The Communist party dealing with opposition

Mao deceiving political opponents

• He promised disaffected groups what they wanted and then, once his power was more secure, he broke the promises one at a time

• Peasants were told that land would be redistributed

• workers were promised higher living standards

• minorities were offered autonomy, intellectuals were to be allowed freedom, and private ownership would continue for businessmen

• The CPPCC conference that set the political tone of the early years even included members of the Democratic League, a splinter group from the GMD, to give the impression that politics would be inclusive

Mao's initial priority had to be mopping up the remaining areas of GMD military resistance in the south and establishing political control over as much of China as possible. This involved sending the PLA into the GMD heartland of Guangdong province and into the outlying provinces of the far west, which had been asserting their independence from Beijing since 1912.

Maos internal wave of terror

• At the same time as Mao intervened in the Korean War, he also launched an internal wave of terror against enemies of the Party

• The terror began in rural areas in October 1950, spreading to the cities in April 1951; by the time it ended later that year, it had accounted for at least one, possibly two million lives

• While direct violence may only have been inflicted on a small percentage of the population, fear affected everyone, and even people who overtly sympathised with the revolution felt compelled to educate themselves so they could quote the correct slogans to prove that they fully embraced the new ideology

• A network of forced labour camps (laogai) awaited many of those who failed to do this

Over a million government servants were sacked in the 'three antis' movement of 1951, in 1952, the business community was attacked in the 'five antis' movement (see page 184). In 1955, the drive to collectivise agriculture signalled an end to the brief period of peasant land ownership and, the following year, private businesses were nationalised. In 1957, it was the turn of the intellectuals to suffer in the Hundred Flowers campaign.

The reunification campaigns, 1949-50: Guangdong

• ,a coastal province in southern China, had been the GMD heartland during the last months of the civil war, and the town of Guangzhou was the GMD capital

• However, the GMD made no last-ditch effort to defend it, and the province capitulated to the PLA only two weeks after the PRC had been declared in Beijing

• This did not mean the war was completely over - it dragged on in the far south until the end of 1950, and there were some nationalist forces in the far west that still needed to be dealt with

The reunification campaigns, 1949-50: Xinjiang

• Xinjiang was the westernmost province of China, which had only been conquered by the Qing in the 1880s, and which the Russians had more recently been developing as a potential buffer state, in case of further Japanese expansion in the Second World War

• 80 percent were Uyghurs, most of whom were Muslims

• By a combination of conquest and negotiation, the nationalist opposition in Xinjiang was subdued by the Communist Party

• Local Uyghur leaders were offered key posts in the regional council, while Peng used the PLA to capture Urumqi at the end of 1949

• Future Communist control was established by the appointment of a Long March veteran to run the local CCP and army unit, while large numbers of Han Chinese were brought in to work on construction projects

• Xinjiang became a security buffer zone for the PRC

The reunification campaigns, 1949-50: Tibet

• Tibet had been operating as an independent entity since 1913 and had announced its intention to resist Communist conquest

• However, now that India was independent, the British were no longer interested in protecting Tibet, and the United Nations was too busy with Korea to do anything;
  Russia had agreed to allow China a free hand there, in return for a similar offer in Outer Mongolia, and it was too far from the USA for its direct influence to come into play

• This left Tibet alone to face the PLA when it invaded in October 1950

• Although it took six months, the conquest was relatively straightforward for China

• In May 1951, Tibet came under Chinese sovreignty, and the PRC began a prolonged campaign to destroy Tibetan identity by bringing in large numbers of Han settlers and promoting a Chinese lifestyle

• Local resistance was backed by the American CIA (anxious to make Buddhist friends in Vietnam) and escalated into a serious uprising in 1959, when the Dalai Lama (the Tibetan leader) fled to exile in India rather than waiting to be removed

The use of terror against opponents of Communist rule: labelling

• Within days of the declaration of the new republic, the police were deployed to root out potential nationalist sympathisers

• the new government expanded the household registration system that the GMD had introduced in 1945

• Every employed worker was assigned to a danwei (work unit) through which housing, food and clothing was allocated

• The cadre in charge of each danwei was issued with a supply of food ration cards, distributed several times a month by the police - so the denial of these became a powerful device with which to enforce conformity, and the registration process itself enabled the party to pry into people's lives to an extent never seen before

• every individual was given a class label that specified their family background, social status and occupation

• 60 labels, divided into three categories of 'good, 'middle' and bad, according to their presumed loyalty towards the revolution

• These labels were soon simplifiedinto 'red' or 'black' - in other words, friend or foe

• Since children inherited the status of the head of their household in a family, these labels determined an individual's fate for years to come

• Using this helpful information, the police were soon able to move beyond the obvious targets of known GMD sympathisers to monitoring members of the bad' classes, although even those of 'dubious backgrounds were not victimised in the first 12 months if their professional expertise was contributing to the regime

