The Tragedy of Liberation

A Review and Observations

Frank Dikotter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006. Prior to that, he taught modern Chinese history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He holds an honorary doctorate from Leiden University and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

He has written a number of books on the modern history of China. Of particular note are three titles which form The People’s Trilogy and which cover the history of China under Mao Zedong. The first book in the series The Tragedy of Liberation overs the period from 1949 to 1956.The second book – Mao’s  Great Famine – covers the period 1958 to 1962 and the final book – The Cultural Revolution – takes the story from 1962 to 1975.

The People's Trilogy documents the impact of Communist-led China on the lives of ordinary people. It is based on new archival material. The books are not a light read. The research has been thorough and meticulous. `The thematic development of the chapters, at times pedestrian, tell in often frightening detail the way in which the Communists, directed by a frequently obtuse and unclear Mao Zedong, ran the minutiae of life in China. No aspects of day-to-day existence avoided scrutiny. Frequently policies would be implemented with extraordinary haste, to be later abandoned. Mao’s strategy seemed to be one of continuous chaos. But his chaos was not of an anarchical nature but was designed to cement his own power and to eliminate, either directly or indirectly, opposition.

At times Mao would encounter resistance. In 1956 he faced some opposition from some of his senior cadres and surprisingly allowed criticism – indeed welcomed it – in the movement known as the Hundred Flowers. Let a Hundred Flowers bloom was the Maoist metaphor for criticism and a certain level of free speech. But just as suddenly the hundred flowers were uprooted. The critics had had their say, were revealed and were ruthlessly suppressed at Mao began his next great plan – the Great Leap Forward – which was the subject of Mao’s Great Famine.

The books were not published in chronological sequence. Famine in fact was published first, followed by The Tragedy of Liberation. The Cultural Revolution was published last.

The Tragedy of Liberation challenges the view that the early years of the People's Republic of China were constructive and relatively benign, at least when compared with the destruction of the preceding Chinese Civil War , or the subsequent Great Leap Forward.

Dikotter describes it as an era of "calculated terror and systematic violence", characterised by indoctrination, ill-conceived economic policies that stunted growth, the uprooting of traditional social relations, and officially mandated "death quotas" that contributed to the unnatural deaths of 5 million people within the first decade of the establishment of the republic.

Dikotter has been the subject of some controversy. There is no doubt that he holds no brief at all for Mao Zedong who comes through in all the books as a scheming, power-hungry malevolent monster who set quotas for the number of citizens who were to be liquidated without giving a thought to whether or not they were in fact opponents of his regime.

Dikotter has been described as a revisionist although Roderick McFarqhuar has stated that Mao's Great Famine is "Pathbreaking ... a first-class piece of research. ... [Mao] will be remembered as the ruler who initiated and presided over the worst man-made human catastrophe ever. His place in Chinese history is assured. Dikötter's book will have done much to put him there."

Felix Wemheuer, lecturer in Chinese history and politics at the University of Vienna, in his review of Mao's Great Famine, criticized Dikötter for his book's lack of explanation of local variations in destruction and death toll, his ignorance of Mao's efforts to deal with the problems, and his lack of sophisticated arguments due to his political agenda: to reduce Chinese Communism to terror.

Anthony Garnaut, a social historian of China, said that Dikötter's juxtaposition and sampling techniques fell short of academic best practice. Garnaut also mentioned Dikötter's neglect of very plain wording of the archival documents on which he hangs his case.

According to Andrew G. Walder, Dikötter's high death estimate cannot be reconciled with age-specific population data.

Despite these criticisms Dikotter’s work makes one thing clear. The death toll and ruin that was caused by Mao’s policies, strategies and U-turns was extensive. What is astonishing is how firstly he is still revered and secondly how it was that China managed to recover and become the economic powerhouse that it presently is.

Much of the credit for the recovery must be attributed to Deng Xiao Ping who was one of Mao’s faithful lieutenants throughout the Communist regime. Deng ruthlessly oversaw the implementation of Mao’s policies in the southwest, was denounced in the Cultural Revolution and managed to survive Mao’s death and the attempted coup by the Gang of Four.

Deng, already a significant Communist party figure by the 1940s, admitted, concerning land reform among the peasant farmers of western Anhui province. "We kept on killing," he declared, "and the masses kept on feeling more and more insecure, taking fright and fleeing." Deng admitted that "all the work we did in twelve villages was ruined". Mass, sometimes public executions, were used to bring the population into line. In six populous central Chinese provinces, some 300,000 people were killed between October 1950 and November 1951.

