“That day, dozens of us were working in the sweet-potato fields at Shanmuling, about 2 kilometers from the production brigade.” Zhou Fumei, from Xingqiao Township’s Qiaotou Village,1 was telling us about the killing of Zhou Wendong and his entire family:
As we were about to finish for the day, our production team leader, Zhou XX, suddenly blew his whistle fiercely and shouted, “Come on, get to it!” Before I knew what was happening, a dozen male workers rushed over and grabbed Zhou Wendong and his wife, Chen Lian’e, who were still bent over their work, along with their son Zhou Hui, and pushed them to the ground and tied them up. I later learned that this had been discussed in advance, and that the family was to be killed because Zhou Wendong was a Rightist. Team leader Zhou then ordered, “Quickly push them into the cellar!” Realizing that disaster was at hand, Zhou Wendong knelt on the ground weeping and pleaded: “If you need to kill someone, just kill me. Don’t kill my wife and son, they didn’t do anything wrong. …” But what use was it? The others acted like madmen, grabbing all three of them and pushing them into an abandoned cellar. Someone brought out two bundles of rice straw that had been hidden among the pine trees, set the straw alight, and stuffed it into the cellar. We could hear heart-rending cries from inside as pine branches were piled at the mouth of the cellar to keep the smoke inside. It didn’t take long for the cries to stop, and those three lives were ended. I couldn’t bear to watch what was happening, and ran away. Before Liberation, I was a servant girl, and it was tough, but while class enemies could be harsh, they treated us well. People are always afraid of putting themselves in others’ place. Zhou Wendong’s family never had an easy day among us; how could they have done anything worthy of death?
As the sun was about to set behind the mountains and it was time for us to go home, team leader Zhou recalled that Zhou Wendong still had a son and a daughter at home, so he sent two men back to the village to bring the kids back to do away with them. The two who were sent back were normally very kind and honest men, but everyone changed back in those days. Zhou Wendong’s eight-year-old daughter, Zhou Damei, was at home looking after her two-year-old brother, Zhou Xiaomei. When the two men arrived at their home, Zhou Xiaomei was asleep naked on a wooden bench in the main room of the house. Zhou Damei had just brought a bucket of water home, and when she saw the men she offered them a drink. The men said they weren’t thirsty, and they lied to her: “Your mama wants you to take your brother to your grandma’s house. They’ll meet you on the way.” Zhou Damei believed them and said, “My little brother is asleep. Let’s leave him here and I’ll go by myself.” The men said, “It doesn’t matter if he’s sleeping, you can carry him.” The little girl, suspecting nothing, lifted her brother onto her back and followed them. After they’d walked for a while, Zhou Damei realized they weren’t heading for her grandmother’s house, and seeing the thick smoke coming from Shanmuling, she became afraid and refused to go further. One of the men picked up Zhou Xiaomei, and the other dragged Zhou Damei, and they continued on to Shanmuling, where people were impatiently waiting. Everyone understood that with the parents dead, there would be no one to take care of the children. Team leader Zhou took Zhou Xiaomei and tossed him into the smoking cellar. Zhou Damei wailed in terror, but team leader Zhou paid her no mind and pushed her in as well. The fire was still burning, and the two kids roasted to death. Zhou Damei was a cute little girl with pigtails and a sweet smile who called everyone auntie and uncle. Only a black-hearted person could kill her! Who would think that such a nice family could come to such a bad end? It’s a crying shame!
We have an old saying here: when someone dies, the rice steamer opens. That means when someone dies, the entire village goes to help and then eats all the dead person’s rice. That night, the Zhous’ home blazed with light as people from the production team slaughtered their chickens, ducks, a yellow dog, and a big, fat pig. Then there was the rice, the tea oil, the melon seeds and soybeans, the cotton and the farming implements, pots and pans, the floorboards of the house. … Whatever could be eaten was eaten on the spot, and what couldn’t be eaten became the spoils of the victors, just like during Land Reform.
