High Tide of Terror

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Among the 80,000 ideographs in the Chinese language, none are charged with more meaning for the people of China today than Hsiao Mieh. In the abstract but exact language of ' China, Hsiao Mieh means "deprived of existence . . . done away with . . . otherwise disposed of." In the broader language of humanity, Hsiao Mieh today symbolizes the greatest planned massacre in the history of mankind.

Even the millions of Chinese who cannot read know the story these picture words tell when they see them written against a neighbor's name. Five years ago in the province of Anhwei, the Chinese Communists deprived the landlords of existence and redistributed the land among the peasants. Some time ago, as part of a plan to speed socialization, the Communists began reorganizing the Anhwei farmlands into cooperatives. In the village of Liuchiatsun a peasant named Liu resented the seizure of his tiny (three-acre) farm and carelessly talked of resisting. The Communists' answer was quick, final. The local peasantry was called together at the new brick Public Security Station to see Liu standing before a Circuit Tribunal. A People's Procurator charged him with being a "reactionary." The Procurator asked the assembled crowd: "Comrades, what do we do with these inhuman counterrevolutionaries, these criminals, bandits, secret agents of capitalism, and organizers of Taoist sects?" Voices cried: "Kill them! Kill them!" The peasants understood from the accents of the words that the response had been made by people from another part of the country, but they took their cue. "Kill him! Kill him!" they echoed.

Next day Liu's name was brushed on the wall newspaper at the Public Security Station. Beside it was brushed the dreaded Hsiao Mieh.

The Monstrous Pyre. Since October 1949, when the Chinese Communists officially set up the Chinese People's Republic, Hsiao Mieh, by the account of Red China's press, has been written officially against the names of millions of Chinese. Foreign specialists, carefully sifting reports from refugees and other sources, estimate that at least 20 million Chinese have been deprived of existence, done away with, or otherwise disposed of. This does not include 23 million believed to be held in forced labor camps.

These are figures that stagger the imagination. In no previous war, revolution* or human holocaust, either in the days of Tamerlane or in the time of Hitler, have so many people been destroyed in so short a period. Because it is hard for the mind to visualize so vast a slaughter in human terms, the Communists have been able to reap an advantage from the very size of their funeral pyre: many Westerners, finding the monstrous incredible, cannot see the blood on the hand of pretended friendship proffered by Chinese Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung.

It was Mao who set the pattern of the Chinese Communist terror in his 1949 tract, On People's Democratic Dictatorship. Said Mao: "The reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinion." One of Mao's lieutenants, writing in the Peking Current Affairs, wryly but grimly spelled out how to proceed: "Execution means fundamental physical elimination of counterrevolutionaries, and is of course the most thorough measure for depriving counter-revolutionaries of the conditions for counterrevolution ary activity." What gave the Chinese terror speed and weight was tested techniques borrowed from the Soviet Union at a time when Stalin was at the top of his power. But the Chinese system differs in one important respect from the Russian: Stalin's NKVD and MVD worked in secret, but Mao's terror gets the utmost publicity.

With Fanfare. The trial of the peasant Liu is only a village echo of hundreds of mass trials, often involving thousands of blood-yelling participants, carried out in the big cities, usually at a popular sports ground, in which the victims are publicly denigrated, then publicly shot. (In one Shanghai mass trial, described by a Shanghai business man, relatives were allowed to take the body away in a wooden coffin after paying the cost of the bullets used to kill the victim--approximately $38.) There is an official phrase for this peculiarly Chinese variation of Communist terror: "Campaign for the suppression of counter-revolutionaries with fanfare.'''' Appropriately enough, the inventor of this apt phrase last year became Mao's No. i working terrorist. His name: Lo Jui-ching.

Now in his middle 505 and tall for a Chinese (about 5 ft. 8 in.), Lo Jui-ching was born in Nanchung, in mountain-girded Szechwan. His parents belonged to a class he has since all but exterminated: the landlords. Trained in the famed

Whampoa Military Academy (onetime commandant: Chiang Kai-shek), Lo joined the Communist Party in 1928 and went early to the Soviet Union through the Eastern branch of the Comintern.

