Mao's Great Famine (27 page)

Even when service stations undertook to launder clothes, what should have been a relatively straightforward matter became caught in a hopeless quagmire. A cumbersome bureaucracy involved a whole series of separate steps, from registering the items and issuing a receipt to handing out the washed clothes, all these operations being performed by different people, involving a third of the workforce. Those who actually did the washing rarely managed more than ten items a day. Everything was run at a loss and charged to the state, despite the high prices. On Shantou Road, Shanghai, a small laundry paid 140 yuan in salaries each month, although it made only about 100 yuan a month in income, not counting numerous lost items of clothing that had to be compensated for.
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Of course most ordinary people would have preferred to repair their clothes, shoes and furniture themselves, but their tools had been taken away during the iron and steel campaign. Lao Tian remembered that in Xushui – one of the country’s model communes – for several years his mother had to queue up to borrow the only needle that had not been confiscated in the neighbourhood.
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20

Housing

Every dictator needs a square. Military parades are at the heart of state rituals in communist regimes: power is evinced by a show of military might, with leaders gathering on the rostrum to greet the cadenced tread of thousands of marching soldiers and model workers, while jet fighters scream and whine overhead. Stalin had the Resurrection Gate on Red Square bulldozed and Kazan Cathedral demolished in order to make room for heavy tanks to clatter past Lenin’s tomb. Mao was Khrushchev’s guest of honour at the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, celebrated in Red Square in 1957, but he had no intention of lagging behind his rival. Tiananmen Square had to be bigger, he decided: was China not the most populous nation on earth?
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The square was expanded to hold 400,000 people in 1959, as a maze of medieval walls, gates and roads were levelled to create a vast concrete area the size of sixty football fields.
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The expansion of Tiananmen Square was one of ten gigantic achievements designed to overawe Khrushchev at the tenth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, to be celebrated in October 1959 in the presence of hundreds of foreign guests – one edifice for each year of liberation. A brand-new railway station, capable of handling 200,000 passengers a day, was built in a matter of months. A Great Hall of the People appeared on the western side of Tiananmen Square, a Museum of Chinese History on the eastern side. The Zhonghua Gate was erased to make room for the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a granite obelisk some thirty-seven metres high at the centre of the square.