What kind of man was Zhou Wendong? From what I read in the “Rehabilitation Notice” that the Daoxian People’s Government handed down regarding Zhou’s family, Zhou was admitted to the 137 Army Military and Political Cadre School of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1949, and after graduation he was retained to work in the army, later changing professions due to illness and returning to Daoxian as a teacher. After offering opinions during the Hundred Flowers movement in 1957, he was labeled a Rightist, dismissed from his job, and sent back to his home village to engage in agriculture. When the “Rehabilitation Notice” was issued, Zhou’s family was paid 379 yuan as compensation for the property confiscated from them, as well as a home repair allowance of 300 yuan. Since the entire family had been killed, the funds were handed over to Zhou’s younger brother. Team leader Zhou, who had directed the slaughter, was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Our original intention was simply to present the record without further commentary and to let readers draw their own conclusions, feeling that anything we wrote would pale into insignificance before the blood-soaked facts. Even so, I feel compelled to add a few words about the price of truth.
There’s a price to pay for speaking the truth in our country, and Zhou Wendong shows us just how high this price is. He first lost his future and his good life for trying to “help the party rectify itself,” and to this price was added the lives of himself, his wife, and his children during the Cultural Revolution. I wonder how the poor peasants who killed Zhou and his family would have felt if they had known that one of the opinions Zhou had submitted to the CCP was that some rural cadres were trying to “secure their own advancement by falsely representing their achievements through exaggerated reports that increased the burden on the peasants.” One cadre who had worked many years in Daoxian told us, “In Daoxian, if you did your work honestly and never made false claims, people would look down on you and think you had no real abilities, and you were less likely to be promoted or put in positions of importance.” (This phenomenon was by no means limited to Daoxian.)
So what kind of people were promoted and put in positions of importance? Certainly not those with alternative views or who spoke the truth. What a pity!
It should be obvious that the courage and ability to put forward alternative viewpoints is the basic prerequisite of being a free person. A society that doesn’t allow free persons to exist is a society of slaves, and a society of slaves is a savage, ignorant, brutal, and backward society, which in turn is a society without morality, mired in superstition and plagued with disaster.
The relevant data show us that in August 1957, in accordance with the CCP Central Committee’s May 1 directive on its rectification campaign, Daoxian established a county CCP committee rectification leading small-group office, which initially carried out rectification campaigns in 43 work units and 31 CCP branches to mobilize the masses to assist the CCP in rectifying itself. The campaign then spread to the schools. In December, the CCP’s internal rectification turned into an anti-Rightist struggle. Daoxian designated 293 people as “Rightists,” about a quarter of them cadres and most of the rest teachers, and many of these Rightists eventually became victims of Daoxian’s killing wind. One Task Force leader told us with great sadness, “Reading through their dossiers breaks my heart. These were the best possible comrades. The views they raised were correct then and now and will be in the future as well.”
After the Anti-Rightist campaign, Daoxian became one of the counties that advanced at double speed toward communism during the 1958 Great Leap Forward. From 1958 to 1960, Daoxian raised high the Three Red Banners (the General Line, the Great Leap Forward, and the People’s Communes), and the Five Evil Winds of communism, exaggeration, coercive commandism, cadre privilege, and chaotic directives raged through the county and resulted in the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, during which an estimated 10 percent of the local population died of unnatural causes. The Cultural Revolution reports of “counterrevolutionary organizations” being uncovered everywhere and other increasingly fantastical rumors were part of the same phenomenon of lies and exaggeration to win approval, and the results were similarly fatal.
For Chinese, lying is the inevitable result of a totalitarian society in which rulers preserve their power through violence and falsehood. “Bragging is not a crime.” “Achievements are summarized, experience is unearthed.” “You can’t accomplish anything substantial without lies.” These became the maxims of a generation of Chinese (including Daoxian residents). Many benefited from lies, and just as many suffered for the truth. The people of Daoxian summed it up most succinctly: “Telling the truth hurts only yourself, while lying hurts only others.”
