14 4 { China’s Quest
lower-level toadying to superiors set in. As more and more of the agricultural
produce was taken by the state, less and less was left to feed the people who
grew the crops. Loss of a ration book or deprivation of a food ration because
of some offense was tantamount to a death sentence. According to scholar
Frank Dikötter, the very real threat of starvation via loss of one’s ration card
became a major mechanism of social control as agricultural production col-
lapsed under these insane policies. Mass starvation spread. Yet the entire sys-
tem worked to provide the state with large agricultural “surpluses” used to
finance accelerated hyperindustrialization.
Mao could not, of course, foresee the exact parameters of popular resist-
ance as he maneuvered China into the Great Leap Forward, but he under-
stood quite well that farmers would resist the new arrangements. People
would be reluctant to lose their homes, their family gardens, their family
lands. “Land to the tiller” had been the popular slogan on which the CCP
had won power after 1946. The collectivization of 1958 marked the final move
by the party to take that land away. People would no longer work their own
land for their own benefit; they would work collective land for the collec-
tive benefit. People would resent being separated from their spouses and their
children and having their houses seized and perhaps destroyed, along with
metal items. They would resent being bossed about by cadres who had the
power of life and death over them. They would resent the extremely long and
hard labor demanded of them, with compensation barely adequate to keep
them alive. Mao understood that there would be strong resistance to “the
construction of socialism.” That, after all, was the lesson of Stalin’s collec-
tivization of agriculture from 1928 to 1934, of Hungary in 1956, and of the
upwelling of criticism during the Hundred Flowers campaign. (The Hundred
Flowers was brief period of encouragement and apparent toleration of intel-
lectual dissent in 1957 that preceded the repression of the Great Leap.) Again,
propaganda, exhortation, and terror could help control mass resistance. But
it’s hard to militarize a society without a military crisis. With the threat of
imminent war with the United States, the justification for heavy demands on
the people to finance crash industrialization and military development would
be obvious. To protect the socialist motherland from attack and invasion, the
people would be willing to bear even heavy sacrifices. As Mao explained to a
PRC State Council meeting on September 5, 1958:
[I] s it true that tension always harms us? Not exactly, in my opinion.
How can tension benefit us instead of harming us? Because tension ...
may serve to mobilize forces and awaken inactive strata and interme-
diate sections. The fear of atomic war demands a second thought. Just
look at the shelling of Jinmen and Mazu islands ... Such a few shots and
there was such a drastic storm and the towering smoke of gunpowder. It
is because people fear war, they are afraid of disasters the United States