Two years of this type of indoctrination and terror turned the lively young volunteers from passionate exponents of justice and equality into robots. When outside journalists were allowed into Yenan for the first time after many years in June 1944, a Chongqing correspondent observed an eerie uniformity: “if you ask the same question of twenty or thirty people, from intellectuals to workers [on any topic] their replies are always more or less the same … Even questions about love, there seems to be a point of view that has been decided by meetings.” And, not surprisingly, “they unanimously and firmly deny the Party had any direct control over their thoughts.”
The journalist felt “stifled” by “the air of nervous intensity.” “Most people,” he noticed, “had very earnest faces and serious expressions. Among the big chiefs, apart from Mr. Mao Tse-tung who often has a sense of humour, and Mr. Chou En-lai who is very good at chatting, the others rarely crack a joke.” Helen Snow, wife of Edgar Snow, told us that in 1937, when she was in Yenan, people could still say things like “There goes God” behind Mao’s back. But seven years on, no one dared to say anything remotely so flippant. Mao had not only banned irony and satire (officially, since spring 1942), but criminalized humor itself. The regime invented a new catch-all offense—“Speaking Weird Words”—under which anything from skepticism to complaining to simply wise-cracking could lead to being labeled a spy.
Mao had decided that he did not want active, willing cooperation (willingness, after all, could be withdrawn). He did not want volunteers. He needed a machine, so that when he pressed the button, all its cogs would operate in unison. And he got it.
BY EARLY 1944 Russia was on the offensive against Germany, and Mao could look to it entering the war against Japan. After Japan was defeated, Mao would need cadres to fight Chiang Kai-shek, so he now began to tone down the terror.
The victims remained locked up, still living in uncertainty and torment, while the security forces began to examine their cases, to see whether there were any genuine spy suspects at all from among the mountains of coerced confessions — a process that was predictably long and slow. But one thing the apparatus was sure of from the start: that true spy suspects were far less than 1 percent of the young volunteers.
At this time, Mao ordered other Red bases to start their spy-hunting, replicating the Yenan model. He specifically warned them not to get into examining individual cases just because Yenan was doing so. All must go through the full cycle of terrorization. To spur them to whip up the same kind of frenzy as in Yenan, Mao inflated his KGB’s estimate of the proportion of spy suspects from 1 percent to 10 percent, claiming, falsely, that Yenan had uncovered a plethora of spies through his method.
It was not until another year elapsed, in spring 1945, that Mao ordered a wholesale rehabilitation of the victims. By then, he knew that Russia would be entering the war against Japan; soon he would be fighting for control of all of China, and he needed cadres fast.
The young volunteers, who numbered many tens of thousands in Yenan alone, had been through a hell of mental confusion and anguish. There had been many breakdowns — some lifelong. People who lived through Yenan remembered seeing caves in valleys crammed with people “many of whom had gone mad. Some were laughing wildly, some crying,” producing “screams and howls like wolves every night.”
The number who perished could be in the thousands. For many, suicide was the only way to end their ordeal. Some jumped off cliffs, others into wells. Those with children and spouses often killed them first. Repeat attempts were common: one physics teacher failed when he swallowed match heads (which were poisonous), then hanged himself, successfully. Survivors of suicide attempts were hounded mercilessly. One who had swallowed broken glass was brought back to life and immediately told to “write self-criticisms.”
Suicide was sometimes also used as a way to stage a protest — in one case becoming a double protest. When one detainee killed himself by jumping off a cliff, his classmates buried him opposite the residence of his interrogators, one of whom registered the import of the gesture: the ghost will come back to haunt you!