Tangjiashan Village in Qingxi District’s Qingkou Township lies in close proximity to the Shuangpai Reservoir, and during the Cultural Revolution it fell under the jurisdiction of Chetou District’s Meihua Commune. During the killing wind, the Tangjiashan production brigade killed 10 people (including one suicide), and the Rightist I want to talk about here was one of them. His name was Jiang Anmin, and three other members of his family were also killed, leaving only one survivor, his daughter, Jiang Lanju.
The reason for Jiang Anmin being labeled a Rightist was basically the same as for Tang Yu in Qingtang District’s Jiujia Commune, whose story was related back in chapter 6; that is, he was a good talker, but what he said wasn’t pleasing to the ear. Having little opportunity to express his views under normal circumstances, Jiang Anmin couldn’t resist the opportunity in 1957 when he was invited to the county seat, provided with plenty to eat and drink, and asked to help the CCP with its rectification efforts. He differed from Tang Yu only in that after being labeled a Rightist and being dismissed and sent back to his home village, he basically tucked his tail between his legs and managed to stay out of trouble. Jiang Anmin came from a middle-peasant family, and although he’d been sent back to Tangjiashan as a Rightist, his fellow villagers didn’t really understand what that was, so they initially didn’t treat him like other black elements. Since he had some education and exposure to the outside world, other villagers often came to him for advice on all kinds of matters. As the saying goes, “It is easier to move mountains and rivers than to alter one’s character”; over time, Jiang’s tail became untucked, and forgetting his recent painful experience, he began offering opinions on things he felt were unfair in his production brigade and production team. This bred great resentment in brigade leader Jiang Lizhu, among others.
After Jiang Anmin was labeled a Rightist, his wife had divorced him. Back then, divorce was rare, but Jiang Anmin’s ex-wife was apparently unwilling to spend the rest of her life sharing her husband’s status as a “black element.” The couple had a daughter, and Jiang Anmin’s ex-wife would have had trouble remarrying if she brought the daughter with her, so she left the girl with him. This created difficulties when Jiang was sent back to his native village, so he handed his daughter over to the care of his elder sister while fulfilling his paternal responsibilities by covering her living expenses.
This daughter was Jiang Lanju, the only member of Jiang Anmin’s family who survived. Jiang Anmin had chosen the girl’s name in hopes that she would grow to be as elegant and refined as an orchid (lan), and as noble and unsullied as a chrysanthemum (ju).
Eventually Jiang Anmin remarried, and as two more children were born, he inevitably paid less attention to Jiang Lanju. Jiang Lanju grew up in her aunt’s house, resembling the orchid and the chrysanthemum as her father had wished, but in her young heart, resentment grew against her father. She couldn’t possibly understand his difficulties, nor could she forgive her father for abandoning her to her aunt rather than trying to forge a life with her. Whenever Jiang Anmin came with money and rice for his sister and tried to see his daughter, she would run away and hide. This was wounding to Jiang Anmin, but in those times of material shortage, people didn’t have the time or energy to struggle over matters that didn’t involve finding enough to eat.
The really hard times started for Jiang Anmin during the Socialist Education movement, which informed the poor and lower-middle peasants of Tangjiashan that “Rightists” were included among the black elements and were even worse than “counterrevolutionaries,” opposing the CCP and socialism and wanting poor peasants to suffer another round of exploitation through the revival of capitalism. Jiang Anmin suddenly found himself in the front-row seat among the Tangjiashan brigade’s class enemies; no longer merely disadvantaged, Jiang was what his fellow peasant vividly described as “ground into the mire.”
The killing wind began blowing in August 1967, and Meihua Commune started its killing-mobilization meetings on August 23.
On August 24, the commune’s deputy CCP secretary, Wang Guoxiang, and commune head He Changjin made a special trip to Tangjiashan to see Zhou Yumei, vice chairman of the county women’s federation, who had been seconded to Tangjiashan for work experience during the Socialist Education movement in 1965. After meeting with Wang Guoxiang and He Changjin, Zhou Yumei called a meeting of the brigade’s cadres to discuss the killing issue, and brigade head Jiang Lizhu suggested that the first person to be killed should be the Rightist Jiang Anmin.
