Out of the Gobi Read online

  Between 1851 and 1864, there was a massive peasant uprising known as Taiping Rebellion. About 20 million people perished in the seesaw battles between the peasants and government forces before the rebellion was brutally crushed. The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) led to another invasion of China and the occupation of Beijing by the joint forces of eight foreign powers, which included European countries, the United States, and Japan. In 1894, Japanese warships obliterated the newly formed Chinese navy off China’s northeast coast, clearing the way for Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. The ground battle of the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905) was fought in the Chinese port city of Lushun, known at that time as Port Arthur, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilian deaths.

  By the beginning of twentieth century, the Qing dynasty was rotten to the core, and the country was on the verge of being torn apart by foreign powers. The 1911 Revolution marked an end to the imperial era and gave birth to the Republic of China. But it did not bring either peace or a stronger nation. The country soon fractured into many different territories, controlled by warlords who relentlessly waged bloody wars against each other, causing numerous deaths and much misery.

  In 1927, a Northern Expedition Force led by Chiang Kai-shek marched from the southern city of Guangzhou, fought its way north against the warlords, and eventually brought the country under one flag, albeit extremely tenuously. Along the way, Chiang carried out a purge of Communists, his former allies in the fight against the warlords. Thousands were massacred by Chiang’s Nationalist troops, and the rest either went underground or led uprisings against the new regime. In August 1927, Zhou Enlai, who later became the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, led an armed uprising in the southern city of Nanchang, which marked the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. In autumn 1927, Mao Zedong led what became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, establishing the first Communist base in the mountainous areas of Jiangxi Province. This began the first civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists; it would last for the next 10 years.

  In 1931, Japanese troops invaded northeast China and captured a territory about twice the size of France, turning it into a puppet state they called Manchukuo. In 1937, Japan launched an all-out war against China and occupied all the coastal cities and some inland provinces. By various estimates, Chinese casualties from the time of Japan’s invasion to its surrender in 1945 numbered between 20 and 30 million, the vast majority of which were civilian deaths.

  The Nationalists and the Communists cooperated in the war against Japan, but as soon as hostilities were ended, their own conflict was rekindled. In the ensuing war, Communist forces led by Mao Zedong rapidly grew in strength to rival and eventually overwhelm the Nationalist troops. Between 1947 and 1949, the Communists won three decisive battles, each of which eliminated about half a million Nationalist troops, sealing the fate of Chiang Kai-shek’s Old China. Chiang fled to Taiwan with what was left of his troops and his government, taking with him tons of gold and all movable treasures from Beijing’s Forbidden City.

  Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. This was to be the New China: finally unified, free of the yoke of imperial and colonial aggression, marching forward into a promising future.

  * * *

  I was born into this New China, a country that had finally begun a period of sustained nation-building after a hundred years of tragic upheaval and war. It is for this reason my parents named me Weijian. The Chinese character wei means “great,” and jian means “build” or “construct.” They certainly had great hopes for nation-building, for peace, and for a better life for their children.

  But it was not to be. Not, at least, as they had hoped.

  Chapter 1

  Man-Made Famine

  On March 10, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Mao Zedong, the leader of Chinese Communist forces in the war against Japan. “My Dear Mr. Mao,” Roosevelt wrote, “I received your letter of November 10, 1944 upon my return from the Yalta Conference and appreciate very much receiving your personal views on developments in China.” Roosevelt noted Mao’s emphasis on the unity of the Chinese people and expressed his hope that Mao and the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, could find a way to work together to defeat the Japanese. Roosevelt concluded by saying: “The friendship of the Chinese people and the people of the United States is, as you say, traditional and deep-rooted, and I am confident that the cooperation of the Chinese and American peoples will greatly contribute to the achievement of victory and lasting peace.”

  It was rather extraordinary that Roosevelt should have written to Mao at all. At the time, Mao was mainly known as a Communist guerrilla leader with a force far smaller and worse equipped than that of Chiang’s Nationalist government; few would have predicted that he would seize national power only four years later. But Mao went out of his way to make overtures to the US president. In 1945, months before the Japanese surrender, Mao offered to visit Roosevelt in Washington, but the offer was spurned by the US ambassador at the time, Patrick J. Hurley, who never delivered Mao’s offer to the president.

  After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s remaining forces fled to the island of Taiwan. Although the United States continued to recognize Chiang’s government as the legitimate government of all of China, it seemed that it was not prepared to throw its lot in with the defeated Nationalist government altogether. On January 5, 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the United States would not intervene in the event of an attack on Taiwan by the PRC, indicating that while it remained wary, the United States had not entirely ruled out a relationship with the Communists, who had cooperated effectively with the Americans in the war against Japan.

  But if Mao had cherished any hope of a good relationship between his New China and the United States, it was dashed six months later with the outbreak of the Korean War. On June 27, Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, declaring that a Communist takeover of the island would constitute a “direct threat to the security of the Pacific area.” The United States also imposed a total trade embargo on China. From that point on, Mao’s China leaned inexorably into the camp of the Soviet Union. But that friendship proved to be short-lived as well.

