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In March 1961, the most important issue facing China was the nationwide famine then claiming the lives of millions of peasants. The purpose of the expanded politburo work conference in Guangzhou was to review agricultural policy. Mao had spent much of February absorbed in formulating a workable agricultural program and planned to submit a draft of his plan to the work conference for review.
The article Mao wanted me to read was about an innovation in agricultural organization that Anhui had introduced to cope with the crisis. Anhui, traditionally one of China's poorest provinces, had been devastated by the famine. In the beginning, Anhui party secretary Zeng Xisheng had been an ultra-radical supporter of the Great Leap Forward, and he had introduced Mao to the backyard steel furnaces. By early 1961, some 10 million Anhui peasants were on the verge of starvation, and millions died in the ensuing months. Hundreds of thousands, those with sufficient energy, were fleeing in search of food. Zeng Xisheng's enthusiasm for the Great Leap Forward had dissipated, and he was now desperately trying to restore agricultural production. He had begun distributing small plots of communal land to individual peasants, who agreed to farm the land in return for paying the commune a specified portion of their crop. The peasants did not actually own the land, so Zeng could claim that the system was still “socialist,” and therefore, he hoped, acceptable to Mao.
Zeng Xisheng believed Mao supported him when he began introducing the new policy after the Shanghai meetings in January 1960, more than a year earlier. Mao had spoken well of the field responsibility system then, and Zeng Xisheng had interpreted his words as encouragement. The initial results of the new policy had been positive. Farming their assigned land, responsible for its output, peasants could clearly see the relationship between their efforts, what the land produced, and their income. Agricultural production in Anhui was on the upswing.
Mao's draft proposal to the Guangzhou conference mentioned neither Zeng's new field responsibility system nor other similar forms of household contract production that were being introduced in other parts of China. But after Zeng Xisheng spoke at the meeting on March 15, Mao again seemed to warm to the idea. “If we do it right,” he said after hearing Zeng's presentation, “we can increase national grain production by a billion jin.1 Our lives would be easier then.” Zeng again interpreted Mao's comments as approval.
In fact, controversy over the policy was about to split the Communist party apart.
Ke Qingshi, the Shanghai mayor and now also chief of the politburo's East China region, led the battle against Zeng. Ke was still a close follower of Mao and no friend of Zeng Xisheng. He believed in socialism for the sake of socialism. As head of the East China region, Ke Qingshi should have been overseeing work in Anhui, and he felt slighted that Zeng had introduced the new responsibility system without consulting him first. He would soon become the most vocal spokesman for retaining a collective system whatever the cost.
The convictions of the central leadership were not yet clear at the Guangzhou meetings. But their proclivities were. It was in March 1961 that I first heard Deng Xiaoping, speaking in support of Zeng's proposal, make what was to become the most famous and notorious statement of his political career: “I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat,” he said. “It's a good cat so long as it catches mice.” Call it capitalist or socialist, Deng's overriding goal was to raise agricultural production and end the famine.
Liu Shaoqi, always less forceful than Deng, his language less colorful, came to his position more gradually. But even in Guangzhou, he was inclined to permit experiments in household production.
The Guangzhou meetings did not settle the issue. Party leaders wanted more firsthand information on what was happening in the countryside before deciding how the problems could best be solved. Mao's draft regulations on work in the people's communes (the so-called 60 points) were approved without reference to Zeng's new innovations, but the draft status of the proposal meant that changes could be introduced later. The country's top leaders decided to go to the rural areas themselves to investigate, and agreed to reconvene in May to report on what they had learned. Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Deng Xiaoping left for the countryside immediately. The public facade of unity had been maintained.
But behind the scenes the party was seething with tension, torn by increasingly insidious clashes of personality and ideology and Mao's growing willingness to promote his sycophantic followers regardless of their abilities or skills.
I sensed from the moment I read the article about household contract production that Zeng Xisheng's policy would bring trouble. On the surface, the policy made excellent sense. If distributing land directly to the peasants was the most effective way to increase agricultural production, then clearly that policy was best for China. Agriculture was the lifeline of the country. Millions were dying of hunger. We had to eat. The majority of the country's leaders had chosen the socialist road because they believed that only socialism could overcome poverty, increase the living standard of the vast majority of Chinese people, and make China rich and powerful again. This is why I supported socialism—not for socialism's sake but rather as a means to an end. Faced with a severe agricultural crisis, many party leaders believed that returning farming responsibility to individual peasant households would cause production to increase. When agricultural production did go up, support for the experiment grew.
The problem with Zeng's policy was that it smacked of private farming, which was not socialist. The party was being divided by its members' different perceptions of what socialism meant and what was best for the country. Mao believed in socialism for the sake of socialism. His highest ideal was not wealth or production but collective ownership, life in common, equality, a primitive form of sharing. Whether socialism would increase the living standard of the Chinese people was one of Mao's concerns but not the main one. He knew that the peasants wanted above all to own their own land. “What we want, though,” Mao said, “is socialism. We are facing difficulties in agricultural production now, so we have to make concessions to the peasants. But this is not the direction we should take in the future.”
Nor did it matter to him that household farming seemed more effective than the commune in increasing agricultural output. He was stubborn. “Some people,” he said, quoting an old Chinese saying, “don't give up their convictions until they see the Yellow River and have no other place to retreat. I don't give up my convictions even when I see the Yellow River.” Mao would not give up.
