owned, but authority was given to trained managers over Maoist ideologues. Skilled technicians were promoted, and material incentives were created in the place of moralistic slogans. Control over commerce was returned to an economics ministry. The government closed thousands of small and inefficient factories. The industrial work force was cut in half, and many were sent back to the countryside, where, it was hoped, they could find gainful employment.
In the countryside, more freedom was given to the People's Communes to set their own production quotas. Attempts were made to mend the People's Communes. Communist Party pragmatists found that many former commune leaders had abused their positions of power, and the Party moved to replace former commune leaders with trained Communist Party members. And to reinforce the Party's authority in the countryside, these new commune managers were given support by units of the People's Liberation Army.
A part of the Party's increase in control and discipline was its demand for accurate statistics from the communes. The People's Communes were reduced in size. Machinery that had been distributed to the communes, such as tractors, was returned to a soviet-style equipment rental center.
The Party abolished the commune school system, seeing these schools as failures and that people were teaching subjects in which they had no training. Many peasants had already dismissed them as failures, wishing to have their children educated instead in the old-fashioned schools.
But attempts were made to re-establish mess halls and to abolish private plots. And here too Mao's masses abandoned him: the peasants resisted. Government authorities did not want to press the issue., so mess halls remained abandoned. The Party gave in to peasant sentiment and restored as much as twelve percent of tillable land to private ownership and production - which coincided with the Party wishing to encourage individual responsibility and initiative rather than group conformity.
Party pragmatists encouraged the re-establishment of open markets in the countryside. Peasants were encouraged to trade locally. And for the sake of industrialization in the cities farming families were encouraged to buy goods made in urban factories rather than to engage in communal industries.
With a good harvest in 1962 and a return to incentives over official altruism came a rise in industrial production and productivity, and in 1964, the Party leader second to Mao, Zhou Enlai, wishing to encourage and reassure everybody, announced that the recovery from economic disaster was complete.
Then, in 1965, Mao, at the age of 72, came out of seclusion. He complained about the retreat, about the rise of a new class of bureaucrats, a new exploiting class. China, he believed, was going the way of the Soviet Union and becoming a bureaucratic state. The Party, according to Mao, had been taken over by "capitalist roaders" - by people with a bourgeois mentality. Mao, like Trotsky, was advocating "permanent revolution" - although he did not label it as such. Reinvigorating his leadership, Mao was about to create what was to be known as the Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, a former actress, belonged to a group of artsy Maoists who wished for socialist purity in literature and the performing arts. In February 1966, the minister of defense, Lin Biao, still siding with Mao, invited Jiang Qing to establish cultural policy for the People's Liberation Army. Jiang Qing and her group were encouraged. They charged that China's garden of culture was infested with "anti-socialist poisonous weeds." Jiang Qing called for a revolution against bourgeois culture - a cultural revolution.
Mao spoke out about a spiritual regeneration taking precedence over economic development - a communist attitudinal spirituality. And he spoke of weeding from authority those who had chosen to lead China down "the capitalist road." Old comrades directly beneath Mao - Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping - chose to accommodate Mao rather than collide with him head-on. And Liu Shaoqi, who had been a leading pragmatist, tried to curry favor with Mao by orchestrating an "anti-revisionist" campaign.
Still believing in the wisdom of the masses, Mao moved again for their support. He was especially interested in young people. Young people, he said, were the most willing to learn and were "the least conservative in their thinking." Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, agreed with Mao's move, and she allied her group with student unrest in Beijing. The disturbed students were filled with idealism. China's students were more in tune with Mao's idealism than they were with the pragmatism practiced by Mao's Party rivals. Jiang Qing's cultural revolutionaries distributed armbands to the students and declared that they were a new vanguard - Red Guards. And Mao, still a venerated figure, encouraged the student radicals, announcing that they should "learn revolution by making revolution."
Youth tend to be more passionate than older folks - whose enthusiasms are tempered by experience if not disappointment - and Mao's Red Guards were passionate. In Beijing their ranks swelled with disaffected youths from the provinces, attracted by the rhetoric, by their reverence for Mao as the father of China's revolution and by the excitement. During the autumn of 1966, Mao was reviewing gigantic parades at Tiananmen Square, his Red Guards chanting and waving the little red book of "Quotations from Chairman Mao" that Lin Biao had put together for the Red Army.
