《經濟學人》9月7日(周六)刊登了題為“通往奴役之路”的文章,介紹了在荷蘭出生的香港大學曆史學家Frank Dikotter撰寫的書《“解放”的悲劇》,該書戳穿了毛澤東革命的核心是暴力。
文 章說,根據中國共產黨人的說法,在毛澤東統治下的中華人民共和國,第一年是一個黃金時期。畢竟,在1949年的“解放”結束了兩個殘酷的、重疊在一起的戰 爭:日本侵華戰爭及與國民黨的內戰。十年後,中國直接闖入了毛澤東烏托邦式的大躍進災難,數以千萬計的人被餓死,緊接著又是文革的恐怖。黨把一個混亂的國 家拽在了手裏,以粉碎公民的方式創造了“新中國”。
Dikotter先生在他的新書《“解放”的悲劇》中打破了這種錯覺。他列出的事實,其中很多是最近在中共的檔案館裏發掘出來的。根據這些,Dikotter先生展示了共產黨如何奪取政權及後來如何管理政權的核心是極端的暴力行為,而不是出於道義。
內戰接近尾聲,該書講述了共產黨的軍隊如何發動戰爭。僅僅在滿洲,大約有50萬平民事先逃離共產黨,躲進長春避難。林彪進行了圍攻,稱要使長春成為“死城”。總共有16萬平民死亡,主要是被餓斃,許多人被困在城牆外的殺戮地帶。
所以,當毛澤東的農民士兵進入北京和上海時,城裏充滿了恐懼和放棄希望的情緒,也有相互的困惑。城裏人盯著這些鄉巴佬,他們當中很多人沒有見過什麽世麵。一些士兵試圖用燈泡點燃香煙;其他人在廁所便缸裏洗米,當他們發現拉下便缸的鏈子大米就消失了,這讓他們很難過。
在經過編排的勝利遊行後,共產黨開始了它的暴力。首當其衝的是這個國家的“地主” 。毛澤東和他的同僚們要粉碎中國民間和地方領導人之間的關係。“土地改革”意味著推翻一個邪惡的階級。
尤其是經過了幾十年的戰爭,在中國農村,大部分都不對勁了,但並不存在共產黨人所攻擊的那個“地主階級”。大多數中國人是小地主,財富都差不多。因為隻有肥沃的土地可以租出去,租戶不比地主窮多少。在南方,種植水稻的租戶比北方貧瘠的平原上的地主過得富庶。
盡 管如此,如Dikotter先生展示的,工作組進行了煽動,號召村民無休止的開會,把村民分為從蘇聯學來的五種人為製造的階級:地主、富農、中農、貧農和 雇農。最後兩個階級的成員可以獲得從富人那裏沒收來的土地的繼承權,並呼籲“化苦難為仇恨”。舊怨被挖出來了,貪婪起到了有力的作用。有的時候,整個村莊 勇敢地站起來支持那些被指控是地主的人。對於大多數情況下,隨著工作組的灌輸,中國緊密的農村社區解體了。
共產主義暴力“天才”是要把更 多的人牽連進來。地主在村的法庭前受審後,被毆打和槍斃,其土地和財產被人群瓜分。這成為去尋找新的受害者的一個誘因,其中許多人被燒或活埋。但受害者越 多,悲痛欲絕的家屬害怕被報複的恐懼就越大。因此,殺戮之繼續,兒童也不能幸免。到1952年年底,已有高達200萬中國人被殺害。
與此 同時,共產黨還對那些被視為反革命、國民黨或外國間諜的人發動了恐怖鎮壓。受害者中,有的隻有8歲,每天都有新的受害者被用卡車運到行刑現場。縱觀這些狂 歡式的暴力行為,毛澤東和其他領導人們冷靜地定下配額,每一千名中國人中,有4人死亡被認為是合適的。在鄧小平管轄下的三個省,至1951年11月,已有 15萬人被處死。總的死亡人數將永遠是謎。但在1952年底,最近被審判的薄熙來的父親薄一波說,有200萬人被執行了死刑。
正如Dikotter先生所描述的,這個國家走上了“通往奴役之路”。用地主濺出來的血來賦予農民權力。但這些動亂摧殘了中國的農村。農民們長期依賴的市場和其他網絡被摧毀,但國家要求農民交更多的糧稅。生活加倍困苦。村民們賣掉自己的孩子。
黨的答複是更快地走向公社,就是把所有的私有業國有化。公開的叛亂爆發了。一旦被鎮壓下來,增加的戶籍製度不許農民(進城)走動。在短短幾年內,這個國家把其宣布“解放”了的人們變成了奴隸。
到了1956年,普遍的不滿情緒日益高漲,毛澤東在黨內的威信處於低潮。此前三年,毛的導師斯大林去世。毛一直忠實地遵循斯大林的指令,並依靠蘇聯的援助。現在,赫魯曉夫譴責他的前任——斯大林的恐怖統治。但在這一點上,毛澤東的“天才”這時發揮了作用。
隨 著波蘭的動亂和匈牙利的公開起義,毛澤東將自己定位為倡導一種更人性化的社會主義。他呼籲針對民眾對黨的普遍不滿的情緒,要進行“百花齊放”運動。批評如 滾雪球一般,甚至震驚了毛澤東。但隨後毛進行了反擊。超過50萬中國人被劃定為“右派” 。毛本人穩穩地又回到了黨的領袖的位置,他的同僚們現在才知道,毛是如何讓人們轉向針對他們的。毛已做好了準備,要把這個國家帶入巨型的實驗——大躍進。 Dikotter先生已寫下了“毛澤東的大饑荒”。他計劃寫的最後一部是文化大革命 ,為這個真正災難性的時期落幕。
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.