Witnesses to the “suppression of rebellion” and Great Leap Forward in Qinghai 1958-61

 
One page from the Hainan Headquarters Report

 

"Atomic City" (Factory 221) , a tourist attraction today

Witnesses to the “suppression of rebellion” and Great Leap Forward in Qinghai 1958-61: The Hainan Headquarters report, and the memoirs of Yin Shusheng and “Han Youren”

Jianglin Li and Matthew Akester

 

This post presents one original document and a series of articles by informed eye-witnesses, which add compelling detail to the documentation of events in Qinghai, and the role of the central leadership.

 The Hainan Headquarters Report 

The Hainan Headquarters for Suppressing Rebellion was a military command established in August 1958 to coordinate counter-insurgency operations in Hainan (Tsolho), one of the prefectures most seriously affected by popular resistance to ‘democratic reform’. On May 22^nd 1959 it submitted a report alerting higher authorities to the failings of “political winning-over” work in the prefecture: this meant that the Party’s “Four No-s” policy, guaranteeing that rebels surrendering to the PLA would not be executed, arrested, imprisoned or subjected to ‘struggle’, was not being followed on the ground, and that arbitrary mass arrests and executions were ruining the Party’s credibility with the Tibetan masses.  

The fact that this report was issued by a military authority, which would normally defer to the local Party committee on such matters, in itself indicates the severity of the situation. It would certainly have been encouraged by the central leadership’s recent moves to correct “Leftist mistakes” in the implementation of the Great Leap Forward nationwide: hence the document received swift endorsement from the provincial Party Committee “in the spirit of the Zhengzhou conference” (February 1959), at which Mao Zedong himself had criticised Leftist excesses in the People’s Commune movement. As is well known, this window of reassessment was slammed shut after the Lushan conference in July, when Mao relaunched the Great Leap Forward with catastrophic effect, and it was not until late 1960 that political conditions began to allow for some redressal of excesses. It is likely that the Hainan Headquarters was concerned to avert blame from the military for the atrocities committed in the region, by exposing the local Party leaders.  

It begins by affirming the correctness of Party policies for the suppression of rebellion, before levelling its chief complaint, that implementation has been “extremely uneven”, as “many comrades fail to understand the need for political winning-over.” Section One frames the problem theoretically as an incorrect grasp of the relation between suppressing rebellion and developing production. In Xinghai county (Tib: Tsigorthang), local officials saw only the latter as their responsibility, and due to their failures in “political winning-over work”, the rebels were able to make off with 130,000 cattle and over 1000 horses in one township alone, and in the first five months of the year 441 people in the county had left home to join them. 

Section Two presents examples and statistics of interest. In Tongde county (Tib: Gepa Sumdo), “…the favorable situation of military strikes in winter was used to win back 79 rebels. However, 51, or 61%, of the surrendered rebels were quickly arrested. Since then, not a single rebel returned…it was only after the [Four No-s] policy… was strictly applied to all the rebels who surrendered voluntarily, that [winning-over] work was able to resume again.” In Xinghai county, by contrast, “random arrests and executions have brought serious consequences for the work.” The Headquarters had investigated some of them, but “…due to insufficient disclosure, it is still impossible to find out how many wrongful arrests and killings there have been in the county. [In some cases], even the killers have been found, but the persons responsible [for issuing the order] cannot be identified… the killings were witnessed by some people, and a number of corpses have been dug up by the masses. This created an extremely bad impact.” It concludes with four recommendations: surrendering or captured rebels must be carefully distinguished and treated accordingly, arrests should be kept to the minimum and conducted in public, cases of wrongful arrest (clearly the majority) should be corrected, but the disciplining of cadres responsible should not be done hastily, “…it is better to discipline and dispose of the few cadres who committed serious mistakes with horrendous results.”

 

Section Three lists four “urgent issues” that further reveal the situation on the ground: the first is an appeal, of the kind that would soon be forbidden nationwide, to address the imminent threat of mass starvation. The second is a call to improve communication with the masses through propaganda-education. The third notes that “grassroots cadres’ forceful orders and violations of law and discipline” breed sympathy for the rebels, calling for “work-style” to be corrected, and the fourth calls for normal religious activity and popular customs to be respected, giving examples such as Tibetan women being forced to wear their hair in two braids like Chinese women, and remove their ornaments.

 Yin Shusheng and “Han Youren” 

Yin Shusheng, Executive Deputy Director of the Public Security Bureau in his native Anhui province, began his career in the Qinghai Public Security Bureau. He was transferred there as a new graduate in 1961 - despite his wish to become a teacher - and witnessed the rectification that year of “Leftist mistakes” committed during the Great Leap Forward. In retirement, Yin wrote a series of outspoken articles for the liberal journal Yanhuang Chunqiu, condemning the political violence of the period in considerable detail, based on personal experience and familiarity with the official documentation. He is one of very few former officials with knowledge of events in minority regions of the PRC in the 1950s and 60s to have come forward. We present four of these articles in English translation. Since Yanhuang Chunqiu was forced to accept personnel and editorial changes in 2015, the original texts are no longer available online.

 My Experiences in the Work of Implementing Nationality Policies (2013) is one of the most revealing accounts of the disastrous years in Qinghai yet published. It begins with the Summary of the First Ethnic Work Conference of the Northwest Bureau held in July-August 1961, which found that “…the Party’s ethnic policies were not conscientiously implemented and executed, or were even violated. Problems in Tibetan areas of Qinghai and Gansu stood out as the most serious…”, and called for “all efforts to be made in disaster relief and to save lives.” It was endorsed by the Central Committee, but Yin candidly points out that “Since the CCP Central Committee still believed that the Three Red Flags (the General Line for Socialist Construction, the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Communes) was great and correct, it was impossible to point out the root cause of the problem.”

He then presents a valuable series of official figures on excessive arrests, closure of monasteries, arrests of upper strata figures, and numbers of wrongful arrests (more than 90%), and deaths in custody. The summary reads: “From 1958 to 1960…the Qinghai Provincial Public Security Bureau arbitrarily arrested and detained people who opposed, resisted or were considered potential opponents of the [Great Leap Forward]. In three years, 63,064 people were arrested, 6,157 detained, 9,918 sentenced to live under surveillance, and 39,419 sent to collective political reeducation camps, making a total of 108,558, accounting for 4.4% of the province's total population of 2.44 million.” 

The remainder of the article is taken up by Yin’s fascinating account of his experience on the Northwest Bureau Inspection Team’s mission to Yushu and Golok in December 1961. The team arrived in Yushu to find that the authorities had already followed directives and released their prisoners. They declined a dinner invitation from prefecture Party secretary Shen, who was responsible for imprisoning most of them, and was about to be relieved of his duties. They moved on to Jiuzhi county (Tib: Chikdril) in Golok, where “1,540 people were arrested in three years, accounting for 27% of the total population. Among them, 848 died in prisons and detention centers, the death rate was as high as 57%.” County Party secretary Guo had “implemented the Three Red Flags, so-called “religious reform”, and following the “leftist” line, to the point of madness.” The several anecdotes about Guo make shocking reading; he too was removed from office once the inspection team had returned to Xining. 

The Agony of Jinyintan (2012) is Yin Shusheng’s memoir brought on by a recent visit to the Atomic City tourist attraction at the former Factory 221, when “my mind churned with thoughts of being there 40 years ago.” Jinyintan (Tib: Ser-ngul tsa-thang), the ‘gold and silver pastures’ in Haiyan county (Tib: Dashi), on the northeast shore of Qinghai lake, was chosen as the site of China’s atomic weapons development base in the late 1950s. In 1963, Yin was sent to the area to investigate appeals “related to the suppression of counter-revolutionaries and relocation” in 1958, the year construction of Factory 221 began. In this article, he reveals the truth that he was not allowed to write in his report at the time.

The author begins by summarising the background in two or three highly instructive pages covering the outbreak of the Xunhua revolt and provincial Party secretary Gao Feng’s approach to suppressing it (“Rebellion is good! It has provided an excuse for us to strike the enemy”). He goes on to explain that under such circumstances, it was possible for the authorities in Haiyan, where no rebellion had occurred, to arrest over 700 people on the charge of “attempting to rebel in the name of hunting” simply because herders in the area kept primitive firearms to protect their livestock from wolves. The victims were rehabilitated only in 1978, but “by then the majority… had been starved or tortured to death in labor farms.” At the same time, in October 1958, over 9000 local people were relocated under “extremely barbaric” conditions to make way for Factory 221, and many died in the process. 

We have supplemented his account with another testimony from the same area, taken from a book written anonymously by another former official, A Vanished War:  The Full Story of Magnification and Reassessment of the 1958 Suppression of Rebellion in Qinghai. The author styles himself “Han Youren” (“Han friend”), explaining that he made many Mongolian and Tibetan friends during his years in Qinghai, who had treated him as a brother, and that he could not be at peace with himself without recording what he had witnessed. The book was published in Hong Kong in 2013, and chapter 7, translated here, details how the authorities in neighbouring Gangcha county (Tib: Kangtsa) imprisoned 10% of the Tibetan population in 1958 on false charges of “rebellion”. 

The Great Leap Forward in Public Security Work (2010) by Yin Shusheng is a 16-page tour de force, an impassioned yet carefully worded summing up of how the police and judicial authorities functioned during the Great Leap Forward, conducting arbitrary mass arrests by quota. Yin draws on personal experience, in Anhui as well as Qinghai, and official speeches and documents to which he had access, presenting references, examples and cases. Readers are warned that some of these are disturbing. He confides that he himself survived the political campaigns of the Maoist era by learning early on to keep quiet; the downfall of his college principal in the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign “made me deeply aware that careless talk leads to disaster. From then on, I was very cautious, and did not dare to talk freely…”

The final article does not concern Qinghai, but is included here for its importance to early PRC history. Mao Zedong and the Third National Security Conference (2014) is Yin Shusheng’s study, based on internal sources, of the background to a conference on the conduct of the nationwide Suppress Counter-revolutionaries campaign held in Beijing in May 1951. The resolution called for the campaign to be scaled back at once because, the author explains, in the four months since it was launched, 2 million people had been arrested and over 500,000 killed, and Chairman Mao was concerned that the situation was out of control. 