After working for a time with the Soviet secret police, Lo became a political commissar in the Chinese Red Army, made the famed Long March (1934-35) to the North, where Mao Tse-tung had fled from defeat by Chiang Kaishek. Here, in Shensi, Lo mastered the technique of intrigue: inciting disputes among the students at the Communist officers' school in order to expose their attitudes, recruiting and rewarding informers and isolating and arresting those who openly defied the Mao faction. Lo's big break came during one of the fratricidal struggles within the Communist forces, when he was ordered to clean up the anti-Mao faction in the Fourth Front Army. This he did with "such crudeness. savagery and maliciousness" (says Chang Kuo-tao, ex-Politburo member, now a refugee in Hong Kong), that he earned the gratitude of Mao, his chief sponsor today.

Because of an old wound, Terrorist Lo cannot smile, but only grimace, and he speaks through clenched teeth out of the corner of his mouth. A chain smoker, heavy drinker and woman chaser, Lo has made a unique contribution to Marxist dialectics: he invented "the deviation of boundless magnanimity" (i.e., being too soft on counter-revolutionaries), a deviation which had to be "discovered and resolutely corrected." Though now a full general and recently decorated, Lo still lacks high party rating (he is one of 27 alternates of the Central Committee), and Mao still keeps much of the secret political and party control apparatus in his own hands. But as Minister of Public Security in the National People's Congress (i.e., legislature), Lo has modeled his machine on the Soviet MVD and become the nearest Chinese equivalent to a Beria.

The Resistance of Millions. Lo's career in the People's Republic began in 1949 when Mao ordered him to take China's fragmented police forces in hand and transform them into a unified Communist whole. At that moment (the time of the U.S. State Department's White Paper, writing off China), much of the country was in chaos, the Communists' hold was anything but sure, and probably 60% of the existing police were ex-Nationalist holdovers. Simultaneously, Lo had to direct a series of armed struggles with guerrillas and bandit gangs which amounted to a nationwide extension of the civil war long after the outer world had been assured that there was no further conflict.

But Lo soon saw that the real resistance to Communist regimentation lay not in the rifles of a few thousand guerrillas, but in millions of hearts. In 1950 he told a Peking Public Security Administration Conference that the suppression of "counterrevolutionaries" was the first necessity of the new state, that it would be a continuing necessity, and its scope and difficulties would increase rather than decrease as the revolution continued. On this thesis Lo built his rise to power.

At the outset Lo had used Chinese Red army troops for his pacification act. The Conference authorized him to create a new, politically conscious People's Armed Police like the Soviet MVD militia. Lo recruited and trained, technically and ideologically, thousands of trusted party workers and intellectuals, at the same time purging the existing forces of doubtful elements. He soon fashioned an organization of some eight interlocking bureaus specializing in intelligence, counterespionage, personnel, economic defense (i.e., preventing strikes, collecting taxes), frontier defense, anti-guerrilla work, supervising forced labor camps and normal police duties. Total strength: approximately 700,000.

With this army of Communists, Lo and his comrades carried out one of the greatest collections of purges in history. They had the Russian experience to lean upon, and they were thus able to avoid the fumbling experiments in mass liquidation made by the early Soviet Chekists. But they worked with a cold-blooded calculation that the Russians, with their basically Christian sense of guilt (evident in this week's Moscow disclaimers) never achieved. The Chinese Communists were so certain of their moral right to kill for the revolution that they attempted at every opportunity to make the people also a party to their act, e.g., enforced spectator participation in the mass trials. By the end of 1951 and the beginning of 1952 the slaughter had reached such a pitch that the whole of China (as the Communists intended) was shaken to its roots with terror. There was a lull in the next two years, but last year the execution rate perceptibly increased again. The result has been a widespread recognition of the futility of resisting. Lo's liquidation campaign has been a ringing success.