  In the United States, the political discourse in the 1950s became focused on “who lost China”—as if the US had ever owned it. In an era when McCarthyism dominated the US scene and all the “China hands” in the State Department saw their careers trashed or worse, any relationship with “Red China” was out of the question. The “Red scare” with respect to China would persist long after Senator Joseph McCarthy was discredited and disgraced. It would take 20 years, and a staunch anti-communist Republican president, to break the ice in the US relationship with China.

  Meanwhile, the China Mao had conquered remained a country in dire poverty. Outside the major urban areas, it was largely a preindustrial society; by the estimates of British economist Angus Maddison, China’s per capita GDP in 1950 was about $450, less than 20 percent that of the United States in 1870 (in 1990 dollars). Mao’s New China began economic reconstruction in earnest when peace finally came after the end of the Korean War in 1953. That same year, China adopted its first five-year economic development plan and began a process of rapid industrialization, with the help of the Soviet Union. Between 1953 and 1957, China’s GDP grew by about 50 percent, or more than 9 percent a year.

  But Mao still thought the pace of growth was too slow. In 1958, he launched the “Great Leap Forward,” a social and economic campaign to mobilize the entire nation to massively increase industrial and agricultural production in an effort to catch up with the more developed countries. I turned five in October of that year, and so began my earliest recollections and memories as a young child in China.

  * * *

  When I first met my late mother-in-law, who was a dentist in a military hospital, she could no
t find anything good about me except my teeth. To this day, I cannot truly explain why I was blessed with such nice teeth and the smile of an optimist, or why that was my one redeeming feature in her eyes.

  I suffered my fair share of malnutrition, occasional starvation, and poor oral hygiene in my formative years, so it is a little bit of a mystery where I got my unusually good teeth. The only reason I can think of is all the vitamin D I got from being exposed to sunlight in the little one-room home in Beijing where I spent my infant years. The window faced south, and filled the room with sunlight and brightness. My first memory is of my mother bringing my newborn brother home from the hospital in 1957, when I was about three and a half years old.

  My parents had come to Beijing from Shandong Province when I was about a year old, and we lived in that sun-drenched room until just before my fifth birthday. That year, 1958, we moved to a new home in a walled residential compound located approximately a mile east of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. There were a few residential buildings of different vintages and styles in the compound where, I would guess, 50 to 60 households resided. Our family shared our dwelling with more than 20 households under one tiled roof of a dilapidated, probably 100-year old Chinese-style house that used to be the office of Old China’s customs administration. Each household occupied one or two rooms and all the families shared the only two toilets located on each side of the building. There was a relatively new, gray-colored, four- or five-story apartment building on one side of the compound, and there were some buildings that looked like military barracks on the other. At the very far end of the compound was an auditorium, no doubt built for the official function of the old customs administration but now used for occasional movie showings. In the center of the dwellings was an open, irregular-shaped space the size of about three tennis courts with a few old trees growing here and there.

  The year 1958 turned out to be eventful and pivotal in the history of the New China. Even though I hardly remember anything of our personal life at home, I vividly remember taking part in what was happening around us. Those episodes and activities were so unusual and so tantalizingly exciting to a child that they left an indelible impression on me.

  The Great Leap Forward, a campaign launched that year by China’s charismatic leader, Mao Zedong, became a mass movement that touched everyone in the country. The policies of the Great Leap Forward were designed to mobilize China’s masses and resources to drastically accelerate China’s economic growth, to increase agricultural and industrial production, and to propel China quickly into the ranks of more developed economies. This would pave the way for China to move from the “stage of socialism” to the “stage of communism”—the classless, materially abundant utopia that was Karl Marx’s ultimate vision.

  Mao effectively aimed to accomplish in a few years what it had taken Europe more than a century to develop. But he was confident. After all, the Communist Party had grown from nothing to become the masters of the world’s most populous nation and had won victory after victory against overwhelming odds. China could achieve anything by mobilizing and motivating its masses. His Great Leap Forward would be a people’s war to accelerate China’s economic development and drastically increase its production of all things. His goal? “To surpass Britain in 15 years and to catch up with America in 20 years” in steel production, considered the main barometer of industrialization.

  In 1957, China produced less than a quarter of the steel that Britain did, and less than half as much iron. Surpassing Britain in 15 years was a colossal task. But as a 1958 publication of Beijing’s foreign-language press put it, “To the emancipated Chinese people nothing is impossible.”

  Some people believed that making iron and steel was not so hard. It was suggested that iron and steel could be made anywhere with simple homemade tools and methods. It required no more than a small blast furnace made of bricks and clay, fired by coal and fed with scrap metal.

