28 THE GREAT TURNING POINT

Achieving the First Five-Year Plan for agricultural production and the social transformation of the countryside was at the center of the party's work. The completion of agrarian reform in 1950–53 radically changed the majority of peasants into middle-ranking individual peasant proprietors, a status that largely freed them from the arbitrariness of the authorities. The post-reform countryside, however, was unable to supply society with sufficient produce and raw materials. The basic reasons were the backwardness of production forces in China; agrarian overpopulation; the shortage of arable land and, as a consequence, the existence of small-scale households; the underdevelopment of the agricultural infrastructure; and archaic social relations. The social leveling consequent to the agrarian reform exacerbated the crisis of underproduction since it led to an increase in peasant consumption and diminished the marketable surplus. As Liu Shaoqi remarked to the new Soviet ambassador, Vasily Kuznetsov, on November 9, 1953, “if the peasants are sufficiently well-fed, then grain production in the country suffices only to meet their needs, but the cities are without grain…… In the present circumstances we are still not in a position to allow the peasants to eat as much as they want.”¹

The party leadership faced the task of devising new forms of rural cooperation. They had already discarded a market approach. The idea of a socialist utopia began to guide policy. In the fall of 1953, Mao Zedong launched an attack against New Democratic market relations in the countryside. His goal was utterly clear, namely, to collectivize the peasantry and nationalize private property in order, on this foundation, to achieve the industrialization of an economically backward country. None of the Chinese leaders demurred. To implement this program they had established the strictest control over the socioeconomic, political, and ideological life of the Chinese people. Intraparty discord concerned only the methods and tempo of executing this plan.

On October 16, on Mao's initiative, the Central Committee decided to introduce a monopoly on grain as of November 16, 1953.² This meant the compulsory purchase of grain from peasants at low fixed prices.³ Individuals were forbidden to purchase grain or sell it on the market. The following year state monopolies were introduced on trade in cotton and cotton goods and vegetable oil. Peasants were thereby reduced to being tenants of the state and completely deprived of any property rights. These measures profoundly destabilized the market economy throughout China and soon led to the introduction of rationing for basic consumer goods among the urban population. This made it possible to guarantee a supply of essential provisions, albeit at a low level. Urban residents could now purchase provisions only in state stores and only by presenting ration coupons.

The powerful state repressive machine tried to control the flow of all basic goods. If in 1952 the state stockpiled 33 million tons of grain, between 1953 and 1955 the authorities succeeded in raising this to 48, 53, and 50 million tons. The grain was collected by means of a high tax in kind as well as by compulsory grain purchases; the ratio between the former and the latter was usually about 2:3. In 1954 and 1955, the PRC harvested about 160 million tons of grain per annum. Of that amount 31 percent was extracted from the peasantry, which was 6–11 percent more than the peasants themselves usually sold on the market.⁴ According to the Russian economist L. D. Bony, the likely result was that “the physically necessary consumption level of the Chinese peasant must have been infringed upon, which is attested to by peasant disturbances in many districts around the country.”⁵ Mao and Zhou Enlai later admitted that the communists “purchased a little more grain” from the peasants than they should have.⁶ Peasant disturbances continued in the spring of 1955.

The concentration of provisions in the hands of the state did not solve the problem of hunger. According to official figures, in 1952 China produced on average 250 kilograms of grain per person, a situation that did not improve in 1953 or 1954. Ten percent of peasant households were not self-sufficient in grain and depended upon state assistance. In reality, more than half of the rural population lived in a state of semi-starvation and millions of families could survive only with direct state support.⁷ The situation was paradoxical. On one hand, by implementing the centralized procurement of grain and other products the authorities controlled a significant proportion of the rural production and created the appearance of state economic power. On the other hand, they had to return almost two-thirds of the grain to the countryside to save millions of peasants in the poorer districts from starvation. The state's capacity to assist the development of agriculture gradually diminished. The increase in state requisitions undercut peasant interest in boosting production, and the number of those requiring state assistance constantly grew. Their own anti-market policy created a vicious circle in which Mao and his associates were trapped.

