Return to the Genocides "Tour" Page

Excerpts from The Black Book of Communism; China: A Long into Night by Jean-Louis Margolin.
[… pg. 463] "After our armed enemies have been crushed, there will still be our unarmed enemies, who will try to fight us to the death. We must never underestimate their strength. Unless we think of the problem in precisely those terms, we will commit the gravest of errors." Thus Mao Zedong adjured the Central Committee of the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in March 1949.

Was repression in Communist China simply a replication of the practices of the Soviet Big Brother? After all, until the early 1980s Stalin's portrait was still to be seen everywhere in Beijing. In some respects the answer is no. In China, murderous purges in the Party itself were very rare, and the secret police were relatively discreet, although the influence of their leader, Kang Sheng, and of the Yan'an maquis was constantly in the background from the 1940s until his death in 1975. But in other respects the answer is assuredly yes. Even if one excludes the civil war, the regime must be held accountable for a huge number of deaths. Although the estimates are quite speculative, it is clear that there were between 6 million and 10 million deaths as a direct result of the Communist actions, including hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. In addition, tens of millions of "counterrevolutionaries" passed long periods of their lives inside the prison system, with perhaps 20 million dying there. To that total should be added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great Leap Forward--estimates range from 20 million to 43 million dead for the years 1959-1961--all victims of a famine caused by the misguided projects of a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his mistake and to allow measures to be taken to rectify the disastrous effects. The answer again is yes if one looks at the scale of the genocide in Tibet; some 10 to 20 percent of the inhabitants of the "rooftop of the world" died as a result of Chinese occupation. The genuine surprise of Deng Xiaoping as he observed that the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, where perhaps 1,000 died, was totally insignificant in comparison to the scale of events in China in the comparatively recent past, clearly amounts to an admission of guilt. One can hardly argue that these massacres were the sad consequences of an extremely bloody civil war, since the war was not in fact particularly violent and the regime was firmly entrenched by 1950. Nor can one argue that this was the continuation of a generally bloodstained history. If one discounts the Japanese occupation, which was not followed by famine or other disasters, one has to go back to the third quarter of the nineteenth century to find slaughters on anything resembling a comparable scale. And at that time there was nothing to compare to the generality or the systematic and carefully planned character of the Maoist atrocities, despite the dramatic nature of events in China at the time.

An analysis of Chinese Communism is doubly important. Since 1949, the Beijing regime has governed nearly two-thirds of all people who lived under the red flag. When the Soviet Union finally broke up in 1991 and Eastern Europe abandoned Communism, the figure rose to nine-tenths. It is therefore quite clear that whatever happens to "real socialism" now depends on the development of Communism in China. Beijing has been a sort of second Rome for Marxism-Leninism, openly so since the Sino-Soviet break of 1960, but in actuality since the birth of the free zone of Yan'an in 1935-1947 after the Long March. Korean, Japanese, and even Vietnamese Communists would retreat to China to consolidate their strength. Although Kim Il Sung's regime predates the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party, and owes its existence to Soviet occupation, it also owes its survival during the Korean war to the intervention of more than 1 million armed Chinese "volunteers." Repressions in North Korea were based quite closely on the Stalinist model, but what the master of Pyongyang took from Maoism, which after Yan'an became synonymous with Chinese Communism, was the idea not of the Party line but of the mass line--the intense effort to classify and mobilize the entire population--and its logical consequence, an insistence on permanent education as a means of social control. Kim paraphrased Mao when he noted that "the mass line is to mount an active defense of the interests of the working masses, to educate and reeducate them so that they rally to the cause of the Party, to count on their strength, and to mobilize them for revolutionary tasks."

