The Sino-Soviet Schism } 143
context of Khrushchev’s deepening apostasy and striking a blow in support
of the Arab people’s revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle were important
factors. But the concern dominating Mao’s thinking was the course of China’s
revolution. For China to rapidly industrialize, build socialism, and prepare
the transition to communism, China’s peasants had to be herded into col-
lectivized communes where their consumption could be held down and their
work intensified. Resistance was certain to be strong. An atmosphere of im-
minent war and invasion was politically useful in overcoming all obstacles.
As Mao told a leadership conference at Beidaihe in October 1958, “The bom-
bardment of Jinmen, frankly speaking, was our turn to create international
tension for a purpose.” Later he told the conference, “War mobilizes the peo-
ple’s spiritual state. ... Of course we do not now have war, but under this type
of armed antagonism, [we] can mobilize all positive forces.”^70
Mao’s program of coercive hyperindustrialization faced extremely strong
resistance from the ordinary people fated to bear the heavy burdens of Mao’s
vast ambitions. Full collectivization of agriculture required the final oblit-
eration of family plots and merger of all land into single collective farms.
Even small family gardens were merged into collective farms. Under collec-
tivized agriculture, the process through which labor was organized (who did
what, how, and for what compensation) was organized by village-level cadres
appointed on the basis of their preparedness to use brutal tactics to achieve
compliance with the new arrangements. Farmers were compensated for their
labor with pay determined by cadres, often in the form of rations of food or
cloth and other essentials rather than in cash. Moreover, under Mao’s Great
Leap policies, labor was organized along military lines, with production
teams and brigades working under military-like discipline. By winter 1958,
three hundred million people had been enrolled in militias. Family homes
were closed down and people moved to barracks segregated by sex. Husbands
and wives slept separately. Wood from demolished homes provided fuel for
backyard “blast furnaces” that transformed useful metal goods and tools, also
taken from family homes, into crude ingots of often useless metal alloy. Meals
were prepared and eaten in communal mess halls rather than in family kitch-
ens. The quality of meals in communal mess halls was often poor and bland,
while perverse incentives to eat as much as one could soon set in. Children
were shuffled into collective day-care centers. One purpose of these arrange-
ments was to free female labor from tasks like cooking, housecleaning, and
tending children so they could work in the fields.
The one resource that China had in abundance, labor, was mobilized,
with minimal need for the employer of that labor, the proletarian state, to
pay for it. Most important of all, the agricultural harvest now went directly
from fields into cadre-controlled warehouses, and was no longer subject to
“theft” by those who labored to produce the crops. Levels of “procurement”
demanded by state organs rose rapidly as a vicious cycle of elite hubris and