Republicans Overseas Philippines

6 hours ago

Years before Mao Zedong stood atop Tiananmen Gate and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on this day in 1949, Communist work teams were entering villages under their control.

They arrived with lists, questions, and a new way of seeing humanity. Every family had to be classified:

Landlord.

Rich peasant.

Middle peasant.

Poor peasant.

Laborer.

These were presented as economic descriptions, but they quickly became moral judgments. The poor were told that their hardships had been inflicted upon them by identifiable enemies living in their own villages. A neighbor who owned more land, employed another family, lent grain, or happened to possess a better house because he had saved more diligently could be transformed into an oppressor.

Then the meetings began.

Villagers were gathered together and encouraged to “speak bitterness.” They stood before crowds and recited every humiliation, debt, grievance, hunger, and resentment they could remember. Party organizers did not simply collect testimony. They taught people how to arrange their memories into a revolutionary story.

Someone had caused their suffering. Now someone had to pay.

The accused were dragged before struggle sessions. They were shouted at, forced to bow, struck, bound, humiliated, and compelled to confess. Old grudges entered the proceedings. So did envy, fear, opportunism, and the desire to survive.

Some villagers resisted. Others tried to defend the accused. But Communist work teams could continue the meetings until the desired anger appeared. The purpose was larger than transferring land. The village itself had to be remade.

Violence was central to this process. Land reform taught villagers to abandon old loyalties and accept the Party’s division of humanity into righteous classes and condemned ones. Property taken from the victims was distributed among those encouraged to denounce them. Participation implicated the crowd in what followed.

This was happening years before the Communist Party controlled all of China.

Radical land reform intensified across Communist-held northern territories during the civil war. By 1947, organized “speaking bitterness” campaigns were being used both to mobilize rural communities and to recruit soldiers into the People’s Liberation Army. Work teams classified families, identified targets, organized accusations, and reordered village authority.

The revolution was already rehearsing.

Then, on October 1, 1949, Mao appeared atop Tiananmen Gate.

Official accounts place approximately 300,000 soldiers and civilians below him. Red flags covered the square. Bands played. Artillery fired ceremonial salutes. Aircraft passed overhead. Many Chinese people believed they were watching their country rise again.

Their hope was understandable. China had suffered terribly. Japanese occupation had devastated cities and villages. Civil war had divided families and consumed armies. The Nationalist government had been weakened by corruption and catastrophic inflation. Rural inequality and exploitation were real in many regions.

Mao spoke directly to these wounds and promised to heal them.

The new China would belong to workers and peasants. Land would belong to those who cultivated it. Hunger would disappear. Foreign powers would no longer humiliate the nation. Ordinary people would become masters of their own future.

But the methods of the new state had already appeared in the villages.

After the Communist victory, land reform expanded across the country. The struggle session became one of the revolution’s characteristic rituals. People designated as landlords were publicly accused and dispossessed. Many were beaten or executed. Their wives and children could inherit the class label long after the supposed economic basis for it had disappeared.

Historian Frank Dikötter estimates that close to two million people classified as landlords and other enemies were killed during the campaigns surrounding the Communist consolidation of power. The precise number remains disputed, but the scale of imprisonment, dispossession, public humiliation, and killing is beyond serious doubt.

Then came one of the revolution’s cruelest betrayals.

The peasants had been told that the land was theirs. But within a few years, the Party began taking it back. Individual farms were combined into cooperatives. Cooperatives were absorbed into collectives. By 1958, private farming had largely disappeared into enormous people’s communes. Families surrendered control of their land, animals, tools, labor, and food.

The same machinery used during land reform now made collectivization possible.

Class labels identified possible opponents. Work teams carried commands into every village. Struggle sessions silenced dissent. Public humiliation turned disagreement into treason. Local officials learned to report whatever their superiors wanted to hear. Neighbors learned that survival might depend upon accusing one another.

The Great Leap Forward therefore did not come from nowhere. Its economic policies were new in scale, but its moral world had already been created. The Communist Party had spent years teaching people that compassion toward a designated enemy was betrayal, that political loyalty mattered more than truth, and that human beings could be sacrificed to the demands of history.

When local officials reported imaginary harvests during the Great Leap Forward, Beijing imposed grain-procurement quotas based upon food that existed only in official reports. State agents removed grain from villages already going hungry. Cadres who admitted failure risked being purged. Peasants who concealed food could be tortured or killed. Many were prevented from leaving their villages in search of survival.

Between 1959 and 1961, the system collapsed into the deadliest man-made famine in modern history. Estimates vary because China has never permitted a complete public accounting. Demographic studies commonly place the toll between 15 and 30 million excess deaths, while other researchers calculate considerably higher totals.

Wherever communist regimes imposed mass collectivization, catastrophe followed. But in Mao’s China, the scale beggars belief. Under his rule, tens of millions died through famine, execution, forced labor, and political persecution.

The road to their deaths began years before the Great Leap Forward, when the Party entered the villages, divided neighbors into righteous and condemned classes, and taught ordinary people to call cruelty justice.

Measured by the human cost of the policies he imposed and prolonged even as the evidence of catastrophe mounted, Mao has a grim claim to being the deadliest ruler in human history.

- Tony Valerino ... See MoreSee Less