Mao's Great Famine (46 page)

In any event, as the promise of utopia was followed by yet another spell of back-breaking labour, the willingness to trade hard work for empty promises gradually eroded. Soon, the only way to extract compliance from an exhausted workforce was the threat of violence. Nothing short of fear of hunger, pain or death seemed to be able to galvanise them. In some places both villagers and cadres became so brutalised that the scope and degree of coercion had to be constantly expanded, creating a mounting spiral of violence. With far fewer carrots to offer, the party relied more heavily on the stick.

The stick was the weapon of choice in the countryside. It was cheap and versatile. A swing of the baton would punish a straggler, while a series of blows could lacerate the back of more stubborn elements. In serious cases victims could be strung up and beaten black and blue. People were forced to kneel on broken shells and beaten. This happened, for instance, to Chen Wuxiong, who refused to work on an irrigation project far away from home. He was forced to kneel and hold a heavy log above his head, all the while being beaten with a stick by local cadre Chen Longxiang.
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As famished villagers often suffered from oedema, liquid seeped through their pores with every stroke of the stick. It was a common expression that someone ‘was beaten until all the water came out’, for instance in the case of Lu Jingfu, a farmer chased by a team of thugs. So enraged was their leader Ren Zhongguang, first party secretary of Napeng commune, Qin county, that he beat the man for twenty minutes.
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Party officials often took a lead. The report compiled by the local party committee which investigated abuses in a commune in Qingyuan explained that the first party secretary Deng Zhongxing personally beat more than 200 farmers, killing fourteen in an attempt to fulfil the quotas.
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The brains of Liu Shengmao, too sick to work at the reservoir in Huaminglou, Hunan, were widely spattered by the beating he received from the brigade secretary, who continued to pummel his lifeless body in a blind fury.
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Ou Desheng, party secretary of a commune in Hunan, single-handedly punched 150 people, of whom four died. ‘If you want to be a party member you must know how to beat people’ was his advice to new recruits.
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In Daoxian county – ‘everywhere is a torture field’, an investigation team wrote – farmers were clubbed on a regular basis. One team leader personally beat thirteen people to death (a further nine subsequently died of their injuries).
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Some of these cadres were veritable gangsters, their mere appearance instilling fear. In Nanhai county, brigade leader Liang Yanlong toted three guns and stalked the village in a big leather coat.
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Li Xianchun, team leader in Hebei, injected himself with morphine daily and would swagger about the village in bright red trousers, swearing loudly and randomly beating anybody who had the misfortune to catch his attention.
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Overall, across the country, maybe as many as half of all cadres regularly pummelled or caned the people they were meant to serve – as endless reports demonstrate. Four thousand out of 16,000 villagers working on the Huangcai reservoir in Hunan in the winter of 1959–60 were kicked and beaten, and 400 died as a result.
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In a Luoding commune in Guangdong, more than half of all cadres beat the villagers, close to a hundred being clubbed to death.
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A more comprehensive investigation of Xinyang, Henan, showed that over a million people died in 1960. Most died of starvation, but some 67,000 were beaten to death by the militias.
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The stick was common, but it was only one tool in the arsenal of horror devised by local cadres to demean and torture those who failed to keep up. As the countryside slid into starvation, ever greater violence had to be inflicted on the famished to get them into the fields. The ingenuity deployed by the few to inflict pain and suffering on the many seemed boundless. People were thrown into ponds, sometimes bound, sometimes stripped of their clothes. In Luoding a ten-year-old boy was tied up and thrown into a bog for having stolen a few stalks of wheat. He died after a few days.
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People were stripped naked and left in the cold. For stealing a kilo of beans, farmer Zhu Yufa was fined 120 yuan. His clothes, his blanket and his floor mat were confiscated, then he was stripped naked and subjected to a struggle session.
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In one commune in Guangdong, where thousands of farmers were sent to do forced labour, stragglers were stripped of their clothes in the middle of the winter.
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Elsewhere, in the rush to complete a reservoir, up to 400 villagers at a time were made to work in sub-zero temperatures without cotton-padded clothing. No exceptions were made for pregnant women. The cold, it was thought, would force the villagers to work more vigorously.
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In Liuyang, Hunan, a team of 300 men and women were made to work bare-chested in the snow. One in seven died.
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And then, in the summer, people were forced to stand in the glaring sun with arms spread out (others had to kneel on stones or on broken glass). This happened from Sichuan in the south to Liaoning in the north.
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People were also burned with incandescent tools. Hot needles were used to singe navels.
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When farmers recruited to work on a reservoir in Lingbei commune complained about pain, the militia seared their bodies.
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In Hebei people were branded with a hot iron.
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In Sichuan a few were doused in petrol and set alight, some burning to death.
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Boiling water was poured over people. As fuel was scarce, it was more common to cover people in urine and excrement.
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One eighty-year-old woman, who had the temerity to report her team leader for stealing rice, paid the price when she was drenched in urine.
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In Longgui commune, near Shantou, those who failed to keep up with work were pushed into a heap of excrement, forced to drink urine or had their hands burned.
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Elsewhere, a runny concoction of excrement diluted with water was poured down a victim’s throat. Huang Bingyin, a villager weakened by starvation, stole a chicken but was caught and forced by the village leader to swallow cow dung.
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Liu Desheng, guilty of poaching a sweet potato, was covered in urine. He, his wife and his son were also forced into a heap of excrement. Then tongs were used to prise his mouth open after he refused to swallow excrement. He died three weeks later.
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Mutilation was carried out everywhere. Hair was ripped out.
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Ears and noses were lopped off. After Chen Di, a farmer in Guangdong, stole some food, he was tied up by militiaman Chen Qiu, who cut off one of his ears.
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The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied up with wire, a ten-kilo stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a hot iron – as punishment for digging up a potato.
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In Yuanling county, Hunan, testicles were beaten, soles of feet were branded and noses were stuffed with hot peppers. Ears were nailed against the wall.
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In the Liuyang region, Hunan, iron wires were used to chain farmers.
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In Jianyang, Sichuan, an iron wire was run through the ears of thieves, pulled down by the weight of a piece of cardboard which read ‘habitual thief’.
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Others had needles inserted under their nails.
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In several parts of Guangdong, cadres injected salt water into people with needles normally used on cattle.
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Sometimes husbands and wives were forced to beat each other, a few to death.
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One elderly man, when interviewed for this book in 2006, quietly sobbed when he recounted how as a young boy he and the other villagers had been forced to beat a grandmother, tied up in the local temple for having taken wood from the forest.
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People were intimidated by mock executions and mock burials.
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They were also buried alive. This was often mentioned in reports about Hunan. People were locked up in a cellar and left to die in eerie silence after a period of frantic screaming and scratching against the hatch.
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The practice was widespread enough to prompt a query by provincial boss Zhou Xiaozhou during a visit to Fengling county in November 1958.
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Humiliation was the trusted companion of pain. Everywhere people were paraded – sometimes with a dunce cap, sometimes with a placard on their chests, sometimes entirely naked.
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Faces were smeared with black ink.
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People were given
yin
and
yang
haircuts, as one half of the head was shaved, the other not.
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Verbal abuse was rife. The Red Guards, ten years later during the Cultural Revolution, invented very little.