The country was deeply divided: the authorities strived to increase the extraction of goods from the countryside while the peasantry actively resisted. Mao Zedong began to lose the support of the peasantry. In October 1955 he was forced to admit:

The peasants are no longer satisfied with the alliance we formed with them in the past on the basis of the agrarian revolution. They are beginning to forget about the benefits they reaped from the alliance. They should now be given new benefits, which means socialism…… The old alliance to oppose landlords, overthrow the local despots and distribute land was a temporary one; it has become unstable after a period of stability.⁸

This situation helped launch the cooperative movement.

During the period of agrarian reform from 1950 to 1953, the Chinese communists had done almost nothing to accelerate cooperativization. By the end of 1951 there were only three hundred or more so-called lower-stage cooperatives, with between twenty and forty households each.⁹ The New Democratic political atmosphere restrained the active proponents of the socialist transformation of agriculture. Conceptually and in practice the CCP was very cautious in approaching the transformation of the countryside. Typical in this regard was “The Resolution on Mutual Labor Aid and Cooperation in Agricultural Production,” adopted by the Central Committee on February 13, 1953. The draft document, prepared by the Rural Work Department of the Central Committee, was presented to the committee by its director, the veteran communist Deng Zihui, concurrently a deputy premier of the State Council. It was party practice to indicate the danger of both right and left policy deviations, but Deng pointed to the left deviation as the main danger. “At present,” Deng Zihui noted, “haste and racing forward are the main deviation and the main danger on a national scale.”¹⁰ His report, approved by the Central Committee, served as the guiding document on the basis of which struggles against various “leftist” errors were conducted.

Meanwhile, the party accumulated experience with the cooperative movement during the period of New Democracy. Supply and marketing co-ops and credit co-ops, which had begun during the Guomindang era, became an organic part of the development of market relations in the reformed villages. By the end of 1952, 40 percent of peasant households had joined mutual aid teams.¹¹ These were special forms of cooperation that had first been approved in the communist-controlled “liberated areas” during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. The party leadership, especially Liu Shaoqi, viewed these teams as the definitive organizational and economic foundation of the voluntary cooperative movement. The semi-socialist “lower-stage” cooperatives likewise expanded, although in 1953 the Central Committee conducted a “massive disbandment” of nonviable cooperatives that had been created by violating the principle of voluntary membership. By the end of 1953, there were more than fourteen thousand cooperatives.

Mao's victory over the “moderates” in the summer of 1953 encouraged him to force the pace of collectivization. The question of the tempo of the socialist transformation of the peasantry became a central theme in intraparty discussions. “We struck while the iron was hot,” Mao recalled later on. “This was a tactical necessity, it was impossible to ‘take a breather' or to establish a ‘New Democratic order.' If we had undertaken to create that, later we would have wasted our energies on breaking it up.”¹²

In the fall of 1953, Mao held meetings with officials of the Rural Work Department to persuade them to counteract the increasingly “dangerous” strengthening of “capitalist tendencies” in the Chinese countryside and to accelerate socialist transformation.¹³ He did not succeed, however, in suppressing the resistance of some party functionaries. Therefore, on December 16, 1953, a compromise Resolution of the CCP Central Committee on Developing Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives was adopted and briefly became the programmatic document for the socialist reconstruction of the countryside.¹⁴ The resolution envisioned the planned and gradual cooperativization of peasant households along with the mechanization of agriculture. Central Committee officials considered it dangerous to implement cooperativization apart from the technical transformation of the countryside. The document indicated that by the end of 1954, the number of “lower-stage” cooperatives would be 35,800, or less than 1 percent, of all peasant households. The tasks set for the First Five-Year Plan were equally moderate. Initially, the draft envisioned the cooperativization of 20 percent of peasant households by the end of 1957;¹⁵ later, in the final version, this was increased to 33 percent. This referred only to “lower-stage” cooperatives. “Higher” or “advanced” cooperative farms, meaning fully “socialist” collectives, based on the complete collectivization of peasant property and aggregating 100–300 households, were to be established only on an experimental basis.