• Most professionals were sensible enough to take advantage of the 're-education' classes and libraries that sprang up in workplaces in the cities, so they could at least adopt the behaviour of conformists

• everything was noted down in a dossier (dangan) that followed them thereafter

The use of terror against opponents of Communist rule: The crackdown on crime

• In the short-term, the police were ordered to clean up the cities by removing a whole range of petty criminals and 'nuisances', preferably by relocating them to the countryside or by locking them up

• Beggars and prostitutes were particularly targeted

• This was broadly popular among many urban residents, who longed to see order restored after so many years of war and chaos, but it proved an uphill task, as many of those rounded up and sent away simply drifted back as soon as they could, and the 're-education camps' were quickly full

• The situation only got worse when the government began to demobilise soldiers from the PLA once the remaining nationalist resistance had been dealt with

• The clean-up was also the opportunity to tackle the more serious problem of the criminal gangs and triads that had been notorious for their influence on underworld crime, especially in Guangzhou and Shanghai

• Over 150,000 criminals were arrested, over half of whom were executed

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: role of Tao Zhu

• known as the tank, due to his ruthless reputation

• was dispatched to orchestrate the clampdown in Guangxi province on the Vietnam border

• particularly brutal treatment was required because of its lingering nationalist sympathies

• killed over 46,000 alleged bandits in the next 12 months, a ratio of 2.5 per thousand of the population

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: role of Luo Ruiging

• the head of security in Beijing

• was responsible for transmitting Mao's wishes to the provincial leaders

• Pressure from Luo led to the leader of Hubei province stepping up the killings in his area, from 220 in January 1951 to 45,000 by October

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: targets of killings

• Mao suggested that killing roughly one in every thousand of the local population in each area was an acceptable target

• By suggesting that this figure could be adjusted according to local circumstances, Mao could pose as a voice of moderation if it suited him, but he was also making sure that officials below him took the actual decisions, and so were inextricably implicated in the terror

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: killings inside the party

• In March 1951, Mao agreed to Rao Shushi's proposal that the killings be extended to enemies inside the CCP itself

• So many people were being arrested by the summer of 1951 that there was a bottleneck in the prisons, and arrests had to stop until sufficient numbers had been executed to create more space inside them

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: killings in the cities

• Initially, the Terror claimed fewer lives in the cities, partly due to fears of adverse publicity and partly because the urban professionals were still needed

• However, this changed in March 1951, when a top-ranking military official was shot dead at a public concert in Jinan, the capital of Shandong

• Mao demanded a quick response, and on the night of 28 April, police swept through 16 cities in a co-ordinated raid, arresting nearly 17,000 peopie. Confessions and executions followed, as well as a wave of suicides

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: young party activists

Young Party activists, hoping to advance their careers in the Party, were forced to watch mass executions to immerse them in the revolutionary experience.

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: deaths in the years of the terror

A Party convention in 1954 was told that 710,000 had been killed in total, but some historians put the figure as high as two million.

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: labour camps

• Several million were sent to labour camps or subjected to surveillance by local branches of the PLA

• Countless more with "black' labels became outcasts, and therefore targets of every subsequent political campaign (along with their children, who inherited the label)

The suppression of counter-revolutionaries in the Great Terror, 1950-51: isolation

• Even those who survived the Terror with their reputations intact lived in fear

• So many people had informed on friends in order to protect themselves that normal human relations changed - since friends knew most about you, the fewer friends you had, the less likelihood there was of being betrayed

• Survival therefore encouraged people to become more isolated

The three antis movement: when was it launched?

• launched at the end 1951

• Some outsiders were impressed by the campaign, saying here was a party so determined to stamp out corruption that it was even prepared to shoot some of its own leaders. However, many who were actually involved knew only too well that the accusations were often false and it was fear that prevented people from standing up for each other.

The three antis movement: what did it target?

corruption, waste and delay in the government and Party

The three antis movement: the catalyst

• The catalyst was the arrest in November of Zhang Zishan and Liu Qingshan, two leading members of the CCP hierarchy in Tianjin, charged with embezzling large sums from the Party

• Mao insisted on their execution and put minister of finance, Bo Yibo, in charge of orchestrating a clean-up campaign

The three antis movement:

• Employing the methods used earlier in the Yanan rectification campaign, mass meetings were held at which managers and officials were denounced by their work colleagues

• if found guilty, they were forced to issue humiliating confessions

• A Ministry of Public Security manual, called 'How to hold an Accusation Meeting, made organisation easy

• Suspects accused of small-scale embezzlement were referred to as ‘flies', while larger-scale corruption was pinned on 'tigers’

• Before long, Tiger-Hunting Teams were trying to outdo each other

• By the end of February 1952, Bo Yibo was proudly boasting that he had hunted down 100,000 'tigers' in east China

The five antis movement: What did it target?