I read Famine and The Cultural Revolution a couple of years ago and was appalled and horrified by what I read. I recall in the late 1960’s members of the Progressive Youth Movement – a Communist front organisation supported by the New Zealand Communist Party which at the time along with Albania was the only Communist Party which supported Mao’s Stalinist model which had been abandoned by the Soviets – mindlessly parading, holding aloft their copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, imitating the fanatics in China, without really understanding what horrors were being perpetrated by those whom they imitated. The Cultural Revolution makes that clear.

The Tragedy of Liberation, which I have just finished reading, examines the establishment and first decade of the People's Republic of China. In the book, Dikötter describes the early years of the state as an era of "calculated terror and systematic violence" – a characteristic that could be applied to all of Mao’s years in power.

The book was well received in the popular press, but academic reviews, as I have already observed, were much more critical. For The Financial Times, Julia Lovell called it

"[a] remarkable work of archival research. Dikötter rarely, if ever, allows the story of central government to dominate by merely reporting a top-down directive. Instead, he tracks the grassroots impact of Communist policies – on farmers, factory workers, industrialists, students, monks – by mining archives and libraries for reports, surveys, speeches and memoirs. In so doing, he uncovers astonishing stories of party-led inhumanity and also popular resistance."

It is in the effect of the bureaucratic directives on the lives of the ordinary people that the power of Dikotter’s writing and the horror of the Communist Chinese regime becomes clear.

Official CCP Party historians and some Western scholars for a long time portrayed the period between 1949 and 1957 as the “golden age" of Chinese communism. During this time, it is suggested,  the Party and the people rebuilt the country in social harmony. However, a new generation of Western scholars have conducted field studies based on local archival material to show that the transition of the early 1950s was experienced by different people across the country in diverse way. And it was no “golden age.”

Dikotter shows the significance of terror and mass killings during CCP campaigns to establish the new order. Mao clearly used the setting of quotas for arrests or executions as a tool to propel the campaigns. For example, he defined the quota for execution during the zhenfan campaign as 0.5 people per thousand in the cities, one person per thousand in areas where the enemy was still active and not more than 1.5 people per thousand in regions with extraordinary problems.

Using a report from August 1952 by the minister for public security, Luo Ruiqing, Dikotter shows that in some provinces the death rates were even higher, for example 1.92 per thousand in Hunan and 2.56 per thousand in Guangxi.

Mao promoted mass killings of enemies in several campaigns, but he also launched policies to limit or stop violence, when these campaigns got out of hand, no doubt to appear as the benevolent force for moderation against a campaign which he himself had unleashed.

For example, at the end of 1947，Mao criticized "chaotic killings in the context of Land Reform in several directives and said: "The fewer people are killed, the better." Clearly, killing is a given as a part of policy. After intervention by the Party leadership, the worst excesses were stopped but the campaign escalated again after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.

Felix Wemheuer is critical of Dikotter’s approach in a lengthy review in The China Quarterly for September 2014. He concludes his review by noting:

Dikotter is retelling an old story about the early years of the Cold War based on new sources. While many journalists celebrate A Tragedy of Liberation in their reviews, most Western historians, political scientists and sociologists offer a much more complicated version of early PRC history that includes diverse experiences and local variations. Finding credible alternative narratives is a huge task that warrants future research by modern China scholars. Unfortunately, Dikotter's condemning of the Chinese revolution in his People's Trilogy requires an academic response that consists of more than a few novel local case studies.”

Despite these criticisms nobody who reads about the cost of the establishment of the PRC will find much sympathy for the authoritarian cause. This excellent book is horrific but essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions.

Dikötter's work aims to demolish almost every claim to truth or virtue the Chinese Communist party ever made. He combines a vivid eye for detail with a historian's diligence in the archives. However, he leaves some questions unanswered: the CCP established complete control in a huge country that had been torn apart by war for the best part of 50 years. Was terror the only explanation? Or was there something else?

What is interesting is that after the Mao era there was a shift away from the “one person” leadership model that Mao developed and represented. Indeed in the mid-1950’s there was a move away from “Mao Zedong Thought” – it was no longer present in the Constitution. Yet today we have seen a return to the Maoist model in the rule of Xi Jinpeng. His benevolent smile does not reflect the true nature and ruthlessness of his power. “Xi Jinpeng Thought” has found its way back into the Constitution. The face may have changed but the ruthlessness of Communist power and the apparatus of the totalitarian authoritarian State remain.

Dikotter’s books present some interesting and broader lessons for us, even in New Zealand. The lessons are considerable but as I read the following matters occurred to me.

