The bulk of the Kuomintang troops who surrendered to the Japanese became puppet troops. The CCP in its official history claims Chiang Kai-shek secretly ordered many of his troops to surrender to the Japanese invaders and then, under the command of the Japanese, to attack the 8th Route Army and New 4th Army. Because of Chiang’s orders the Japanese were able to mobilise over 90% of those who surrendered.[66]
The KMT – as a result of the Southern Anhwei Incident – imposed a tight blockade on the entire area controlled by the CCP and withdrew its subsidies to the 8th Route Army (worth about 10 million silver dollars in 1940). In Yenan, prices of everything rocketed and there were substantial tax increases on all sections including the formerly-exempt poor peasants. October 1940 saw the Red Army launch a surprise attack on Japanese forces causing significant losses of Japanese troops. In response by January 1941, the Japanese army had concentrated nearly two-thirds of its forces on the Liberated Areas located behind Japanese lines, and a large-scale campaign was launched based on the policy of ‘Burn-all, Kill-all and Loot-all’. The essence of this policy was to surround a given area, kill all young men, kill or steal all livestock, destroy everything possible, all the houses, furniture, farming implements and tools, so that the area would be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.[67]
When rallying support in the face of these adversities and attempting to make the Border Region economically self-sufficient, the CCP found serious divisions opening up in the Party. There was conflict between the largely illiterate peasant layers recruited as a result of the land revolution (mild though it was), and who formed the great majority of the rank and file, and the more recent incomers who were invariably literate had joined the Party on the basis of its Popular Front and reformist policies, and formed the majority of the administrators. The taxes imposed on one group supported the other and the self-sufficiency campaign threatened to generate a division of potentially disastrous proportions. There was also grave concern about the quality of the cadres. Party membership had risen from 40,000 to nearly 800,000 between 1937 and 1940 but with the exception of the leading cadres and some intellectuals there had been virtually no education in Marxist-Leninist ideas (or any other kind of education or training).[68]
An added complication was that for the local population, Party membership had become a route to upward social movement. Selden has provided data which shows that in at least one area, over half those who joined the Party locally did so as poor peasants or landless labourers but within a year the majority had gained sufficient land to be classed as middle peasants: “Party members … had been major beneficiaries in the land revolution.”[69] This had a conservatising effect, promoting opposition within the CCP itself to the new higher taxes, a large part of which were spent in supporting the newcomers.
The answer was a Rectification Campaign that sought to educate Party members in the CCP version of Marxism, motivate them to adopt the radical measures necessary for self-sufficiency and to accept Party discipline. In 1941, the CCP began a series of training programmes to overcome the deficiencies in Party cadres that had appeared. Possibly in preparation for this campaign Mao, in early 1938, had made a study of the works of Stalin to determine which should be translated into Chinese.
The character of this initial Rectification Campaign can be seen from material which participants were expected to read, study and make notes on prior to discussing them: Stalin, On Bolshevisation of the Party; Stalin, Problems of Organisational Leadership; Dimitrov, Cadre Policy and Cadre Education Policy; a selection of Stalin’s writings on Party Discipline, Party Democracy and Equalitarianism; the Conclusions from the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[70] To emphasise Mao’s pre-eminence within the CCP six of his pamphlets were on the list to be studied.
Within the Party there was a group of intellectuals, writers and artists who were becoming increasingly dissatisfied and had come to believe the rich peasant elements within the Popular Front were putting a brake on social progress, particularly with respect to the liberation of women. This group coalesced around Ding Ling, the Party’s most outspoken and free-thinking woman, and took the opportunity of the Rectification Campaign to publish material unmasking the CCP’s hypocrisy by pointing out instances of inequality in Yenan.