Mao was dissatisfied with these plans. At the same time he was not bothered by the extreme technical backwardness of the countryside, evident in the underdevelopment of the forces of production. “We must carry out the socialist revolution before anything else, that is, agricultural cooperativization,” he wrote in July 1954 to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. “Carrying out the technical revolution, that is, the gradual introduction of mechanization and the implementation of other technical transformations in the countryside is a secondary task…… Various possible technical changes [should be introduced] on the foundation of cooperativization.”¹⁶

He continued to express dissatisfaction with the “slow tempo” despite the fact that by the end of 1954 the number of cooperatives had increased sevenfold to 100,000. In October 1954, on Mao's initiative, the Central Committee adopted a resolution to further speed up the organization of cooperatives. A new, accelerated program was drafted calling for a leap forward in the cooperative movement. In 1955 the number of lower-stage cooperatives was slated to increase sixfold to 600,000. However, by the spring of 1955, their number had already grown to 670,000.¹⁷ In the province of Zhejiang alone in the winter of 1954–55, 42,000 cooperatives were organized, seven times as many as existed before.¹⁸

Naturally, the cadres who were mobilized to achieve accelerated collectivization used violence, harsh orders, and arbitrariness in fulfilling the party's tasks. In many villages peasants who refused to join the cooperatives were forced into the street and made to stand in the broiling sun or freezing cold for hours or even days until, exhausted, they agreed to submit their applications “voluntarily.” In many districts peasants began to slaughter their livestock and poultry in protest. In Zhejiang, for example, the number of hogs dropped by 1.2 million, or 30 percent. In one region famous for its ham, the drop was 40 percent. In other places a shortage of fodder caused an outbreak of cattle plague. At the beginning of 1955, a large number of rural inhabitants who had lost their land were starving to death. Some of the middle peasants committed suicide; others fled from their homes and headed for the cities. Many openly expressed their dissatisfaction. “The communist party is worse than the Guomindang,” they said. “The CCP has led [us] to the brink of death, the CCP has degenerated.”¹⁹

Meanwhile, several party leaders were still trying to restrain the Chairman's radicalism. Deng Zihui, director of the Rural Work Department of the Central Committee, insisted that the program of cooperativization be implemented in accordance with the Five-Year Plan. His department proposed slowing the pace to organize no more than 350,000 cooperatives in a year and a half. Deng Zihui also intended to dissolve 120,000 nonviable cooperatives.²⁰ Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and many other Politburo members, especially Zhou Enlai, supported his position.

Mao vacillated for a while and thought that perhaps “the relations of production must correspond to the needs of the development of the forces of production; otherwise, the forces of production might rebel. Now the peasants are killing their hogs and sheep. This is a rebellion of the forces of production.”²¹ He decided to halt cooperativization for half a year, until the fall. Liu Shaoqi supported this decision and suggested cutting the number of cooperatives by 170,000. In the spring of 1955, the Rural Work Department decided to dissolve cooperatives that had been established through administrative means rather than voluntarily.

This decision provoked opposition from local leaders who tried to continue forcing the pace of the movement. “There is no need,” they said, “to curtail the number of cooperatives.”²² The head of the Shanghai Bureau of the CCP, the veteran Bolshevik Ke Qingshi, was particularly indignant, charging that as many as 30 percent of the party cadres did not support socialism, and expressing his dissatisfaction directly to the Chairman when he visited Shanghai in April 1955.²³ At this time Mao went on a sixteen-day inspection tour of the eastern and southern provinces, during which many other provincial and county officials also voiced leftist sentiments.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, Deng Zihui convened a National Conference on Rural Work at which he advocated slowing the tempo of cooperativization. He and other “moderates” were out of step with the times and Mao no longer wanted to listen to them. The Chairman returned from his tour inspired by the Bolshevik mood of the provincial leaders, which revived his interest in achieving a rapid “breakthrough” to socialism. He abandoned his doubts and stood firm. He met with Deng Zihui and warned him, “Do not repeat the mistake of mass dissolution of cooperatives made in 1953, or otherwise you will …… have to make a self-criticism.”²⁴ Several days later he added, “The peasants want ‘freedom.' But we want socialism…… There is a group of …… officials who reflect the mood of the peasantry and who do not want socialism.”²⁵