Among other things, the students were moved by animosity towards the Soviet Union. They were with Mao in his attempt to prevent China from developing into a bureaucratic state, as had the Soviet Union. And, backed by their government, they also demonstrated displeasure with U.S. actions in Vietnam. Unlike protesting students in the United States at the time, China's Red Guards enjoyed the support of China's military, Lin Biao encouraging the students and describing Mao as "the greatest genius of the present era" and as "the great helmsman." And Lin Biao spoke of Mao as having created a Marxism-Leninism that was "remolding the souls of the people."
Through 1966, secondary schools and colleges closed in China. Students - many from the age of nine through eighteen - followed Maoist directives to destroy things of the past that they believed should be no part of the new China: old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking - the "four olds." In a state of euphoria and with support from the government and army, the students went about China's cities and villages, wrecking old buildings, old temples and old art objects. In their wake, monasteries and places of worship were converted into warehouses, and leading Buddhist monks were sent off to do manual labor. To make a new and wonderful China, the Red Guards attacked as insufficiently revolutionary their parents, teachers, school administrators and everyone they could find as targets, including "intellectuals" and "capitalist roaders" within the Communist Party.
In cities through China, Mao's movement was joined by a variety of people trying to prove they were as loyal to Mao as were the Red Guards. Politicians joined the movement in an effort to win against their political rivals. A mass hysteria had developed. Mobs of Red Guards grabbed prominent individuals whom they deemed insufficiently revolutionary, put dunce caps on their heads or hung placards around their necks, and paraded them through the streets. Officials were dragged from their offices. Their files were examined and often destroyed, and the officials were often replaced by youths with no managerial experience.
As had happened in the Soviet Union, the revolution in China was devouring its own. The purges in the Party went higher and higher, until Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, were removed from their offices, and they and their families were humiliated. Filled with righteousness, the power of their numbers, and support from Mao, the campaigns for revolutionary change became violent. People seen as evil were beaten to death. Thousands of people died, including many who had committed suicide.
By September 1967, the chaos was too much even for Mao, Lin Biao and Jiang Qing. Civil war seemed to be in the making. Jiang Qing spoke out against what she called "ultra-leftist tendencies." With intolerance riding high and variation in opinion being inevitable, violent battles erupted between Red Guard factions. Mao ordered the People's Liberation Army to quell the Red Guard factionalism. Lin Biao and the People's Liberation Army called on the Red Guards to stop fighting each other and instead to study the works of Mao. The chaos and deaths continued, with the People's Liberation Army itself splitting into hostile camps. Mao was aware that some order was necessary, and he commanded that the Red Guards disperse, Mao describing the Red Guards as having failed in their mission.
By the summer of 1968, with the help of the army, the Red Guards were subdued. In large numbers, groups of young Red Guards were sent to labor in the countryside, confused in their being cast down from the height of glory and political importance. Mao's romance with the masses was all but over. For order, Mao was now counting on the People's Liberation Army, and he had the army form revolutionary committees in all provinces.
Mao wished to rebuild the Party, and the Ninth Party Congress was held in April 1969. There, a new Party constitution was adopted. With sixty percent of the former Party membership having been purged during the Cultural Revolution, room existed for new people within the Party, and two-thirds of those attending the congress were in military uniform - reflecting the power of Lin Biao. New Party members were to be limited to those of proper class origin - in other words, people with humble origins. Lin Biao was named Mao's successor. And at the Party Congress, Lin Biao denounced his old comrade from pre-revolutionary days, and his former rival, Liu Shaoqi. Liu, he said, was a "traitor and a scab." Liu Shaoqi had been put in prison during the cultural revolution, and he was to die in prison later that same year.
After the Party Congress, Mao moved to reduce the role of the military within the Party, and he moved against Lin Biao for reasons not easily ascertained. Perhaps Mao had come to see Lin Biao as too opportunistic and too powerful. Zhou Enlai was also opposed to Lin Biao, and Zhou also wished to reduce the role of the military in Party affairs. Unlike Lin Biao, Zhou favored improving relations with the capitalist powers - Lin Biao favoring, instead, unending class struggle.
