In Yenan in 1942–43, Mao had built an efficient instrument by terrorizing his power base, the members of the Communist Party. Now he was terrorizing his economic and cannon-fodder base, the peasantry, in order to bring about total, unquestioning conformity. The result was that the peasants put up little resistance to Mao’s requisitioning of soldiers, laborers, food, and anything else he wanted for his goals.
Mao regarded this process of terrorization as indispensable for winning the war. So when he was preparing for the last decisive campaign, Huai — Hai, he sent Kang Sheng to Shandong province, which was going to bear most of the logistics burden, to carry out a
IN THE LAND REFORM, the people who implemented Mao’s policy were Party cadres, who were also being terrorized and brutalized in the process. This was part of Mao’s design. Most new Party members were sent to villages to be “educated” in the ways of land reform. One person Mao made a point of hardening was his 25-year-old son An-ying, whom he placed under Kang Sheng’s tutelage in 1947–48, disguised as Mrs. Kang’s nephew. Less than ten days after arriving at Kang’s HQ, An-ying was already in torment. He was bombarded with criticisms and made to feel that his thoughts “smelled right-wing.” He lay awake at night, and was in a constant state of self-criticism for his “petty bourgeois feelings.” “I have not become proletarianised,” he wrote in his diary, which remains a secret to this day. “My character is so rotten.” He felt “extremely full of pain, so full of pain that I wept.”
An-ying was shocked by the public, mass brutality, which was something he had not experienced in Stalin’s Russia. This was exactly what his father wanted him to get used to, and to learn to incite, by being with Kang. After two months in Kang’s company, he wrote to his father (using Red jargon) that “my own proletarian stand is firmer now.” But he retained a sense of aversion, which emerges strongly from notes he wrote about mass rallies other people had described to him. In one case, 10,000 peasants had been herded to rallies that lasted for almost a week. “It was very cold that day,” An-ying wrote. “Everyone was saying: ‘How cold! There must be quite a few frozen to death today. What have we done to deserve this!’ ” He evinced palpable distaste about the rallies themselves: “After careful rehearsals, on the fifth day, denunciations began … all the masses were told to raise their weapons when the word was given and shout several times: ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’ … the rally site was in a chaotic storm, and ended in eight people being beaten to death.” An-ying also registered that the Party was often relying on the worst people in the land reform: “Some of the activists promoted were thugs and dregs, [former] Japanese puppet soldiers and lackeys.” Such people made up a sizable proportion of the Party’s new recruits in rural areas.
LIKE AN-YING, many Party members who had joined up during the Sino-Japanese War, and who tended to have been idealists, were repelled by the atrocities, and some petitioned the Party about it. A few top leaders also feared that this level of violence might cost the Party its chance to capture power. Mao was not worried. He knew his power did not depend on popularity. As he had done in Yenan, he let terror sink deep into everyone’s heart before he called a halt. This came in early 1948, when he circulated reports criticizing atrocities, which he pretended he was hearing about for the first time.
After the Yenan Terror, Mao had made some unapologetic apologies to pacify Party cadres. Now he designated a scapegoat for the violence and atrocities. On 6 March, he wrote to his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, informing him that he was to be the fall guy: “I feel the many mistakes committed in all areas are mainly … the result of the leading body … not clearly demarcating what was permissible and what was not … Can you please do a critical review of yourselves.” Liu resisted at first, but then caved in: “most [mistakes] are my fault,” he told top cadres. “It was not until Chairman Mao made a systematic criticism … that these were corrected.” Thenceforth it was Liu, not Mao, whom Party officials tended to blame for the violence in the land reform. To rise high under Mao you had to carry the can for him.