Ding had toured the Border Regions as part of a propaganda group performing plays for the peasants and had been given the job of leading the development of women’s organisations in Yenan, which put her at the focus of the contradictions between mobilising women but limiting their activities to those not deemed divisive. She edited the Literature Section of Liberation Daily, which appeared several times a week. Based on her wide experience of the actual life of peasant women and women within the Party, she wrote an article Thoughts on 8 March, Womens’ Day, which appeared in the 9 March 1942 issue of the paper.[71]
The article only hinted at some issues (those seeking abortions risked punishment; some babies were wrapped in soft wool and looked after by governesses while others were wrapped in soiled cloth and left crying on their parents’ beds), its main emphasis was to blame the Party for its contradictory attitude of promoting the role of wife and mother and then when the “woman’s skin was wrinkled, her hair thin, and fatigue had robbed her of the last traces of attractiveness, she was blamed for her political backwardness” which was then used as a reason to get a divorce. The article was condemned as “narrowly feminist”, Ding Ling was removed from her post on Liberation Daily, and she and others were successfully pressured to repent and disown their criticisms.[72]
Ding’s accusation that Party leaders married at their convenience and divorced their wives when it suited them with little regard for the principles of equality, is supported by Hua Chang-Ming.[73] In a situation where men outnumbered women by as many as 18:1 this behaviour of the leaders must have seemed particularly reprehensible and a clear abuse of position. In Yenan the bureaucracy was increasingly becoming aware of itself and defence of the family as an institution took on the character of defence of a conservative element in society which would act as a prop for the Party elite. This was very similar to the defence of the family taking place in the Soviet Union at about this time. Zhou Enlai took the lead to emphasise the importance of motherhood, to argue that women had a “natural” pre-disposition to look after the welfare of the home within the context of family life.[74] He laid down ground rules that the Party would faithfully follow. Mao, in 1958, would return to this theme and claim that not only did Chinese society need the family but that the family needed a head.[75]
Ding Ling’s article was the first of several that criticised the ruling Party elite. The most damaging came from Wang Shiwei (Wang Shih-wei), a young writer and translator who had been to study in Moscow in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He had associated with a Trotskyist group in Shanghai for which he translated a number of Trotsky’s works. In 1936 he travelled to Yenan to become a research officer in the translation department of the Academy for Marxist-Leninist Studies. In this post he enjoyed privileges of cadre clothing and extra food, and was close to the Party elite.[76]
Wang was also employed on the Liberation Daily and specialised in the short essay (zawen), traditionally used in China to expose social ills and often used by Communist writers in political debates. Wang Shiwei was by no means the only one who spoke out against the CCP’s leadership, but he was unique in that he refused to recant and remained unrepentant. His Wild Lilies which criticised the hierarchical structure and privileges of the Party bureaucracy appeared in two parts in the Literature section of the paper on 13 and 23 March 1942.[77]
The title Wild Lilies was itself a barb against Mao’s taste for women, especially young actresses from Shanghai, which was common gossip. Mao had married one such actress, Lan Ping (Jiang Qing), in 1939. Ostensibly Wild Lilies is a story about 26 year old Li Fen a student comrade who was handed over to the authorities by her uncle because she was a Communist. “Before going to her death, she put on all her three sets of underclothes and sewed them tightly together at the top and the bottom. This was because the troops in Pao-ch’ing often incited riff-raff to debauch the corpses of young girl Communists they had shot.” Li Fen is presented as a model of sexual reticence and self-sacrifice which stood in stark contradiction to the activities of the Party elite who were well known for their parties, dances and drinking, and which were a clear symbol of the social stratification that existed. Readers could well contrast the woman – Li Fen – to whom the article was dedicated, with Mao’s taste for dramatic beauty. In case the lessons were missed, Wang wrote the articles in a parody of Mao Zedong’s renowned colloquial style and salty peasant language.[78]
More importantly for the bureaucracy, was the criticism of the hierarchical system of ranks maintained by the Party, and justified by attacks on petty-bourgeois egalitarianism. Rank and file Communists had little or no money with which to buy food or clothes on the open market and so depended on the food and clothing allocated by the local Soviet administration. Wang made his often-quoted criticism of the five levels for food:
At present there is no noodle soup for sick comrades to eat and young students only get two meals of thin congee (a type of rice porridge) a day – when they’re asked whether they have had enough to eat, Party members are expected to lead the rest in a chorus of ‘Yes, we’re full!’. What is more, relatively healthy ‘big shots’ get far more than they need or than is reasonable to eat and drink, with the result that their subordinates look upon them as a race apart.[79]
Wang also attacked the three levels of clothing whereby the higher the Party rank, the better the clothing provided.
The bureaucracy had been challenged where it was weakest, on its privileges. The CCP machinery swung into action and pressured Wang Shiwei to retract his criticisms. Wang refused, the CCP’s initial attacks only made him more intransigent and popular amongst his supporters. Wang was put on trial for disrupting party unity, slandering party leaders, espousing Trotskyist ideas, and being a member of a group of subversive Trotskyists within the CCP. The trial took the form of a series of public struggle sessions in May and June of 1942, and on 10 June Wang was found guilty of absolute egalitarianism, being hostile to democratic centralism and Party discipline and hence, anti-Party.