  The small blast furnace I saw, built in the open space of our residential compound, was only a couple of meters tall, in size and shape very much like the smallest camping tents in today’s sporting goods stores. Soon there was a frenzied effort to build such homemade blast furnaces everywhere throughout China, in the backyards of homes, in schools and in villages. It was later reported that at least 60 million such blast furnaces had been built. The nationwide campaign, known as “mass steel-making,” became so feverish that people toiled at their furnaces day and night as fire and smoke bellowed out of the small chimneys. All families were expected to contribute to steel production. To demonstrate their enthusiastic support, people donated whatever metal they had in their possession, eventually including their cooking pots and pans. I followed some activist adults in our compound and went door-to-door to collect anything made of iron or steel.

  The only iron we had at home was our stove, which was stripped of its ornamentation; children helped adults carry the metal parts to the blast furnace to be melted. The fire, the smoke, the piles of scrap, the busy crowd carrying pieces of metal or doing this and that—and above all the noise—were all very exciting. Children ran around the makeshift blast furnaces more excited than on Chinese New Year. I do not know how many days or weeks this went on, but it must have gone on for a long time to leave a lasting impression on me. I do not know how much iron and steel the blast furnace in our yard produced. In the end, as I later learned, the steel production campaign was a total failure. Well, it was a big joke: Anyone with any knowledge of metallurgy would know that you can’t just toss scrap metal into a backyard furnace and expect it to produce durable, high-quality steel. People destroyed or damaged useful metal things and burned tons of wood and coal to produce only waste, as the output from the small blast furnaces was completely useless.

  In the end, China only produced about 10 percent more steel in 1958 than in 1957, but nobody knew how much of that increased production was usable. An estimated 100 million farmers, government employees, schoolteachers, and students went into the backyard steel production in that year, diverting resources and manpower from the production of other goods (including food). As a result, there was a shortage of farm labor and 15 percent of the grain crop rotted in the fields because there was no farm labor available to harvest it, which directly contributed to the Great Famine that engulfed the country.

  * * *

  To boost agricultural production and to improve health, another campaign was waged in 1958 simultaneously with the Great Leap Forward. It was called “Eradicate the Four Pests”—mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows.

  The whole country was mobilized to kill the four pests. Beijing used to have many flies and mosquitoes. Our home was sprayed with pesticides and fumigated from time to time. When this happened, we would stay outside, running and horsing around. Our building was very old and in need of repairs, and there were rats in the roof. I could sometimes hear them rustling around at night. Rat traps and poison were used to kill them. Sometimes we were warned to stay indoors as the entire city was blanketed by insect-killing smoke. We also used ingenious flytraps made with a see-through screen stretched over a pyramid-shaped frame with an opening at the bottom. We put a piece of rotten fish head in the bottom to attract flies. They had no trouble getting into the pyramid, but when they took off they were trapped; flies do not know how to fly sideways.

  But the most exciting and memorable thing to a child was the campaign to capture and kill sparrows. The alleged crime of sparrows was the theft of grain. For this offense, Mao decided to condemn them all to heaven. Between March 14 and 19, 1958, a national “Coordination Conference for the Great Leap Forward to Eradicate Four Pests” was held in Beijing. For the purpose of killing off sparrows, Beijing established a command center, and a vice mayor, Wang Kunlun, was appointed the commander-in-chief of the effort. On the day of the action, April 19, 1958, it seemed that the entire population of the city came into the streets. Some people carried long sticks with colorful rags tied on the tips, or held flags on long poles. People bea
t drums, gongs, and pans so loudly the noise was deafening. Initially, startled birds were flying everywhere. Whenever a bird flew over our heads, people would make even louder noises and wave their flags more wildly to prevent the bird from landing.

  Sparrows are short-distance fliers. Big as the city is, there was no place for the birds to hide or land as there were multitudes of people everywhere, making loud noises and waving flags. The commotion sent birds into a panic and they flew like shooting arrows here and there in search of safety. Sometimes a bird would land on a roof corner, exhausted. But there were people on the roof, and under the roof, and the crowds would rush toward the bird or throw stones at it, forcing it to take off again. After a while, exhausted birds began to drop from the sky, one after another. Whenever a bird fell, crowds would cheer and swell forward to capture it. I have never seen anything like this before or after. I had a great time with other children running around, yelling, and throwing stones at the birds.

  Poor birds. This was a doomsday they had never dreamed of. For all I knew at the time, the campaign was successful. The People’s Daily reported on April 20, 1958, that three million people in the capital participated in the operation on April 19, and by 10 p.m., 83,000 sparrows perished in the waves of the people’s war. In three days, the residents of Beijing killed more than 400,000 sparrows.

  Birds basically disappeared from Beijing from that time on. This was a nationwide campaign, so similar operations were carried out in other population centers in China. I don’t know what they did in China’s rural areas where there was more land than people. But later I saw posters depicting farmers and their children laying traps on their threshing ground to capture sparrows. Indeed, there was no escape.