Even more apparent is China's influence on Asian Communist regimes established after 1949. The memoirs of the Vietnamese leader Hoang Van Hoan, who went over to Beijing, reveal that from 1950 until the Geneva accord of 1954 numerous Chinese advisers trained troops and administrators for the Viet Minh, and that from 1965 to 1970 some 30,000 soldiers from Beijing helped North Vietnamese troops in their fight against the South. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the victor at Dien Bien Phu, indirectly acknowledged the Chinese contribution in 1964: "After 1950, in the wake of the Chinese victory, our army and our people learned some precious lessons from the Chinese People's Liberation Army. We educated ourselves according to the military thought of Mao Zedong. That was the important factor that allowed our army to mature and that led to our successive victories." The Vietnamese Communist Party, which at the time was known as the Workers' Party, inscribed in its statutes in 1951 that "The Workers' Party recognizes the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin and the thought of Mao Zedong, adapted to the realities of the Vietnamese revolution, as the theoretical foundation of its thought and as the magnetic needle that points the way in all its activities." The "mass line" and the idea of reeducation were placed at the center of the Vietnamese political system. The cheng feng ("the reform of work style"), which had been invented in Yan'an, was transcribed into Vietnamese as chinh Izuan and became the justification for the ferocious purges of the mid-1950s. In 1975-1979 Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge also received powerful support from Beijing and tried to carry out what Mao himself had failed to accomplish, taking up in particular the idea of the Great Leap Forward. All these regimes, like that of Mao, were strongly colored by their military origins (though less so in North Korea, even if Kim often boasted of his alleged exploits as a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese), which inevitably resulted in a permanent militarization of society. This occurred the least in China, which had no front line. It is notable that the central role played by the secret police in the Soviet system was in China always played by the army, which sometimes carried out repressive measures on its own.

[… pg. 465]  A Tradition of Violence?
During his lifetime, Mao Zedong was so powerful that he was often known as the Red Emperor. In light of what is now known about his unpredictable character, his ferocious egotism, the vindictive murders he committed, and the life of debauchery that he led right up to the end, it is all too easy to compare him to one of the despots of the Middle Kingdom (ancient China). Yet the violence that he erected into a whole system far exceeds any national tradition of violence that we might find in China.

As in most other countries, there had been periods of great bloodletting in China, which usually occurred against a backdrop of religious tension or an irreconcilable ideological clash. What separates the two great Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Taoism is less the theoretical differences than the conflict between the focus by Confucius on society and on rationality and the emphasis by Lao Tsu, the great promoter of Taoism, on the individual and intuitive and irrational aspects of behavior. Chinese generally incorporate some mixture of these two traditions. Sometimes in moments of crisis Taoists will gain the upper hand among the disinherited and the lost, launching a massive assault on the bastions of Confucianism--the educated and the state. Over the centuries there have been numerous uprisings inspired by apocalyptic, messianic sects, including the Yellow Turbans of 184, the Maitreyist revolt of Faqing in 515, the Manichean rebellion of Fang La in 1120, the White Lotus in 1351, and the Eight Trigrams of 1813. The message of these movements was often quite similar, synthesizing Taoism and popular Buddhism, and often using the figure of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future whose imminent, luminous, and redemptive coming is to be accomplished in a universal cataclysm of the old world. The faithful, the chosen few, must help bring about the realization of the prophecy for salvation to occur. All contingent links must be broken, even with one's own family. According to the chronicle of the Wei dynasty in 515, "Fathers, sons, and brothers did not know one another."

In China most morality is based on respect for familial obligations. Once these are broken, anything can happen. The replacement family that the sect becomes annihilates the idea of the individual. The rest of humanity is condemned to hell in the hereafter and to violent death in this world. Sometimes, as in 402, officials were cut into pieces, and if their wives and children refused to eat them, they were dismembered themselves. In 1120 massacres evidently involved millions of people. All values can be inverted: according to a proclamation of 1130, "The killing of people is the carrying out of the dharma [Buddhist law]." Killing becomes an act of compassion, delivering the spirit. Theft serves the purposes of equality, suicide is an enviable happiness; the worse a death is, the greater its reward will be. According to a text from the nineteenth century, "Death by slow slicing will ensure one's entry [into heaven] in a crimson robe." From certain points of view it is difficult not to draw a comparison here between this millenarian cruelty and the Asian revolutions of this century. This does not help explain a number of the latter's characteristics, but it does help explain why they sometimes triumphed, and why the violence that accompanied them could initially, appear quite ordinary and normal.