On the night of August 26, at the edge of the Shuangpai Reservoir, the Tangjiashan brigade used explosives provided by the commune to send Jiang Anmin and three others off on a “homemade airplane.” Jiang Anming’s wife and two sons were among five more people killed on August 31.
Jiang Lanju, then 16 years old, escaped her father’s fate because she was in the care of her aunt. When she heard that her father had been killed, she broke out in sobs and heart-rending wails. Her aunt, in a panic, urged her to step crying or at least do it more quietly, but to no avail. Finally, Jiang Lanju’s weeping gradually subsided, but some inner trauma caused her health to deteriorate after that, and she stopped menstruating. Later, hearing that this kind of illness would cure itself following marriage, Jiang Lanju’s aunt hastily found a husband for her. After five years of marriage she was still childless, but eventually she recovered enough to give birth to four children, every one of them as sickly as a frost-blighted sprout.
The other Rightist family I’d like to mention is that of Wan Guangzhi in the Wanjia brigade of Qingxi District’s Ganziyuan Commune. Someone observed that Wan Guangzhi’s designation as a Rightist was thoroughly undeserved, because the Task Force found that his files contained not a single instance of “erroneous thought or action” that would qualify him as a Rightist. So how did this happen? The most reasonable explanation is that back then, when the county CCP committee handed down a quota of how many people should be labeled Rightists (as was done for each work unit throughout China), Wan Guangzhi’s school didn’t have enough proper Rightists to reach its quota and threw in his name to top up the number. As to why he was chosen rather than some other person, there may have been any number of reasons relating to family background, the impression he had made on his superiors, his everyday work performance, or even his relations with his colleagues.
One informed colleague said, “In any case, the man is dead, and a lot of times these situations can be summed up in two words: bad luck!”
Having been labeled a Rightist, this unlucky devil was dismissed from his job and returned with his wife and children to his native Wanjia Village. Since he’d been away teaching for so long, all he had left in that village was his landlord class designation. Quite apart from remolding his thinking and making a fresh start in life, the first problem he encountered was one of shelter. Fortunately a distant relative had a place to rent to him, resolving this most urgent issue, but housing remained a worry for the family from then on.
At that time, Wan Guangzhi and his wife, Li Meijiao, were still young and strong, and as long as they set their minds to remolding themselves, they could deal with the labor demands placed on them. By living frugally and gritting their teeth, they were able to get by. Besides that, they had three sons who would grow into able-bodied workers, and in the countryside, having adequate manpower always made things easier. Building their own home, however, was a different matter, requiring not only labor, but also wood, brick and tiles, a foundation, and hard cash. Back then, only a tiny minority of people in Daoxian, or anywhere in the Chinese countryside for that matter, had the means to build a new home; the vast majority of villagers lived in homes constructed before or shortly after Liberation. Mountain forests had been cleared during the Great Leap Forward to stoke backyard smelting furnaces, and during the communization movement, the construction of large-scale communal canteens and communal housing had resulted in the destruction of many homes, their crossbeams chopped into firewood. In short, wood had become a precious commodity. But the Wans had to build a house, not only for their own comfort but also to improve the marriage prospects of their sons. Wan Guangzhi summed up his resolve to be like “Iron Man” Wang Jinxi:2 “I’ll shed my skin if that’s what it takes to build a house.”
There’s no need to go into what the family experienced during the Three Years of Hardship. Having survived that time, in 1962, Wan Guangzhi applied to the production brigade to lay a foundation for a house. From then on, after finishing work in the production team every evening, the Wan family could be seen at the site of their new home, making use of what little time was left before nightfall. Wan and his sons carried rocks from the mountain behind the village to lay the foundation, and in winter they would go to the hills to burn lime or saw wood planks. The family saved money for what they needed to buy by eating only congee in the morning and skipping the evening meal.