In mid-May he held a meeting in Zhongnanhai with the leaders of fifteen provincial and municipal party committees to impress upon officials of the Rural Work Department what he believed the people wanted. He called for discarding “pessimistic moods” with regard to cooperativization. “If we don't discard [them],” Mao gloomily observed, “we will be making a big mistake.”²⁶ Soon he departed again to “conduct an investigation,” this time to Hangzhou.

Deng Zihui, however, did not heed these words and, relying on the support of Liu Shaoqi, clung to his own views. In mid-June a Politburo meeting chaired by Liu Shaoqi thoroughly discussed the issue and a majority of its members supported the proposals of the Rural Work Department. Liu Shaoqi noted, “By next spring [i.e., a whole year later] we will raise the number of cooperatives [only] to one million, i.e. we will screen access to them. This is good. Let the middle peasants come and knock on the door. By keeping the door closed, we will guarantee that middle peasants enter voluntarily.”²⁷ The Rural Work Department then disbanded more than 20,000 nonviable co-ops by the middle of 1955, including more than 15,000 cooperatives embracing 400,000 peasant households in Zhejiang alone.²⁸

Mao had no intention of surrendering. He simply circumvented the Politburo, which had rebuffed him, and appealed directly to party cadres throughout the country. At a meeting he convened on July 31, 1955, he called on provincial, municipal, and district party secretaries to support his plans. Mao's report, “On the Co-operative Transformation of Agriculture,” aimed at convincing party activists of the need to accelerate rural cooperativization. Contrary to the Five-Year Plan just adopted by the National People's Congress, which envisioned 33 percent of peasant households enrolled in cooperatives by the end of 1957, Mao insisted on a figure of 50 percent. By the fall of 1956 the number of cooperatives should double from the 650,000 that remained after the disbandment of nonviable cooperatives, to 1.3 million.²⁹

Mao's speech contained the usual positive assessment of the Soviet development path, including the assertion that the Soviet experience demonstrated that large-scale collectivization in a short time was fully possible.³⁰ Yet it was evident that while the Chairman was still inspired by the Soviet model, he had already begun to contemplate even higher rates of socialist construction than in the USSR. He condemned “several comrades” who invoked Stalin's well-known criticism of the errors of “hastiness” and “running ahead” committed in the course of Soviet collectivization and added, “[O]n no account should we allow these comrades to use the Soviet experience as a cover for their ideas of moving at a snail's pace.”³¹ Formulating the principle of building socialism “more, better, faster” for the first time, Mao did not yet enshrine it as the new general line. He still embraced the Soviet model but wanted to achieve it more rapidly. In irritation he told his personal physician,ⁿ⁶⁴ “When I say ‘Learn from the Soviet Union,' we don't have to learn how to shit and piss from the Soviet Union, too, do we?”³² Khrushchev asked him not to accelerate the pace of cooperativization, but Mao had stopped listening.³³ He was optimistic about the powerful upsurge of the cooperative movement. The conference marked the first time in the history of the party that Mao had appealed to local cadres over the head of the Politburo and had openly expressed his disagreement with its decisions. He would return to this practice many times.