Terrorist Lo had to warn his comrades, as recently as last July, against "boundless magnanimity." He regaled the National People's Congress with horror stories of the resisters still around, then dramatically asked: "Deputies, can any one of you be tolerant with these heinous and inhuman counterrevolutionaries? Can any one who has heard of such horrible conspiracies still comfort himself with the feeling that counter-revolutionaries are nothing but 'a few small fish that cannot create waves?' " Back in 1951, when Lo's army of terrorists set to work, the fish were many and the waves big. Village Communists, prompted by activists, had already liquidated tens of thousands of landowners, rich and poor. Lo's forces carried on the program with scientific thoroughness. Nominally, their campaign was directed against "exploiting landlords," but in practice people were liquidated because their parents or grandparents were landlords, because they were intellectuals, village elders, held religious beliefs, objected to Communism in principle, or simply would not cooperate. The Lo cadres were given target quotas for grain and confiscated land, so that even if a village had few landlords, a necessary percentage of Hsiao Mieh was written up. The announced objective was to redistribute the land among the peasants, and that was actually done. But the real purpose was to break the fabric of economic and social traditions of China's rural population.

Terror in the Cities. With "land reform" launched, Lo turned his attention to the cities. He had one piece of advice: "Two ways are open to all counterrevolutionaries : the way of death for those who resist, and the way of life for those who confess." People were told that by registering their names and stating their past misdeeds (such as having served the Nationalists), all would be forgiven.

"To confess is better than not to confess" (a Lo phrase) became a handbook slogan for party workers. In cities like Shanghai (pop. 7,000,000), the terrorists made sure that people would know about "the way of death" by staging machine gun executions on the paddyfields, and sending through the streets open wagons bearing people bound hand and foot. Then one spring night in 1951 the sirens wailed in Shanghai, and all night long the police wagons sped about the city. Next morning there was nothing in the newspapers to indicate what had happened, but as people began checking with friends, horror spread through Shanghai: it was reckoned that 100,000 people had been arrested that night. Presumably, most of them were people who had chosen the "way of life," and confessed.

Red newspapers were not silent about arrests and executions in other parts of the country. Month after month the Hsiao Mieh totals were issued, almost always in round figures: 1,150,000 in the central-south provinces, 1,176,000 in "four administrative regions," 300,000 in the five northwest provinces, and so on. Said Lo calmly: "A large number of people with blood debts have been executed."

Struggle Meetings. Sure that publicity would have its terrorizing effect, Lo launched in October 1949 his successive purges. He called them "campaigns." The "Five-Anti" (sometimes called the "Five Vices") campaign was ostensibly waged against bribery, tax evasion, cheating in contracts, theft of state property and state economic secrets. Under its cover, businessmen and industrialists were pressured with endless "struggle meetings" (brainwashing) and forced to pay fines and "back taxes" of fantastic sums. Many were arrested, killed, or detained for days and nights by activists among their own employees. Literally hundreds of thousands committed suicide. At one time in Shanghai, the Bund on the Whangpoo River was roped off, the roofs of tall buildings were guarded to prevent suicides, and residents developed the habit of avoiding walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them from the rooftops.

An anti-U.S. campaign (during the Korean war) gave Lo's men an excuse to arrest Chinese doctors, technicians and professionals educated in the West (and therefore suspected counterrevolutionaries) and to pick up servants and drivers who had worked for foreigners. An anti-Christian campaign was conducted under cover of the Communist-backed Three-Self movement, designed to cut the local churches off from the rest of Christendom, but failed when Roman Catholic authorities refused to bend to a rump Catholic Church that the Reds tried to organize. So Lo went ahead arresting missionaries, priests and clergymen as spies, or harried them into leaving the country. Of China's 6,475 foreign missionaries, only eleven priests (eight in prison and three under house arrest) and 14 Franciscan Sisters now remain. Of China's 4,000,000 Christians, only a few thousand worship freely today, and in their churches the Chinese red flag hangs above pulpit or altar.

China's liberal writers and intellectuals, many of them fellow travelers who created the climate for the Communist takeover, came next under relentless attack. Says Lo: "The liberalism in our midst is the best aid to the counter-revolutionaries in stealing party and state secrets." In 1952 all writers, artists and teachers were subjected to an endless series of brainwashing studies, discussions, criticisms and selfcriticism. A minor pro-Communist writer named Hu Feng who kicked against the restrictions was forced to publish a confession. Many were arrested in a campaign following the Hu Feng purge. Others, like Peking University's respected Professor Hsieh Tao, just disappeared. Hsieh's crime: last year, when an Air India plane carrying a Red delegation to the Bandung conference exploded in air, Hsieh was observed to "remark with smiles" that "we have material again, we can give it plenty of propaganda."

