《经济学人》9月7日(周六)刊登了题为“通往奴役之路”的文章,介绍了在荷兰出生的香港大学历史学家Frank Dikotter撰写的书《“解放”的悲剧》,该书戳穿了毛泽东革命的核心是暴力。
文 章说,根据中国共产党人的说法,在毛泽东统治下的中华人民共和国,第一年是一个黄金时期。毕竟,在1949年的“解放”结束了两个残酷的、重叠在一起的战 争:日本侵华战争及与国民党的内战。十年后,中国直接闯入了毛泽东乌托邦式的大跃进灾难,数以千万计的人被饿死,紧接着又是文革的恐怖。党把一个混乱的国 家拽在了手里,以粉碎公民的方式创造了“新中国”。
Dikotter先生在他的新书《“解放”的悲剧》中打破了这种错觉。他列出的事实,其中很多是最近在中共的档案馆里发掘出来的。根据这些,Dikotter先生展示了共产党如何夺取政权及后来如何管理政权的核心是极端的暴力行为,而不是出于道义。
内战接近尾声,该书讲述了共产党的军队如何发动战争。仅仅在满洲,大约有50万平民事先逃离共产党,躲进长春避难。林彪进行了围攻,称要使长春成为“死城”。总共有16万平民死亡,主要是被饿毙,许多人被困在城墙外的杀戮地带。
所以,当毛泽东的农民士兵进入北京和上海时,城里充满了恐惧和放弃希望的情绪,也有相互的困惑。城里人盯着这些乡巴佬,他们当中很多人没有见过什么世面。一些士兵试图用灯泡点燃香烟;其他人在厕所便缸里洗米,当他们发现拉下便缸的链子大米就消失了,这让他们很难过。
在经过编排的胜利游行后,共产党开始了它的暴力。首当其冲的是这个国家的“地主” 。毛泽东和他的同僚们要粉碎中国民间和地方领导人之间的关系。“土地改革”意味着推翻一个邪恶的阶级。
尤其是经过了几十年的战争,在中国农村,大部分都不对劲了,但并不存在共产党人所攻击的那个“地主阶级”。大多数中国人是小地主,财富都差不多。因为只有肥沃的土地可以租出去,租户不比地主穷多少。在南方,种植水稻的租户比北方贫瘠的平原上的地主过得富庶。
尽 管如此,如Dikotter先生展示的,工作组进行了煽动,号召村民无休止的开会,把村民分为从苏联学来的五种人为制造的阶级:地主、富农、中农、贫农和 雇农。最后两个阶级的成员可以获得从富人那里没收来的土地的继承权,并呼吁“化苦难为仇恨”。旧怨被挖出来了,贪婪起到了有力的作用。有的时候,整个村庄 勇敢地站起来支持那些被指控是地主的人。对于大多数情况下,随着工作组的灌输,中国紧密的农村社区解体了。
共产主义暴力“天才”是要把更 多的人牵连进来。地主在村的法庭前受审后,被殴打和枪毙,其土地和财产被人群瓜分。这成为去寻找新的受害者的一个诱因,其中许多人被烧或活埋。但受害者越 多,悲痛欲绝的家属害怕被报复的恐惧就越大。因此,杀戮之继续,儿童也不能幸免。到1952年年底,已有高达200万中国人被杀害。
与此 同时,共产党还对那些被视为反革命、国民党或外国间谍的人发动了恐怖镇压。受害者中,有的只有8岁,每天都有新的受害者被用卡车运到行刑现场。纵观这些狂 欢式的暴力行为,毛泽东和其他领导人们冷静地定下配额,每一千名中国人中,有4人死亡被认为是合适的。在邓小平管辖下的三个省,至1951年11月,已有 15万人被处死。总的死亡人数将永远是谜。但在1952年底,最近被审判的薄熙来的父亲薄一波说,有200万人被执行了死刑。
正如Dikotter先生所描述的,这个国家走上了“通往奴役之路”。用地主溅出来的血来赋予农民权力。但这些动乱摧残了中国的农村。农民们长期依赖的市场和其他网络被摧毁,但国家要求农民交更多的粮税。生活加倍困苦。村民们卖掉自己的孩子。
党的答复是更快地走向公社,就是把所有的私有业国有化。公开的叛乱爆发了。一旦被镇压下来,增加的户籍制度不许农民(进城)走动。在短短几年内,这个国家把其宣布“解放”了的人们变成了奴隶。
到了1956年,普遍的不满情绪日益高涨,毛泽东在党内的威信处于低潮。此前三年,毛的导师斯大林去世。毛一直忠实地遵循斯大林的指令,并依靠苏联的援助。现在,赫鲁晓夫谴责他的前任——斯大林的恐怖统治。但在这一点上,毛泽东的“天才”这时发挥了作用。
随 着波兰的动乱和匈牙利的公开起义,毛泽东将自己定位为倡导一种更人性化的社会主义。他呼吁针对民众对党的普遍不满的情绪,要进行“百花齐放”运动。批评如 滚雪球一般,甚至震惊了毛泽东。但随后毛进行了反击。超过50万中国人被划定为“右派” 。毛本人稳稳地又回到了党的领袖的位置,他的同僚们现在才知道,毛是如何让人们转向针对他们的。毛已做好了准备,要把这个国家带入巨型的实验——大跃进。 Dikotter先生已写下了“毛泽东的大饥荒”。他计划写的最后一部是文化大革命 ,为这个真正灾难性的时期落幕。
China at the liberation
The road to serfdom
A new history lays bare the violent heart of Mao’s revolution
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-57. By Frank Dikotter. Bloomsbury; 400 pages; $30 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE first years of the People’s Republic under Mao Zedong were a golden age, according to Chinese Communists and many in the West. After all, “liberation” in 1949 brought to an end a period encompassing two brutal and overlapping wars: Japan’s invasion and occupation of China and the Chinese civil war with the Nationalists. A decade later, China was charging into the Mao-made Utopian catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, in which tens of millions were worked or starved to death, and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were still to come. According to this view, the years from the republic’s founding to, roughly, the so-called Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956 were constructive, even benign in a paternalistic way. The party took a chaotic state in hand, and out of a shattered citizenry forged a “New China”.