After many years of hard effort and self-deprivation, the Wan family had just about everything ready to build their house in 1967, and they planned to set to work once autumn arrived. Wan Guangzhi had long felt guilty about how his political fortunes affected his sons, and the prospect of providing them with a fine new home finally set his mind at rest. His wife and sons naturally shared his joy and looked forward to the fulfillment of their hopes.
In August 1967, the killing wind reached the Wanjia brigade, where the peasant supreme court sentenced Wan Guangzhi’s entire family to death, along with the family of his cousin, Wan Guangli. In each family, the eldest son managed to escape. Wan Guangli’s son, Wan Kaixian, fled deep into the mountains of Jiangxi’s Yongxing County, where he earned a living making bricks and sawing wood. Wang Guangzhi’s son, Wan Chaxin, ended up in a village of Hunan’s Chaling County, also doing piecework.
It is said that Wan Guangzhi’s second son, Wan Xiuxin, didn’t die from the knife blows to his head and neck. That night, a breeze stirred him awake, and he climbed out from among the pile of corpses and crawled back to the village and into his home, climbed into the loft area, and hid among the construction materials that had been stored there for the new house. The next day, when members of the brigade arrived to confiscate the family’s movable property, they discovered Wan Xiuxin on the brink of death among the wood planks, and thinking he was a ghost, they were scared half out of their wits. Finally they threw him out of the loft, and he died in the grain-drying yard. As he died, he kept saying the same word over and over: “My, my, my. …”
After the first Chinese edition of this book was published in Hong Kong, a number of additional cases reached my hands through various channels, many even more grisly and dramatic than those already included. However, I’ve maintained my ironclad rule that cases that can’t be verified through original official (pre-1986) documents cannot be included, and even new cases verified through official documents have generally not been added to a book that is already too gory for many readers. This case is an exception, however: it has moved me and inspired my reflection more than any other.
The victim in this case was Liao Puzhan, a resident of the Nikouwan brigade of Lefutang Commune, at that time under the jurisdiction of Qiaotou District (but now under Shouyan District). Liao Puzhan was born to a rich peasant family in 1935 and received a year and a half of high-school education. He was 32 at the time of his death on August 21, 1967. The Nikouwan peasant supreme court sentenced him to death as a “reactionary rich peasant, Daoxian’s biggest anti-CCP and antisocialist element, and a ‘little Peng Dehuai.’ ”3 Implicated and killed along with him were his father and elder brother.
How could a man who had been only 16 during the Land Reform movement, with no position or power—a semieducated, ordinary peasant—wear these three labels?
It all started with a letter that the 24-year-old Liao wrote to the CCP Central Committee Politburo on September 1, 1959. It has not been possible to ascertain what motivated him to write the letter, but in any case, he took the opportunity while at Shouyan Market to put it in the postbox.
Accompanying Liao’s courteous letter to the Politburo members was a lengthy essay. It credited the CCP’s focus on agricultural production with dramatically increased yields and bolstering the construction of socialism: “As a result, last year our country had bumper harvests both in industry and agriculture, this achievement of the party and the people marking a red-letter day in the annals of history.” However, Liao noted, following the steel-forging campaign, agricultural production was faltering:
The problem is that the people involved in production were returning from the factories and mines during the spring planting season and didn’t have time to sow the seeds when they got home, much less to repair the slopes and ridges between fields. They just dropped the seeds into the unleveled fields. As a result, our crops here (in the county and prefecture) are somewhat worse than last year; according to current estimates, paddy yields average 180 kilos (per mu), a huge decrease from last year’s 310 kilos. The main reason for the reduction in output is inadequate fertilizer and insect plagues. Originally the peasants here used the entire winter to mow grass for compost, to burn lime, and to put their fields in order in preparation for the next spring planting. In this way, when seeds were planted the next year, there were no weeds, the soil was loosened, and the crops could grow faster and more luxuriantly. In the past, in winter and spring alike, the caves4 were full of wheat, barley, and compost, but with 90 percent of the workforce engaged in steel production and irrigation projects last year, the caves held just a few vessels of wheat and compost. … While our country urgently needs steel and coal, in order to better support our country’s industrial construction, the countryside (with communes and counties as work units) needs to proceed in a way that takes account of the county’s and commune’s advantages (in terms of transportation and the production of ore sand). … Once we’ve gained a firm grasp of agricultural bumper harvests, satellites of steel production can also be launched.