Many people in China might think that the safest place in these troublous days is in the Communist Party. That line of reasoning does not escape Mao. Warning party members that many who had stood up to real bullets under fire were unable to withstand "the candy-coated bullets of the capitalists," Mao began a purge of party members. In one provincial group alone a commission found no less than 1,400 "corrupt" party members. There were also deep rifts in the party leadership. Manchurian Communist Boss Kao Kang, with a section of the Red army, challenged and secretly plotted against Mao's control. Mao's spies exposed him. In March 1955 Kao Kang was officially said to have committed suicide, but thousands of his suspected supporters met death by other than their own hands. The Kao Kang upheaval led Mao to appoint special party Control Committees (outside Lo's bailiwick) to check and punish deviators and to set up a system within the party by which members were required constantly to spy on other members.

Spy & Counterspy. The system extends down to the humblest home. Every Public Security Station now has its Household Office, which checks on travelers, overnight guests, hotel patrons, births and deaths, unemployment, marriages and divorces. The Household Police has dossiers on each household and is expected to know every individual's source of income, education, class category, and family background up to three generations, personal history from the age of eight, his friends and relatives inside and outside China. The Household policeman is entitled to drop in anytime at any home. Sometimes the visit is limited to pointless talks, sometimes trick questions are tossed in casually. After each trip the policeman hands in a report, thus building up the dossier (in triplicate, for distribution at higher levels), which will follow the resident wherever he moves as long as he lives.

In the case of a resident who is considered to be hiding something or is "not frank enough," casual visitors will call on him, each using a different form of approach. These visitors, assigned by the police, may consist of Youth Corps League members, party members, unit chiefs, members of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, activists from peasants' or workers' organizations. This will go on until the man is cleared or arrested. Said a middle-aged housewife who came to Hong Kong a few months ago: "You people outside always pity us for our short rations, dirty rice and scanty clothing. I tell you that's nothing compared to the nameless fear and suspense one suffers from each time the Household policeman knocks on the door."

Ordinary people stay off the streets after 8 p.m., and people who do venture out are shadowed by police, often disguised as beggars or pedicab drivers. Although today the mass trials are mostly held in country areas, arrests are still frequent in the big cities. In Shanghai bodies are still hauled to the crematories in lowsided trucks, with splashes of blood visible on the victim's clothing. Said a Shanghai housewife, recently arrived in Hong Kong: "If you hailed me in the street as a friend,

I would ignore you and think you were very inconsiderate. Who knows whether you will be arrested for something the very next day, and I will be in trouble for talking to you? Spies are everywhere, and they might have seen us talking."

Reform Through Labor. A feature of Lo's system is collective responsibility and collective punishment. A neighborhood may be punished for a misdemeanor committed by one family. Fishermen are forced to guarantee each other mutually, in units of from five to 15 fishing boats. Peasants must join Peasant Associations, which are collectively responsible for the behavior of individual members. In state factories and mines, Comrade Tribunals, composed of Communist workers, conduct "cases that are of educational significance and are related to labor discipline and work regulations," i.e., workers suppress workers. At a recent mass trial at Tenckuang football field in Nanchung, 4,000 people cheered while four workers were sentenced to prison for "larceny and corruption." The trial was cited as "a mobilization meeting for increased production, practicing economy, and opposing corruption and waste."

In the background of the terrorist picture there are the forced labor camps. Why kill opponents when work can be got out of them? Like the Soviet Communists, the Chinese believe in the theory of "reform through labor." Millions, including many with "suspended death sentences," have been trucked to railroad and water conservation projects all over China and to lumber camps in Manchuria.

In his 1954 report, Lo boasted that forced labor, among other things, had produced 2 billion bricks, 770 million construction tiles, 714,000 dozen pairs of socks, and 1,700,000 steam-radiator couplers. His chilling reference to the financial aspect was a classic in Marxist accountancy: "The income from production of labor service for reform during the past four years, after deducting the living costs of the criminals and the other necessary expenses incurred in the work of reform through labor, has been accumulated, in the forms of fixed capital and fluid capital, to an amount approximately equal to the expenses."

