Mao: The Unknown Story

During the trip Liu visited his sister. She had married into the family of a “landlord,” who was categorized as a “class enemy.” When she had written to Liu at the beginning of Mao’s regime about their hardships during the land reform, he had written back giving her all the “correct” and comfortless advice. Now he came with food: 2.5 kg of rice, 1 kg of biscuits, 1 kg of sweets, 9 salted eggs and a jar of lard. His sister was lying in bed famished and extremely ill. She wept as she talked about her husband, who had died not long before in great agony after eating a bun made of unhusked grain, which their daughter had specially saved for him. His weakened stomach could not cope with the coarse food. There were no doctors to call, no hospitals to turn to.

This brother-in-law had written a letter to Liu in 1959, after Liu became president, to tell him about the starvation in the village. The letter was intercepted, and he was punished by being tied to a tree and left out to freeze in bitter winds until he was on the verge of passing out.

Everywhere he went Liu encountered heart-rending sights and tragic stories. He could sense how much people hated the Communists — and him. In his home village a twelve-year-old boy had written “Down with Liu Shao-chi” outside Liu’s old family house. This boy had seen six members of his family succumb to starvation-induced illness within one year, the last being his youngest brother, who had died in his arms; he had been carrying the baby around looking for someone to breast-feed him, as their mother had just died. Liu told the police not to punish the boy as a “counter-revolutionary,” which would normally have been the charge for such an act.

He also stopped the local authorities punishing peasants for “stealing” food, making a striking admission to the villagers that it was the regime that was robbing them. “Commune members think this way,” Liu said. “Since you take from us, why can’t I take from you? Since you take a lot, why can’t I take a little?”

Liu did something else unprecedented. He apologized to the peasants for the misrule the Communists had brought. After nearly forty years away, he said, “I am shocked to see my fellow-villagers are leading such a harsh life … I feel responsible for causing so much suffering to you, and I must apologise …” He started to sob, and bowed to the villagers.

The trip marked Liu profoundly. After he returned to Peking, he told the top managers: “We cannot go on like this.”

IN AUGUST 1961, as autumn harvest time approached, Mao once again gathered his managers under the clouds of Mount Lushan to fix the food extraction figures. Liu pressed him to set them lower. The two men had many arguments, and the tension in their relationship seeped through to their outward behavior, as the teenage son of a provincial boss observed. He was swimming in the reservoir with other children of high officials when Mao arrived. The children clambered excitedly onto the wooden platform where Mao was sitting with bodyguards and dancing girls. The boy told Mao he had swallowed some water while swimming. Mao said: “It’s nothing to be choked by thousands of mouthfuls of water when swimming, you have to be choked by ten thousand mouthfuls before you master it.” Choking when learning to swim was a metaphor for “learning comes at a price,” one that Mao often enlisted to explain away his repeated economic disasters. Soon Liu Shao-chi swam over with his bodyguards, and climbed onto the platform. He and Mao did not exchange so much as a nod. They just sat apart, in a space of about 30 square meters, smoking, not speaking a word. The boy remembered wondering: “How come they don’t greet each other?”

Mao’s other colleagues had also been trying to reason with him. After touring an old Red base area in Hebei, Chou En-lai told Mao that people “have only tree leaves, salted vegetables and wild herbs, and absolutely nothing else. There is genuinely no grain left.” Mao was mightily irritated, and once, while Chou was describing what he had seen, snapped: “What’s all the fuss about?”

Nevertheless, under intense pressure at Lushan, Mao accepted a cut in food requisitions of over 34 percent from the figure he had set at the beginning of the year. As a result, deaths from starvation in 1961 fell by nearly half from the year before — though they still approached 12 million.