Social safeguards were nonetheless extremely powerful, a fact that explains why society was only rarely troubled. European visitors in the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment were always struck by the tremendous peace that reigned in the old empire. Confucianism, the official doctrine taught in the countryside, made benevolence the cardinal virtue of the sovereign and modeled the state on the family. Without any risk of anachronism, one can speak here of humanist principles that have valorized human life from time immemorial. Looking at the work of thinkers who have been the cardinal points of reference for nearly twenty-one centuries of imperial rule, we can single out the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti (ca. 479-381 B.c.), who condemned wars of aggression thus: "If a simple homicide is to be considered a crime, but the multiple homicide that is an attack on another country is to be considered a good action, can we possibly call that a reasonable distinction between good and evil?" In his famous treatise Tue Art of War, Sun Tzu (writing around 500 B.C.) noted that "war is like fire; people who do not lay down their arms will die by their arms." One should fight for economic reasons, as swiftly and efficiently as possible: "No long war ever profited any country: 100 victories in 100 battles is simply ridiculous. Anyone who excels in defeating his enemies triumphs before his enemy's threats become real." Saving one's strength is essential, but neither should one allow oneself to annihilate the enemy entirely: "Capturing the enemy is far better than destroying him: do not encourage murder." That is perhaps less of a moral tenet than an opportunistic consideration: massacres and atrocities provoke hatred and lend the enemy the energy of despair, possibly allowing him to turn the situation around in his favor. In any case, for the victor, "The best policy is to capture the state intact: it should be destroyed only if no other options are available."

Such is the typical reasoning of the great Chinese tradition, as illustrated above all by Confucianism: ethical principles are derived not from some transcendental vision, but from a pragmatic vision of social harmony. This is surely one of the reasons for their effectiveness. A .different "pragmatic" approach, developed by lawmakers who were contemporaries of Confucius and Sun Tzu, implied that the state must affirm its omnipotence by terrorizing society. The fundamental failure of this approach was immediately apparent, even in its hour of glory during the short Qjn dynasty, in the third century B.C. Despite enormous variations from one reign to the next, such arbitrary rule became more and more uncommon, particularly after the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). The most common punishment for errant officials became the long walk into exile, which did not exclude the possibility of pardon and return.

[… pg. 470] When in January 1928 the inhabitants of a Red Flag village saw a group approach brandishing a scarlet flag, they rallied enthusiastically to one of the first Chinese "soviets," that of Hai-Lu-Feng, directed by P'eng P'ai. The Communists tailored their speeches to take account of local hatreds and used the coherence of their message to win the locals over to their own ends while allowing the new partisans to give full vent to their cruelest impulses. These few months in 1927-28 adumbrated the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge forty and fifty years later. The movement had been prepared since 1922 by intense activity in Communist Party-led peasant unions, which had produced a strong polarization between "poor peasants" and "1and owners," with the latter being constantly denounced. Although neither traditional conflicts nor social realities had accorded much importance to this division, the canceling of debts and the abolition of tenant farming ensured wide support for the new soviets. P'eng P'ai took advantage of it to establish a regime of "democratic terror": the whole people were invited to public trials of "counterrevolutionaries," who almost invariably were condemned to death.

 [… pg. 474] A Comintern representative in Yan'an commented on Maoist methods there: "Party discipline is based on stupidly rigid forms of criticism and self-criticism. The president of each cell decides who is to be criticized and for what reason. In general it is a Communist who is attacked each time. The accused has only one right: to repent his 'errors'. If he considers himself to be innocent or appears insufficiently repentant, the attacks are renewed. It is a real psychological training . . . I understood one tragic reality. The cruel method of psychological coercion that Mao calls moral purification has created a stifling atmosphere inside the Party in Yan'an. A not negligible number of Party activists in the region have committed suicide, have fled, or have become psychotic. The cheng feng method is a response to the principle that 'everyone should know the intimate thoughts of everyone else.' This is the vile and shameful directive that governs every meeting. All that is personal and intimate is to be displayed shamelessly for public scrutiny. Under the protocol of criticism and self-criticism, the thoughts and aspirations and actions of everyone are on full view."