Punishment also extended to the hereafter. Sometimes the corpses of those who had been beaten to death were simply left to rot by the roadside, destined to become pariahs of the afterlife, their wandering ghosts – according to popular belief – never able to rest without proper burial rites. Signs were put up by some graves. In Longgui commune, Guangdong, where one in five died in 1959, some people were hastily buried by the roadside, the site marked by a signboard with the word ‘sluggard’.
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In Shimen, Hunan, the entire family of Mao Bingxiang starved to death, but the brigade leader refused to give them a burial. After a week rats had gnawed through their eyes. Local people later told an investigation team that ‘we people are not even like dogs, nobody buries us when we die’.
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Family members could be punished for trying to bury a relative who had fallen foul of local justice. When a seventy-year-old mother hanged herself to escape from hunger, her child hurried back home from the fields in a panic. But the local cadre was infuriated by the breach of discipline. He chased the daughter down the road, punched her head and then, when she was down, kicked her upper body. She was crippled for life. ‘You can keep her and eat her,’ he said of her mother, whose body was left for days to decompose.
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The worst form of desecration was to chop up the body and use it as fertiliser. This happened with Deng Daming, beaten to death because his child had stolen a few broad beans. Party secretary Dan Niming ordered his body to be simmered down into fertiliser for a field of pumpkins.
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The extent of the violence is difficult to underestimate: in a province such as Hunan, which did not rank as one of the worst in terms of overall casualties, a report by a central inspection committee addressed to Zhou Enlai at the time noted that people were beaten to death in eighty-two out of eighty-six counties and cities.
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But it is harder to come up with reliable figures, and none are likely ever to be produced for the whole country. It was difficult enough for investigators at the time to determine how many people had died during the famine, let alone ascertain the cause of death. But some of the teams sent to the countryside probed further and came up with a rough idea of what had happened on the ground. In Daoxian county, Hunan, many thousands perished in 1960, but only 90 per cent of the deaths could be attributed to disease and starvation. Having reviewed all the evidence, the team concluded that 10 per cent had been buried alive, clubbed to death or otherwise killed by party members and the militia.
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In Shimen county, Hunan, some 13,500 died in 1960, of whom 12 per cent were ‘beaten or driven to their deaths’.
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In Xinyang, a region subject to an inquiry headed by senior leaders such as Li Xiannian, a million people died in 1960. A formal investigation committee estimated that 6–7 per cent were beaten to death.
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In Sichuan the rates were much higher. In Kaixian county, a close examination by a team sent by the provincial party committee at the time concluded that in Fengle commune, where 17 per cent of the population had perished in less than a year, up to 65 per cent of the victims had died because they were beaten, punished with food deprivation or forced into committing suicide.
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Report after report detailed the ways in which people were tortured, and the image that emerges from this mass of evidence is that at least 6 to 8 per cent of all the famine victims were directly killed or died as a result of injuries inflicted by cadres and the militia. As we shall see in Chapter 35, at least 45 million people perished above a normal death rate during the famine from 1958 to 1962. Given the extent and scope of violence so abundantly documented in the party archives, it is likely that at least 2.5 million of these victims were beaten or tortured to death.

There is no simple explanation for the violence that underpinned crash collectivisation. One might very well point to a tradition of violence stretching back many centuries in China, but how would that have been any different from the rest of the world? Europe was steeped in blood, and mass murder took an unprecedented number of lives in the first half of the twentieth century. Modern dictatorships can be particularly murderous in their combination of new technologies of power, exercised through the one-party state, with new technologies of death, from the machine gun to the gas chamber. When powerful states decide to pool these resources to exterminate entire groups of people the overall consequences can be devastating. Genocide, after all, is made possible only with the advent of the modern state.