The purge was widened in January 1952, to become the 'five antis' movement against bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, fraud and economic espionage

The five antis movement: attacks on the bourgeoisie

• Party activists encouraged workers' groups to accuse their employers of criminal activities

• Denunciation boxes sped up the process

• Once accused, a victim had such a negligible chance of acquittal that the main problem was getting his confession believed quickly, to shorten the ordeal of interrogation and imprisonment

• Robert Loh, a manager in a cotton mill, recalled how he was kept locked up for four days in a bare room, containing only a bucket, until his seventh attempt to confess to Party officials was finally accepted, He was then allowed to face the crowd and confess in public.

The five antis movement: statistics

• According to the historian Frank Dikotter, roughly one percent of victims were shot,

• one percent were sent to labour camps for life

• three percent were jailed for more than ten years and the rest were fined, although the fear of humiliation drove many to commit suicide

The five antis movement: preventing suicide

• Nets were attached to break people's falls from high buildings, and parks were patrolled to prevent people hanging themselves from trees

• One person who succeeded in committing suicide was the Dean of the Shanghai Law College, who threw himself into a river to drown as a result of the treatment he was receiving

The five antis movement: fines

Fines were a way of destroying the old business class by removing their wealth, and also contributed to the financing of the Korean War - although it may be argued that the chaos caused to normal economic activity by the movement did more harm than good to the economy.

The five antis movement: purge of the party

• Gao Gang and Rao Shushi in late 1953, were accused of infringing the ban on factions and building up their own empires inside the Party

• Gao committed suicide

• Rao was arrested and died in jail in 1975, over 20 years later.

• The affair reinforced Mao's position at the top and made the cadres lower down realise that it was dangerous to take opposition too far

• This was a lesson that would become even more obvious during the Hundred Flowers campaign

The development of the laogai system: what was the purpose of them and the reality?

places of re-education rather than of punishment- accidnetly dleted a bit of this

The development of the laogai system: the reason for Soviet experts

• Just as in Russia, where the gulag system developed, the existing Chinese prison system simply could not cope with the extra number of inmates produced by the Great Terror

• Soviet experts were brought in to provide guidance on the management of a new labour camp system. By 1953, there were two million prisoners, over half of whom were working as forced labourers in laogai

The development of the laogai system: Political purpose of the camps

Misguided people who had failed to grasp the benefits that Communism had brought would be shown the error of their ways, before being eventually reintegrated as useful citizens

In reality, the system supplied the terror that the regime depended on in order to frighten most of the population into conformity.

The development of the laogai system: Economic purpose of the camps

contributed 700 million yuan in industrial products and 350,000 tonnes of grain to the state each year by 1955

Under the Great Leap Forward, prisoners were used as a convenient means of getting the most hazardous jobs done, such as mining and clearing malaria-infested swamps.

The development of the laogai system: Social purpose of the camps

Socially, the prison population represented a cross-section of Chinese society, ranging from poor farmers in debt to the state, to technical experts accused of being counter-revolutionaries.

The development of the laogai system: wrongly accused prisoners

• nine out of ten inmates were political prisoners, and such was the backlog of cases that many had been working in them for years before they were formally charged

• At village level, many farmers were sent to prison without any trial at all, and while it was widely accepted that a significant proportion of prisoners had been wrongly accused, there was no means of redress

The development of the laogai system: prison conditions

• constant fear of violence

• frequent use of sleep deprivation and other forms of torture

• hard labour

• poor diet

The development of the laogai system: thought reform

involved endless self-criticism and indoctrination meetings, designed to make prisoners lose their previous identity.

The development of the laogai system: re-education through labour

• The prison population ballooned again in 1955, when there was a further purge of counter-revolutionaries

• re-education through labour, was added to absorb a further 300,000 inmates

• This system bypassed judicial procedures entirely: victims were sent without trial and could be held indefinitely in prison until the police, or local militia, who ran them decided they had been sufficiently 're-educated'

• It was through this system that many people disappeared without trace in subsequent years

The development of the laogai system: statistics of deaths

• vary enormously

• may have been as high as 25 million over the whole period, 1949-76

• those fortunate enough to be released could rarely slot back into normal life, because they were frequently ostracised by others, who feared being branded as guilty by association

The development of the laogai system: guanzhi

• Placing people under public supervision (guanzhi) was an additional way of responding to prison congestion

• It involved placing convicts under the control of local cadres, who could use them to perform whatever menial tasks were required, and as handy scapegoats to be paraded around during public campaigns

• It was a device used far more widely in rural areas. Luo Ruiging spoke of 740,000 people under this system in 1953, but the figure is likely to be higher, as local cadres took the law into their own hands and could call on the local militia to back them up if required