[… pg. 476]  Agrarian Reform and Urban Purges (1946-1951)
By the time the Communists seized power in China in 1949, violence and massacres were already everyday events, and governance often consisted in settling scores with one's neighbors. The actions taken to establish a new state were thus a sort of riposte to other very real acts of violence (one of the victims of P'eng P'ai, a local magistrate, had ordered the execution of almost 100 peasants) and were recognized as such by many rural communities. For this reason the period has been glorified both in official post-Maoist history (until the Anti-right movement of 1957, the Helmsman was perceived to have steered a steady course) and in the memory of many eyewitnesses and those who were or were perceived to be the direct beneficiaries of the suffering of their fellow countrymen. The Communists themselves, including Communist intellectuals, were not affected too badly by the purges. Yet what resulted was in fact the bloodiest wave of repressions yet launched by the Chinese Communists, affecting the entire country. In its breadth of application, generality, length, and planned and centralized nature, the repression marked a new departure for the sort of violence seen in China. There were brief moments of respite, but almost every year saw the launching of a new "mass campaign." The Yan'an "Rectification" of 1943 may have been a sort of dress rehearsal on a local scale. Where certain social strata were concerned, the massacres took on a genocidal aspect previously unknown in China, at least on a national scale. Even the Mongols in the thirteenth century had ravaged only the northern parts of the empire. Some of the atrocities occurred in the context of a brutal three-year civil war; one example is the massacre of 500 mostly Catholic inhabitants of the Manchurian town of Siwanze after its capture. In addition, once the Communists had gained a considerable advantage in 1948, they abandoned their previous practice of freeing prisoners for propaganda reasons. Henceforth people were locked up by the hundreds of thousands, and the prisons quickly became overcrowded. These prisoners became the first occupants of the new labor camps, called the laodong gaizao, or laogai for short, which combined a drive for reeducation with a concern for the war effort. But during the period of hostilities the worst atrocities were committed behind the lines, outside any military context.

[… pg. 479]  At that point the opportunists or those who bore a grudge against the accused would begin the denunciations and accusations, and the temperature would begin to rise. Given the tradition of peasant violence, the outcome was usually a death sentence for the landowner (accompanied by confiscation of all goods and possessions) and immediate execution with the active participation of the peasants. The cadres often attempted, not always successfully, to bring the prisoner before the local magistrate to have the sentence confirmed. This Grand Guignol theater in which everyone knew his role by heart prefigured the "struggle meetings" and self-criticism sessions that were to become the everyday lot of all Chinese people right up to Mao's death in 1976. From these early days the traditional Chinese propensity for ritual and conformism, which any cynical government could use and abuse at will, was immediately apparent.

There is no precise tally of the number of victims, but because there was necessarily at least one per village, 1 million seems to be the absolute minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and 5 million dead. In addition, between 4 million and 6 million Chinese "kulaks" were sent to the new laogai, and almost double that number were placed under observation for varying lengths of time by the local authorities, which meant constant surveillance, ever harder work, and persecutions in the case of any "mass campaign." If we extrapolated from the number killed in Long Bow--15--we would arrive at the top end of the estimates. But the reform process started early there, and after 1948 some of the excesses of the previous period were banned. Long Bow had been hit extremely hard, with a massacre of the whole family of the president of the local Catholic association (and the closure of the church), beatings, confiscation of the goods of poor peasants who had shown solidarity with the rich, and a search for any "feudal origins" in the last three generations (which meant that almost no one was safe from some sort of reclassification). People were tortured to death in attempts to force them to reveal the whereabouts of alleged treasure. Interrogations were systematically accompanied by torture with red-hot irons. The families of people who were executed were tortured and the tombs of their ancestors robbed and destroyed. One cadre, who was a former bandit and a renegade Catholic, forced a fourteen-year-old girl to marry his son and declared to the world at large: "My word is law, and anyone I condemn to death dies." On the other side of China, in Yunnan, the father of He Liyi, a police officer in the previous government, was classified as a landowner on those grounds alone. As an official, he was sentenced to hard labor. In 1951, in the middle of the agricultural reforms, he was paraded from town to town as a "class enemy" before being sentenced to death and executed, without ever being accused of any particular act.

[… pg. 489]  The reasons for the catastrophe were fairly technical. Some agricultural methods advocated by the Soviet academic Trofim Lysenko, who rejected genetics, won great favor in China under the auspices of Mao. They were imposed on the peasants, and the results were disastrous. Mao had proclaimed his belief that "in company grain grows fast; seeds are happiest when growing together" attempting to impose class solidarity on nature. Accordingly, seeds were sown at five to ten times the normal density, with the result that millions of young plants died. The intensity of the farming methods dried out the soil or caused the salt to rise. Wheat and maize never grow well together in the same fields, and the replacement of the traditional barley crop with wheat in the high, cold fields of Tibet was simply catastrophic. Other mistakes were made in the nationwide campaign. The extermination of the sparrows that ate the grain resulted in a massive increase in the number of parasites. A large amount of hydraulic equipment that had been hurriedly and carelessly built was found to be useless or even dangerous because of the increased erosion and the risk of flooding at the first high tide. Moreover, the cost of its construction in terms of human life had been enormous: more than 10,000 out of 60,000 workers had died on one site in Henan. Risking everything on one large cereal crop (as on steel in industry, where the slogan was "Big is beautiful") ruined all the smaller associated agricultural activities, including the raising of livestock that was often vital for balance in the ecosystem. In Fujian, for instance, the highly profitable tea plantations were all resown as rice fields.

