The terror and the extraordinarily high level of killing were recorded on the spot in Hebei province by Jack Belden, an American reporter extremely sympathetic to the Reds, who told US diplomat John Melby about “the increasing use of terror against any form of opposition, and the extermination of large sections [
But Stalin responded eagerly to Mao’s request to help subdue the vast and remote northwestern deserts and annihilate a fierce anti-Communist Muslim army there. No problem, Stalin said. The Muslim horsemen “could be destroyed by artillery very easily. If you wish, we can give you 40 fighter planes which can rout … this cavalry very fast.” A senior Russian diplomat told us, with accompanying “rat-a-tat” of machine-guns and mowing-down hand gestures, that this is what Stalin’s air force had done, far from prying eyes, in the wastes of the Gobi.
This system fooled foreigners into thinking that security was light, from which many concluded, wrongly, that the regime was popular, and so did not need much protection. A not untypical reaction was that of a French journalist who watched Chou En-lai drive across Tiananmen Square with India’s Premier Nehru in October 1954: “Assassinating Chou En-lai … would have been child’s play,” he wrote.
THE TRANSITION FROM Nationalist to Communist rule was managed without great disruption. The advancing Communist army took over all civilian institutions, and recruited educated young urban men and women to staff them, in addition to seasoned Party cadres. This machine immediately assumed control of the country.
Many old administrators stayed on, under their new Party bosses, and for a time the economy ran much as before. Private businessmen were told that their property would not be touched for a long while and that they must keep their factories functioning and shops open. Industry and commerce were not nationalized for some years, and the collectivization of agriculture was not carried out until the mid-1950s.
In these few years, with much of the economy still in private hands, the country quickly recovered from well over a decade of war. Agriculture saw considerable growth, as the new government issued loans and invested in water works. In the cities, subsidies were doled out to alleviate starvation. Death rates dropped.
Some sectors were subjected to instant drastic change. One was the law, where courts were replaced by Party committees. Another was the media, on which tight censorship was imposed at once; public opinion was stamped out. Mao would digest the rest of society gradually.
Mao had an able team, headed by his No. 2 Liu Shao-chi, with Chou En-lai, the No. 3, as prime minister. In June 1949 Mao sent Liu to Russia to learn about the Soviet model in detail. Liu stayed there for nearly two months, and saw Stalin an unprecedented six times. He held meetings with a stream of top Soviet ministers and managers and visited a wide range of institutions. Hundreds of Soviet advisers were assigned to China, some returning with Liu on his train. A Stalinist state was being constructed even before Mao had formally assumed power.
The new regime ran into armed resistance in the countryside and dealt with it without mercy. Once the state was secure, Mao began systematic terrorization of the population, to induce long-term conformity and obedience. His methods were uniquely Maoist.
Mao was viscerally hostile to law, and his subjects were utterly shorn of legal protection. He described himself to Edgar Snow in 1970 as “a man without law or limit” (which was mistranslated as him saying he was “a lone monk”). Instead of laws, the regime issued edicts, resolutions and press editorials. It accompanied these with “campaigns” conducted by the Party system. There was a paper facade of law, which formally allowed the “right of appeal,” but exercising it was treated as an offense, a “demand for further punishment,” as one ex-prisoner put it, which could result in one’s sentence being doubled, for daring to doubt the wisdom of “the people.”