“How did the storm of hastiness, of mass arrests, mass killings, wrongful arrests and wrongful killings start?” he asks. “Fundamentally, it started from the Central Committee. In the early days of the campaign…the CCP Central Committee made this point: ‘A serious right-wing bias exists on the issue of suppressing counter-revolutionaries. As a result, a large number of ringleaders and wicked counter-revolutionary elements who continued to do evil after the Liberation, and even after being leniently treated, have escaped the punishment they deserve.’” 

The article goes through Mao’s directives and comments on the campaign from January to April, revealing how decisions on mass killing quotas were made. The author argues that the arbitrary nature of the campaign set a disastrous precedent for the new Peoples Republic: “…there was no law to guide the implementation of the campaign, and they relied entirely on documents issued by the Central Committee and instructions from the top leaders, mainly Mao Zedong… Since the experience and lessons of the first campaign were never carefully summed up, these mistakes were repeated in successive political campaigns…” In fact, he says, “China’s Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries movement never really stopped until 1976” (with Mao’s death).

 Links:

Document 1 
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Document 6

PDF

Yin Shusheng: Mao Zedong and the Third National Security Conference

  (Written by Yin Shusheng, Former Executive Deputy Director of Anhui Province Public Security Bureau,  also worked in Public Security Bureau, Qinghai Province)

Translated by Jianglin Li
Edited by Matthew Akester

*All notes and square brackets added by translator*

 

 

Partial instructions of Mao Zedong to Huang Jing[1]

In the 17 years prior to the Cultural Revolution, the Ministry of Public Security held a total of 14 national public security conferences. Most of these conferences were directly guided by Mao Zedong.  The Third National Public Security Conference in particular, held in Beijing from May 10 to 15, 1951, was under the direct leadership of Mao Zedong, to which he devoted great energy. The first draft of the Resolution of the Third National Public Security Conference passed at the conference was penned by Peng Zhen (彭真)[2] and Luo Ruiqing （罗瑞卿）.[3]  However, dissatisfied after reading it, Mao Zedong personally revised the document four times, making so many changes to the manuscript that the original became virtually unrecognizable. In a sense, this resolution was actually written by Mao Zedong himself.

The Third National Public Security Conference was originally planned for June and July 1951, with the agenda of reporting on and summarizing the situation regarding the Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign throughout the country since the issue of the “Double Ten Directives”,[4] summing up and exchanging experiences, and arranging tasks for the second phase of the campaign. However, at the beginning of May, Mao Zedong called Luo Ruiqing and made it clear to him that the Third National Public Security Conference could not wait till June or July, and must be held immediately. Following Mao Zedong’s instructions, the conference was shifted to an earlier date, May 10th, during which the resolution was passed.  On May 16th, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP) approved the resolution and forwarded it to provincial party secretaries, requesting that  "the entire party and the entire army must resolutely and completely implement [the resolution] as such."

At the Ninth National Public Security Conference in 1958, Luo Ruiqing summed up the public security work in the past nine years since the founding of the People's Republic of China: "The Third National Public Security Conference is a meeting with great significance not only for the history of our public security work, but also for the history of our party. This conference played a decisive role in consolidating the achievements of the first large-scale Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign, enabling us to prevent and timely correct mistakes. This meeting was also the key that allowed us to eliminate remnants of the counter-revolutionaries in a short period of time without making the mistake of proliferating the movement.”

Luo Ruiqing spoke highly of the Third National Public Security Conference because it was directly related to the content of the "Resolution of the Third National Public Security Conference" (hereafter referred to as the Resolution) drafted by Mao Zedong himself. If we take a look at the main content of the Resolution, you will have a better understanding.

The Resolution issued a clear order that the large-scale Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign must be pulled back and recuperate immediately. Within the next four months, with the exception that counter-revolutionaries who carry out sabotage activities must be arrested and sentenced, all other arrests and killings must be temporarily suspended. The number of  counter-revolutionaries to be killed must be limited to a certain population ratio, that is, around 0.5 to 1% of the total population, and the highest ratio could not exceed 2%. Authority to approve arrests should be taken back from county level to prefecture and commission level; authority to approve killings should be taken from prefecture level back to the level of province, autonomous region and directly governed cities. In addition to these regulations, the Resolution also stipulated that future arrests and executions must be in accordance with the following principles: make sure not to arrest those who could or could not be arrested, to arrest them would be considered as committing an error; making sure not to kill those who could or could not be killed, to kill them would be considered as committing an error. Principles for killing counter-revolutionaries were as follows: those who had blood debts or had committed other serious crimes (such as rape) and had to be killed to assuage the people's anger, and those who had caused serious damage to national interests must be given the death sentence and executed immediately. For those without blood debts and public resentment, and those who caused serious damage to the national interest but did not reach the most serious level, but whose offences were serious enough for capital punishment, the policy of death penalty with a two-year suspension and forced labor, to observe the after-effects, should be adopted. The Resolution specifically requested that for counter-revolutionaries swept up from the Communist Party, the people's government, and People's Liberation Army institutions, and from cultural and educational circles, the business sector, religious circles, democratic parties and people's organizations, whose offenses were serious enough for the death penalty the principle should be that in general one or two in every ten should be executed, the other eight or nine should get the death penalty with a two-year suspension and forced labor, to observe the after-effects. The resolution also contains decisions on sorting out accumulated cases, organizing prisoners into reform-through-labor camps in order to create national wealth, etc.

Why did the Resolution urgently put on the brakes to the large-scale Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign that was in full swing? The reason was that since the campaign started, in a short time of just a few months, more than 2 million people had been arrested, and more than 500,000 killed.  Mass arrests and killings continued into May, and the momentum did not show any signs of weakening. Instead, the pervasive feeling among party, government, and military cadres at all levels, the ones who were responsible for leading the campaign, especially the local and county-level cadres, was to make more arrests and killings. They conducted arrests and killings hastily. In many places some of the “borderline” people were arrested and killed (investigations showed about one-third in each category), some were even mistakenly arrested or killed. If no emergency brake was put on, more would have been arrested and killed, and the consequences would have been unimaginable.

Regarding the number of  arrests and killings in the Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign, Xu Zirong, executive deputy minister of the Ministry of Public Security, said in a report in January 1954: ‘Since the beginning of the Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign, more than 2.62 million arrests were made nationwide, among those, 712,000 were executed, more than 1,290,000 imprisoned, 1,200,000 successively placed under surveillance, and more than 38,000 released after education.’ What Xu Zirong referred to was the general number of arrests and killings in the first large-scale Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign. This campaign, however, lasted for three years and was divided into three phases. The first phase was from October 1950 to September 1951; the second phase from October 1951 to September 1952; the third phase from October 1952 to the end of 1953.

According to the Public Security department statistics, the number of killings in the first phase accounted for about 75% of the total killings in the campaign. Taking the figure as 712,000, more than 543,000 killings took place in the first phase, mainly in February to May 1951. Since the first phase of the campaign was initiated after the “Double Ten Directives” were issued, there was a process of communication, organization, and implementation. The actual implementation began in January 1951, and the climax was in the four months from February to May. Only a small number of arrests and killings occurred before January 1951. The four months from June to September were a period of restriction and recuperation, the requirement was to suspend arrests and killings (except for current offenses). Therefore, the 500,000-plus killings executed in the first phase mainly took place in the four months of February, March, April, and May. In just a few months, more than 500,000 people were killed, surpassing the total number of deaths in the three major battles (Liaoshen, Pingjin and Huaihai) in the civil war. This was truly astonishing. (According to the Full History of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, during the four years of the Liberation War, the death toll on our army was about 300,000, that of the Kuomintang army was 400,000, adding up to 700,000. The combined death toll on both the Kuomintang and Communist armies in the three major battles of Liaoning, Pingjin and Huaihai was more than 400,000).

 

At that time, the party, government, and military leaders in the entire country were busy with executions, and were rushing to kill. Some people were arrested the day before, and shot to death the next day or even on the same day, some were arrested at night and shot in daytime. If the situation continued in this way, big trouble was ensured!  More importantly, left-wing sentiment prevailed among the party, government, and military leading cadres commanding the Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign,  and they demanded more arrests and killings. If this ideological tendency was not corrected in time, the campaign would develop in the wrong direction. Mao Zedong saw the seriousness of the problem and gave clear instruction: "Do not overkill, too many killings will cost us social sympathy and reduce labor resources."

The question is: how did the storm of hastiness, of mass arrests, mass killings, wrongful arrests and wrongful killings start? Fundamentally it started from the Central Committee. In the early days of the campaign, some leaders were timid and hesitant and failed to render effective strikes on current Counter-revolutionary activities. Mao Zedong criticized the tendency of "leniency without boundary." In the “Directives on Correcting the Right-wing Bias in Suppressing Counter-Revolution Activities” [i.e., “Double Ten Directives”], the CCP Central Committee made this point: “A serious right-wing bias exists on the issue of suppressing counter-revolutionaries. As a result, a large number of ringleaders and wicked counter-revolutionary elements who continued to do evil after the Liberation and even after being leniently treated have escaped the punishment they deserve.”  However, at the same time, the "Double Ten Directives" also made it clear that in order to prevent the "left-wing" tendency, it is necessary to insist on emphasizing evidence, investigation and research; confession under duress and torture were strictly prohibited.

