Terrible
Honeymoon:
Struggling
with the Problem of Terror in Early 1950s
Jeremy Brown
What is the value of human life? Is terror ever justifiable? Scholars who study the first four years of
the People’s Republic of
In 1955, Yale University Press published Richard L.
Walker’s China Under Communism: The First Five
Years. The militantly anti-communist
book portrays
Scholars are in general agreement that significant
numbers of Chinese people were executed in the early 1950s during land reform
and the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries. They also agree that even larger numbers were
arrested and sentenced to “labor reform” (laodong
gaizao), and that the purpose of the killings and
arrests was to terrorize the Chinese population. All scholars base their numerical estimates
on public statements by Chinese leaders and press reports of public
executions. The German scholar Jurgen Domes estimates that, based on remarks by Luo Ruiqing and Bo Yibo, over 3,000,000 people were executed in the campaign
to suppress counterrevolutionaries (1973, 52).
Maurice Meisner accepts an estimate of
2,000,000 people executed during the first three years of the PRC, while Julia
Strauss mentions a possible low figure of 700,000-800,000 and a high of more
than 2,000,000 (Meisner 1999, 72; Strauss 2002,
87). Not surprisingly, Richard Walker
provides a high figure of 14,000,000 deaths (219).
Whichever figure we accept, the toll is
staggering. By its own admission, the
new Chinese regime was responsible for extinguishing hundreds of thousands, if
not millions, of human lives. Although
none of the authors under review in this essay cite Mao’s personal role in
ordering executions, we now know from his manuscripts that the impetus for
terror came from the very top. “Kill all
who should be killed” (ying sha zhe, jun
sha zhi), Mao wrote in
his remarks on a work report in early February 1951; the next week he defended
killing “bandit leaders and habitual bandits,” “bullies,” and “important spies”
as necessary for the consolidation of power (Jianguo
yilai Mao Zedong wengao
1988, 2: 112, 124).
Domes, Strauss, and Walker would all agree with Meisner’s statement that state violence succeeded in
creating a “public climate of fear and terror” in the early 1950s (72). While the above authors rely on second-hand
figures and statements to discuss terror in macro terms, C.K. Yang comes to
similar conclusions based on first-hand observations in a
Several points are noteworthy about Yang’s
account. First, Communist soldiers and
cadres did not hesitate to apply violence just because a team of academic
researchers were in the area. Second,
Yang mentions no instances of execution, but concludes that arrest, torture, and
the threat of death were sufficient to scare villagers into submitting to the
new government. “Villagers were well
aware,” he writes, “that the violation of Communist law could cost a man his
life” (163-4).
It should now be clear that many scholars accept the
notion that the new Communist government killed, arrested, punished, and
otherwise terrorized millions of Chinese people in the years immediately
following 1949. Even authors who
characterize the early years of the PRC as a “honeymoon” for “most Chinese
villagers” do not dispute the Chinese Communist Party’s capacity for terror
(Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden 1991, 133). Before the “Honeymoon” chapter in their
Therefore, while scholars agree that terror should
be part of our conceptual vocabulary for the early years of Communist rule,
regional variation and differences in timing complicate the picture. “Honeymoon” might be an appropriate label for
north Chinese villages in 1950-51.
However, “terror” is probably a better descriptor for the same period in
large cities and other areas that had recently come under Communist control
like south
In a sense, the very willingness of Chinese
Communist leaders to offer broad numerical estimates and openly speak of the
necessity of exterminating “enemies of the people” has impeded scholars’
understanding of terror in the early 1950s.
Mind-boggling national death estimates obscure the impact of public
executions and mass arrests at the local level.
We lack knowledge about the spatial and temporal dimensions of terror in
the early 1950s. In addition, the
tendency of some scholars to agree with Communist leaders that terror and state
killing are unavoidable, if unpleasant, byproducts of revolution has limited
our understanding of the human consequences of terror in the early 1950s. This section will discuss how different
assumptions and frameworks have shaped and ultimately constrained discussions
of terror.
Broadly speaking, we can divide authors who
explicitly address early 1950s terror into three conceptual paradigms:
totalitarianism, modernization, and comparative revolution. Richard L. Walker claims that
Unlike
Maurice Meisner and Julia
Strauss are more vexed than Yang by the troubling precedent set by terror, but
their comparative revolution framework views terror as unavoidable. Meisner’s
seven-page analysis of early 1950s terror in Mao’s China and After
(first published as Mao’s China in 1977) offers a particularly sensitive
treatment of the issue. Throughout the
book Meisner draws comparisons between revolutionary
Meisner has difficulty reconciling
the human toll of terror with the requirements of revolution. As a supporter of the Chinese Communist
revolution and a Marxist expert on comparative revolution, he cannot
unconditionally criticize the killings.
