The terror worked. A report to Mao on 9 February 1951, only a few months into the campaign, said that after this first bout of killings, “rumor-mongering died down and social order stabilised.” What the state called “rumors” were often the only way people had to express their real sentiments. In one case, a seemingly bizarre alert spread not just from village to village, but from province to province: “Chairman Mao sends people to the villages to cut off [men’s] balls to give to the Soviet Union to make atom bombs.” (In Chinese, “balls” and “bombs” share the same pronunciation:
This campaign clamped the lid down hard on any such expression of dissent, but there were still a few cracks in the system in those early years. Victims could sometimes still hide. A small landowner from Anhui province managed to stay on the run with her son for 636 days, without ever being informed on, even by people sent to catch them. When the fugitives eventually returned to their village, “the overwhelming majority of people, particularly women … shed tears of pity,” the son recalled. As the campaign was over by then, they survived.
But control became increasingly pervasive, and with it the loss of freedom on every front: of speech, movement, work, information. A nationwide system of concierges called Order-Keeping Committees was established in every factory, village and street, composed of members of the public, often the nosiest and most hyper-active busybodies, now made complicit with the regime’s repression. These committees kept an eye on everyone, not just political suspects and petty criminals. Above all, the regime nailed every person in China to a fixed, and usually immutable, job and place of residence through a registration system (
The government also used the “suppression of counter-revolutionaries” campaign to move against all sorts of non-political offenses, such as ordinary banditry, gangsterism, murder, robbery, gambling, drug-dealing and prostitution (“liberated” prostitutes were organized to do manual labor). Thanks to phenomenal organization and ruthlessness, these actions were extremely successful. By the end of 1952, drug-dealing was virtually wiped out, as were brothels.
Mao repeatedly said that his killings “were extremely necessary.” “Only when this thing is properly done can our power be secure,” he pronounced.
WHILE NUMEROUS CHINESE were executed, only two foreigners are known to have suffered this fate — one Italian, Antonio Riva, and a Japanese called Ryuichi Yamaguchi. The charge was no minor one: planning to kill Mao with a mortar bomb as he stood on Tiananmen on 1 October 1950, National Day. The two men were arrested days before, together with several other foreigners. Ten months later, on 17 August 1951, these two were driven through central Peking standing up in jeeps, and then shot in public near the Bridge of Heaven. The news was splashed across next day’s
For anyone, let alone a foreigner, to contemplate assassinating Mao on a maximum-security occasion like National Day, amid a throng of hundreds of thousands of organized and hyper-vigilant Chinese, not to mention some 10,000 police and another 10,000 troops, was a very tall order. Actually, Barrett, the alleged ringleader, had left China many months before. Two decades later, Chou En-lai apologized, in a vague way, about implicating him, and invited him back to China. This was an indirect acknowledgment that the accusation was faked.