On the issue of how to implement such a large-scale campaign and how to ensure its healthy development, the Central Committee and Mao Zedong did not put forward effective and operable measures. They continued to use the methods of the revolutionary war and mass movement instead of the legal approach. At the beginning of 1949, the CCP Central Committee announced the abolition of the "Six Codes".[5] Since then, no new laws have been enacted to replace them. Although the Government Administration Council later introduced “Regulations on Punishing the Counter-Revolutionaries", they are all substantive and difficult-to-grasp principles without procedural regulations. Therefore, there was no law to guide the implementation of the large-scale Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign, and they relied entirely on documents issued by the Central Committee and instructions from the top leaders, mainly Mao Zedong.

To lead the campaign, Mao Zedong used the same methods he used to command war in the revolutionary war era. On the issue of arrests and killings, quotas, fixed tasks and deadlines were imposed. He lapsed into subjective judgment and was eager for quick results by constantly issuing instructions,[6] and demanding certain numbers of arrests and killings at certain places to be done by a certain time.  Although the "Double Ten Directives" required "laying stress on evidence and not being too ready to believe confessions" in the campaign, and that "death penalties must be approved by provincial, municipal, district and the commissioned local committees", when pressed by the deadlines, task requirements and quotas imposed by Mao Zedong, it was impossible to follow these directives, not to mention that the authority to arrest and kill had been transferred by Mao Zedong the supreme leader to the lower levels.

Let us take a closer look at how the Central Committee, mainly Mao Zedong, led the campaign by issuing orders.

On January 17th, 1951, Mao Zedong received a Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries report from the 27th Army stationed in western Hunan province submitted by the South-Central Bureau. The report stated that in the 21 counties of western Hunan the garrison troops alone had executed more than 4,600 bandit leaders, local bullies and spies, and was prepared to let the local government kill another batch. Mao Zedong penned the following comment: "This move is very necessary," and stressed that "it is necessary to kill a few more big batches, especially in the places where bandits, bullies and spies are congregated," demanding that "all localities must be quick to follow this example without fail."

On January 22nd, Mao Zedong telegraphed the South China Bureau and the leaders of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee: "You have killed more than 3,700, which is very good. Kill 3,000 or 4,000 more." "You can set killing 8,000 or 9,000 as the goal for this year." On January 29th, the Central South Military and Political Committee reported to the Ministry of Public Security that Hubei Province had made 19,823 arrests, including 160 within the provincial government. The Ministry of Public Security made this remark on the report: "Making arrests without internal and external distinction may easily cause panic and ideological fluctuations among cadres." Mao Zedong saw this remark, and criticized the Ministry of Public Security: "Hubei is doing very well, don't dump cold water on them."

On February 5th, the Northwest Bureau of the CPC Central Committee reported that more than 5,000 had been arrested in two months and more than 500 had been killed, but that in general, the killings were not strong and effective enough, and the procedure was slow. However, the implementation of the suppressing counter-revolutionaries plan was required to be stable and steady, and all killings must be approved by the province (Author’s note: this is the requirement of the "Double Ten Directives”). After reading the report, Mao commented: "Regarding the death sentences, execution of mild cases can be approved at prefectural level." Subordinates followed the example set by their superiors, and thus, in many places the authority to approve killings was transferred from the prefectural level further down to the county level.

In the Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign, whether a criminal should be executed was not decided in accordance with his crime, but was based on the quota set on population proportion, which required that a certain number of people be killed in a certain area or city. This is the greatest absurdity. Mao Zedong originally demanded that the proportion of execution should reach 0.5 % of total local population, and in a place where the situation was more serious, it should reach 1 % of total local population. Later, he said that some places can exceed this quota, but not more than 1.5 %, and should not exceed 2 % at the most.

In mid-February 1951, Mao Zedong directly telegrammed the heads of the Shanghai and Nanjing party Committees: "Shanghai is a big city with a population of 6 million. Based on the situation that more than 20,000 arrests have been made in Shanghai, but only over 200 were killed, I think that in the year 1951, at least around 3,000 bandit ringleaders, professional brigands, bullies, spies, and superstitious organizations and secret society leaders should be killed. At least about 1,500 should be killed in the first half of the year. Please consider whether this number is appropriate. In Nanjing, according to the February 3^rd telegram sent by Comrade Ke Qingshi[7] to Comrade Rao Shushi,[8] 72 had been killed and the plan was to kill another 1,500. This number is too small. Nanjing is a big city with a population of 500,000 and was the capital of the Kuomintang. Reactionary elements who should be killed seem to be more than 2000.” “Nanjing kills too few people; more should be killed in Nanjing!"

On February 2nd 1951, the Administrative Council issued “Regulations on Punishing Counter-Revolutionaries". Mao Zedong immediately instructed [leaders of] Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing and other provincial capitals, saying that these places were “important nests of counter-revolutionary organizations. Reconnaissance and arrests must be arranged in a planned manner. Within a few months, a large number of counter-revolutionaries who have committed serious crimes with well-founded evidence against them must be killed."

On February 17th 1951, under the direct leadership and command of Luo Ruiqing, 675 arrests were made overnight. On the second day (February 18th), 58 were publicly executed. On the night of March 7th, another 1050 were arrested, and 199 were publicly executed on 25th. Mao Zedong gave Beijing his full affirmation. To implement Mao Zedong’s instructions, the CCP Tianjin Municipal Committee reported in early March that on top of the 150 executions already done, another 1,500 executions were planned. Mao Zedong commented: "I hope that Shanghai, Nanjing, Qingdao, Guangzhou, Wuhan and other big and medium-sized cities have an operable suppressing counter-revolutionary plan for the next few months to the end of this year. The masses have said that killing the counter-revolutionaries is more exciting than enjoying a good rain. I hope that every big and medium-sized city will kill a few large batches of counter-revolutionaries."

In accordance with Mao Zedong’s repeated instructions to “kill a few large batches of counter-revolutionaries”, the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee reported to the Central Committee: “Shanghai is determined to take a free hand in making another  10,000 arrests, 3,000 executions, 4,000 imprisonments and 3,000 supervisions on top of the 1,068 arrests and the more than 100 executions already made." Mao Zedong fully affirmed the Shanghai Party Committee's attitude of correcting the overcautious approach to arrests and executions, and the plan of action. He immediately cabled the Shanghai Party Committee: "If you can arrest more than 10,000 and kill 3,000, it will play a great role in promoting the suppressing counter-revolutionaries work in other cities. You should take note of the need for rapid trial after arrests are made; the first batch to be killed ought to be fixed in about half a month, sentencing and execution should be done every couple of days after that.” Following Mao’s instructions, the Shanghai Party Committee arrested 8,359 people in one day, April 27^th. Three days later, on April 30^th, 285 were executed in one day, and 28 more were executed on May 9th. After the Resolution was released, Shanghai’s mass arrests and executions did not stop right away, due to inertia. On June 15th, 284 more were executed, and every few days after that, a group of people, sometimes a couple of dozen, sometimes 140 to 150, were shot to death.

Due to Mao Zedong’s supervision and encouragement, arrests and killings went out of control. Some localities requested to break through the arrest and killing quotas set by the Central Committee, especially the killing quotas. The Guizhou Provincial Party Committee proposed that unless the number of killings reached 3% of the total population, the problem would not be solved. The Southwest and Southern [bureaus] also requested to break through the quotas. By the beginning of May 1951, Guangdong and Guangxi provinces had made 188,679 arrests and 57,032 executions - among the executions, 10,488 took place in Guangdong in April alone. By the end of April, more than 358,000 arrests were made in the region of East China, and more than 108,400 were executed, or 0.78% of the total population. In the southern central regions, in early May, more than 200,000 people were executed, close to 1.5% of the total population.  

The situation of arbitrary arrests and killings had drawn the attention of some local party committees. On the eve of the Third National Public Security Conference, the CCP Shandong Branch issued a notice stipulating that “the proportion of killings in Shandong, regardless in the city or in the country, should be less than 1%.” (Author’s note: this was due to the fact that Shandong had already finished land reform, during which many landlords and local bullies had been killed, and the killings in both campaigns combined had already exceeded the 1% quota).

On March 23rd, Huang Kecheng, secretary of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee, reported to the Central Committee and Mao Zedong: "There have been cases where the scope of arrests has been expanded and the handling is sloppy - and it has begun to involve internal (underground party branches, enterprises, governments and institutions), and the struggle with the hidden counter-revolutionaries needs to be more refined." “We intend to hold back immediately – to limit the scope of killings, and the struggle is to be carried out in a planned and step-by-step manner." He was the first provincial party committee leader to propose holding back the campaign and limit the scope of arrests and killings. But Mao Zedong ignored it.

Meanwhile, in mid-April, the South-Central Bureau ordered Hunan, Henan, Jiangxi, and Hubei provinces to stop mass arrests and executions, and to return the authority to  approve executions to provincial party committees. However, the results were minimal: in less than one month, from late April to mid-May, more than 50,000 people were executed in these four provinces, and the majority did not go through the approval procedures. It was clear that the problem could only be solved by the person who started it. To correct the disorderly situation of mass arrests and executions, Mao Zedong had to attend to the matter personally, and issue instructions to effectively halt it.