The Liberation Daily, produced a day-by-day diary of the anti-Wang meetings including his public cross-examination. This diary was to act as a guide for future public meetings in CPC rectification campaigns. Its purpose was to popularise the Party’s view and guide the readers to accept the leadership’s rationale for the social differentiation that existed, and the predetermined verdict of the trial.
Mao and the Party leadership broadened the scope of the Rectification Campaign to include all critical writers; first in Mao’s Yenan Talks in May 1942, and then in the campaign against Wang Shiwei. The Yenan Forum on Literature and Art was held in relative secrecy and was not reported in the Liberation Daily. Mao published his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art about one year later.[80] His themes sound familiar – literature, especially, must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers, content should be Party-directed and form should suit the needs of the Chinese peasants and workers. All the Party’s newspapers were re-organised to fit with the Party’s rectification movement, i.e. no dissident writers allowed. Mao side-stepped the content of the criticisms and counter-attacked along true Stalinist lines: “There are a few people who speak from an incorrect standpoint, that is, the concept of absolute egalitarianism and the methods of covert attacks.”
Mao was simply repeating in a Chinese context the arguments for proletarian (or socialist) art given a decade earlier in the Soviet Union. Despite the propaganda, the arguments that sought to reduce literature to an expression of the immediate political and practical needs of the Chinese workers and peasants were, in reality, arguments to protect the interests of the bureaucracy. Since the bureaucracy equated its interests with those of the socialist revolution it interpreted any attack on itself as counter-revolutionary.
After Mao’s Yenan talks, the Rectification Programme to “correct unorthodox tendencies” took on a much darker character and was extended and deepened to eradicate all independent criticism within the Party. The thought-reform movement which was carried out in Yenan during 1941-44 would become a well-established part of CCP cadre training. As with the Futian incident, to both stimulate and justify the excesses of the campaign, it was suddenly announced that as many as 10% of CCP members were KMT agents who had to be rooted out.
Benton has described Mao’s intensive purging of the Party from 1942-1944 as the fourth Bolshevisation of the CCP, and has claimed that it was even more effective than when Stalin mastered the Comintern after 1924.[81] The 1942 Rectification Campaign did not use the term Bolshevisation largely because it sounded too foreign for a movement that was purporting to unite Marxism-Leninism with the concrete reality of the Chinese Revolution. The purpose was to root out and destroy all remaining leftist opposition to the leadership of the Party, especially those influenced by the Trotskyists who opposed the Popular Front. It also had the aim of extending the rule of the Mao group into the subsidiary bases established outside the main Shanxi base and to politically homogenise the new raw recruits.
What made this campaign uniquely sinister and effective was the extent it extended into the lives of ordinary Party members. In Yenan the same comrades tended to sleep and socialise in their work groups. One of the first instructions by the leadership was to limit contact between different groups to trusted Party cadres. These semi-isolated groups then became the basis for the campaign, which was managed so that the personal ties and links that had formed within a group became a weapon against the individual members. Group criticisms isolated individuals and subjected them to the rebukes and admonishments of all others present, which was intended to shake their self-confidence. These meetings, which could be daily and last for three or four hours, could result in demotion and additional work that placed the offender in a humiliating position. It is claimed that all members of the CCP had their activities reviewed and if sufficient ground were found (a chance remark, even cracking a joke), they were made to provide additional information on themselves and their life experiences sufficient for their peer group to subject them to extensive criticism.
Individuals who were believed to require thought reform were reported to a Party committee and the next step, if necessary, was one or more public struggle meetings where the individuals were publicly accused and humiliated before a large and usually jeering audience, allegedly representing the community. In Chinese society where great emphasis was, and is, placed on group esteem, these were powerful and effective methods of obtaining obedience to authority.
Mao did not exempt the top of the Party if he sensed any weaknesses. In the case of Peng De-huai (deputy commander of the 8th Route Army) who took equality and fraternity too seriously, these sessions are said to have lasted forty days, while for Zhou Enlai who had been too close to Wang Ming, five days was deemed enough.[82]
The combination of one’s workmates, colleagues, comrades, friends, and companions exerted an almost irresistible pressure to conform. As the pressure increased and individuals found no escape from the denigration of their old selves, they were made to write and re-write confessions of their evil conduct, analysing the reasons why and asserting their desire to change. Pressure was often increased by a period in jail, possibly in solitary confinement but more likely in a cell with others. This prepared them for the final stages of recantation and reconciliation. When the confession was finally accepted and the Party welcomed them back into the fold, the accused naturally experienced a tremendous relief and elation and willingly accepted Party guidance. Whether this psychological experience did change personalities is less certain than the fact that it was a highly unpleasant experience to be avoided in future. One way or the other, the result was conformity to the Party line.[83]
The Rectification Campaign, which lasted from 1942 to 1944, was largely successful in eliminating the last vestiges of democracy, free speech and open criticism of the leadership within the CCP. How many were driven mad, to nervous breakdowns or to mental disorder will never be known but it is certainly in the thousands. Sad to say, the main way of protest was suicide, with some desperate individuals killing their families first.
