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Those who were so deemed were immediately executed along with those who sympathized with them. The rule was that there had to be at least one person killed per village. The numbers killed is estimated to be between one and five million. In addition, another four to six million landowners were slaughtered for the crime of being capital owners. If anyone was suspected of hiding wealth, he or she was tortured with hot irons to confess.
The families of the killed were then tortured and the graves of their ancestors looted and pillaged. What happened to the land? It was divided into tiny plots and distributed among the remaining peasants. Anyone who was suspected of involvement in prostitution, gambling, tax evasion, lying, fraud, opium dealing, or telling state secrets was executed as a "bandit. Resident committees of political loyalists watched every move. A nighttime visit to another person was immediately reported and the parties involved jailed or killed.
The cells in the prisons themselves grew ever smaller, with one person living in a space of about 14 inches. Some prisoners were worked to death, and anyone involved in a revolt was herded with collaborators and they were all burned.
There was industry in the cities, but those who owned and managed them were subjected to ever tighter restrictions: forced transparency, constant scrutiny, crippling taxes, and pressure to offer up their businesses for collectivization.
There were many suicides among the small- and medium-sized business owners who saw the writing on the wall. Joining the party provided only temporary respite, since began the campaign against hidden counterrevolutionaries in the party itself. A principle here was that one in ten party members was a secret traitor.
As the rivers of blood rose ever higher, Mao brought about the Hundred Flowers Campaign in two months of , the legacy of which is the phrase we often hear: "Let a hundred flowers bloom. The liberalization was short lived. In fact, it was a trick. All those who spoke out against what was happening to China were rounded up and imprisoned, perhaps between , and , people, including 10 percent of the well-educated classes.
Others were branded as right wingers and subjected to interrogation, reeducation, kicked out of their homes, and shunned. But this was nothing compared with phase two, which was one of history's great central planning catastrophes. Following collectivization of land, Mao decided to go further to dictate to the peasants what they would grow, how they would grow it, and where they would ship it, or whether they would grow anything at all as versus plunge into industry.
This would become the Great Leap Forward that would generate history's most deadly famine. Peasants were grouped into groups of thousands and forced to share all things. All groups were to be economically self-sufficient. Production goals were raised ever higher. People were moved by the hundreds of thousands from where production was high to where it was low, as a means of boosting production.
They were moved too from agriculture to industry. There was a massive campaign to collect tools and transform them into industrial skill. As a means of showing hope for the future, collectives were encouraged to have huge banquets and eat everything, especially meat. This was a way of showing one's belief that the next year's harvest would be even more bountiful. He proclaimed that "seeds are happiest when growing together" and so seeds were sown at five to ten times their usual density.
Plants died, the soil dried out, and the salt rose to the surface. To keep birds from eating grain, sparrows were wiped out, which vastly increased the number of parasites. Erosion and flooding became endemic. Tea plantations were turned to rice fields, on grounds that tea was decadent and capitalistic.
Hydraulic equipment built to service the new collective farms didn't work and lacked any replacement parts. This led Mao to put new emphasis on industry, which was forced to appear in the same areas as agriculture, leading to ever more chaos. Workers were drafted from one sector to another, and mandatory cuts in some sectors was balanced by mandatory high quotas in another. In , the disaster was everywhere. Workers were growing too weak even to harvest their meager crops, so they died watching the rice rot.
Industry churned and churned but produced nothing of any use. The government responded by telling people that fat and proteins were unnecessary. But the famine couldn't be denied. The black-market price of rice rose 20 to 30 times. Because trade had been forbidden between collectives self-sufficiency, you know , millions were left to starve.
By , the death rate soared from 15 percent to 68 percent, and the birth rate plummeted. Anyone caught hoarding grain was shot. Peasants found with the smallest amount were imprisoned. Fires were banned. Funerals were prohibited as wasteful. Villagers who tried to flee the countryside to the city were shot at the gates. Deaths from hunger reached 50 percent in some villages. Survivors boiled grass and bark to make soup and wandered the roads looking for food.
Sometimes they banded together and raided houses looking for ground maize. Women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition. But even elsewhere in the world Mao is often praised, after his brutality has been acknowledged, as a visionary, poet, calligrapher, guerrilla chieftain, military genius, unifier, and even - as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger claimed - charmer.
Not any more. By that I mean that Mao's reputation as a "great man," unless one includes Hitler and Stalin too, is finished. Chang's previous book, Wild Swans, which is said to be the biggest-selling non-fiction paperback ever, and worth every penny, showed the effects of Maoism on her family and herself.
Halliday, her husband, is a specialist on Soviet archives. His best-known book, written with Bruce Cumings, is Korea: the Unknown War, which was turned into a vivid television series. Chang and Halliday use the word "unknown" again in their new book. The central thesis of this biography is that Mao was as evil as Hitler and Stalin.
Some will dismiss this is a hatchet job, meaning that Mao cannot have been that bad. He was. Chang and Halliday have taken a wrecker's ball to Mao, but they use the scalpel too. They have investigated every aspect of his personal life and his career, peeling back the layers of lies, myths, and what we used to think of as facts.
Many of these facts were really lies, usually originating in the titanic autobiographical lie that Mao fed the American journalist Edgar Snow in for his scoop, Red Star Over China. For decades, that series of lies underpinned all that Chinese and foreigners knew about Mao. Here is a startling example of what Chang and Halliday discovered during their decade's research. The central heroic narrative of Mao's life, indeed of the Communist Party's life, is the Long March, , long before Mao came to power in A Chinese Odyssey, it goes like this: the Red guerrillas escaped from the encirclement of President Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces and, over terrible terrain, often attacked by the Nationalists and hostile local people, and after almost 90 per cent losses, finally reached safety in the remote north-west.
From their guerrilla stronghold at Yanan they built up their reputation as land-reforming revolutionaries and went on to conquer China in For years Mao was given the credit - largely from what he told Snow, who thought him "Lincolnesque" - for commanding the Reds during that epochal ordeal.
And of all the ordeals along the way, the worst was crossing the Dadu River, by way of a bridge over the deep gorge. The Nationalists on the other side had set the bridge alight, the story goes, and if the Reds had stalled there, exhausted and diminished as they were, the Long March would have probably ended in annihilation.
But in the Mao legend, volunteer soldiers scrambled hand over hand along the suspension chains, through the flames, and although some fell to their deaths in the rapids below, the survivors got to the other side, drove off the enemy, the bridge was repaired, and the Reds got across and survived. It didn't happen. Not didn't happen like that, but didn't happen at all.
How do Chang and Halliday know this? They interviewed "a sprightly year-old" woman who ran a bean curd shop right next to the bridge in and saw the whole thing. They also read an interview with Peng Dehuai, a senior commander at the time, who could recall no fighting or a burning bridge. The widow of Zhu De, Mao's closest comrade in arms on the March, mentioned no fighting at the Dadu gorge.
As for Mao, the inspiring commander, he now emerges as nearly left behind by the March, disliked by almost everyone, wrong-headed in both tactics and strategy, and, most disgracefully for the legend, a survivor of the Long March only because President Chiang let the Reds go.
At one point the Nationalists left a truck at the side of the road loaded with food and detailed maps of the route ahead.
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