Liao then turned to the “Eight-Point Charter for Agriculture,” consisting of eight measures that Mao proposed in 1958 to increase agricultural output. He noted that in practice, the peasants suggested improvements on the points relating to “deep plowing” and “close planting.”
The peasants observe that deep plowing has to be determined by the actual conditions of the soil, and that an inflexible standard of at least two-thirds of a meter is inappropriate. The peasants suggest that deep plowing is appropriate for good soil, but that poor soil requires shallow plowing, so that deep plowing is applied flexibly on the basis of the quality of the soil.
As for “close planting,” following two years’ experience, close planting … has several disadvantages: (1) it makes weeding more difficult, (2) it makes application of fertilizer more difficult, (3) it decreases the amount of sunlight that reaches the plants, leading to cooler water temperatures and more insects, (4) it is disadvantageous to pest control, (5) it increases manpower consumption (the original planting methods require only one unit of manpower per mu, but close planting requires five manpower units), (6) it uses more seeds (the original methods require 4 to 5 kilos per mu, while close planting requires 12.5 kilos), (7) it is not beneficial to the growth of the seedlings… . The peasants find that in promoting advanced techniques, the party and the government should consider practical conditions in the countryside, and not listen only to some professors of agriculture and other experts… . Requiring close planting exhausts peasants with work that can never be completed, while increased production has no scientific basis or effective outcome.
Turning to the communal kitchens, Liao noted that after large communal kitchens had proven unworkable, downsized versions were managing to meet local needs. However, he noted a lack of pork due to the practice of raising pigs communally:
When pigs were raised individually during the advanced agricultural cooperatives, after meeting the state’s annual requisition quotas and sending more than 400 pigs to the state over and above the quota (and these pigs weighing 20 kilos more than the current ones), the cooperatives still slaughtered six pigs each month, and some meat even went unsold; now even if you have money, there’s no pork to buy… . It turns out that the communist thinking of our country’s peasants is not that advanced, and they’re not responsible enough. The pig keepers don’t pay attention to how well the pigs eat; they just dump fodder into the basins and leave it at that. If a pig dies, it’s just taken to the communal kitchen to eat and is treated as a routine matter, without considering the relationship between loss and living standards. No thought, or not much, has been given to how to make the pigs eat more and grow faster. It was different when pig rearing was dispersed among households (in the advanced cooperatives); if a pig wasn’t eating, this was considered a grave misfortune to the household, and householders couldn’t let it go.
As the saying goes, “Poor people rely on raising pigs.” Although there are no poor people now, pigs have always been a major source of income for peasants and the state and are the most basic factor in improving the people’s living standards. The party needs to think of a way to resolve this problem. The preliminary view of the peasants is to distribute the pigs for rearing by households, to distribute feed per pig, to establish a system of rewards and penalties, and to pay an appropriate remuneration. In this way, people will demonstrate more responsibility toward the pigs, the pigs will grow faster and better, and peasant incomes will increase.
Liao observed that peasants were also not being given their previous grain ration of 240 kilos per year, a problem compounded by the loss of small plots of land cultivated by individual households:
Piecemeal plots of land and small vegetable gardens around homes went fallow; the communes didn’t manage these small plots (of 2 square meters or so), nor did individual households, fearing that the commune would just seize whatever was grown, so this was also a loss.
Liao went on to request a more appropriate balance of young village people recruited to work in factories:
Our country needs workers, but in order for the counties and communes to properly allocate assignments, each commune shouldn’t lose too much or too little manpower. Regarding the establishment and expansion of local factories and industries, this should be decided in accordance with local conditions and advantageous conditions.