Mao Zedong began to worry that the number of killings was increasing and that the situation had gone out of control. On April 20th, he cabled secretaries of all CCP regional bureaus requesting them to control the execution proportion: "The Central Committee meeting in February decided that the standard number of executions be temporarily set as 0.5% of the total population, but now the Southwest has reached 1%,  and some provinces in South Central and the East China have reached 1%, and in some places exceeded [1%]. Generally speaking, it seems that to solve the problem, the three regions of East China, South Central and Southwest all have to exceed 1%. However, it does not seem appropriate to exceed too much. The Liuzhou prefecture[9] wanted to kill 5%, which is obviously wrong. Guizhou Provincial Party Committee has requested to kill 3%, that I feel is too many. I have the idea that 1% can be exceeded, but not too much. Don’t set 2% as a general standard. It should be the norm to list many prisoners as serving life sentences, take them away from their hometown to be concentrated by government in batches, and put them in productive work to construct roads and dams, cultivate wasteland, and build houses. For example, of the 60,000 more prisoners the southwestern region plans to kill, just kill about 30,000 to assuage popular indignation, and gather the remaining 30,000 in batches to do productive work.” “Taking 0.5% of the population, there are more than 150,000 people in the three regions of Southwest, South Central and East China [to be killed], that is a big manpower resource" (Author’s note: that is, if the three regions followed their original plan and kept the execution ratio at 0.5%, they would kill 150,000 less. In fact, all [three regions] exceeded 1%. If 1.5% ratio is reached, 300,000 more will be killed). "Guizhou Provincial Party Committee requested to kill another 22,000 to 25,000. We can allow them to kill a little more than 10,000, leaving more than 10,000. This already exceeds the 2% ratio.  To handle the situation in accordance with Guizhou’s special circumstances, it will be considered as [striking] hard and on target.” ( Author’s note: Using special circumstances as an excuse to allow Guizhou to break through the quota of 2%, means that it does not matter if other places break through the quota and kill more. There is no determination to correct the mistake).

He then telegraphed leaders of the South China Bureau: "Based on the situation that more than 57,000 have been killed in South China, and there are still more than 160,000 imprisoned, the two provinces and one city in South China (Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, and Guangzhou City) should stop arrests for four months from June 1st, and focus on sorting out accumulated cases, summing up experience and educating cadres. The same is also applicable to Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi [provinces].” Since Mao gave Guizhou permission to break through the quota, his instruction would not be implemented resolutely by the two provinces and one city of South China.

At this time, Mao Zedong felt that his instructions and telegrams alone were not enough to halt this powerful storm of mass arrests and killings. He had to call a meeting immediately, summon the “local vassals" and step on the brakes in person, otherwise more heads would roll on the ground. 

Once the Resolution was passed, the Central Committee immediately forwarded it by telegram to local authorities, and the mass arrests and killings were initially subject to restraint. However, due to inertia, some places continued to make unnecessary arrests and killings. For example, in East China, the May 1951 statistics showed that a total of 358,000 people were arrested and 100,840 killed; in October, the statistics showed 468,385 arrests made and 139,435 killed. This means that in the few months following the Third National Public Security Conference, another 110,000 were arrested and 40,000 executed, a big discount off the so-called “stop arresting and killing for four months” directive. However, with the gradual implementation of the Resolution, the momentum of arresting and killing people was held back to a certain extent. The actual number of arrests and killings nationwide in the second and third phases of the campaign in the following two years saw a relatively large decline. The total number was only about a quarter of the arrests and killings in the first few months of 1951, so there is no doubt that the Resolution played its part.

Sixty years have passed since the first large-scale Suppressing of Counter-revolutionaries Campaign took place, and many lessons can be summed up. After years of war, people needed to recover. When the new regime was established, those in power should have adopted a policy of leniency, trying best to heal the social rift and win support from all walks of life. Except those who have to be killed, killling should not have been taken lightly. Each one of the 1,107 war criminals captured from the Japanese aggression against China had caused unprecedented disaster for the Chinese people, yet they were well treated in the War Criminal Management Centre. After a few years, they were granted amnesty and went back to Japan. Why couldn’t ordinary counter-revolutionaries in China, those who had no blood debts and no serious current sabotage activities, be given a chance to live?! 

Take the 81 county magistrates in Guizhou Province during the Kuomintang era as an example: when the People's Liberation Army liberated Guizhou, some of them changed sides, some surrendered, some were arrested and released, a few of them were given jobs, and the majority of them had already been handled in accordance with their specific situation. However, in the killing frenzy of Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign, every single one of them was executed. Can it be that their crimes were greater than those of the Japanese war criminals?

Regarding the death penalties, why were they handled so sloppily and lightly?  Tongcheng County (桐城县), Anhui Province planned to kill 16 counter-revolutionaries and submitted the cases to the Anqing Prefecture Party Committee for approval. The party committee reviewed the cases and disapproved all of them. Related documents were sent back to the county.  Without so much as opening the envelope to check the content, officials in the county public security department assumed that the death penalties were approved. All 16 people were dragged to the execution field and shot. Among them, 5 were baozhang,[10] 4 were Youth League of the Three Principals of the People[11] district branch members, 3 were gendarmes, 2 were local branch heads of the Persistent Way, a religious sect, and 6 were landlords. None of the 16 individuals had blood debts or committed rape. Later those cases were reviewed and it turned out that 11 out of the 16 should not even have been arrested and should have been released immediately. When several bully landlords were executed in the Fuyang (阜阳) area, a few women who had slept with them were also killed together with them. Their crimes were "disgraceful behavior that brought shame to the laboring people." There were also innocent people who were killed by mistake, including many people who risked their lives to engage in underground work [for the CCP]. They had managed to escape numerous assassination attempts by Kuomintang spies, only to be killed by people on their own side, This is truly, unimaginably absurd. 

Since the experience and lessons of the first large-scale Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign were never carefully summed up, these mistakes were repeated in successive political campaigns after that, causing enormous disasters for the Chinese people. The first Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign was followed by the Campaign of Eliminating Counter-revolutionaries,  the Agricultural Cooperative Movement and the Socialist Transformation in Industry and Commerce Movement, the Anti-rightist Struggle, the Great Leap Forward Movement, and the “Four Clean-ups” Movement. Following requests from the CCP Central Committee, local public security bureaus had to make arrangements for struggle against the enemies, and Suppressing the Counter-revolutionaries was used as an important means to ensure the smooth progress of those political campaigns. That was the reason why until 1976,[12] China's Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries movement never really stopped, and continued all the way up to the Cultural Revolution when the "Six Regulations of Public Security" were issued. Movements like Clean-up Class Ranks，One Smash and Three Antis, Special Case Investigations, etc. were a continuation of Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries, and were all carried out in the same manner. No legal procedure was followed, it was completely lawless. The Chinese people have been greatly devastated and hurt again and again.

 

Source:  Yin, Shusheng, “Mao Zedong and the Third National Public Security Conference”. Yanhuang Chunqiu, No. 5 (2014). 

 

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[1] Huang Jing (黄敬，1912-1958), the first mayor of Tianjin City. For the complete document,  See Mao, Zedong. Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao. Volume 2 (1951. 1 – 1951. 12) [Beijing]: Zhong yang wen xian chu ban she, 1987. Semi-classified.

[2] Peng Zheng (October 12, 1902 – April 26, 1997)，deputy director of the Politics and Law Commission of the Government Administration Council and mayor of Beijing. [All notes by translator]

[3] Luo Ruiqing (May 31, 1906 – August 3, 1978), first Minister of Public Security, 1949 - 1959.

[4] Referring to“Central Committee Directives on Correcting the Right-wing Bias in Suppressing Counter-Revolution Activities”, one of the key documents in the Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries Campaign. It was issued on October 10^th, 1950, thus popularly known as “The Double 10 Directives”.  

[5] “Six codes” refers to the six main legal codes that made up the main body of law in the Republic of China, including the  Constitution, Civil Code, Code of Civil Procedure, Criminal Code, Code of Criminal Procedure and Administrative Laws.

[6] In  Jiaguo yilai Mao Zedong wegao Volume 2 (1951. 1 – 1951. 12) [Manuscripts of Mao Zedong since the Founding of the Country: 1951. 1 – 1951.12] is a collection of 79 instructions on the Suppressing Counter-revolutionary Campaign from January to May. See Mao, Zedong.  

[7] Ke Qingshi (柯庆施;  1902 –  1965), then mayor of Nanjing.

[8] Rao Shushi (饶漱石；1903—1975) ，then Chairman of Military and Political Committee and General Secretary of East China Bureau, and First Secretary of CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee.

[9] Today’s prefecture-level city in north-central Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

[10] Baojia system, a form of local political organization. A jia was composed of 10 households, a bao was composed of 10 jia. Jiazhang was the head of a jia, baozhang was the head of a bao. Both were unpaid positions.

[11] A youth organization of the Kuomintang era.

[12] Mao Zedong died on September 9^th, 1976.

Yin Shusheng： “Great Leap Forward” in Public Security Work

 (Written by Yin Shushegn, Former Executive Deputy Director of Public Security Bureau, 

Anhui Province, also worked in Public Security Bureau, Qinghai Province)

 

Translated by Jianglin Li
Edited by Matthew Akester

*All notes and square brackets added by translator*

 

This author was born with the luck to be caught up in all the political movements that followed Liberation, and thus experienced the changing tides of the past half century, and acquired a lot of knowledge and understanding. Having been hit by many dangerous waves in those political movements, I was lucky enough to navigate through them and land in safety each time. Compared with many of my devastated and innocent contemporaries, I was indeed very fortunate.

In the summer vacation of 1952, I was just a junior high student. As one of the student representatives, I participated in the ideological reform movement of middle school teachers held in Wuhu City, Anhui Province. Our task was to help teachers confess their political and historical issues over a period of three months. Since my political consciousness was too low to understand anything, I was respectful to the teachers, and sometimes even blushed when I spoke, never mind being able to help the teachers.  Therefore, I became a voluntary odd-job boy, taking over the indoor and outdoor cleaning work. However, when the critical struggle meetings were held, all student representatives had to participate. It was upsetting to watch the teachers I respected being humiliated and scolded, with people pointing fingers at their noses. I felt sympathetic and helpless, and feared that something might happen.

