For years Mao Zedong groped to find his way as a young man, first as a scholar, then as a publisher, finally as a labour activist. In the countryside, five years after joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, he finally discovered his calling. Still a young man of thirty-three, tall, lean and handsome, he was enthralled by the peasant violence that had erupted in the countryside after the nationalists had launched a military campaign from their base in Guangzhou to seize power from local warlords and unify the country. Russian advisers accompanied the nationalist army, as Chiang Kai-shek, at this stage, was still collaborating closely with Stalin.
In Mao’s home province of Hunan, the nationalist authorities followed Russian instructions in funding peasant associations and fomenting a Soviet-style revolution.
Social order broke down.
In Changsha, the provincial capital, victims were paraded in tall conical hats of mockery. Children scampered down the streets singing,
‘Down with the [imperialist] powers and eliminate the warlords.’
Workers armed with bamboo sticks picketed the offices of foreign companies. Public utilities were wrecked.
In the countryside, the poorest of the villagers took control of the peasant associations and turned the world upside down. They were now the masters, choosing their targets at random, striking down the wealthy and powerful, creating a reign of terror.
Some victims were knifed, a few decapitated. Chinese pastors were paraded through the streets as ‘running dogs of imperialism’, their hands bound behind their backs and a rope around their necks. Churches were looted. Mao admired the audacity and violence of the rebels. He was attracted by the slogans they coined:
‘Anyone who has land is a tyrant, and all gentry are bad.’
He went to the country side to investigate the uprisings.
‘They strike the gentry to the ground,’
Mao wrote in his report on the peasant movement.
‘People swarm into the houses of local tyrants and evil gentry who are against the peasant association, slaughter their pigs and consume their grain. They even loll for a minute or two on the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the households of the local tyrants and evil gentry.
At the slightest provocation they make arrests, crown the arrested with tall paper hats, and parade them through the villages.’ Mao was so taken with the violence that he felt ‘thrilled as never before’. Mao predicted that a hurricane would destroy the existing order:
In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.
This from the book by Dikotter, The Tragedy of Liberation, on how Mao, using Soviet tactics, and expanding on them, took over China. Slogans, destruction, oppression, and a forced change on society.
These tactics have been used before by many others. There is no end to them if we forget history.
Posts