Massive irrigation projects also required more prudent planning:
During the great iron-smelting campaign last year, each locality also carried out irrigation projects such as irrigation canals and ditches, reservoirs, and dams, and this work was done splendidly, providing enormous and essential benefit to production. But the success or otherwise of such undertakings is the dividing line between happiness and disaster. On the basis of our country’s current conditions, hydroelectric plants and large reservoirs cannot be built on each and every rivulet. Apart from the Yangtze, Yellow, Huai, Qiantang, Pear, and Xiangjiang Rivers, other rivers should not have such projects built for another one, two, or even four or five years. Every county was doing this kind of work last year, and some counties built five or six medium-sized reservoirs. Some reservoirs were built successfully and were a blessing to the people, reducing their hardship. But some reservoirs, due to a lack of long-term planning and examination, were swept away by river currents, and losses were immense… . In fact, building small reservoirs can solve the irrigation problem, but when the county made its plans, it wanted to construct communism and build large reservoirs, and the results were counterproductive. Therefore, going forward in irrigation construction, it would be best to first send a survey group and to approve and begin planning the project only after ascertaining that there will be no problems and that everything suits local conditions.
Finally, Liao drew attention to “a minority of lower-level cadres, who due to poor education have a less than thorough and comprehensive understanding of party policy”: “Some have excessively Leftist or Rightist tendencies and engage in arrogant, ambitious, and impractical behavior. The party should transfer some cadres with poor educational and theoretical backgrounds to terms of study so they can better serve the people from now on.” Liao also recommended that cadres be prohibited from reporting exaggerated crop yields. “Correcting this phenomenon will bring the people and cadres closer together.”
Liao offered to provide further information and opinions if desired, and even to go to Beijing to report directly to the Politburo. He added, “If what I say is not beneficial to the development of agriculture and industry or to the party and the construction of socialism, please also send me a letter censuring and sternly criticizing me.” By way of personal background, Liao wrote:
I’m 24 years old this year, and after beginning my schooling at the age of 8, I continued studying until high school, discontinuing my studies in the latter half of 1955 and returning home to engage in agricultural production (because both my grandfather and mother died within two months). I embarked on education work in 1956, and in 1957 I worked at the cadre school under the direct jurisdiction of this county while also in charge of the county Federation of Trade Unions library. At the end of the first lunar month in 1958, my application to return home to engage in production was approved. I have always worked hard in production and have gained a firm grasp of all farming techniques. Since I began taking part in production, I have never missed work except for seven days’ sick leave; my work-point record contains not a single absence.
What pains me most is having said some things detrimental to the party and the people (saying that the literary value of Journey to the West, The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Romance of the Tree Kingdoms, The Water Margin, Unofficial History of Confucian Scholars, and Romance of the West Chamber is greater than that of all new books). I have clearly debriefed the government on everything I said, and I was sentenced to two years of production under surveillance (beginning on September 15, 1958). In the first lunar month of this year, I related this in a letter to the Central Committee Politburo and requested that my surveillance be rescinded. For some reason, the Politburo did not reply. Now in the course of my labor I have surmounted my Right-deviating conservative thinking and have further remolding my thinking, tempering myself into an ideologically resolute new person. … It is because I am loyal to the party and to the cause of socialist construction that I have reported the actual situation in the countryside to you, in hopes that you will know the true situation and formulate policies that will enrich and develop the countryside, make our country even stronger and the living standards of our people even more satisfying, further accelerate industrial and agricultural development, and further facilitate the cause of socialist construction.
Respectfully yours,
Wishing health and happiness to all of you in the Politburo!
Liao Puzhan, Nikouwan Village, Lefutang production brigade, Qiaotou Commune,5 Daoxian, Hunan Province
From today’s perspective, there is nothing problematic in the content of this letter, and indeed, it has much to recommend it. Official documents show that the actual situation in Daoxian was much worse than Liao’s depiction. Although mass starvation had not yet occurred, many problems were already apparent. From his remote village, the young peasant Liao Puzhan could write only from his own experience, and fearing accusations of exaggeration, he minimized problems almost to the extent of untruth. In this way he earned his label of a “little Peng Dehuai,” because like his namesake, he wished to speak the truth but didn’t dare speak it fully.