According to Communist theory, all the forced labor workers are "voluntary," and the cadres supervising the slave labor always use high-sounding, almost loving words, to describe their charges. Those who die of exposure and overwork are eulogized as "dead heroes." On the "mechanized farms" a few Soviet tractors are used, but most of the work is done with primitive plows manned by groups of six pulling on plow ropes. When the slave laborers fail to fulfill their "norms," they are obliged to conduct "selfcriticism" sessions. Risings in these remote camps have been frequent. Mobile units of slave laborers have been reported as far distant as Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Trade by trade, industry by industry, the Communists have worked over China's extensive and once thriving commercial life. By 1952, 58% of the economy was under government control. Because the Communists control raw materials, retail prices, staff hirings and firings, and can demand exorbitant taxes at will, private businessmen have no alternative but to give up. By last November, 70% of all Shanghai firms had been handed over. Since then socialization of business has been speeded up, and complete transformation, already achieved in many smaller cities, is soon expected.

In the country areas peasant holdings are being reorganized into cooperatives. Peasants who join the cooperatives get advantages, such as the use of tractors, plows, water wheels and fertilizers. They also get cheaper loans from banks. By the end of 1955, almost 2,000,000 cooperatives had been formed, or twice as many as had originally been planned for the fall of 1956. In cooperatives the peasants still profit from their own crops, but in the next step, i.e., complete collectivization, the land will belong to the state, to be farmed by central management. The peasant will be a paid worker.

Breaking the Will. Something of deep significance to China, to Asia and all the world occurred in the last six months of 1955. The crescendo of terror in 1951 and the skillfully timed and carefully calculated applications of terror since had their cumulative effect. One of the most enduring and resilient of peoples apparently gave up hope. Whatever those hopes had been--an internal breakdown, a return of the Formosa Nationalists, or simply, in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Dulles, "hope from without"--six years of unremitting terror had finally crushed them. On this important fact most of the foreign agencies whose work it is to observe, analyze and report on Communist China agree. Millions of Chinese--something in the order of 100 million families --had surrendered, not to the idea of Communism, but to its iron system.

This collapse of the will to resist surprised even the Communists themselves, who suddenly revised their calculations upward. In July Mao predicted that the New China was about to witness the "high tide of the great socialist revolution." In January of this year he said the tide was running. Last July Mao announced that only 16.9 million of the no million "peasant households" had been forced into producer cooperatives; by December he was able to announce that "more than 60% of peasant families" were in cooperatives--an astonishing increase of 53.1 million peasant families in six months. Mao and his subordinate leaders presented other evidence of a widespread consolidation of Communist power and, elated by their success, announced a speedup in their socialization programs. Plans which were to have been accomplished in ten or 15 years were cut to five years. "The socialist revolution, in the main," said Mao, "could be completed on a national scale within about three more years."

The non-Communist world, which had not been able to prevent this vast upheaval, at least had a duty to understand it. The triumph was not the victory of the "Uncle Mao" of Peking propaganda, the benign statesman who has charmed such outstanding humanists as Attlee, Nehru and U Nu. It was the triumph of terror.

The Communist party's troubles in China are not over. An immense problem of organization and leadership now confronts it. There is evidence that millions of peasants and businessmen who have suddenly swarmed into rural cooperatives and urban state enterprises dislike and distrust the new order as much as they ever did. The same accounts attest that thousands of new organizations, brought into being to brainwash the new recruits, are little more than paper houses. It is predictable that within a few weeks or months the same leaders who now cry triumph will again be berating their terrorist cadres for "rightist lethargy."

That may well be the moment Lo Jui-ching rises to his greatest power. Said Lo last June: "Every step forward taken by our revolutionary cause arouses unrivaled hatred and frantic sabotage on the part of the external and internal enemies . . .

Counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries do not reconcile themselves to their ex tinction; on the contrary, it is precisely because of their impending doom that they put up resistance and carry out sabotage more desperately." The terrorist with the twisted mouth knows better than most that there will never be peace--must never be peace--in Communist China.

* During the 15 years in which the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia, an estimated 15 million Russians were killed or died of planned or accidental starvation.

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