The leadership bragged to the foreign press eagerly anticipating the anniversary that sufficient new buildings had been erected to give the capital a total of thirty-seven square kilometres of new floor space – more than fourteen times that of all the office buildings put up in Manhattan since the Second World War.
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It was an empty boast, as Beijing was turned into a giant Potemkin village designed to fool foreign visitors. But there was no denying that the party was spellbound by a vision in which soaring skyscrapers of steepled glass and concrete would transform Beijing overnight, relegating to oblivion the shameful mud huts and grey brick houses clustered along narrow lanes. Plans were drawn up for the systematic destruction of the entire city within ten years. At one point even the Imperial Palace was threatened by the wrecking ball.
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Tens of thousands of houses, offices and factories were pulled down, as the capital became a giant building site permanently covered in dust. Foreign embassy staff were taken aback by the rate of demolition, as some of the buildings that were pulverised had only recently been completed. ‘The general picture is one of chaos,’ commented an observer. All work was concentrated in Tiananmen Square, while elsewhere long-established building sites were deserted.
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More often than not pillars and beams went up for the first and second floor, and were then abandoned because of shortages of materials, leaving skeletal frames to stand forlorn as so many monuments to delusion.
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While most of the prestige buildings were ready in time for the October 1959 celebrations, they came at considerable cost. The planners were effective at creating an illusion of order on paper, but chaos reigned on the ground. In a fitting tribute to the folly of the Great Leap Forward, defective steel was incorporated into the party’s new nerve centre. Close to 1,700 tonnes of the steel beams used for the Great Hall of the People were either bent out of shape or insufficiently thick. Threaded steel produced in Tianjin was so weak that it had to be discarded. Across the square thousands of bags of cement were wasted, while a third of the equipment used on the building site was routinely out of order. And even at the heart of power, the party could not get more than three-quarters of the workforce to arrive on time in the morning. When they finally got to their posts, many slacked and skimped. A team of twenty carpenters called in from Wenzhou took three days to install fifteen window casements. Only one actually fitted.
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Across the country vast amounts of money were lavished on prestige buildings. Stadiums, museums, hotels and auditoria were built specifically to mark the tenth anniversary of liberation in 1959. In Harbin 5 million yuan was spent on a National Day Hotel, more than the total cost of the Beijing Hotel. A further 7 million was thrown at a National Day Stadium. In Tianjin, too, a National Day Stadium was planned, with seats to hold 80,000 spectators. Stadiums went up in Taiyuan and Shenyang, among other cities. Jiangsu decided to allocate 20 million yuan to National Day projects.
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Every local dictator, it seemed, wanted to have his ten pet projects in slavish imitation of the capital. The accoutrements of power in Beijing were widely duplicated at lower levels, as many leaders aspired to become a smaller version of Mao Zedong. Another reason was that officials were accountable to their bosses higher up in Beijing, not to the people below them. Big, tangible structures and flashy projects were a sure way to foster the illusion of effective governance. In Lanzhou, the capital of impoverished Gansu, provincial boss Zhang Zhongliang pushed for ten big edifices, although this rapidly spiralled up to sixteen schemes, including a People’s Hall designed to be exactly half the size of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, a People’s Square, an East Railway Station, a Culture Palace for Workers, a Culture Palace for Minorities, a stadium, a library and a luxury hotel, as well as new buildings for the provincial committee, the provincial People’s Congress, a Television Tower and a central park. The cost was set at 160 million yuan. Thousands of houses were destroyed, leaving many of the inhabitants homeless in the middle of the winter. Very little was achieved. After construction work was stopped in the wake of Zhang Zhongliang’s fall from power in December 1960, nothing but rubble remained in the centre of the city.
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Dozens of other prestige buildings were also started without any sort of approved plan. One example was a brand-new Friendship Hotel for foreign experts. The number of guests was misjudged by a factor of three, so that in the end the 170 foreigners were given an average of sixty square metres of luxurious accommodation while villagers were dying of cold and hunger just outside Lanzhou. After the recall of Soviet experts the building was eerily quiet.
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A step further down the ladder of power was the commune, and there was no shortage of radical leaders willing to transform them into models of communist utopia. In Huaminglou, where Liu Shaoqi was born, party secretary Hu Renqin initiated his own ten construction projects. These included a ‘pig city’, a giant pig shed stretching for ten kilometres along the main road. Many hundreds of houses set back from the street were destroyed to make room for the project. Stopping here on an inspection tour in April 1961, as we have seen, Liu Shaoqi found nothing but a few dozen scrawny animals. A water pavilion was built on the lake, as well as a large reception hall for visiting officials. In the meantime, half a million kilos of grain rotted in the fields. The death rate in some teams was as high as 9 per cent in 1960.
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All over the country similar monuments to party extravagance appeared. In Diaofang commune, Guangdong, where thousands starved to death, some eighty houses were ripped up for timber and bricks, all of which were earmarked for a People’s Hall spacious enough to convene a gathering of 1,500 people.
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In the three years up to September 1961, a total of 99.6 billion yuan was spent on capital construction, to which had to be added a further 9.2 billion in housing projects ostensibly earmarked for ordinary people. Most of the money ended up being invested in prestige buildings and offices with no tangible benefit for anyone but party members.
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But that did not take into account all sorts of accounting tricks used to fund even more construction. In Guizhou the Zunyi region appropriated some 4 million yuan of state funds, including financial assistance for the poor, to indulge in a building spree, sprucing up leading cities with new buildings, dancing halls, photo studios, private toilets and elevators. In Tongzi county funding reserved for six middle schools was embezzled to set up a brand-new theatre.
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Li Fuchun, on reviewing the many billions spent on prestige projects without state approval, felt sheer despair: ‘People cannot eat their fill and we are still building skyscrapers – how can we communists have the heart to do that! Does it still look like communism? Is it not empty talk when we go on all day long about the interests of the masses?’
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As private property became a thing of the past, collective units moved into the mansions that had once been the pride and joy of the moneyed elite. As a sense of ownership evaporated, no one individual being held accountable for any one property, a form of destruction appeared that was more insidious than the muffled thud of the sledgehammer. Once one of the most magnificent estates in Shanghai, Huaihai Middle Road nos 1154–1170 were taken over by an electric machinery unit in November 1958. In less than a year the windows were broken, the marble and ceramic tiles were smashed, and the building was stripped and gutted of expensive imported kitchen equipment, its heating system, the fridge and all the toilets. Stench permeated the premises, and rubbish was strewn all over the compound. The army was just as careless. Once it had claimed control of a garden villa on Fenyang Road, the place was left to crumble. The staircase fell apart, railings were broken, the chimney collapsed, all removable property was stolen, the trees in the garden died and the lotus pond turned into a smelly swamp. After a manor on Hongqiao Road had been occupied by the air force, the floorboards were broken up, the water taps and electricity switches dismantled, while the toilet overflowed with faeces. There were many other examples, ‘too many to be enumerated’, according to a report by the housing authorities.
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Lack of maintenance spread beyond individual houses. In Wuhan termites literally ate their way through many old buildings. In Station Street, half of one thousand buildings were infested. No. 14 Renhe Street simply caved in on its inhabitants. Architectural landmarks such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Hankou were in danger of being overrun by vermin.
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Places of worship were no exception. Religion had no place in the people’s communes: churches, temples and mosques were turned into workshops, canteens and dormitories. In Zhengzhou, eighteen out of all twenty-seven places of worship for Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists and Muslims were taken over, and a further 680 rooms privately rented out by religious congregations were confiscated. The city was proud to announce by 1960 that the number of Christian and Muslim worshippers had shrunk from 5,500 to a mere 377. All eighteen religious leaders now participated in ‘productive labour’ – except for three who had died.
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Destruction also extended to historic monuments. In Qujiang, Guangdong, the tomb of Zhang Jiuling, the famous Tang-dynasty minister, was damaged by a people’s commune digging for treasures, while a Ming-dynasty Buddhist temple in Shaoguan was torn down for building material. Further south in Guangdong a cannon built by Lin Zexu to fight the British during the Opium War was blown up and used as scrap iron.
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In Dujiangyan, Sichuan, the scene of an irrigation system dating back to the third century AD, a string of ancient temples were dismantled and burned for fuel.
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The Erwang temple, abounding in cultural relics and surrounded by ancient trees, was declared an historical monument in 1957 – and partly blown up with explosives a few years later.
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In the north the Great Wall of China was plundered for building material, while bricks from the Ming Tombs were carted away with the approval of local party secretaries. A stretch of wall measuring forty metres long and nine metres high at Dingling Tomb, where the Yongle Emperor was buried, was razed to the ground, while hundreds of cubic metres were dug from the Baocheng Tomb, also known as the Precious Hall. ‘Bricks belong to the masses’ was the clinching argument.
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City walls too were an object of official wrath. Their crenellated parapets, erstwhile symbols of imperial grandeur, overgrown with vines and shrubbery, were now seen as monuments to backwardness. Mao Zedong set the tone, pointing out at the Nanning conference in January 1958 that the walls around Beijing should be destroyed. Large sections of the vermilion gates and walls would be taken down in the following years. Other cities followed suit: parts of the wall that girdled the old city of Nanjing were dismantled by collective units in search of building material.
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