Bringing more than one thousand “questionable” teachers from all parts of the province and congregating them on the site of today’s Anhui Normal University, for ideological remolding, was a major event in education circles after the Liberation. The campus was around Zhushan Mountain with spectacular scenery. Standing on the mountain top, one could see the Yangtze river flowing beneath. Whenever we had time, like the children we practically were, we would go to the mountain to have fun, but a few of the teachers who were unable to cross the threshold[1] during the ideological remolding hanged themselves in the woods.  After that, we never dared to go up the mountain again.

After the ideological remolding movement ended, some teachers mysteriously disappeared. Later, I heard that they were counter-revolutionaries and were arrested.

In the internal Purging Counter-revolutionary Movements of 1955 and 1956, of the best Chinese, mathematics and history teachers at my school, Shucheng Middle School, two committed suicide, and one was arrested, sentenced and died in the reform-through-labor farm (rehabilitated after 1978). I was shocked once again. Before getting over the lingering fear, I was admitted into Beijing College of Political Science and Law (today’s China University of Political Science and Law) only to get caught up in the Anti-Rightist Struggle. Shortly after joining the college, one day I witnessed Qian Duansheng, the dean, being struggled after returning from India. The school took him straight from the airport into the auditorium to be struggled. In the early days of the Rectification Movement, he raised a few opinions to the college party committee. Those opinions were not sharp at all, but he was classified as a Rightist after he left the country for an official visit. Shortly after the Rectification Movement started, the Central Committee sent him to visit foreign countries to represent Chinese jurists. He could not have dreamed of such an ending. In 1954, when the Constitution of the People's Republic of China was being worked on, Mao Zedong personally wrote a letter to him and appointed him as the General Counsel of the Constitution [drafting team]. Mao's letter was displayed as part of school history, indicating that he enjoyed a very high position in the legal profession. The fact that Qian Duansheng and many teachers and classmates in the school were labeled as Rightists made me deeply aware that" disaster proceeds from careless talk". From then on, I was very cautious, did not dare to talk freely, and thus safely got through one political movement after another.

In 1958, the Great Leap Forward campaign was vigorously launched in the country, proposing to overtake England and catch up with the United States in production of major industrial products in a short period of time, and transit to communism within a dozen years, even a couple of years. To achieve this goal, the Great Leap Forward, the Communization and Backyard Furnace Movements were in full swing. Our school also built more than a dozen small furnaces, using wood and coal to make iron. I actively participated as well and worked for a few months, but not even one piece of quality iron was produced.

In the spring of 1959, food shortage gradually spread throughout the country. By 1960, due to hunger and malnutrition, I suffered from hepatitis and edema. For more than three months, I was not able to attend classes, and had to be hospitalized. (At that time, due to overcrowding, I could not get admitted to a hospital. The school vacated a dozen rooms to house the patients, and the hospital regularly sent doctors to check on us). The so-called treatment was to stop taking classes (at that time, gymnastic classes in all Beijing schools were canceled, some schools only opened for half the day), rest in bed to avoid burning calories, and a little extra nutrition. In three months, I was given 1 kg of eggs and 0.5 kg of pork as nutritional supplement. By the end of the year, tens of millions of people had died of starvation, including two of my uncles and my brother-in-law living in the countryside. However, in the year 1958, the newspapers were taken over by reports about thousands, tens of thousands or even more kilograms of grain yield per mu,[2] and the national leaders were worrying about having too much grain to consume!

In the autumn of 1961, I graduated from college. On the form where you enter your career choices, I put “teacher” for all three. However, the Ministry of Public Security came to the school to pick new graduates, and I just had to have the luck to be picked. I had no choice but to go to the ministry. In this way, the three of us recent graduates from Beijing College of Political Science and Law went straight to the Ministry of Public Security. After reporting for the job, I learned that the Central Committee had transferred Wang Zhao,[3] the Deputy Minister of Public Security, to Qinghai Province as the second provincial party secretary and governor of the province, to correct the mistakes committed by the Leftist line.

After Wang Zhao got there, he found that the public security, prosecutorial and legal organs had been deeply involved in breaking law and discipline during the "Great Leap Forward" movement and needed to be thoroughly rectified. They needed to strengthen the cadre force.  For this purpose, he went to the Ministry of Public Security and asked for more cadres. We three new recruits and dozens of other cadres already working there were transferred to Qinghai Province to strengthen the political and legal departments, mainly the public security departments. I went to the Qinghai Provincial Public Security Department, and was assigned the task of receiving the masses’ appeals to the authorities for help, handling appeal cases, cooperating with the provincial Party committee’s case-review office to investigate and work on major unjust and false cases. This gave me the opportunity to learn that the public security organs had launched their own “great leap forward” in line with the national Great Leap Forward movement, using instruments of dictatorship[4] to suppress the masses, and had created a huge human tragedy.

How did "great leap forward" movement in public security work happen?

On January 1st, 1958, after Mao Zedong’s personal review and revision, the People’s Daily published its New Year’s Day editorial entitled “Ride the Wind and Waves,” and put forward the slogan of “Develop the Power and Strive for the Upstream”, demanding “in about 15 years, catch up with or overtake the United Kingdom in the output of steel and other major industrial products... to strive for a great leap forward and a great harvest in agricultural production in 1958."

The Ministry of Public Security took immediate action and summoned some provincial and municipal bureau directors on January 22 for a briefing meeting to discuss how to carry out the "great leap forward" in public security circles. At that meeting, the "Main Points in 1958 Public Security Work" was formulated to define the direction and goals for public security work.  The "Main Points" clearly required the national public security organs to "strive to achieve ‘four no-s’” in agricultural production cooperatives, i.e., no theft cases involving more than 15 yuan, no fire causing losses of more than 10 yuan, no relatively large-scale superstitious activities; and institutions, enterprises and schools with no accidents causing serious damage, no theft cases involving more than 100 yuan, no fires causing losses of more than10 yuan."

The main points of this plan were personally reviewed and approved by Mao Zedong to be forwarded to lower levels. Like the “Great Leap Forward” in economic construction, this is a dream plan that was simply impossible to achieve. At the same time, the "Main Points" did not propose a specific and effective way to achieve the objectives of this plan, but generally required the public security organs at all levels to "resolutely arrest those who should be arrested according to law, and resolutely control those who should be put under control. The department should assist relevant departments to find out bad elements inside the enterprises and resolutely remove the majority of them. Put the hats[5] back on all the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, and bad elements whose hats have been taken off but who violated the law again."

What is "should be arrested"? What is "should be put under control"? "According to the law", according to what law? There were no operational guidelines, each person had his own explanation, and whatever explanation was given made sense. This provided a policy basis for those who abused the penal law.  In addition, this paragraph clearly and unambiguously told public security organs at all levels that their instruments of dictatorship were meant to be utilized to defend and promote the completion of the political task of the "Great Leap Forward" movement.

The Guizhou Provincial Public Security Department actively responded [to the “Main Points”]. In February 1958, it took the lead in proposing a “seven no-s” campaign in the province, meaning “no fire, no accumulated cases, no bandits, no theft, no riots, no opium, no gambling activities”. The Ministry of Public Security immediately issued a document to promote the adoption of Guizhou Province’s practices by public security organs throughout the country, and public security organs at all levels in the country responded right away. On the basis of the "seven no-s", some provinces launched "ten no-s", "dozens of no-s" and "hundred no-s" movements. Some localities felt that all these "no-s" were still not sufficient to reflect the reality of the "great leap forward" in public security work, and the idea of "glass plate" and "crystal stone" was put forward. This meant making the whole society as clean and bright as glass plates and crystal stones, without a trace of dust. Not only would there be no crime, even arguments between husbands and wives, and quarrels between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law would not come up. That wording was praised by the central government leaders in charge of political and legal work at that time.

Now that the slogans and goals for “great leap forward” in public security work had been put in place, how to achieve them? The solution was to use the instruments of dictatorship to arrest all those considered to be, or to have the potential to be, bad people, and those who were likely or had the potential to commit crimes, and lock them up in roundhouses, detention centers, investigatory asylums, training teams and prisons, so they had no way to engage in sabotage activities. On April 9, 1958, Qinghai Provincial Party Secretary Gao Feng had this to say at the public security work forum: "Some people may not have engaged in current sabotage activities, but they may be dangerous elements. Secret arrests can be made to round them up. [Arrests] should be done in a skillful way so no one can find out; a variety of methods can be utilized, such as getting them into fights, [encouraging them to] report on each other, grabbing and sending them in [to the authorities], etc.. Knock out all the dangerous elements and social problems will be reduced.” "Who told them to make trouble at this time (during the Great Leap Forward)?, grab all of them and don’t let a single one out [of jail]. Should they die, let them die in prison.”

Accordingly, arrest plans were formulated at every level from central to local [party committees], and arrest quotas were assigned. That’s a Great Leap Forward, isn’t it!  Arrest quotas were added at each local level, making the numbers bigger and bigger with each addition. Therefore, from 1958 to 1960, in many places the number of arrests exceeded the grand total of the years from 1949 to 1957. In Anhui Province, more than 8,000 suspects were arrested in 1957, and the arrest quota issued by the central government in 1958 was 45,000. Anhui Province overfulfilled its task and ended up making more than 101,000 arrests. By 1960, more than 173,000 arrests were made in three years. Most of the arrested were innocent working-class people who had verbally expressed their discontent with the Great Leap Forward, the people's commune, the backyard furnace movement, the public canteen and free sharing of private materials and human resources. Some of them stole and ate unripe grain from the field for survival; some stole or made unauthorized distribution of food belonging to production teams; some looted the production teams’ grain warehouses rather than starve to death; some were arrested as fugitives after fleeing in hope of survival elsewhere. About one-third of the arrested died in custody, a staggering loss. In Anhui Province, more than 50,000 prisoners and uncharged criminal suspects and reeducation-through-labor personnel died in Labor Reform farms and detention centers in three years, accounting for 31% of the total number of these personnel. In the Reform-Through-Labor and labor camp system administered by Qinghai Province, 49,304 people (labeled “three-types” -reform camp prisoners, former prisoners reemployed after serving full term, and reform-through-labor prisoners) perished, accounting for 30% of the total number of 160,000.

