Mao: The Unknown Story полностью

Mao played a key role in this. In June 1941 he had personally ordered unrestrained printing of the local Communist currency, bianbi. The original plan had had a ceiling. After he saw the budget, Mao wrote: “don’t get fixated on the idea that bianbi should be kept within 10 million yuan … don’t tie our hands.” He urged spending “generously” on administration and the army, showing a total disregard for the local economy: “If in the future [the system] collapses, so be it.” In 1944 the price of salt was 2,131 times that in 1937, cooking oil 2,250 times, cotton 6,750 times, cloth 11,250 times, and matches 25,000 times, according to Chief Secretary Xie.

This hyper-inflation did not hurt those feeding at the state trough. Russian ambassador Panyushkin, who probably had a better picture than most, said it hurt the “toilers,” i.e., the peasants, who needed cash to buy basics like cloth, salt, matches, utensils and farm tools — and medical care, which was never free for non-state employees, if they could get it at all. A hospital official in one Red area revealed: “Only when we want wheat do we admit the lao-pai-shing [man-in-the-street].”

One practice where cash was needed, and the impact of inflation can be measured, was buying a bride. In 1939 a bride cost 64 yuan. By 1942 the prices were: seven-year-old girl: 700; adolescent: 1,300; widow: 3,000. By 1944 the price for a widow was 1.5 million.

Loan-sharking flourished, with average interest rates running at 30–50 percent monthly, according to Chief Secretary Xie, who also recorded the astronomical rate of 15–20 percent from one market day to the next — which was five days. These rates were as bad as the worst before the Communists. To raise cash, many peasants presold crops, which sometimes meant accepting as little as 5 percent of the harvest-time price.

“Reducing loan interest” was one of the Communists’ two main economic pledges at the time; the other was to lower land rent. But, whilst there were specific regulations about the latter (which actually meant little, as the peasants just had to hand over their harvest to the state instead of to landlords), the regime set no ceiling on loan interest. All it said was: “it should be left to the people themselves to fix … and the government should not fix too low an interest rate, in case lending dries up.” As the regime advanced virtually no loans, it had to find some other way to get credit floated. Some Red areas enforced low ceilings on interest rates, but in the Yenan region the regime let loose the most rapacious forces of the private sector on the most helpless of its subjects.

In March 1944 the regime stopped the runaway printing of money and started to call in bianbi. This was partly prompted by the imminent arrival of the first non-Russian outsiders for five years — an American mission, and some journalists. Hyper-inflation did not look good. But deflation was no boon to those in debt either, as Xie noted on 22 April: “No matter whether the currency goes down or up, those who suffer are always the poor … the debt they owed when prices were high now has to be paid back by selling more of their possessions. I heard that many are selling their draft animals.”

Opium-growing stopped at this point. Apart from not wanting the Americans to see, there was overproduction. In fact, the surplus had become a headache. Some hard-liners advocated dumping it on the population within Yenan, which Mao vetoed. A drug-addicted peasantry was no use to him. But some peasants had inevitably become hooked by growing the stuff. The regime ordered locals to kick the habit, with tough deadlines, promising to “assist addicts with medicine” and saying that “the poor” did not have to pay for treatment, clearly showing that one had to pay if one could remotely afford it.

To officials in the know, Mao met the widespread disquiet about opium-growing by calling it one of the Party’s “two mistakes,” but he went on to justify both in the same breath. One mistake, he said on 15 January 1945, “was that during the Long March we took people’s things”—“but,” he immediately added, “we couldn’t have survived if we hadn’t”; “the other,” he said, “was to grow a certain thing [mou-wu, i.e., opium] — but without growing this we couldn’t have got through our crisis.”

YENAN STAYED extremely poor even years after Mao had taken control of China. A visitor from Communist Hungary, itself by no means rich, commented on “indescribably squalid and poverty-stricken villages” near Yenan in 1954. In fact, all the Red bases remained among the poorest areas in China, and the reason was precisely that they had been Red bases. An exchange between Mao and a Swedish enthusiast in 1962 ran:

J. MYRDAL: I have just come back from a trip to the Yenan area.

MAO: That is a very poor, backward, underdeveloped … part of the country.

MYRDAL: I lived in a village … I wanted to study the change in the countryside …