Ninety-seven million people in this province, Xao thought. More than in the entire Han Dynasty at its height, more than the Ming, more than Rome. I am responsible for ninety-seven million people. And I don’t know how to feed them. Here, in the so-called Rice Bowl of China, we can no longer feed ourselves. A cultural revolution indeed.
His assistant, Peng, currying favor, had repeated to him the flattering play on words that was being repeated in the teahouses: “If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang.” And it was true that he had made some reforms, throwing out some of the ideologues who were so badly mismanaging some of the production teams. But “some” was not good enough. The reforms had to be systemic.
And the system was so idiotic, Xao thought as he took another long drag on his cigarette. Insane, really. And I blame you, old friend, he thought, looking at the Chairman’s portrait that hung on the office wall, as it did on all office walls.
They had begun as tongmen-jr-comrades-although the Party cliche was a curse on his tongue now. He had looked up to the Chairman then, almost as an older brother. He had joined the Party, fought the Kuomintang, lost, and joined the Chairman on the Long March. How clear things seemed in those days, how clear and pure in the crystalline air of the mountains, when he and the Chairman and all the rest were fighting to build a new China in a new world.
And the fighting. Fighting the Kuomintang, and then the Japanese, and then the Kuomingtang again. Fighting with the Chairman’s guidance, under his precepts of guerrilla war. Like fish swimming in the sea of the people. And as they fought, they liberated, came to control vast areas of the country. And they threw out the landlords and gave the land to the peasants, then recruited the peasants for the army. And he remembered that when they retreated from a village, the Kuomingtang would come back in and shoot all the peasants who had been left behind.
What fighting he had seen! Bodies stacked like rice hulls along the side of the road. Entire villages beheaded by the Japanese. He remembered the Japanese patrol they had pinned down in the mountain pass-they had picked them off one by one over the course of three days. When finally they went to loot the bodies, they saw that some of the Japanese had not been shot at all, but had frozen to death, their bodies stuck to the rocks by ice, their fingers frozen to their rifle triggers.
And in those same mountains he had met her. She was a courier, a message runner… a spy. She risked torture at the hands of the Japanese, but she never flinched, and he had heard of her before he met her. He chuckled at the memory. They hadn’t called it “love,” that would have been too romantic and decadent. No, they had called it a “oneness of spirit in revolutionary fervor”-but it was love. Such beauty… such soul…
They married in a high mountain meadow and honeymooned in a tent under tall cedars. Then they went back to their separate duties. He was terrified for her, terrified for himself that she might never return from her dangerous missions. For five years they made infrequent, brief rendezvous-passionate couplings in peasant huts or tents, even caves. And when the Japanese had been beaten, and the Kuomintang destroyed, they met in the joyous celebration in Tiananmen Square and never separated again. Started a life and raised a family and never separated again until…
Xao Xiyang lit another cigarette. I must be getting old, he thought. I seem given to the old man’s habit of living in the past, in the realm of memory. But you, old friend, he thought as he looked again at the portrait, you are now in the realm of the shadows. Thank you. The last, best thing you could do for us was to die. It is only a shame you didn’t do it sooner. You should have died on the day of victory, when we all stood on Tiananmen Gate and proclaimed the republic. The New China.
Before you decided to become an emperor.
Xao took another sip of the green tea and pronounced another curse on the head of his old friend. He pronounced it in the name of twenty million of the dead. Twenty million peasants, twenty million of “the people,” who had starved in the Chairman’s Great Leap Forward. “Great Leap,” indeed-the great leap from this world to the next. The next world, he thought. Good Marxist that I am, I don’t believe in the next world. But I will see you in hell, old friend.
The Chairman’s Great Leap Forward started in 1957, after an unusually fine harvest. But the Chairman wasn’t satisfied with the mere production of food; society had to be recorded along less “individualistic” and “selfish” lines. Collectivization of all the land was accelerated. The entire rural population was organized into production teams. No peasant dared own so much individual property as a chicken. Worse still, by year’s end, over 300,000 “stinking intellectuals,” including the best economists and scientists, had been labeled “rightists” and shipped off to prison camps.
So when the crisis hit, all the experts who might have controlled it were gone, and no one else dared speak. The Chairman set quotas for grain production, and the new commune managers met them all-on paper. The Chairman looked at the figures and boasted that the new order-the new China-was working just as he said it would, and commanded in the name of “the people” that collectivization be speeded up. Then he set higher quotas, and the people met them-on paper.
Figures may not lie, but the people who write them do, and the Party cadres who reported the figures did just that. They were afraid to be labeled “defeatists,” so they reported victory. They ordered fields to lie fallow to avoid a glut of grain. They took peasants from the fields and set them to building warehouses to hold all the grain that would be harvested. On paper.
But in the fields and the paddies it was a different story, for less than half the grain the figures claimed was actually harvested, and even less was processed. Crops rotted in the fields while the peasants built useless warehouses, fields were not tended while the peasants were sent to work in “backyard steel mills” to help with industrialization. Collectivization was chaos. Urban cadres who knew nothing about agriculture gave idiotic and contradictory orders to the peasants. The already fragile transportation system broke down completely, and precious farm tools and invaluable fertilizers sat in stalled railroad cars or were “lost” entirely. Grain production dropped over sixty percent, and while the cadres dutifully checked nonexistent grain into nonexistent warehouses, the Chairman shipped the real grain to the Soviets to repay the debts of industrialization.
The experts who might have helped-the Western-trained agronomists, economists, statisticians, and biochemists-were in prison for the very crime of being Western-trained experts. The few who had escaped that fate were silenced the moment they spoke the truth that the Great Leap Forward was a sham, a tragic fiasco launched by a madman. The emperor had no clothes and the people had no food.
The people starved. Twenty million people starved to death in three years. Many more died of malnutrition-related diseases in the years following. And more than half of the dead were children.
That was our “New China,” Xao thought, a land where we starved our children.
He could never shut his eyes without the sights coming back to him. His nightmares were not of the war with all its various horrors, but of those years, of the emaciated mothers-too weak to walk-who lay beside the road, trying to feed rice husks to babies who were already dead. Or of the children begging him for food, staggering toward his staff car on spindly legs, their rheumy eyes asking him questions for which he had no answers. If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang.
I will see you in hell, old friend. You and I will both be there, because I, too, posed for the cameras in the “model villages,” those sham communes that received the money, the fertilizers, and the pesticides. I, too, posed beside the huge piles of grain, the fattened hogs, and the smiling peasants with fat and rosy-cheeked children. I, too, congratulated their leaders and held them up as an example to the rest, even though I also knew that their figures were lies. Even with all their resources, they had to lie. And the rest of the country had to live up to the lie, and send out more grain, and starve all the more. Oh, I will join you in hell, old friend.