On the whole his maneuver succeeded. Having received the support “from below” that he had anticipated, the Chairman was now able to compel the party leadership to accept his program of accelerated Stalinization. In October 1955, he convened the Sixth Enlarged Plenum of the Central Committee in Beijing to secure formal support for his political course. The number of middle- and low-ranking party officials invited was ten times greater than the number of Central Committee members, ensuring that the plenum would approve his policy prescriptions, which indeed it did. “We are facing a steady upsurge of the movement for cooperativization in the countryside,” the resolution asserted, and “the task of the party is boldly to advance this movement…… Meanwhile, some comrades persist in adhering to old ideas……[T]hey do not see the activity of the majority of the peasants who want to take the socialist path.”³⁴

Deng Zihui, Bo Yibo, and Li Fuchun engaged in self-criticism while Zhou Enlai unconditionally supported Mao.³⁵ The Chairman, still agitated, grumbled that “Deng Zihui supported us during the democratic revolution …… but after liberation he went another way. He is like a girl walking on bound feet. She walks, swaying back and forth, sometimes to the east, sometimes to the west.”³⁶ Only in retrospect did he note with satisfaction that “1955 was the year in which basic victory was won as regards the aspect of ownership in the relations of production.”³⁷

After the plenum Mao Zedong launched what proved to be an effective propaganda campaign to rally the party behind him. Rank-and-file communists actively threw themselves into the struggle to achieve the utopian plans of their leader. They believed in Mao, worshipped him, even deified him. A leader-centered party could not exist without such a cult. Mao was the embodiment of New China, of the general line for constructing socialist society, of the bright future of equality and abundance. It is understandable, therefore, why participation in all-around collectivization was a matter of honor for a majority of ordinary communists.

By the beginning of 1956 Mao and his supporters had sharply accelerated the tempo of cooperativization, which now entered a new stage of basically completing collectivization in the first half of 1956. Local party cadres skillfully exploited the egalitarian mood of the poor peasants who accounted for the majority of small-scale households. The communists still enjoyed great prestige among them, and the masses of poor peasants supported the communists enthusiastically, hoping that the policy of the CCP would be to their advantage as it had been during the agrarian reform. At the same time, following Stalin, the Chinese government freely employed repressive methods. In 1956, it forcefully bound the peasants to the land by forbidding rural inhabitants to move anywhere outside their immediate cooperative.³⁸ From then on peasants had to get permission from village authorities even to travel to a nearby city or a neighboring cooperative.

In sum, agrarian socialism triumphed. By June 1956, 110 million peasant households (about 92 percent of the total number) had joined agricultural producers' cooperatives. Of these, 63 million had become members of “higher-stage” (“socialist”) cooperatives. This process continued in the second half of the year until practically all peasants were included in cooperatives. Meanwhile, small cooperatives were consolidated and primary cooperatives transformed into higher-stage cooperatives. By the end of 1956, there were 756,000 agricultural producers' cooperatives embracing 96 percent of all peasant households throughout the country; 88 percent of peasant households belonged to higher-stage cooperatives.³⁹

Mao's enormous political victory came at a great personal price. During the sharp conflict within the CCP, especially toward the end of 1955, Mao was almost unable to sleep. He had suffered before from periodic insomnia and at such times was simply unable to close his eyes for several days straight. “His waking hours grew longer and longer,” his physician wrote, “until he would stay awake for twenty-four or even thirty-six or forty-eight hours, at a stretch. Then he could sleep ten or twelve hours continuously.” He took sleeping pills (barbiturates) in unimaginably large doses, but they did not help. He would become exhausted, rock from side to side, suffer from unbearable itching, and grow dizzy. But his doctor was powerless to help him. His “sleeplessness …… was a result of …… political battle.”⁴⁰