[… pg. 492]  This last province, in north-central China, was the worst affected of all. In 1960 the death rate soared to 68 percent from its normal level at around 15 percent, while the birth rate fell to 11 percent from its previous average of 30 percent. As a result the population fell by around 2 million people (6 percent of the total) in a single year. Like Mao himself, Party activists in Henan were convinced that all the difficulties arose from the peasants' concealment of private stocks of grain. According to the secretary of the Xinyang district (10 million inhabitants), where the first people's commune in the country had been established, "The problem is not that food is lacking. There are sufficient quantities of grain, but 90 percent of the inhabitants are suffering from ideological difficulties." In the autumn of 1959 the class war was momentarily forgotten, and a military-style offensive was launched against the peasants, using methods very similar to those used by anti-Japanese guerrilla groups. At least 10,000 peasants were imprisoned, and many died of hunger behind bars. The order was given to smash all privately owned cutlery that had not yet been turned to steel to prevent people from being able to feed themselves by pilfering the food supply of the commune. Even fires were banned, despite the approach of winter. The excesses of repression were terrifying. Thousands of detainees were systematically tortured, and children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer--at the very moment when a nationwide campaign was telling people to "learn the Henan way." In Anhui, where the stated intention was to keep the red flag flying even if 99 percent of the population died, cadres returned to the traditional practices of live burials and torture with red--hot irons. Funerals were prohibited lest their number frighten survivors even more and lest they turn into protest marches. Taking in the numerous abandoned children was also banned, on the ground that "The more we take in, the more will be abandoned." Desperate villagers who tried to force their way into the towns were greeted with machine-gun fire. More than 800 people died in this manner in the Fenyang district, and 12 percent of the rural population, or 28,000 people, were punished in some manner. This campaign took on the proportions of a veritable war against the peasantry. In the words of Jean-Luc Domenach, "The intrusion of Utopia into politics coincided very closely with that of police terror in society." Deaths from hunger reached over 50 percent in certain villages, and in some cases the only survivors were cadres who abused their position. In Henan and elsewhere there were many cases of cannibalism (63 were recorded officially): children were sometimes eaten in accordance with a communal decision.

[… pg. 495]  For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15 percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from 33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961. Excluding the deficit in births, which was perhaps as many as 33 million (although some births were merely delayed), loss of life linked to the famine in the years 1959-1961 was somewhere between 20 million and 43 million people. The lower end of the range is the official figure used by the Chinese government since 1988. This was quite possibly the worst famine not just in the history of China but in the history of the world. The second worst had occurred in northern China in 1877-78 and had taken between 9 million and 13 million lives. The one that had struck the U.S.S.R. in a similar political and economic context in 1932-1934 had caused around 6 million deaths, a smaller proportion of the total population than in China during the Great Leap Forward. Under normal conditions, mortality in the countryside was between 30 percent and 60 percent higher than in the cities. In 1960 it doubled, climbing from 14 percent to 29 percent. Peasants managed to delay the effects of the famine slightly by consuming their own livestock, which amounted to using up their productive capital. In 1957-1961, 48 percent of pigs and 30 percent of all dairy animals were slaughtered.  The surface area given over to nonfood crops such as cotton, which was the country's main industry at the time, diminished by more than one-third in 1959-1962, and this fall in production inevitably hit the manufacturing sector. Although after 1959 peasant markets were reopened to stimulate production, the prices demanded were so high and the quantities available so low that few of the starving could find enough to survive. In 1961, for example, the price of pork was fourteen times higher in the markets than in the state shops. The price of feed went up less than that of grain in the pastoral northwest, which was chronically deficient in grain. In Gansu people were still dying of hunger in 1962, and the grain ration was equivalent to only half the official limit for conditions of "semi-starvation."