Unfortunately, Liao’s timing could hardly have been worse. The Eighth CCP Central Committee had just held its Eighth Plenum in Lushan in July–August 1959, and State Council Vice Premier and Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, whose personal observation of conditions in the countryside had led him to “plead on behalf of the people” for a rollback of China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward economic policies, had been named ringleader of a “Peng, Huang, Zhang, and Zhou Anti-party Clique,” which included Hunan provincial CCP secretary Zhou Xiaozhou. The influence of the purge spread throughout the country, and on September 21, 1959, just three weeks after Liao Puzhan wrote his letter, the Daoxian CCP committee held a meeting to implement the spirit of the Lushan Conference.
By then Liao’s letter had been sent back down to county CCP secretary Shi Xiuhua, who ordered the secretariat to immediately print copies of it with his editorial comments. Shi accused Liao Puzhan of “persistently launched venomous attacks expressing his discontent with the socialist system” and said that Liao used “contemptible and shameless Rightist tricks of dual meaning, fabrication, rumors, and slander” to attack the CCP’s policies on communal production and to attack the Great Leap Forward, while “promoting capitalist economics and individual economy, and dreaming of society’s regression and the restoration of the evil capitalist system.” Shi concluded:
What difference is there between the rumormongering and attacks of this antisocialist element under surveillance and the anti-party program of the Right-opportunistic anti-party clique? It is very clear: whom does the anti-party program of the Right-opportunistic anti-party clique represent if not Liao Puzhan and his ilk? This letter from Liao Puzhan is nothing but a narrative of the anti-party, antisocialist words and actions of capitalists in the rural upper-class petty bourgeoisie, as well as of the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, Rightists, and their proxies.
Shi Xiuhua
September 25, 1959
The Central Committee produced a Peng Dehuai, and Daoxian produced a Liao Puzhan. How perfectly these “Right opportunists” and “anti-party, antisocialist elements” inside and outside the CCP collaborated and echoed each other! Shi Xiuhua could only regret that this fellow Liao Puzhan had no official position or power and was just a country bumpkin; if he’d been a member of the county CCP committee or even just a CCP member, that would have been perfect!
The Daoxian CCP committee on September 29 embarked on an internal rectification to purge its “anti-party faction.” On October 12, this became a struggle against “Rightist deviation” outside the CCP, during which 169 people were publicly denounced. Liu Puzhan was the lowest ranking among them (having no rank at all), but he was given the ultimate treatment of being named a “little Peng Dehuai.” Among the 169 people who were denounced, 21 were designated “Right opportunists” and another 12 (including Liao Puzhan) as “anti-party, antisocialist elements.”
After the ravages of the Great Famine, the Daoxian CCP committee in 1962 rehabilitated this group of people on a case-by-case basis, but seven were not rehabilitated, and one of them was Liao Puzhan.
When the Socialist Education movement was launched in 1965, the family background of the “anti-party, antisocialist element” Liao Puzhan was investigated, and he was determined to be a “rich peasant who slipped through the net,” elevating his entire family to the level of class enemy. When the killing wind blew through Daoxian in 1967, there was no way Liao Puzhan and his family could emerge unscathed. The commune leaders said, “If we don’t kill Liao Puzhan, there’s no one else we can kill!”
After Liao Puzhan was killed, three of the village’s bachelors vied to marry Liao’s attractive young wife. Since none would back down, the production brigade decided they should cast lots for her. The wife’s younger brother in Tangjia Commune’s Bingtian production brigade heard about this, and he rushed to Nikouwan to take his sister home, only to be surrounded by local militiamen and narrowly escaping with his life. Fortunately, the wife’s family was up to the challenge, and more than a dozen friends and relatives from Bingtian descended on Nikouwan before the shotgun wedding could take place, rescuing Liao’s wife and their two children and bringing them safely home.