But he is equally unable to defend state terror with the alacrity of Mao
or Peng Zhen, who in 1951 stated that there was
nothing wrong with using “shock and panic” (zhendong
konghuang) tactics against counterrevolutionary
targets (Jianguo yilai
zhongyao wenxian xuanbian 1992, 2: 51).
Meisner writes, “In most revolutionary
situations, the choice is not between terror and its absence but rather between
revolutionary terror or counterrevolutionary terror”
(73). Because the latter had been so
destructive in
Julia Strauss is less idealistic than Meisner. Meisner sees the terror of the 1950s as an inevitable and
possibly justifiable part of the quest toward utopian society. Only Mao and his colleagues’ mistakes and
miscalculations threw the process off track.
For Strauss, the legacy of early 1950s terror was simply more and more
terror. In a 2002 article, she agrees
with Meisner that the “deployment of terror against
enemies of the revolutionary state” was a natural outcome of revolution in
France in the 1790s, the Soviet Union after 1917, and China in the early 1950s
(Strauss 2002, 98). But Strauss
concludes that “paternalist terror” (caring welfare offered to the “people”
coupled with harsh terror unleashed against “non-people”) was “built into the
foundations of the revolutionary regime” in China and “remained at the core” of
the PRC “as it moved through ever-widening circles of targets, enemies, and
counter-revolutionaries over the next generation” (99). Widespread terror immediately following the
Communist victory was to be expected, Strauss holds, but it established a terrible
pattern from which China’s leaders were unable—or unwilling—to deviate. Strauss herself does not mention the
anti-rightist movement of 1957 or the Cultural Revolution, but we can assume
that she views these events not as excesses or aberrations but as outgrowths of
the pattern of paternalist terror established in the early 1950s.
Strauss’s vision of a persistent pattern of terror
differs from Meisner’s view of revolutionary violence
as a distasteful means toward a better future.
However, at a basic level Meisner and Strauss
both suggest that state terror in the early 1950s had drastic and sustained
costs not only for individuals and families, but for
C.K. Yang’s detached
social science prose conveys a distressing lack of discomfort with the torture
and terror he encountered firsthand. Of
all of the scholars under discussion, Yang’s sources are the richest and arguably
the most reliable. Yet because his
framework is devoted to celebrating modernization, the local color gets washed
out. The theoretical concerns of the
sociology field in the 1950s prevented Yang from taking a principled stand
against terror, which ends up looking like a regrettable byproduct of progress.
For Maurice Meisner and Julia Strauss, revolution, not modernization,
gives rise to unfortunate episodes of terror.
But we should not underestimate the distance between Meisner
and Strauss’s views. Meisner’s
focus on revolution stems from his ideological support of the concept and the
fact that he was writing in the 1970s before Mao and the Chinese revolution
died. Julia Strauss belongs to a new
generation of scholars interested not in revolution for its own sake but for
the light it sheds on the state building process. Strauss, a political scientist, wrote her
first book on state building in Republican China (1998). Moreover, her conclusion that terror was
“built into” the “core” of
One could counter
Strauss’s point that terror was an inherent part of the Chinese regime under
Mao by noting that increasing inequality and corruption seem to be “built into”
the current Chinese political system.
But we should first question her and Meisner’s
assumption that terror must follow revolution if a new revolutionary state
hopes to survive. To be sure, the
French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban cases support the case that terror and the
liquidation of sworn enemies follow on the heels of revolutionary victory (in
Cuba, most of Castro’s enemies fled to Miami instead of staying behind to face
arrest, or worse). In addition, the
vulnerability of the self-styled “Bolivarian revolutionary” government of Hugo
Chavez in
Nonetheless, Meisner and Strauss’s acceptance of revolutionary terror as
a given is troubling. Do populists
fighting for social change have no alternative to mass executions? Is it possible to attack inequality and
exploitation without devaluing human life?
Mao would have responded with a firm “no” and probably would have
criticized my questions for their “bourgeois humanism.” It is, of course, important to strive for
historical accuracy, as Meisner reminds us. We must understand the violent atmosphere
that shaped and constrained historical actors in
For this reason, more
research is required on the human dimension of
References
Cheng, Tiejun, and Mark
Selden. “The Origins and Consequences of China’s Hukou
System.”
Domes, Jurgen. The Internal Politics of
Friedman, Edward, Paul G. Pickowicz,
and Mark Selden.
Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao Zedong’s
manuscripts since the founding of the People’s Republic of
Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian
(Selected important documents since the founding of the People’s Republic of
Meisner,
Maurice. Mao’s China and After. Third edition.
Strauss, Julia C.
“Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and Regime
Consolidation in the People’s Republic of
Strauss, Julia C. Strong
Institutions in Weak Polities:
Su, Yang. “State Sponsorship or State
Failure? Mass Killings in Rural
Walker, Richard
L.
Yang, C.K. A
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Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.