 In the Great Leap Forward campaign, the secretary of the Anhui Provincial Party Committee, Zeng Xisheng, took the law in his own hands and gave blind and reckless orders that deviated from reality. As a result, the province was devastated by starvation and misery, with the homeless roaming the country and the corpses of starved people lying by the roadside. Four million people starved to death. Even at such a time, when people were filled with anger, they dared not speak out, for any slight sign of resistance would land them in prison or persecution to death. Under such unbearable circumstances, one person who could endure it no longer did something to vent his resentment. In the spring of 1959, a large poster was found in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui Province, with the slogan “Down with fatty Zeng and kill Evil Yu” (Yu was the surname of Zeng Xisheng’s wife). Zeng ordered the public security organs to crack the case within a limited time, forcing all the cadres (including those in the provincial Party committee) to have their handwriting analyzed. A total of 18,000 people were investigated, 3,000 had their handwriting examined, and 4,000 were secretly searched. Some of the key targets were followed, stalked, had their mail checked and bugs installed in their homes. Among the cadres under investigation, 6 were directors of department in the provincial government. Among the “criminal suspects”, one was arrested, one detained and one suspended from work. In the end, after carrying on like this for half a year, spending considerable human, material and financial resources and the suicides of two “criminal suspects”, this so-called "counter-revolutionary slogan case" remained unsolved. Zeng Xisheng was furious. He summoned the detectives several times, reprimanded them and yelled at them to "get out!" saying "I would be better off feeding a dog than feeding you." The public security organ was turned into Zeng’s private detective agency. In those days, if the leaders (including grassroots, commune, and brigade leaders) did not like someone, all they needed to do was write a note, and the person would be put into jail. This was how they understood “people who should be arrested”.

In Qinghai Province, 63,064 people were arrested in the three years from 1958 to 1960,  accounting for 2.6% of the province's [then] average population of 2.44 million, which is equivalent to more than 3.3 times the total number of 19,077 arrests made in 1949 -1957. Among them, 40,602 arrests were made in 1958 for the purpose of suppressing opposition and promoting the Great Leap Forward.

With the constant chaotic occurrences during the Great Leap Forward campaign, Mao Zedong held two meetings in Zhengzhou at the end of 1958 and in spring 1959, and took initiatives to correct the Leftist line. Based on Mao Zedong’s directives, the Ministry of Public Security requested the public security organs to implement a “three less" policy, that is, "less executions, less arrests, and also less surveillance than in the past." Because of this, the number of arrests and detentions in 1959 was sharply reduced. The number of arrests in Anhui Province dropped from more than 100,000 in 1958 to 8,115. In Qinghai Province, 4,345 arrests were made in 1959, only one ninth of the 1958 figure. In 1960, in order to implement the spirit of the Lushan Conference to counterattack right opportunism, crack down on concealing grain output and unauthorized distribution,[6] uproot rich peasants and pull out "Little Peng Dehuai-s" on all levels,[7] arrests and detentions were once again made on a large scale. In the whole year [1960], 18,177 arrests were made in Qinghai, and more than 50,000 in Anhui. The drastic swelling and shrinking of arrests and detentions was not determined by the state of public security, but by the leaders’ instructions to serve the purpose of coordinating with political movements. This was a common practice in that era.

When making arrests and detentions, no procedures were followed. Instead, they adopted the practices of the war years and political campaigns to make mass arrests. Many of those arrested and sentenced did not have corpus delicti or any proof of a crime having been committed, and some of them did not even have files. Some detainees died in custody but nobody knew their names; some were sentenced, but never had a chance to appear in court and meet with the judge before being sent to Reform-Through-Labor farms, and became “black prisoners”, i.e., prisoners without files. In just one such institution, the Haomen Farm in Qinghai Province,[8] there were more than 800 fileless prisoners. Nobody knew why those people were sent over to “reform through labor” from southeast coastal areas or to how many years each person had been sentenced. They were all became life imprisonment prisoners. When they died, it was impossible to notify their family members. After Wang Zhao got to Qinghai, more than 3,000 of the "black reform-through-labor prisoners" in the province lucky enough to remain alive were released and sent home.

Let's take a look at some typical examples from several counties in Qinghai Province to demonstrate how the “great leap forward” in public security work operated.

On July 1, 1958, the CCP Huzhu[9] County Committee submitted a report entitled Report on Preventing Rebellion by Pre-empting Enemies to the provincial party committee with the intention of gaining awards. However, no rebellion had ever happened in Huzhu County. The report claimed: "In June 1958, Huzhu County Public Security Bureau organized 52 cadres to form 12 working groups which were sent to all townships. On the night of [June] 24, 1,152 arrests were made, including 1,075 in society at large and 77 in government organizations."

In a small county with a population of less than 100,000, what would this situation look like? It is simply unimaginable. In 1959 and 1960, with a large number of people dead or dying, the county continued to make arrests, arresting not only ordinary people, but also grassroots cadres who showed sympathy to people. In April 1960, Ma Xianzhen was the head of Wozi production team, of the Shilang Brigade of the Honglangzigou Commune in this county. In this team of 150 or so, more than 40 died of starvation. His 70-year-old mother said to him: “Your first task as a production team leader is to save people. Otherwise, the whole team will starve to death, and then who are you going to lead?” Inspired by his mother, Ma secretly took the production team’s 4420 jin [c.2210 kilograms] of grain, together with the 800 jin of vegetables he exchanged for the team’s four sheep, and distributed it to the members, at the risk of being jailed or even executed. Knowing that this amount of grain and vegetable was not enough to solve the problem, he took team members to dig edible herbs in the mountains to pull through the difficult time, and was able to temporarily halt the mass deaths due to starvation. However, his action was soon discovered by brigade cadres and reported to the commune. The Public Security Bureau arrested him, charged him as a “bad element”, and sentenced him to five years in prison.

Chi Yuanfa, head of Hongshan production team, Danma Brigade, Danma Commune, saw that 51 out of the 117 members had died of starvation. He felt that if he did not take action, the whole team would perish. However, the team had no grain left. One night, he took seven team members who were still able to move, and stole a few hundred jin of barley from the brigade. They did not grind the barley into flour, just cooked it and sent it door to door to all the team members. Before daybreak, brigade cadres discovered [what had happened] and reported it to Public Security Bureau. When the police came to arrest him, team members who were still alive but barely able to move came out to see him off. A 60-year-old peasant said to the policemen “Our production team had more than 100 people before, now there are only about 50 left. We would all have starved to death without the food Chi gave us. Comrade Policeman, we only beg you please do not abuse him, please do not kill him, we are waiting for him to come back to save us.” The Public Security Bureau charged him as a “bad element”, and sent him to the training team in the county seat for three months. He died one month later. As for the production team, only 18 survived. 

Minhe County is the eastern gate of Qinghai Province with relatively favorable natural conditions, and is suitable for growing wheat, barley, potatoes and various fruits. The  Huangshui River (Huang Shui) flows through the county and enters the Yellow River through Lanzhou. The scenery on both sides is beautiful. It is the granary and major fruit producing county of Qinghai Province. After Wang Zhao went to Qinghai, he sent a provincial-level working group (I was fortunate enough to participate) to conduct an in-depth investigation, and discovered that due to man-made rather than natural disasters, 20,984 people starved to death from 1958 to 1960, and 5,721 people fled and died elsewhere. 7,925 people were unaccounted for (actually died outside the county), and the county suffered a net population loss of 25%. Lijiashan Production Brigade, Gushan Commune, suffered the largest number of deaths. Of the original population of 1,318, 601, or 46%, starved to death. 492 households had no survivors left with 1,623 deaths in these families. 867 orphans were housed by the government. It is in this county that 33 cases of cannibalism took place and 46 people were eaten. Among them, 38 were corpses cooked and eaten; 8 people either killed and ate their own or someone else’s children, 5 children were victims. Even under such circumstances, when people’s lives were in a life-or-death situation, leaders of this county totally disregarded the reality, and continued to carry out the Great Leap Forward, “counter rightist opportunism”, “cracking down on concealing and unauthorized distribution of grain output”, and used dictatorship methods to deal cruelly with the masses who dared to express the slightest complaint. In those three years, 2,680 people were arrested, 1,091 were put under surveillance, 1,915 were sent to Reform-Through-Labor farms or collective training teams, and 2,966 [of the above] were given prison sentences.

