News of this mammoth atrocity was suppressed. The few inhabitants who were let out had four “refugee rules” stamped on their passes, one of which was “no spreading rumors”—i.e., don’t talk. The Changchun model, based on starving civilians to death in order to force the defending troops to surrender was used in “quite a few cities,” according to the Communist general Su Yu, who was understandably unspecific.
CIVILIANS IN THE communist-held territories were also ruthlessly exploited. Most men of working age were either drafted into the Reds’ expanding army, or into hard, often dangerous labor at the front. The latter involved particularly large numbers. In Manchuria the Reds conscripted 1.6 million laborers, roughly two to each fighter. In the Peking — Tianjin campaign the figure was 1.5 million, and in the Huai — Hai Campaign, 5.43 million. This gigantic corvée performed numerous frontline tasks for which the Nationalists used regular troops, such as dismantling fortifications and transporting ammunition and wounded.
Women were left to do most of the farm work, along with children and men unfit for the front. They also had to care for the wounded, mend uniforms, make countless shoes for the army, and cook for the giant army of troops and laborers. Every household had to hand over a designated amount of food — which came to a staggering 225 million kg of grain alone in the Huai — Hai Campaign. In addition to feeding Red soldiers, food was also used in psychological warfare to entice Nationalist troops to defect.
The Nationalists were constantly short of food, as they relied heavily on supplies brought in by railway, and sporadic airlifts. One Nationalist veteran recalled how hundreds of thousands of men sat for a month in one pocket, starving and freezing in a temperature of –10 °C. Soldiers fought — and sometimes killed — each other to get to air-dropped food. Later on, tree bark “was a good meal,” and soldiers turned to eating their leather belts and shoe soles. The veteran remembered digging up a dead rat: “Delicious! It was meat.” At the end, he said, there was no need for the Reds even to shell them: “In an area no bigger than your bum, all you’d have to do was just throw stones at the 300,000 starving ghosts and they would have had it.” Some went over to the Communists as a result of being bombarded by loudspeakers shouting: “Hey, Chiang Kai-shek, we’ve got pancakes here, come on over and eat.” “No amount of politics was as good as food,” the vet remarked. “Everyone knew that stewed pork was better than shoe soles.”
Apart from enduring Red requisitioning and being drafted, many peasants also lost their houses, pulled down to provide fuel for cooking and materials for building bridges. The whole of Communist-held territory was turned into a giant war machine encompassing every aspect of every person’s life. The entire population was made to live and work flat out, night and day, for the war, and very often in the thick of it. Mao called this “People’s War.”
But “the People” did not volunteer this all-consuming type of support, much less with the zeal that Communist mythology proclaims. Only intense terrorization coerced them into providing services for the war “for a long time without getting tired,” as Mao put it. The process went under the misnomer “land reform.”
DURING THE WAR against Japan the Communists had suspended their policy of confiscating and redistributing land and replaced it with one of reducing land rent. When the war against Chiang started in earnest, they reverted to their earlier radical approach. But land redistribution was not the main aspect of Mao’s land reform. The part that really mattered was a practice called
The violence typically took place at rallies, which all villagers had to attend. Those designated as targets were made to stand facing large crowds, and people were psyched up and organized to come forward and pour out their grievances against them. The crowds would be led to shout slogans while brandishing fists and farm tools. Village militants and thugs would then inflict physical abuse, which could range from making the victims kneel on broken tiles on their bare knees, to hanging them up by their wrists or feet, or to beating them, sometimes to death, often with farm implements. And there was often torture of even more ghastly kinds.