Whether through unawareness of or, more likely, indifference to the several million lives that had to be sacrificed to build Communism, the state responded (if such a word can be used here) to the crisis with measures that under the circumstances were quite simply criminal. Net grain exports, principally to the US.S.R., rose from 2.7 million tons in 1958 to 4.2 million in 1959, and in 1960 fell only to the 1958 level. In 1961, 5.8 million tons were actually imported, up from 66,000 in 1960, but this was still too little to feed the starving. Aid from the United States was refused for political reasons. The rest of the world, which could have responded easily, remained ignorant of the scale of the catastrophe.

[… pg. 497]  Chinese Communism has many skeletons in the closet, and it is amazing how long they have escaped the world's attention. The immense concentration-camp system is no exception. There were nearly 1,000 large-scale camps as well as innumerable detention centers (see the maps at the beginning of the chapter), but in many histories of the People's Republic, even in some of the more detailed and recent works, they receive no mention. The repressive apparatus hid itself extremely well. Because punishment by prison or forced labor smacked too much of the old regime, people were sent instead for "reform" or "reeducation" through labor. The main internment camps were disguised as large public enterprises, so one had to know, for instance, that the "Jingzhou Industrial Dye Works," which was the name on the door, was actually Prison No. 3 of Hubei Province, or that the "Yingde Tea Plantation" was Labor Reeducation Center No. 7 of Guangdong Province." Even the families of prisoners wrote only to an anonymous post office box. Throughout the Mao era, visits were forbidden during the whole instruction process, which generally lasted for more than a year. Particularly during the Cultural Revolution, relatives were not always notified about the incarceration or even the death of prisoners, or were informed only much later. The children of Liu Shaoqi, the former president of the Republic, who was held in a secret prison, did not learn about his death in November 1969 until August 1972; only then were they allowed to visit their mother, who like her husband had been locked up since August 1967. If prisoners ever went out into the world, they were under strict orders to remain invisible. Accustomed to hanging their heads and staying silent in their cells, they received strange new orders at the station: "Behave normally in the train. It is forbidden, I repeat, forbidden to bow your head. If anyone has to go to the latrine, signal to the guard, the fist with the thumb sticking out. Smoking and talking will be allowed. No funny stuff. The guards have orders to shoot."

For many years statements from former prisoners were extremely rare. One reason was that under Mao it was extremely difficult for anyone who had entered the penal system to emerge from it. Another was that prisoners who were freed had to swear that they would not talk about their experiences; otherwise they would be reimprisoned. So it was foreigners, who formed only a tiny fraction of the number of those imprisoned, who provided most of the stories that still account for most of the available information. Because the foreign prisoners were protected by their governments, they generally came out alive. Some were explicitly charged with the mission to bear witness to the outside world of the suffering of the army of people trapped in those forgotten prisons. Such was the case of Jean Pasqualini, whose Chinese name was Bao Ruo-wang. One of his fellow prisoners told him why he and his companions were looking after him, so carefully: "All these people, and none of them will ever make it out, myself included. Lifetime contract. You are the only one who is different, Bao. You might get out the big door someday. It could happen to a foreigner, but not to us. You will be the only one who can tell about it afterward if you do. That's why we wanted to keep you alive. . . Don't worry, as long as you're here, you'll live. I can promise you that. And if you get transferred to other camps, there will be other people who think like us. You're precious cargo, old man!"

[… pg. 498] The Biggest Penal System of All Time
The laogai was a sort of nonplace, a black hole where the light of Maoism blinded tens of millions of people. As a rough indication, Harry Wu calculates that up to the mid-1980s some 50 million people passed through the system. Many died there. According to estimates by Jean-Luc Domenach, there were roughly 10 million detainees each year, which equals 1-2 percent of the overall population. Given that the mortality rate was around 5 percent, some 20 million Chinese must have died during imprisonment, including approximately 4 million in 1959-1962 during the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (although a return to normal rations took place only in 1964). Along with Jean Pasqualini's extraordinary revelations, two recent studies (those of Wu and Domenach) now yield a better general picture of the least-known of the century's three great concentration-camp systems.