Frank Dikotter, a Dutch-born historian at the University of Hong Kong, destroys this illusion in his new book, “The Tragedy of Liberation”. With a mixture of passion and ruthlessness, he marshals the facts, many of them recently unearthed in party archives. Out of these, Mr Dikotter constructs a devastating case for how extreme violence, not a moral mandate, was at the heart of how the party got to power, and of how it then governed.
Towards the end of the civil war, word of how the Communist armies waged war went before them. In Manchuria alone, some 500,000 civilians had fled the Communist advance and sought shelter in the city of Changchun. Lin Biao, the general laying siege to it, called for it to be turned into “a city of death”. In all, 160,000 civilians died, mainly of hunger, many trapped in a killing zone outside the city walls.
So when Mao’s peasant-soldiers marched into Beijing and Shanghai, fear and resignation as much as hope were the predominant emotions. There was also mutual bewilderment. Townsfolk stared at these tough bumpkins, most of whom had never seen sophistication before. Some of the soldiers attempted to light their cigarettes with light bulbs; others washed their rice in lavatory bowls, upset that the grains disappeared when they pulled the chain.
After the choreographed victory parades, the Communist Party began its violence. First in line were country “landlords”. Wanting nothing to stand between the people and the party, Mao and his colleagues set out to smash the ties between country folk and their local leaders. “Land reform” meant overthrowing an evil class.
Much was wrong in the Chinese countryside, especially after decades of war, but the junker class which the Communists attacked happened not to exist. Nor was village life across China feudal. Most Chinese were small landowners, with little variation in wealth. Tenants were not much poorer than owners, since only fertile land could be let. In the rice-growing south tenants were more prosperous than owners on the hardscrabble plains of the north.
No matter. Work teams fanned out, calling interminable meetings at which villagers were divided into a system of five artificial classes borrowed from the Soviet Union: “landlords”, “rich peasants”, “middle peasants”, “poor peasants” and “labourers”. Members of these last two, those who stood to inherit land confiscated from the rich, were urged to “turn hardship into hatred”, as Mr Dikotter puts it. Old grudges were dug up, and greed played a powerful part. Occasionally, whole villages stood bravely behind those accused of being landlords. For the most part, as the indoctrination of the work teams ground on, close-knit communities disintegrated.
The genius of communist violence was to implicate ever more people in it. After landlords were tried in front of village tribunals, then beaten and shot, land and possessions were divided up among the crowd. It was an incentive to find new victims, many of whom were burned or buried alive. But the more victims, the greater the fear of reprisals from distraught families. So the tribunals kept on killing. Children were not spared. By the end of 1952 up to 2m Chinese had been murdered.
A parallel terror was waged against those deemed to be counter-revolutionaries, Nationalists or foreign spies, some as young as eight, with new victims trucked daily to execution sites. Throughout these orgies of violence, Mao and other leaders coolly laid down quotas—up to four deaths for every thousand Chinese was considered appropriate. In the three provinces under the jurisdiction of Deng Xiaoping, known today for having been open-minded, 150,000 had been executed by November 1951. The total number of deaths will never be known. But in late 1952 Bo Yibo (father of Bo Xilai, whose recent trial has caused a sensation) said, approvingly, that 2m had been executed.
Not everyone could be killed, Mao acknowledged. So a vast gulag was born, swallowing up counter-revolutionaries, vagabonds, prostitutes, capitalists, marketeers, foreigners and, later, intellectuals. The population in the “reform through labour” camps quickly reached about 2m. The relentless indoctrination, one inmate later said, was nothing less than the “physical and mental liquidation of oneself”.
The country was, as Mr Dikotter puts it, well down “the road to serfdom”—literally so for farmers. All the landlord blood spilled was supposed to empower peasants. But the upheaval had devastated the countryside. Draught animals, fertiliser and skills were in short supply. The markets and other networks on which farmers had long depended were destroyed. Farming risked being branded the work of the evil landlord, yet the state demanded ever more grain from farmers in tax. Hardships multiplied. Villagers sold their children.
The party’s answer was to move faster towards wholesale collectivisation, just as it had nationalised all private business. Open rebellions broke out. Once they were put down, peasants were bound into collectives, forbidden to travel. In a few years the state had enslaved a people it claimed to be setting free.
By 1956, with popular dissatisfaction growing, Mao’s own prestige within the party was at a low ebb. It had not helped that Mao had lost his mentor, Joseph Stalin, three years earlier. Mao had loyally followed Stalin’s directives, and depended on Soviet aid. Now Nikita Krushchev was denouncing his predecessor’s reign of terror. But at this point, Mao’s genius for the moment came into play.
With unrest in Poland and open revolt in Hungary, Mao positioned himself as advocating a more humane kind of socialism than even the Hungarian reformists. He called for popular grievances against the party to be aired: the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Criticisms, slow at first in coming, snowballed, shocking even Mao. But then he struck back. More than half a million Chinese were branded as “rightists”. He himself was firmly back at the head of the party, and his colleagues now knew how he could turn the people against them. He was ready to lead the country into the giant experiment of the Great Leap Forward. Mr Dikotter has already written about that in “Mao’s Great Famine”, which this book only betters. The final volume of his planned trilogy will be on the Cultural Revolution, bringing the curtain down on a truly disastrous period.