When the leadership reconvened in Beijing in May and June 1961, the country was in serious trouble. The people were visibly thinner, their faces grayer, their bodies more swollen from malnutrition. The streets were emptier. People were staying at home. They had no energy to work or to go outside. The first wave of urban transfers had begun. Unable to supply the cities with food, the party was sending some 10 million urban residents from all over the country to rural areas—a way of minimizing the possibility of urban unrest and of bringing the hungry closer to potential supplies of food.
The news from the leaders' fact-finding visits to the countryside left little cause for optimism. The situation in the rural areas was bad. The convictions of the party leadership were becoming more firm. The adamantly pragmatic Chen Yun, silent during the meetings in March, was the most vocal of Mao's dissenters. “The peasants are doing nothing now but complain,” he reported. “They are saying that under Chiang Kai-shek they ‘suffered' but had plenty to eat. Under Mao Zedong everything is ‘great' but they eat only porridge. All we have to do is give the peasants their own land. Then everyone will have plenty to eat.” Chen Yun wanted to disband the communes altogether and return the land to the peasants.
Mao's 60-point draft on commune organization was revised again. The public dining halls, already abandoned in many parts of the countryside, were officially dismantled, and the leadership decided to send another 10 million urban residents to the countryside in 1962. Output targets for industry, steel production in particular, were scaled back dramatically. But the communes remained intact, and the public unity of the party was maintained.
In the summer of 1961, Mao returned to his mountain retreat in Lushan, the site of the disastrous meeting in 1959 when Peng Dehuai wrote his letter of criticism and Mao forced the defense chief's dismissal. Mao wanted to convene another meeting. This time there would be an agenda, focusing on the readjustment of the national plan for agriculture and industry, and Mao would tolerate no disruptions.
Mao still had supporters when the meetings convened in August 1961. Ke Qingshi could always be counted on to follow the Chairman's lead. Lin Biao, too, was vocal in his admiration. In May, Lin had ordered the army's nationally circulated newspaper, Liberation Army Daily, to print a short aphorism from Chairman Mao on the front page of every edition. The military commander was leading a new campaign within the army to study Mao's thought, taking every opportunity to declare that “the thought of Mao Zedong is the highest manifestation of Marxism-Leninism” and to encourage the entire population to “read Chairman Mao's books, listen to Chairman Mao's words, and be Chairman Mao's good soldiers.” But his admiration for the Chairman seemed to me less a matter of genuine conviction than a stepping-stone to power.
Wang Renzhong, the Hubei party secretary, also supported Mao. He was by then an unthinking sycophant. Peng Dehuai seemed to reverse himself, criticizing the household contract system and arguing that the collective economy ought to contribute the dominant share of the national income.
Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were silent on the issue of rural collectives. Both had angered Mao over collectivization and did not want to irritate him again. Tao Zhu, Guangdong's first party secretary and newly promoted head of the central-south region, wavered, generally favoring household contract production but suggesting that only 30 percent of collectively held land be distributed to households. “This way people won't starve to death,” Tao said. “If this is capitalism, then I prefer capitalism. Do we really want everyone to be poor under socialism?”
Liu Shaoqi was moving more firmly in the direction of contracting agricultural production to individual households. “We have to go into maximum retreat in both industry and agriculture,” he said. “Anything that lifts the peasants' spirit is good. We can't say that one method is best to the exclusion of all others. We need to adopt the system of household contracts and individualized farming.”
Deng Xiaoping still did not care whether cats were black or white, declaring his support for whatever system would increase agricultural output. To continue collective farming, he thought, was pointless. When Ke Qingshi criticized Zeng Xisheng's description of the benefits of contract farming, Deng rebuffed him. “It's too early for the East China region to reach that conclusion,” Deng snapped.
Mao disagreed. I thought he would be ruthless. In 1960, Mao had invited me to join him for a meeting with the colorful, wiry British field marshal Bernard Montgomery. Montgomery had accused Mao of being a tyrant, and when he arrived at the entrance to Yinian Hall in Zhongnanhai, wearing a bright red shirt, Mao shook Montgomery's hand and asked whether he minded shaking hands with an aggressor. “If you cannot push everything else aside and fight ruthlessly for your goal,” he had told Montgomery, “then you will not reach it. You have to know exactly what you want and then ruthlessly remove every obstacle standing in your way.”
I had expected him to be ruthless in Lushan, urging his own view upon a recalcitrant party elite. But he was not. He rarely even attended the meetings, following them instead through the written reports that were presented to him each evening. He met once in private with Anhui's Zeng Xisheng, cautioning him further against private farming, but there were no great outbursts of ire.
Mao was still in retreat, in part from necessity and in part by his own strategic calculations. Withholding his final judgment, permitting voice to other views, he was once more allowing the snakes to come out of their holes. His enemies' views were solidifying. The battle lines were being drawn.
But I knew Mao was furious with the party leadership. One night in the midst of the meeting, while we were studying English, he suddenly said, “All the good party members are dead. The only ones left are a bunch of zombies.”
I was astounded. Only with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution five years later would I know for certain who those “zombies” were and realize that he would be happy to see them dead, too.
1 A jin, or catty, is 1.1 pounds.