The scale of the system was enormous, as were the variety of prisoners and the system's durability (the first great wave of liberations began only in 1978). In 1955, 80 percent of inmates were technically political prisoners, although many common criminals had been reclassified as political offenders and their sentences correspondingly lengthened. By the beginning of the following decade the share of political prisoners had fallen to 50 percent, and by 1971 to one-third--perhaps indications of popular discontent with the regime, and of the rise of criminality in a situation of political instability." Internment took a variety of forms. There were preventive centers, prisons (including special establishments for former leaders), the official laogai, and more moderate deportation centers, known as laojiao and jiuye. Detention centers, numbering some 2,500 and located in various cities, were stepping-stones on the way to the penal archipelago. Here detainees waited while the cases against them were drawn up--a process that sometimes took ten years. Sentences of less than two years were also served in these centers.

[… pg. 529]  In the strange place that was China during the Cultural Revolution, a beggar could justify stealing by quoting Mao's words about mutual assistance, and a worker in the underground economy who had stolen bricks could reject all scruples, for "the working class must exercise leadership in everything." But there was always one hard, central idea: the sanctification of violence, the radical nature of class struggle and its political implications. For people who followed the correct line, anything was permitted. Even the rebels could not distance themselves from official propaganda; their texts closely imitated the official language of the Party. They lied outrageously not only to the masses but also to their own comrades.

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of the Cultural Revolution was its reinforcement of the consensus favoring the caste system created in the 1950s. Things could have gone quite differently. To speed things along, the Cultural Revolution Group had opened the doors of its organization to "blacks," who rushed to join. Since 45 percent of the children of all intellectuals in China were enrolled in schools in Canton, a disproportionate number signed up in the south. The children of cadres and of people formally recognized as workers made up 82 percent of conservatives in the great southern metropolis. The rebels, buoyed by the support of workers who had no recognized status, were the natural enemies of political cadres, while the conservatives concentrated their fire on the "blacks." But because the rebels' program included the elimination of sociopolitical divisions (an aspect that promised escape from the stigma of their own inferior status), they launched a campaign of repression against both the conservatives and the "blacks," hoping that the blows would not fall on their own relatives. Worse still, they accepted for themselves the new notion of class heredity that had been put forward by the Beijing Red Guards, most of whom were the children of cadres and soldiers.

This notion was expressed, for example, in a remarkable marching song:
If the father is brave, the son will be a hero.
If he's a reactionary, the son will be an asshole.
If you're a revolutionary, step forward and join us.
If you're not, get lost!
Get lost!
We're gonna chase you out of your fucking job!
Kill! Kill!Kill!

One "well-born" person commented: "We were born Red! Our Redness comes from the body of our mother. And I tell you quite clearly: You were born Black! What can you do about that?" The racialization of categories was devastating. Zhai Zhenhua, belt in hand and insults at the ready, forced the "black" half of his class to spend all their time studying Mao: "If they are to save themselves, they must first learn to be ashamed of their horrible family origins, and to hate their parents." Naturally there was no question of their joining the Red Guards. Red Guards patrolled the train station in Beijing, beating up and sending home any Red Guard who had the wrong origins. People were often more tolerant in the provinces, and there "blacks" sometimes did hold positions of responsibility, but the advantage always went to the "wellborn." Thus, in the case of a schoolgirl nicknamed "Piggy," Ling recalls: "Piggy's class background, a major qualification, was very good: she was from a mason's family and often boasted that for three generations her family had never had a roof over their heads." In any verbal confrontation, the class card was always played and always won. Hua Linsham, who was a very militant rebel, was once thrown off a train by some rather conservative Red Guards: "What I still feel today was how much they found my physical presence offensive and dirty. . . I suddenly had the feeling that I was something quite disgusting." In demonstrations, children with parents in the Five Red categories (Party cadres, army officers, workers, poor peasants, and revolutionary martyrs) always played the leading role. Apartheid divided the entire society. At a meeting of a neighborhood committee in 1973, Nien Cheng sat down by mistake with the proletariat. "Almost as if an electric shock had hit them, the two workers closest to me immediately moved their stools away from me so that I sat isolated in the crowded room." She then went over to join a group of women, "members of the denounced capitalist class and intellectuals, the outcasts of the Cultural Revolution." She makes it clear that it was neither the police nor the Party that imposed this segregation.