The triumph of collectivization had an additional cost. It made Mao and the entire party hostages of the unfulfilled promises of prosperity that had lured peasants into the cooperatives. Soon disappointed, many peasants began to express their dissatisfaction.⁴¹ Two years later, Mao himself acknowledged that cooperativization had not solved the contradiction between the CCP and the “great mass of intermediate elements.”⁴² On the contrary, according to data from Soviet experts, social tensions that had begun to accumulate after the introduction of the grain monopoly now intensified. “The collectivization of agriculture [in China] encountered resistance on the part of peasants,” Soviet economists concluded in early 1957.⁴³ Disturbances racked the newly formed cooperatives but Mao was convinced that it was impossible to build “the bright future” without trials and tribulations. “On this matter we are quite heartless!” he said. “On this matter Marxism is indeed cruel and has little mercy, for it is determined to exterminate imperialism, feudalism, capitalism, and small production to boot…… Our aim is to exterminate capitalism, obliterate it from the face of the earth and make it a thing of the past. What emerges in history is bound to die out.”⁴⁴ The scale of peasant resistance, however, was nowhere near that in the Soviet Union during collectivization. On the whole, socialism came rather peacefully to the Chinese countryside.

At the same time, in 1955–56, the CCP, on Mao Zedong's initiative, carried out the large-scale socialist transformation of industry and commerce. These reforms were the continuation of measures taken in 1951 and 1952 that had been directed against the urban bourgeoisie. In 1953–54 the CCP had established state control over the sale of all important consumer goods, thereby sharply limiting the market economy. State industrial and commercial companies squeezed out private firms. The communists made use of various kinds of so-called lower forms of state capitalism. To a certain degree they repeated what the Guomindang regime had already done in the 1930s and 1940s. This included such things as the government buying up the products of private enterprises and state orders for the compulsory delivery of raw materials at fixed prices. In 1955 the state placed about 80 percent of small and medium enterprises under its control. The large enterprises, those employing five hundred workers and staff, were transformed into joint state-private enterprises by having the state invest capital through purchasing stock in the companies. By mid-1956 private property had been basically destroyed throughout the country.⁴⁵ Mao valued this as a victory of the socialist revolution in the economic realm, an early fulfillment of the party's general line; at this time he believed that the general line was aimed at resolving the question of property.⁴⁶

The upshot was that the CCP succeeded in radically transforming Chinese society in the shortest possible time. Its tactics were effective in both the cities and the countryside and did not encounter significant opposition from wealthier Chinese. The resistance of the bourgeoisie was weakened by the decision of the Chinese government to “buy out” private industrial property. On October 29, 1955, Mao offered the Chinese capitalists significant monetary compensation and full employment as well as high social status in exchange for their promise not to sabotage the socialist reforms. The capitalists had to surrender their property to the government voluntarily.⁴⁷ A subsequent government decision established that they would be paid 5 percent annual interest over a seven-year period.⁴⁸ (In reality, the payments continued for an even longer period, up until 1966.)

It was actually the working class that demonstrated the most resistance to CCP policies, something that came as a shock to a party that proclaimed its fidelity to the cause of the proletariat. The socialist transformation, however, led to deterioration in the material condition of workers. They lost a number of privileges they had previously enjoyed while exercising control over the entrepreneurs. The system of workers' control that had been introduced following the communist victory in 1949 served to defend the interests of workers. But this system was short-lived. The establishment by the CCP of official trade unions in place of actual workers' control, a transformation that took place after the state took over the means of production, led to a reduction in the living standards of manual laborers. The official trade unions, controlled by the state, defended the government, not the workers. The latter began to express their dissatisfaction by means of strikes, which the local authorities managed to suppress with considerable difficulty. According to official data, between August 1956 and January 1957 there were more than 10,000 large and small strikes by workers and more than 10,000 strikes by students and pupils.⁴⁹ Judging from available Chinese archives, workers in the former private companies in Shanghai were particularly active. In the spring of 1957, there were “large disturbances” at 587 enterprises in Shanghai involving about 30,000 workers and less serious disturbances at more than 700 mills and factories. About 90 percent of the incidents took place at factories newly brought under state control.⁵⁰