A large number of detainees died of torture, extortion to make them confess, or starvation, but those in power paid no attention. In three years, 729 detainees died in the county detention center. In August 1960, Xie Fuzhi, who had succeeded Luo Ruiqing as the Minister of Public Security for a year, visited the county Public Security Bureau and witnessed police officers carrying a corpse from the detention center. Upon inquiry, he learned that deaths had occurred every day.  He said to the police chief: "Deaths took place every day and you don’t take measures to stop it. Aren’t you afraid that ghosts might come to you at night?!" Xie Fuzhi, who had done his best to implement the Leftist policies in public security work, suddenly discovered his conscience - this alone indicated how serious the situation was! He said to the public security director Yang Shufang who accompanied him on the inspection tour, “This year, arrests to be made in Qinghai Province should be roughly the same as last year (1959). Do not exceed this [quota].”  He then continued to Xinjiang on his inspection tour. On his return trip to Beijing via Lanzhou, he summoned Yang Shufang again and instructed him to make sure that the arrest quota in Qinghai Province that year must be limited to the 5,000 issued by the central government. If the quota had to be exceeded, it must be reported to the [CCP] central committee for approval. Yang immediately transferred Xie Fuzhi’s instructions to Gao Feng, secretary of the CCP Qinghai Provincial Committee. Gao chaired a provincial Party Committee standing committee meeting to discuss this issue, and had this to say: “This year is a crucial year for defending the Great Leap Forward and resolutely counter-attacking the right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend. The number of arrests cannot be reduced.” The provincial committee submitted a report to the Central Committee with an arrest quota of 15,000. Both the Central Committee and Xie Fuzhi made no comments about it, which was tantamount to approval. In the end, more than 18,000 arrests were made that year.  

Huangzhong County[10] was the largest and most populated agricultural county in Qinghai Province. It was Qinghai’s granary but also the county that suffered the most deaths due to starvation. People there dared not resist because An Youfang, the county head and public security director, was an aggressive follower of  the left-leaning line. He launched a competition in the county, and police stations making the most arrests were praised and awarded red flags; the chiefs of police stations making fewer arrests were criticized, even disciplined, and their stations were given white flags as punishment. In June 1958, following the provincial committee’s directive of "three all-clears”, i.e., "clear all counter-revolutionaries, clear all guns, clear all cases”,  he put forward the slogan of "working hard for three days and nights to make 600 arrests.”  As a result, 841 people were arrested in 6 days. As not enough counter-revolutionaries could be found to fill the quota, 270 people who reportedly had committed adultery were also arrested, accounting for 32% of the total number of arrests.

 In the spring of 1960, [peasants] in Yuanshan production team in the Handong Commune of this county had only 2 liang (16 liang equalled 1 jin)[11] of grain per person per day. Li Zhanxiang, a 14-year-old student in this team, saw 7 members in his family of 11 starving to death. Out of desperation, he went to the teams’ pasture and stole two baby lambs that lasted for five days. In the 6th day, he went to the brigade collective eating house to get his portion. On his way home, he took two sips from the half clay pot of barley soup, feeling it was just like water. Frustrated, he smashed the pot and started to cry. Knowing that the whole family would starve to death in a couple of days, he returned to the pasture with rope and a sickle. Taking advantage of the herder’s absence, he tied up a donkey, cutting off one of its ears and ran back home. When the herder found out, he reported it to the cadres. They traced the blood drops to Li’s home and caught him scraping hair from the donkey ear. They also found the two lambskins. Caught with the stolen objects, brigade cadres tied him up, poked a hole in his ear to hang the donkey ear on, and escorted him to the county Public Security Bureau. They were praised by An Youfang. Li was arrested, charged with the crime of “harming animals” and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In July 1961, the provincial party committee working group went down to Huangzhong County to inspect the self-examination and self-correction of the Public Security Bureau, and asked the new director why Li Zhanxiang had not been released. The director replied that Li had been caught red-handed stealing lambs and cutting off a donkey’s ear. The facts were clear and evidence conclusive, we were not sure [whether he should be released], that was why he was not released. Upon hearing the report, Wang Zhao commented: “In Li’s family, seven out of eleven members died of starvation, he had no choice but to do that to stay alive, plus he was a minor and should not be arrested according to law.” It was under these circumstance that Li was released. After returning home, he learned that his entire family had starved to death, and he was the only survivor. He took a few ragged clothes and went to Xinjiang to live with his uncle.

On July 23, 1960, An Youfang went to Shangxinzhuang commune to inspect work， and decided to make dozens of arrrests. When the police chief reported to him by reading out cases of "criminal suspects", he dozed off. Nobody dared to wake him up, so the police chief continued to read. When he woke up, the chief asked: “How should those people be dealt with?” He was half-awake, and kept saying "arrest, arrest, arrest". It was in this manner that he made the decision to arrest 37 people in one evening.

On June 22, 1958, Ledu County[12] CCP issued a detailed arrest plan to the townships under its administration. Let us take a look at this plan and see how absurd it was! The following is copied from the original document without changing a single character:

The total number of striking targets covering various types of enemies in the county is 450, including 7 to 9 religious personnel, 80 to 85 landlords and rich peasants, 95 to 100 counter-revolutionaries and evildoers, 70-80 enemy and puppet [government] administrative and military officials,[13] 30 to 35 five-type enemies (author’s note: local tyrants, bandits, spies, key members of counter-revolutionary parties and organizations, enemy and puppet administrative, military and police force personnel), 15 to 20 elements under public surveillance, 40 to 45 offenders released from labor camps and family members of counter-revolutionaries, 26 to 30 elements whose surveillance has been withdrawn, 30 to 36 Yiguandao[14] members and necromancers, and 7 to 10 evildoers from government organs and schools who have been handed over to society for work under public surveillance. To divide [the arrest quota] by townships: 28 to 30 arrests to be made in Nianbo[15] Township, 15 to 17 in Laoya Township, 27 to 29 in Jutan Township, 26 to 28 in Ganggou Township, 12 to 14 in Hongshui Township, 11 to 13 in Gaodian Township, 14 to 16 in Fengdui Township, 16 to 17 in Maying Township, 19 to 20 in Lijia Township, 11 to 13 in Shoule Township, 13 to 15 in Gonghe Township, 13 to 14 in Shuimo Township, 20 to 28 in Gaomiao Township, 13 to 14 in Yuruin Township, 16 to 18 in Xinren Township, 19 to 21 in Putai Township, 16 to 18 in Zhongba Township, 17 to 19 in Chengtai Township, 18 to 19 in Machang Township, 15 to 17 in Luhua Township, 12 to 13 in Zhongling Township; 18 to 20 in Yinsheng Township, 15 to 17 in Dala Township, 9 to 10 in Shuangbao Township, 7 to 10 in religious temples. Deadline: start from June 25^th, finish by July 15^th. The pioneer group of arrests is to be made on June 20^th, and additional group from July 3^rd to 5^th; finally, from July 12^th to 15^th, all the subjects under our control are to be arrested.”

Such a thorough and detailed plan to arrest people can truly be rated as unsurpassable. People today may ask how this can happen? It can’t be real. However, I want to state seriously that such incredibly ridiculous things have indeed happened in our country, and it did not happen just in this one place.

At that time, the political and legal departments put forward a slogan for the "Great Leap Forward" as the code of conduct for the public security, the procuratorial and court systems:  "One chief to represent three chiefs (public security chief, procurator-general and chief justice), one handler to substitute three handlers (detective, prosecutor and judge); go down for general arrests, separate [those to be arrested] on return." Guided by this slogan, the Public Security Bureau, procuratorate and court were effectively turned into one single organ without any supervision or restriction. Party, administrative leaders and police personnel from public security, procuratorate and court went down with blank arrest warrants, arresting people wherever they went and whoever they wanted to arrest. Even though the slogan claimed they would “separate after coming back”, it was never put into practice. As a matter of fact, it was impossible to do so.

In December, 1959, Xining City Public Security Bureau drafted 15 policemen and dispatched them to Sanhe Commune, Huangzhong County to carry out “anti-right-opportunism struggle”. Hui Pu, the deputy mayor, gave them this instruction: “The reason for your task is to implement the spirit of the Lushan Conference, and resolutely fight back against the right-opportunist trend. The task was quite hard. To make a breakthrough, a certain number of arrests must be made. When necessary, you can make arrests first and go through the procedure after you come back.” As a result, shortly after the work group arrived at the commune, a decision was made to arrest 58 people. When Hui Pu went down to the country, he always brought blank warrants with him, and arrested people along the way. He claimed that in this way “[warrants] can be used immediately when needed and the procedure is simplified”.

As the Public Security Bureau, procuratorate and court effectively merged into one organ, all the arrested were sure to be sentenced. In areas where too many arrests had been made for available judges to process, conviction notices were preprinted. When sentencing, all they needed to do was to fill in the names of those indicted and the number of years of their sentence, with no trials or interrogations conducted.  In the Yushu Prefecture court, 183 people were sentenced with one single warrant. The “criminal offenses” were written as follows: “XXX, the defendant with extremely wicked character, has never made an honorable living before or after the Liberation, and had raped 607 married women and 51 [other] women. In addition, [he] also committed 607 sodomies and participated in 30 cases of sodomy with each other.” Today people may not be able to understand this unfounded accusation or figure out what this bizarre warrant was all about. It turns out that the 183 accused consisted of 11 females and 172 males. Instead of distinguishing each individual’s criminal activities, the cumulative activities of adultery, rape, and sodomy they collectively committed, both by individuals and with each other, were added up to get the total number. However, reading the warrant one gets the impression that each one of the 183, including the 11 females, had committed 607 rapes and acts of sodomy. The warrant was discovered by the [Qinghai] Provincial Party Committee inspection team during its inspection of Yushu Prefecture which had the highest arrest rate.  Later on, when I went with my superiors to Yushu, I saw this warrant myself.

This warrant should be preserved as a historical artifact to educate later generations and show them what the idiom “treating human life like a piece of dry grass” means.

All these appalling and bizarre activities that completely disregarded law and discipline happened at the lower and grassroots levels during the Great Leap Forward and other political movements, however, the root causes were at the top level, in the CCP Central Committee. Without erroneous direction from the Central Committee, such things would not have happened. Even if they did happen, it would not have developed on such a large scale and it would have been easier to straighten things out. However, in the extreme Leftist era, bizarrely, arrests were based on the quotas issued by the Central Committee; what happened to the spirit of work based on facts and reality?

