Mao: The Unknown Story

Chou was a master of organization, and under him the whole society was dragooned into an all-encompassing, interlocking machine. He was instrumental in building a huge bureaucracy, whose job was not only to run the base, but also to coerce the population into executing Party orders. In any one village, the state set up dozens of committees—“recruitment committee,” “land committee,” “confiscation committee,” “registration committee,” “red curfew committee,” to name but a few. People first got enmeshed in an organization from the age of six, when they had to join the Children’s Corps. At the age of fifteen, they were automatically enrolled in the Youth Brigade. All adults except the very old and crippled were put into the Red Defense Army. In this way, the entire population was regimented, and a web of control was formed.

This machine was an eye-opener to Mao. Before Chou arrived, Mao had ruled the Red land in bandit style, with less regimentation of the population as a whole; but it did not take long for him to appreciate the advantages and potential of the new way. When he eventually took power nationwide, he inherited this totalitarian machine and made it even more seamless and intrusive than Ruijin — or Stalin’s Russia. And he retained Chou’s services till Chou’s last breath.

Chou had also founded the Chinese KGB, then called the Political Security Bureau, under Moscow’s supervision, in 1928. He and his assistants brought the system into Ruijin, and kept the state alive via terror. Whereas Mao had been using terror for personal power, Chou employed it to bolster Communist rule. The henchmen Mao used for his purges had been cynical and corrupt, and out for personal gain. Chou employed Soviet-trained professionals.

When Chou first arrived in Ruijin at the end of 1931, he had adjudged Mao’s purge methods as not altogether correct. Mao had “relied entirely on confessions and torture,” and “caused terror in the masses.” Chou rehabilitated some victims. One man recalled the process. An official

took out a notebook and began to read out names. Those whose names were read out were ordered to go and stand in the inner courtyard under armed guards. There were scores of names … Mine was called, too. I was so frightened I sweated all over. Then we were questioned one by one, and cleared one by one. In no time, all the detainees were released. And all the incriminating confessions were burned on the spot …

But within a matter of months Chou had brought this respite to an end. Even so short a period of rehabilitation and easing up had released a groundswell of dissidence. “Relaxing about purges caused counter-revolutionaries … to raise their heads again,” Chou’s security men noted aghast. And as people thought, wishfully, that there would be “no more killings,” “no more arrests,” they started to band together to defy Communist orders. It rapidly became clear that the regime could not survive without constant killings, and killing soon restarted.

THE RED STATE regarded its population as a source of four main assets: money, food, labor and soldiers, first for its war, and ultimately to conquer China.

There was a big money-spinner in the region — the largest deposit in the world of tungsten, an extremely valuable strategic mineral that had previously been mined by a consortium of foreign capital. The Red regime resumed mining at the beginning of 1932. With soldiers and slave laborers as miners, the tungsten was exported across the Reds’ southern border to the Cantonese warlords who, though White, were anti-Chiang, and eager to make money. The Red area was in theory under blockade, yet trade with the Cantonese boomed, even when they and the Red Army were sometimes fighting each other. Salt, cotton, medicine and even arms, were openly trucked in, in exchange for tungsten. The operation was run by Mao’s brother Tse-min, who was head of the state bank.

In spite of the vast profits it was making from tungsten and other exports, the regime never relaxed its schemes to extract the maximum from the local population. Although peasants now got their own land, and ground rent was abolished, they were in general worse off than before. Prior to this, most people had some possessions beyond those needed for sheer survival; now these extras were taken away, under various ruses. One was to coerce people to buy “revolutionary war bonds.” To pay for these, women were made to cut their hair so that they would hand over their silver hairpins, together with their last bit of jewelry — traditionally their life savings. The fact that people had such jewelry in pre-Communist days was a telling indication that their standard of living had been higher then. After people bought the war bonds, there would be “return bonds campaigns,” to browbeat purchasers to give back the bonds for nothing. The upshot was, as some daring inhabitants bemoaned, that “the Communists’ bonds are worse than the Nationalists’ taxes.”