From Factional Fighting to the Crushing of the Rebels
The second phase of the movement began in early January 1967, when the question of power came to the fore. The Maoist Center knew that the point of no return had been reached in the confrontation with the former Liuist leadership, which was up against the ropes in Beijing but could still count on powerful allies in most of the provinces. To kill it off definitively, the rebels had to seize power. Since the army, the major player in the game, was steadfastly refusing to step in, it was clear that the president's new troops would have all the room to maneuver that they needed. Shanghai gave the first signal in January, and quickly all the municipalities and Party committees were overthrown. Suddenly the rebels could no longer simply criticize from the sidelines, but had to take on the task of governing. And so the disaster began.

[… pg. 532]  Because there was never a definitive interpretation of what Mao said, those who might be imagined to be in a position of authority--the Party' committees--were little heeded in practice. Confusion also reigned concerning the real intentions of the Center, as people found it hard to believe that Mao himself could be so indecisive. The swings of the pendulum were so great that soon everyone was demanding some sort of vengeance, and the victors of the moment never practiced magnanimity.

In addition to these external factors, two internal factors played an important role in increasing violence, particularly inside the rebel organizations. The interests of small groups and individual ambitions, which were never arbitrated in a democratic fashion, constantly led to new splits inside the parties, while cynical "political entrepreneurs" tried to improve their positions by associating with the new local powers, especially by cultivating close relations with the regional PLA headquarters. Many ended up having close links with the Gang of Four and effectively became provincial dictators. Little by little the factional struggles lost their political character and became straightforward struggles for power between those who had the top positions and the people who wanted to replace them. And as was the case in the laogai, anyone who made accusations was always right, since the accusations came with a barrage of quotations and sacrosanct slogans. As a rule, those who tried to defend themselves always ended up in even deeper trouble. The only effective riposte was a counteraccusation at a higher level. It mattered little whether the accusation had any basis; the important thing was that it be couched in correct political terms. The logic of the debate thus constantly expanded the battlefield and the number of targets. In the final analysis, since everything was political, the tiniest incident could be overinterpreted as proof of the worst criminal intentions. The outcome was arbitration through physical elimination.

These events might be described as civil war rather than massacre, although the one leads almost automatically to the other. It was increasingly a war that involved everyone. In Wuhan, in late December 1966, the rebels imprisoned 3,100 cadres and conservatives. The first death in the confrontations between the rebels and the Million Heroes came about on 27 May 1967. As a result armed positions were taken up at strategic points. The rebel headquarters was seized on l7 June with 25 deaths. Casualties rose to 158 by 30 June. After their defeat, 600 conservatives were killed, and another 66,000 suffered persecution of one sort or another. At the moment of the turn to the left in March 1968, the hunt suddenly intensified.

[… pg. 541]  The death penalty continues to be widely used in China. Each year hundreds of people are sentenced to death for crimes ranging from serious cases of smuggling, including the illegal export of art works, to "passing state secrets," which in practice can mean almost anything. Presidential pardons, which technically have been available since 1982, are never used. Thousands of people are executed each year; China accounts for more than half the total annual number of executions worldwide. Furthermore, the number of executions is rising in comparison to the 1970s, as it did in the last centuries of the Chinese empire.

[… pg. 546]  Violent deaths were proportionally much greater in Tibet than in China proper. Even so, it is difficult to believe the figures released by the Tibetan government-in-exile in 1984: 1.2 million victims, or approximately one-quarter of all Tibetans. The figure of 432,000 deaths in combat seems even less credible. But one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers involved, the lack of heed paid to the wishes and rights of civilians and prisoners, and the regularity with which atrocities were committed. According to official Chinese figures, the population of the autonomous region fell from 2.8 million inhabitants in 1953 to 2.5 million in 1964. If one takes into account the number of exiles and the (admittedly uncertain) birth rate, the number of deaths could be as high as 800,000--a scale of population loss comparable to that in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The fact that so many Tibetan women fear that any form of hospitalization may result in abortion or enforced sterilization is an indication of the draconian nature of the region's recently adopted antinatal policies, which are modeled on the practices in force for the Han. Previously, minorities had been excused from these measures. It is said that the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, when visiting Lhasa in 1980, cried in shame when confronted with so much misery, discrimination, and segregation between Hans and Tibetans, a situation he described as "colonialism pure and simple." The Tibetans, so long forgotten or unknown in their remote country of snow and gods, have the misfortune to live in a region of enormous strategic importance, in the heart of Asia. Although they seem no longer threatened by physical extermination, their culture remains in jeopardy.