After the Seven Thousand Conference held by the Central Committee in 1962,[16] the Central Political and Legal Leading Group submitted a report entitled "Summary Report on Political and Legal Work from 1958 to 1961" to the Central Committee. The report said: "While fully affirming the great achievements of political and legal work, some shortcomings and mistakes have occurred in the actual work, mainly in the following: First, public security organs, courts and procuratorates have wrongly arrested a few who should not have been arrested and sentenced. A few grassroots-level public security organs did not act in accordance with national laws, and arrested some people in the name of detention, reeducation through labor, and collective training. In addition, some organs and offices (such as those in communes, brigades, construction sites, enterprises, schools) that are not authorized to arrest criminals, and even a small number of local party committees and responsible persons have illegally exercised the power of arrest and detention, or used apprehension, reeducation through labor, collective training  and other means to arrest and detain people. What is particularly serious is that in a very small number of places, cadres used legal means such as arrest, detention, and sentencing to implement policies that violate the Central Committee’s political directives and guidelines…”

In 1958, it was clearly stated that the main points of public security for that year were to "arrest those who should be arrested, and control those who should be put under control according to law." What does this “should” mean and on what “law” was it to be based? From the central to the local, no one took the law seriously. At a meeting with directors of the Beidaihe Cooperation Zone on August 21, 1958, Mao Zedong said "Law should not be used to manage the majority of the people. The kinds of laws like civil law and criminal law are not needed. Who remembers all the codes in civil law and criminal law? I participated in the formulation of the Constitution and I can’t remember it.... Each one of our resolutions is a law, and the meetings are also laws... We mainly rely on meetings, four meetings a year, and the Big Leap Forward, no time to break the law! No need to rely on civil law and criminal law to maintain order. " In accordance with the spirit of Mao Zedong’s speech, the Central Political and Legal Leading Group immediately wrote a report entitled “Report to Chairman [Mao] and the Central Party Committee on Issues in Political and Legal Work after Communization”. The report clearly stated: “Formulation of criminal law, civil law, and procedural law is no longer necessary.” At the time, those three laws had been drafted, and revised many times, ready to be passed by the National People’s Congress. However, due to prevailing nihilist ideology, they had not been adopted. Now the Central Political and Legal Leadership Group simply announced that these three laws did not need to be formulated. How would the political and legal organs execute law? We could only act according to the party’s resolutions and leaders’ instructions. It was unfair that the Central Political and Legal Leading Group failed to act in accordance with the law but pushed all the mistakes onto the lower level.

Liu Shaoqi wrote this instruction after reading the Summary Report: “The mistakes in political and legal work in recent years were mainly caused by applying the dictatorship method of handling problems between us and our enemies to people on our own side, and problems among the working people. It is a fundamental mistake.   This is not the Communist Party’s method, but the Kuomintang’s style of work, to stand above the people and exert pressure on the people."

Liu Shaoqi’s criticism of the nature of the mistakes in political and legal work hit the nail on the head. However, he did not explicitly point out that even though the error occurred at the lower level, the root cause was in the Central Committee, and did not specify the fact that both the Central Committee and local governments had failed to act in accordance with law, which was the root cause of the mistakes committed in the work.

This is not surprising though. During the "Great Leap Forward" period, Liu Shaoqi was an active advocate and practitioner of the "Great Leap Forward" movement and a legal nihilist himself. He had this to say at the August 21 meeting of the directors of the Beidaihe Collaborative Zone: "Is it the rule of the people or the rule of law? It seems that [we must] actually rely on the people, …and the law can only serve as a reference while getting things done. The party's resolution is the law." Following the speeches of Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, during the "Great Leap Forward" period, the resolutions of the party committees at all levels became law, and leaders’ words were also the law. The only unlucky ones were ordinary people. During the "Cultural Revolution" movement, when the Red Guards subjected Liu Shaoqi to struggle, he once held up the "Constitution of the People's Republic of China" claiming that he was the President of the People's Republic of China and protected by the Constitution, therefore it was illegal to struggle him. However, by that time both the Constitution and the law had been trampled on and completely destroyed, and could no longer protect him. He ended up being cruelly persecuted to death. It was a subject of infinite sympathy and grief. Having said that “the party’s resolution is the law”, in 1968 he was denounced by the party as a “traitor, enemy agent, fink” during the 12th Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee which announced that the party “permanently expels Liu Shaoqi and revokes all his duties inside and outside the party." It was this party resolution, that went totally against the constitution, that ended Liu Shaoqi’s life.

Without respect for the constitution and the law, there will be no constitutional or legal protection. This is a lesson we should never forget.

Working in the public security organs has been my career, to which I had a strong emotional attachment. I wrote this article with a heavy heart. My purpose is to sum up lessons in order to avoid repeating historical mistakes. The basis of public security work is the party's leadership, the mass line, and acting in accordance with the law. However, we must have a correct understanding of the party’s leadership, that is, strictly abide by the constitution and laws enacted under the leadership of the party, and establish the absolute authority of the constitution and the law. Any person or organization at any level must act within the scope of the constitution and law; they cannot put themselves above them, and turn the public security, political and legal departments into their own vassals to implement wrong policies and policies that violate the constitution and the law. The best way of accepting the party’s leadership is to act in strict accordance with the law, as the constitution and the law reflect the will of the party and the will of the people, and represent the fundamental interests of the party as well as the people. In the New Era,[17] the public security organs and police have safeguarded people’s legitimate rights and interests from infringement, and worked hard and fearlessly to maintain social stability so that people can live and work in peace and contentment. They have made a great contribution to maintain the overall stability of the society. Many people have sacrificed their precious lives and have been fully affirmed and praised by the party and the people. In the past 30 years of reform and opening up, public security work has not made big mistakes or directional mistakes. An important experience is that under the leadership of the party, we constantly eliminate all kinds of interference and resolutely act in accordance with the constitution and law. There are still a very few local leaders who often use dictatorship tools to suppress the people in order to promote their own wrong policies, however, resulting in mass incidents occurring from time to time. This situation can no longer continue. Otherwise, “building a harmonious society” is nothing but empty talk.

Originally published in Yanhuang Chunqiu No.1 2010.

  

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[1] “Cross the threshold” is a CCP political term meaning a person passes the party’s investigation and examination. A typical example: after the June 4^th Tiananmen crackdown, every person in universities, colleges, party and governmental organs etc. was required to tell their whereabouts during the month-long protest and make a statement, oral or written and sometimes both, on their thoughts about the protest and the crackdown. This practice was referred to as “everyone crossing the threshold” (Ren ren guo guan).

[2] One mu is 0.16 of an acre.

[3] Wang Zhao (1917-1970), participated in the Korean War as political commissar of the 64^th Army. After returning from Korea in 1953, he was appointed director of the political department in the Ministry of Public Security, and later as deputy minister. In 1961 he was appointed the second secretary of Qinghai Provincial Party Committee and governor of Qinghai. He died of persecution during the Cultural Revolution and was later exonnerated.

[4] In China, the public security and legal system are considered instruments of the proletarian dictatorship. 

[5] In CCP political terminology, “wearing a hat” refers to a person being classified in one of the categories deemed to be “class enemies”.  For example, “landlord” is a “hat” that put a person into a category to be controlled. Once the person was considered to be well reformed, his “hat” was “taken off”. However, a landlord whose “hat” had been taken off was still referred to as “a hatless landlord”.

[6] In the early days of the Great Famine (1959-1961), peasants passively resisted the government’s excessive mandatory grain collection by lying about the actual amount of grain output. On January 27, 1959, Zhao Ziyang, then secretary of Guangdong Provincial Party Committee, submitted a report about this issue. The report was sent to Beijing and Mao Zedong wrote a comment  on February 22 and ordered it transferred to the whole country, which started the movement to search and confiscate grain from peasants’ homes. Known as “counter grain-concealing movement”, it turned out to be one of the factors causing millions of deaths from starvation.

[7] Peng Dehuai (1898 – 1974) , was a senior CCP military leader, commander of Chinese forces in the Korean War and Defense Minister from 1954 to 1959. In 1955 he was awarded the rank of Marshal, second only to Zhu De in the  CCP military hierarchy. He was purged at the Lu Shan Conference in July 1959 for opposing Mao’s Great Leap Forward. His downfall was followed by an internal purge called the “anti-right-opportunist movement”, in which a large number of cadres supposedly belonging to Peng Dehuai’s clique or following his political line were labelled “little Peng Dehuai-s”, and persecuted in various ways.

[8] Haomen Farm is one of the undisclosed number of Reform-Through-Labor farms in Qinghai Province. It is located in Menyuan Hui Autonomous County, Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

[9] (Tib. Gonlung). Huzhu Tu Autonomous County in today’s Haidong City, Qinghai Province.

[10] （Tib. Rusar). The 14^th Dalai Lama’s birthplace was in this county until 1979. 

[11]  From 1932 to 1959, one Jin was 16 liang. One liang was 31.25 grams.

[12] (Tib.) Drotsang. Today’s  Ledu District, Haidong City. It was a county from 1929 to 1979.

[13] In CCP terminology, “enemy and puppet (government)” refers to the Nationalist government.

[14] One of the largest religious sects flourishing in China in the 1930s and 1940s with millions of followers.    

After 1949, CCP declared it a “counter-revolutionary society and cult” and banned it. For details, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiguandao

[15] (Tib.) Nanpae, county seat of Ledu County.

[16] Formally known as the Expanded Working Conference of the CCP Central Committee convened in Beijing from January 11 to February 7, 1962. Participants included leading cadres from the Central Committee to county level, 7000 altogether, and was thus popularly referred to as the “Conference of Seven Thousand.”

[17] New Era refers to the period since the CCP’s “Reform and Opening up” policy [1978].