Communist rule thrives in an authoritarian atmosphere where a single line of thought and expression prevails. There is no room for contrary opinions. There is no tolerance of dissent. The mechanisms for dealing with the “abberations” are many and varied – ranging from the subtle (kind and patronising rejection of ideas) to the more direct (in the current climate – misinformation and disinformation) to outright suppression. The control of information is starkly illustrated by the way that the CCP controls Internet based information via the “Great Firewall of China” and the way it has suppressed content from search engines and social media platforms, ensuring that only approved or “safe” information is available for the populace. Does this approach resonate with the Safer Online Services and Web Platforms proposed by the Department of Internal Affairs here in New Zealand.

Communist rule cannot tolerate any expression of individualism. Everything and everyone must be subordinated to the interests of the State. Individual initiative, individual betterment, individual ambition cannot be tolerated. Individual economic improvement is unacceptable. That sort of thing is an example of the “capitalist roader” and although capitalism (in a manner of speaking) has been tolerated in modern Communist China is does not do to do too well as witness the disappearance of entrepreneur Jack Ma.

The sort of levelling that is anticipated by a wealth tax – proposed by the Greens and by some element of the Labour Party - is typical of the type of levelling that took place in Mao’s China. The motives and the methods may be different as may be the context within a supposedly democratic environment – but the outcome is the same – the subordination of the individual to the interests of the State.

Finally there is the casual attitude towards human life- indeed the lives of the citizens which, under and civilised State, the State is duty bound to preserve and protect. Lives became numbers to the Communist bureaucrats and those numbers became quotas for the widely scattered cadres who not only tried to fulfil but at times endeavoured to exceed the death quotas dictated from Beijing. The message is clear. Under Communism even the life of the citizen is subordinated to the State.

These are but three of the lessons that come out of Dikotter’s study. Clearly he is no friend of Mao or his methods and how could he be. Indeed, how could anyone be.

Professor Anne-Marie Brady has regularly sounded warnings about the objectives of Communist China. Our government has "actively courted" Chinese influence since 1972 when diplomatic relations were established. Since then, there has been the Free Trade Agreement and the close relationship that former Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee talked about on a visit to China in 2015.

Both Labour and National Governments have courted China for economic advantage. China is one of our largest trading partners. But China can turn that tap off very quickly and New Zealand will be floundering in the same way that it was after Britain joined the then EEC. We still haven’t learned the lessons of “too many eggs in one basket” and the Chinese act only in their own interests and in the interests of the State. If it looks as if New Zealand may move too close to the embrace of the Western Alliance, threatening diplomatic noises will emanate from Beijing.

It could be argued that times have changed in China – that the horrors described by Dikotter belong in the archives of history. But we must remember the foundations of the Communist Chinese State – that it was and still is an authoritarian dictatorship that by one means or another be it militarily or by the Belt and Road initiative is interested only in projecting its own power and influence. And in that lies a threat to our interests, our wellbeing and our democracy.

Postscript

The above review was written in January and since writing it I have received a copy of Dikotter’s latest book “China after Mao”. I have only dipped into parts of it but the main theme - apart from charting the political machinations within the higher ranks of the Chines Communist Party - is that of the economic and social transformation of China since the death of Mao. The Chinese economic miracle (I call it miracle because during Mao’s rule it was an economic basket case) provides a foundation for the current regime in China and the extraordinary power wielded by Xi Jin-Ping. It would be interesting to see Dikotter’s take on Xi’s rise and his current position. Certainly the authoritarianism and suppression of individualism and opposition remain. The elevation of Xi’s “Thought” as I have remarked in the body of the article indicates a disturbing trend. Is Xi another Mao with the economic clout that Mao never had?

What was surprising was the unusual partnership of Helen Clark and Don Brash in the New Zealand Herald for 13 February arguing against alignment with the AUKUS programme. Both argue that becoming part of this regional security programme could be damaging to New Zealand’s trade relationship with China. They argue for the “independent foreign policy” position that has been occupied by New Zealand. Mr Brash would consider the matter from an economic perspective. Beneath the many layers that are Helen Clark would basically be an unwillingness to align with the US unless absolutely necessary. She led NZ when it aligned with the anti-terrorism actions in Afghanistan which clearly was necessary.

But the problem that both commentators have is this. History is a great teacher and it has long been a rule in economics not to put too many eggs in one basket. New Zealand did this with the UK and was left high and dry when our preferential treatment went by the board when the UK joined the EEC. Once again there are a large number of eggs in the China trade basket. For fear of losing some eggs - or even the whole basket - do we sacrifice the interests of regional security? Do we bow to the inevitability of China’s dominance in the Pacific? Or do we “free ride” on the AUKUS approach without actually being part of it - all care but no responsibility. Perhaps efforts should be made to have a more diverse trade policy so that if China tries to exert its power in the region, opposition to it will not have such disastrous economic consequences. It is fear of those consequences - fear and fear alone - that drives the sentiment behind the Clark/Brash article.