In October 1950 Mao launched a nationwide “campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries,” and devoted much energy to this, his first major onslaught since taking power, ordering his police chief to “send reports directly to me.” The targets were what remained of the old Nationalist regime. They came under the general heading of “class enemies,” broken down into categories like “Bandits,” which referred to anyone involved in armed resistance: these alone ran into many millions. Another group was “Spies,” which meant not people actually spying, but anyone who had worked in Nationalist intelligence. Grassroots Nationalist chiefs also fell victim en bloc — although senior Nationalists were protected, as bait to entice others back from abroad. “We don’t kill a single one of those big Chiang Kai-sheks,” Mao said. “What we kill are small Chiang Kai-sheks.”
Mao issued order after order berating provincial cadres for being too soft, and urged more “massive arrests, massive killings.” On 23 January 1951, for instance, he criticized one province for “being much too lenient, and not killing [enough]”; when it raised its execution rate, he said this “improvement” made him feel “very delighted.”
This nationwide campaign went hand in hand with the land reform in the newly occupied areas, where some two-thirds of China’s population lived. Some 3 million perished either by execution, mob violence, or suicide. Mao wanted the killings performed with maximum impact, and that meant having them carried out in public. On 30 March 1951 he instructed: “Many places … don’t dare to kill counter-revolutionaries on a grand scale with big publicity. This situation must be changed.” In Peking alone, some 30,000 sentencing and execution rallies were held, attended by nearly 3.4 million people. A young half-Chinese woman from Britain witnessed one rally in the center of Peking, when some 200 people were paraded and then shot in the head so that their brains splattered out onto bystanders. Even those who managed to evade the rallies could not always avoid seeing horrific things, like trucks carrying corpses through the streets, dripping blood.
Mao intended most of the population — children and adults alike — to witness violence and killing. His aim was to scare and brutalize the entire population, in a way that went much further than either Stalin or Hitler, who largely kept their foulest crimes out of sight.
More might well have been killed if it had not been for their value as slave labor. Mao said as much in one order: some people had “committed crimes that deserve to be punished by death,” but they must not be killed, partly because “we would lose a large labour force.” So millions were spared to be shipped to labor camps. With advice from Russian gulag experts on deportation and camp management, Mao sowed a vast archipelago of camps, the official term for which was
In addition to execution and incarceration in prisons and camps, there was a third, and typically Maoist, form of punishment that was imposed on many tens of millions of people during Mao’s reign. It was called being placed “under surveillance” while the victim remained in society. What it meant was “doing time on the outside,” kept on a kind of permanent knife-edge parole, one of the usual suspects to be rounded up and tormented afresh with any new bout of suppression. It meant one’s whole family living like outcasts. The high-visibility stigma served as a warning to the general public never to cross the regime.†