During the upsurge of Maoism in the West, during the sixties and seventies it was often claimed that Mao had shown a qualitative difference from Stalin in that the rectification programme had not massacred dissidents but had re-educated them. This, it was argued even by certain leading Trotskyists, was a qualitative difference between Mao and Stalin.
The outcomes of the purges in the Soviet Union and of the Rectification Campaign in the CCP were the same: complete domination by the leader. Mao had shown in the Futian incident that he was prepared to kill thousands of Party members and Red Army troops to secure his position. In Yenan he used a different approach for many reasons, including:
- The CCP was part of a Popular Front and promoting unity. It would have been very difficult to launch a mass extermination campaign simultaneously.
- Stalin purged the Bolshevik Party, a party which had led a successful revolution and had a history of internal democracy. To ensure bureaucratic rule he had to remove all those whose activities extended back to 1917 and before. No such situation existed in China. The CCP had been thoroughly Stalinised by the time of the defeats of 1927, party membership did not pose the same threat to the leadership as in the USSR.
- Mao, unlike Stalin, was not yet in total control of the Party. Any moves to physically eliminate dissidents were likely to have been seen as a threat to his opponents (such as the 28 Bolsheviks) who would – to save their skins – have had to fight back, and they still held a large number of leadership positions within the Party.
- Stalin was seeking to eliminate any possible threat to the bureaucracy’s hold on state power after a successful revolution. The CCP was still in the stage of making a revolution, Mao had time to achieve his domination of the Party by other means.
- By the time Mao launched the Rectification Campaign it was clear that the Great Purge in the USSR had resulted in widespread chaos in government departments, an atmosphere in which no-one would make a decision and there had been a sharp drop in recruitment to the Party. From Mao’s viewpoint the Great Purge had been a wasteful and disruptive process. The Rectification Campaign could achieve the same goals much more efficiently and without the disruption.
- Unlike Stalin, Mao had played a leading role in the development of the CCP and PLA and could honestly lay claim to the leading position; to be accepted as Lenin’s Lieutenant, Stalin had to imprison or kill those who knew the real history of 1917.
It was openly argued that in the Yenan period, Mao emphasised magnanimity towards his opponents. This was part of the so-called ‘Yenan spirit’.[84] However, the scientific truism that the exception tests the rule, is applicable here. Acceptance of the Rectification Campaign in the West was because Mao appeared relatively benevolent to those whom he considered a political threat. Wang Shiwei spent five years in prison making matchboxes, and was allowed to meet a number of outside visitors to demonstrate the nobility of the CCP. In 1947, when Yenan once again came under KMT attack, the Communists were forced to quickly retreat. Wang Shiwei was summarily executed during the evacuation from Yenan. Sources differ, but all agree he was killed: either shot or hacked to pieces with an axe, most likely on the direct orders of Mao, confirmed by Kang Sheng, head of security of the Communist Party.[85] While Wang Shiwei was imprisoned and then murdered for revealing the layers of bureaucratic privileges that existed in Yenan, eminent socialists such as Isaac Deutscher could write that Mao “had lived all those years amongst the poorest peasants, … had allowed no differences in food rations and uniforms and no social estrangement between officers and men.”[86]
At the start of 1942, as the Rectification Campaign swung into its stride, the CCP abandoned any attempt to mobilise women behind appeals to emancipation and gender equality. A meeting of senior cadres agreed that raising women’s political consciousness was generally permitted but that cadres should ensure it took second place to economic mobilisation, because of both war needs and concerns about potential resentment from male peasants. For the next period the CCP would continue to emphasise women’s participation in production as opposed to a wider general equality, and moved decisively to shore up the patriarchy of its civilian and military forces on the grounds that to make the border region self-sufficient required avoiding inter-social conflict.[87]
On 26 February 1943, the CC issued a statement apparently criticising itself for the lack of progress towards equality for women. In reality it was a re-orientation of Party work away from women’s self-organisation, women-specific projects and slogans. These were now considered a waste of labour power and material resources. Now the Party emphasised “the need to overthrow feudalism gradually” and called on women to achieve liberation through “working harmoniously within the (patriarchal) family towards common economic goals.” There followed a stream of articles in Liberation Daily explaining that work in production and the economic freedom it brought was the way for women to gradually liberate themselves from feudal discipline.[88] In fact, the CCP needed to revive the old handicrafts that had been destroyed by the influx of Western machine-made goods because these articles could no longer be obtained due to the KMT blockade. To supply the cloth for uniforms, weaving and spinning were re-introduced.