By the end of 1956, as a result of accelerated industrial development and forced socialist reforms, the Chinese economy began to experience a number of economic difficulties connected to shortages of raw materials, electricity, and qualified workers. At the same time a triumph of socialism strengthened the CCP rigid dictatorship over the society. The party bureaucracy now enjoyed not only absolute political authority but also total economic power. Under these circumstances, with a national economy now completely under state control, the communist elite could launch even more dangerous experiments in an effort to resolve all economic difficulties by its iron will. Here Mao still followed Stalin, who had asserted: “There are no fortresses that the working people, the Bolsheviks, cannot capture.”⁵¹

¹ Quoted from “Dnevnik sovetskogo posla v Kitae V. V. Kuznetsova” (Diary of the Soviet Ambassador to China V. V. Kuznetsov), 184–85.

² A partial, experimental system of state monopoly over basic consumer goods was introduced in January 1951. On January 5, 1951, the head of the Planning Department of the East China Military-Administrative Committee, Luo Gengmo, informed the Soviet consul-general in Shanghai, Vladimirov, that centralized state purchase of all products from private spinning and weaving mills had been introduced in Shanghai on January 4. “Luo stressed that all of this information was top secret,” Vladimirov, a veteran intelligence agent, reported to Moscow. See AVP RF, collection 0100, inventory 44, file 15, folder 322, sheets 146–47.

³ See ibid.

⁴ See L. D. Bony, “Mekhanizm iz”iatiia tovarnogo zerna v KNR (50'e gody)” (The Mechanism of Grain Acquisition in the PRC [in the 1950s]), in L. P. Deliusin, ed., Kitai: gosudarstvo i obshchestvo (China: State and Society) (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 27, 28.

⁵ Ibid., 33–34.

⁶ See Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 217–18, 290–91; Chou En-lai [Zhou Enlai], “Report on the Proposals for the Second Five-Year Plan for Development of the National Economy,” in Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, vol. 1, Documents (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1956), 270.

⁷ See Gel'bras, Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskaia struktura KNR: 50–60-e gody (The Socioeconomic Structure of the PRC: 1950s and 1960s), 60.

⁸ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 212.

⁹ Ibid., 186.

¹⁰ Quoted from Jiang Boying et al., “Deng Zihui,” in Hu Hua, ed., Zhonggongdang shi renwu zhuan (Biographies of Persons in the History of the CCP), vol. 7 (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1990), 367.

¹¹ See Deliusin, Agrarnye preobrazovaniia v narodnom Kitae (Agrarian Transformation in People's China), 345.

¹² Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in China), series 2, 111.

¹³ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 131–40, 186, 189–90.

¹⁴ See Deliusin, Agrarnye preobrazovaniia v narodnom Kitae (Agrarian Transformation in People's China), 361–86.

¹⁵ Borot'sia za mobilizatsiiu vsekh sil (Struggle to Mobilize All Forces), 33.

¹⁶ Mao, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 4, 497, 498.

¹⁷ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 186.

¹⁸ See Krutikov, Na kitaiskom napravleniu (Pointed Toward China), 169.

¹⁹ Quoted from Shevelev, Formirovaniie sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi politiki rukovodstva KPK v 1949–1956 godakh (The Formulation of the CCP's Socioeconomic Policy in 1949–1956 (manuscript), VI-13.

²⁰ See Jiang, “Deng Zihui,” 369–70; Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 187; Meliksetov, Istoriia Kitaia (History of China), 640. See also Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, eds., The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization in China: Mao, Deng Zihui and the “High Tide” of 1955 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993).

²¹ Quoted from Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 1, 370.

²² Quoted from Shevelev, Formirovaniie sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi politiki rukovodstva KPK v 1949–1956 godakh (The Formulation of the CCP's Socioeconomic Policy in 1949–1956) (manuscript), VI-22.

²³ See Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 1, 374.

²⁴ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 5, 190.

²⁵ Quoted from Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 1, 375.

²⁶ Quoted from ibid., 376.

