The Party’s orders to its cadres were not to try to stop the violence, the line being that these were legitimate acts of revenge by the downtrodden. Cadres were told they must “let the people do what they want” to those who had oppressed and exploited them. In fact, the Party wanted to encourage violence, and where there was no violence, local cadres were accused of obstructing the land reform movement, and promptly replaced.
A model was created between March and June 1947 by Mao’s terror expert, Kang Sheng. Cadres in all other Red areas were instructed to copy his methods. The fact that land reform was entrusted to a man who was an expert not in agrarian reform, but in terror (and who knew nothing about land issues), makes clear the nature of the program. Kang went to a village in northwest Shanxi called Haojiapo. After the first rally, he berated the local cadres and activists for being “far too polite.” “There must be abuse,” he said. “Educate the peasants to … have no mercy … There will be deaths. But let’s not be afraid of deaths.”
Kang told the cadres and activists to treat whole families as targets, even children. He stood by smiling when village children beat up “little landlords,” as children from the wrong families were called. These could be almost anybody, as Kang extended the criteria for condemning people far beyond the original “landlords” and “kulaks,” in order to create victims where there were no landed rich. (This was especially the case in areas that had been occupied by the Reds for years, where the relatively wealthy had been impoverished.) Kang invented a new — and very vague — yardstick: “how they are liked by the masses.” This meant that anyone could be turned into a target, so those who had incurred feelings of indignation or jealousy on the part of their fellow villagers, for behavior like having “illicit affairs,” became prime victims.
Appalling physical abuse swept the Red areas. One woman official described to us a rally where “four people were hanging in a row by their wrists from four ropes,” watched by “every man, woman, the old, young, even children” of the village. There was a “female landlord” at the end of one of the ropes. “It is very painful thinking about it,” the eyewitness told us.
As a matter of fact, she hadn’t got much land; she had only been short of labour and had hired a farmhand … They asked her where she had hidden the grain … I knew she did not have the grain. But they insisted she did and beat her … Her blouse was stripped off. She had just had a baby and her milk was dripping. The baby was crying and crawling on the ground, trying to lick up the milk. People lowered their heads and couldn’t bear to look … Many loathed all this, but they were forced to watch. If they objected, they would come to disaster, too. Some village cadres were really thugs. True honest peasants did not dare to offend them.
Public displays like these brought shivers for decades to people who witnessed them. In many places people were obliged to watch even more gruesome sights. In one place, one elderly member of the gentry whose surname was Niu, which means Ox, had a wire run through his nose and his son was forced to pull him through the village by the wire, like an ox, with blood streaming down his face. Elsewhere, “entire families from the youngest to the oldest were killed. Babies still on milk, grabbed and torn apart at the limbs or just thrown into a well.” Some grisly scenes took place right under Mao’s nose in Jiaxian county in the Yenan region, where he was staying from 16 August to 21 November 1947, doing quite a bit of sightseeing. Reports to Mao about this county included descriptions of how one person was drowned in a vat of salt water, and another was killed by having boiling oil poured over his head. One place actually had
Mao saw violent scenes with his own eyes. His bodyguards described him going, in disguise, to watch a rally in the village where he was staying in late 1947, Yangjiagou, where dreadful things happened. Afterwards, he talked to the guards about the various forms of torture, and the fact that children had been severely beaten up.
The upshot was, as reports to Mao made clear: “Everyone is terrified.” Mao had achieved his goal.
BY THE BEGINNING of 1948 the Reds controlled some 160 million people. Peasants constituted the overwhelming majority, and they were all terrorized in traumatic ways. The Party dictated that 10 percent of the population qualified as families of “landlords” and “kulaks.” This means that in these categories alone (and more were created by Kang Sheng’s new criteria) at least some 16 million people were on the receiving end of some degree of physical abuse and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million, were killed or driven to suicide.