The drive to get women into production resulted in major successes such as the development of the textile industry, in which the Women’s Federation took a leading role. The CCP used local technical knowledge to develop cotton and hemp production, based almost completely on women’s labour and expertise. Much of the raw product was grown through women’s work teams, with virtually all the spinning and further processing out-sourced to co-operatives of women working at home. The articles carried by Liberation Daily now focused almost exclusively on promoting such activities and praising the women involved for their contributions.
However, the Yenan women were too successful at organising themselves, and by 1945, lack of co-ordination and planning by the Party tops led to serious supply and distribution problems. Bureaucratic direction and lack of involvement of the women concerned in overall planning soon became apparent; there was no work plan to match production with need, there was little or no matching of training and personnel with equipment available, the places where cotton was grown were too far from where the spinning was done, the Party cadres had emphasised spinning so that a village could be without weaving facilities, and there were no plans on how to train women to effect repairs, etc.[89]
Goodman has pointed out that in words, the CCP formally remained committed to gender equality but this was not supported by practical activity. The previous encouragement for women to participate in politics now gradually disappeared whilst their mobilisation for production was highly praised. The emphasis on social issues was placed on the rights of the male. Despite constant pressure from the Women’s Federation, the traditional practice whereby widows were forbidden to remarry was repeatedly upheld. It was only under the pressure of food shortages that this finally changed in 1944, resulting in the marriage of 300 bachelors and widows. However, the same logic – that a lower number of households should be generally encouraged because they required less food – had also led a year earlier to divorce being banned.[90] Of course occasionally, in some places, outstanding women did take the lead and create opportunities for genuine participation in social and political activities but these were exceptions to the general rule.
Despite the Popular Front, progress was made in women’s liberation up to about 1945 particularly in taking women out of the home and into production because this required eliminating such feudal customs as foot-binding and the isolation of women. However, radical social measures could only be enacted if ‘self-financing’, so the Party developed a system, for example, whereby women suing for divorce, besides supporting themselves took on the additional burden of paying their husbands grain or money to compensate for the loss of a worker.[91]
-
Hu Chiao-mu, Op. cit.
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Johnson, C. Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Stanford U.P. 1962, p56.
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Selden, M. The Yenan Way, Harvard U.P. 1971, p188-189.
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Ibid, p111.
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North, Op. cit. p196.
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Ding Ling, Thoughts on 8 March, libcom.org/library/thoughts-8-march-women%E2%80%99s-day.
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Benton, G. The Yenan Opposition, NLR., 92. 1975, p93-106.
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Hua Chang-Ming, Op. cit.
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Manning, K. Making a Great Leap Forward?, Gender & History, 2006, 18(3)574-593.
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Wu, E. The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao,1989, Harvard U.P., 1989, p456.
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Cheek, T. The Fading of Wild Lilies, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No 11, 1984, p25-58.
-
libcom.org/library/wild-lily.
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Cheek, Op. cit.
-
libcom.org/library/wild-lily.
-
Mao Zedong Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, 2 May 1942, w.m.org.
-
Benton G. Bolshevising China: From Lenin to Stalin to Mao, 1921-1944. Leeds Univ., East Asia Papers No 22, 1996.
-
Chang, J. and Halliday, J. Mao, Vintage, 2007, p321-322.
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Fairbank, J. The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985 Harper Perennial, 1987 p255 et seq.
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Shao-Chuan Leng, Pre-1949 Development of the Communist Chinese System of Justice, The China Quarterly, No. 30, 1967, p93-114.
-
Short, P. Mao, McMillan, 2001.
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Deutscher, I. Stalin, Pelican, 1949, p582-3.
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Goodman, D. Revolutionary Women and Women in the Revolution, The China Quarterly, No. 164, 2000, p915-942.
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Stranahan, Op. cit.
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Stranahan, Op. cit.
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Goodman, Op. cit.
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Hua Chang-Ming. Op. cit.