Mao visited regional military commanders and criticized Lin Biao. And Lin Biao was obliged to humble himself with public self-criticism. Reports suggest that Lin Biao's son, apparently outraged over treatment of his father, tried to strike back and to uphold his father's standing in the Party. This required drastic steps, namely a military coup. Lin Biao is said to have been a necessary part of his son's conspiracy - a conspiracy, it is claimed, that intended to assassinate Mao. Someone kept the government informed of Lin Biao's activities, and the official story from China is that the government moved against Lin Biao, that on September 13, 1971 Lin Biao and his wife fled in an aircraft that crashed in Mongolia, killing all aboard.
With Lin Biao out of the way, Zhou Enlai's opening to the West took the form of what became known as the ping-pong diplomacy. A ping-pong team from the United States that had been competing in Japan accepted an invitation to China. The friendliness involved in the ping-pong matches in China was a sensation in the U.S. press, and a new atmosphere in relations arose between the United States and China. With Lin Biao out of the way, China was making gains in foreign affairs, China being admitted to the United Nations in October, 1971. And in February 1972, President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, journeyed to China.
With the Nixon visit, China won an improvement in its position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The United States announced its recognition of Taiwan as a part of China and it announced interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan issue between the Chinese. Nixon and Mao exchanged pleasantries, Nixon flattering Mao with the comment that his writings had moved China and "changed the world," and Mao said that he had been able to change "only a few places around Beijing."
Mao was now 79 and suffering from Parkinson's disease. He had regrets over the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and many people in China had regrets about Mao. The Great Leap Forward had tarnished his image within China, as had the demise of Lin Biao. In 1972 Lin Biao was officially declared as having been a "renegade and a traitor." And some people found fault with Mao for having previously praised Lin Biao, wondering how a man who was supposed to be wise had been so wrong about Lin Biao.
Conflict continued within the Party over which direction China should take. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, favored belligerence toward the capitalist powers, her hostility having been apparent to President Nixon during his visit. And she was still advocating cultural purity, attacking interest in Schubert, Beethoven and other Western composers.
Deng Xiaoping, who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, was restored to prominence in the Party. Then on January 8, 1976, Deng's ally, Zhou Enlai, died of cancer. Mourning for Zhou was widespread. Deng gave the eulogy, but a rival, Hua Guofeng, was elevated to fill Zhou Enlai's position as Party leader. Deng was still thought by many as a "capitalist roader."
Students in Beijing, still clinging to Maoist idealisms, demonstrated in favor of rights for the poor and denounced "revisionists and capitalist roaders." Rival demonstrations also erupted, and, on April 5, thousands of students rioted at Tiananmen Square after finding that tributes placed there for Zhou Enlai the day before had been removed. The demonstrators displayed criticisms of Mao. Police cars were set afire. The outburst was quelled by security forces and an urban workers' militia, who arrested as many as 4,000 demonstrators. Deng was suspected of having encouraged the demonstration regarding tributes to Zhou, and those in the Party opposed to Deng rallied against him. Deng was purged again, but he was allowed to keep his Party membership.
Meanwhile, Mao's health was fading. On September 9, 1976, almost 27 years after he had declared the creation of the People's Republic of China, Mao died. A week of mourning was declared. The Soviet Union sent no condolences. Around 300,000 people filed by Mao's body and casket at the Great Hall of the People, at Tiananmen Square, but there was less emotion than had been expressed with the death of Zhou Enlai.
Hua Guofeng was declared Mao's successor as Party Chairman, and Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and three of her fellow cultural revolutionaries were imprisoned and named the "Gang of Four." Hua Guofeng announced his plan to "obey whatever Mao had said" and to continue "whatever [Mao] had decided." Across China, Hua Guofeng's policy became known derisively as the "two whatevers" Hua Guofeng's association with Mao was of little asset, and Hua Guofeng's standing in the Party faded.
Recommended Books
China: a New History, by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, 1998
Hungry Ghosts, by Jasper Becker, Free Press, 1997
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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
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