One night, Mao crossed the river to read the poster by the light of a barn lantern. There he saw the eager crowds and registered Shi-wei’s enormous popularity. He said at once: “I now have a target.” He later complained: “Many people rushed from far away to … read his article. But no one wants to read mine!” “Wang Shi-wei was the king and lord master … he was in command in Yenan … and we were defeated …”
Mao decided to condemn Shi-wei as a way of scaring his sympathizers, the young volunteers. As he could not confront Shi-wei’s points head-on, he denounced him as a Trotskyist. Some remarks that Shi-wei had made in private about Trotsky and Stalin were made public. Trotsky, Shi-wei had said, was “a genius,” while Stalin was “an unloveable person” who had “created untold countless evils” in the purges. The Moscow Trials he described as “dubious.” Shi-wei was sent to prison. He spent the last years of his short life in solitary, where he was subjected to crushing pressure. In 1944, when some journalists from the Nationalist areas were allowed into Yenan, he was wheeled out to meet them and produced a robotic confession. “He said over and over again: ‘I’m a Trotskyite. I attacked Mao. I deserve to be executed … But Mao is so magnanimous … I am extremely grateful for his mercy.’ ” One reporter observed: “When he mentioned his past ‘mistakes,’ his expression was severe to the point of frightening … In my observation, his mind had been badly disturbed …”
His interrogator later revealed the background: “He said what he was told to say. Of course, he had no option. Afterwards, he lay in bed in great anguish. He clenched his fists and showed extreme bitterness.” When the Communists evacuated Yenan in 1947, he was taken along — and executed en route. One night he was hacked to death, and thrown into a dry well. He was forty-one.
AFTER MAO DESIGNATED Shi-wei as his prime target, meetings were held throughout the rest of 1942, at which the young volunteers were told to denounce him. Mao noticed that they expressed a lot of resistance. They were not sufficiently scared. He had to find another way to terrorize them.
So Mao and his KGB chief Kang Sheng devised a blanket accusation — that the vast majority of Communist organizations in the Nationalist areas were spy rings working for Chiang Kai-shek. This assertion turned virtually all the young volunteers into spy suspects, because they had either belonged to one of these organizations, or had come to Yenan under their auspices. To back this accusation there was one single piece of “evidence”—the confession of a nineteen-year-old volunteer who had been deprived of sleep and worked over by the security forces for seven days and nights, at the end of which he produced what he was told to say.
By deploying this charge, Mao found a way to place all the young volunteers in Yenan in one form of confinement or another for “screening,” starting in April 1943. Thousands were arrested and thrown into prison-caves newly carved out of the loess hillsides. In one prison alone, in the ravine behind the Date Garden — the site of the Chinese KGB, where Mao also lived — cells were dug for over 3,000 prisoners. Most of the rest were detained in their own institutions, which now became virtual prisons, sealed off and patrolled by guards. Mao gave orders that every organization must “place sentries and impose a curfew. Ban visitors and freedom of movement in or out.” The roles of jailers and interrogators were filled by those in each institution who were not suspects. These were mainly people who had not come from Nationalist areas, who were often a minority of the personnel, sometimes as few as 10–20 percent in any given institution.
Turning ordinary organizations into virtual prisons was a significant innovation of Mao’s, which he was to apply throughout his rule. Here he went far beyond anything either Hitler or Stalin achieved: he converted people’s colleagues into their jailers, with former colleagues, prisoners and jailers living in the same premises. (In Communist China, people’s workplaces and living quarters were often the same.) In this way, Mao not only drove a massive wedge between people working and living side by side, he greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression, including torture, making the orbit significantly wider than either Stalin or Hitler, who mostly used secret elites (KGB, Gestapo) that held their victims in separate and unseen locales.
In incarceration, the young volunteers came under tremendous pressure to confess to being spies, and to denounce others — not really in order to find spies, but for the sake of inducing terror. Genuine spy-hunting was conducted secretly all the time by the security forces, using conventional methods. Any real suspects were “taken care of without fuss,” Mao’s security assistant Shi Zhe told us, which often meant a speedy, secret and noiseless execution.