²⁷ Quoted from Liu and Chen, Liu Shaoqi nianpu, 1898–1969 (Chronological Biography of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), vol. 2, 340.

²⁸ According to Soviet estimates, the Chinese communists disbanded about 200,000 cooperatives. This figure corresponds to data cited in various dazibao (big character wall newspapers) from the Cultural Revolution years of 1966–69 that criticized Liu Shaoqi and his opposition to Mao. See Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 189–90; Jiang, “Deng Zihui,” 369–70; Shevelev, Formirovanie sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi politiki rukovodstva KPK v 1949–1956 godakh (The Formulation of the CCP's Socioeconomic Policy in 1949–1956), VI-24.

²⁹ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 187.

³⁰ Ibid., 213; Mao Zedong, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 5 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1991), 251.

³¹ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 198; Mao, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 5, 251.

³² Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 136.

³³ See Westad, Brothers in Arms, 17.

³⁴ Reshenie shestogo (rasshirennogo) plenuma TsK Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia sed'-mogo sozyva po voprosu o kooperirovanii v sel'skom khoziastve (Decision of the Sixth [enlarged] Plenum of the Seventh CC of the Communist Party of China on the Question of Agricultural Cooperation) (Moscow: Gospolitzdat, 1955), 4–5.

³⁵ See Jiang, “Deng Zihui,” 371.

³⁶ Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 111, and Li Youjiu, “Deng Zihui yu nongye hezuohua yundong” (Deng Zihui and the Movement for Agricultural Cooperativization), in Lu Lin and Chen Dejin, eds., Hongse jiyi: Zhongguo gongchandang lishi koushu shilu (1949–1978) (Red Reminiscences: True Oral Stories of the History of the Chinese Communist Party [1949–1978]) (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 2002), 245.

³⁷ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 243.

³⁸ See Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1996), 52.

³⁹ Figures calculated from Zhongguo gongchandang lishi jiangyi (Lectures on CCP History), vol. 2 (Changchun: Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1981), 590–91.

⁴⁰ Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 106, 107, 110.

⁴¹ See Zhongguo gongchandang lishi jiangyi (Lectures on CCP History), vol. 2 (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1982), 120; Jiang, “Deng Zihui,” 369.

⁴² Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in China), series 2, 110.

⁴³ To be sure, the Chinese side objected to this assertion. See “Memo, PRC Foreign Ministry to the USSR Embassy in Beijing,” 159–60.

⁴⁴ Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5, 214.

⁴⁵ See A. S. Perevertailo et al., eds., Ocherki istorii Kitaia v noveishee vremia (An Outline History of Contemporary China) (Moscow: Nauka, 1959), 576.

⁴⁶ See Borotsia za mobilizatsiiu vsekh sil (Struggle for the Mobilization of All Forces), 12.

⁴⁷ See Zhongguo gongchandang lishi jiangyi (Lectures on CCP History) Jinan, 138–39.

⁴⁸ See Perevertailo, Ocherki istorii Kitaia v noveishee vremia (An Outline History of Contemporary China), 573.

⁴⁹ See Xiao Xiaoqin, ed., Zhonghua renmin gongheguo sishi nian (Forty Years of the People's Republic of China) (Beijing: Beijing shifan xueyuan chubanshe, 1990), 109.

⁵⁰ See Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957,” China Quarterly, no. 137 (March 1994): 1, 9.

⁵¹ J. V. Stalin, Works, vol. 11 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 62.

ⁿ⁶⁴ This physician was named Li Zhisui. He worked in Mao’s entourage for more than twelve years. In 1988 by some miracle he was able to leave China for the United States, where six years later he published his memoirs. In them he revealed many secrets of the private life of Mao Zedong and other leaders of the CCP, which evoked a storm of indignation in the PRC. Afterward, in an interview with U.S. television in January 1995, Dr. Li announced his intention to publish one more work of biography. He was unable, however, to carry out this intention. Several weeks after the interview, he died in Carol Stream, Illinois.