Part IV Communism in Asia: Between Reeducation and Massacre
21 China: A Long March into Night
A Revolution Inseparable from Terror (1927-1946)
When in January 1928 the inhabitants of a Red Flag village saw a group approaching brandishing a scarlet flag, they rallied enthusiastically to one of the first Chinese "soviets," that of Hai-Lu-Feng, directed by P'eng P'ai. The Communists tailored their speeches to take account of local hatreds and used the coherence of their message to win the locals over to their own ends while allowing the new partisans to give full vent to their cruelest impulses. These few months in 1927-28 adumbrated the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge forty and fifty years later. The movement had been prepared since 1922 by intense activity in Communist Party-led peasant unions, which had produced a strong polarization between "poor peasants" and "landowners," with the latter being constantly denounced. Although neither traditional conflicts nor social realities had accorded much importance to this division, the canceling of debts and the abolition of tenant farming ensured wide support for the new soviets. P'eng P'ai took advantage of it to establish a regime of "democratic terror": the whole people were invited to public trials of "counterrevolutionaries," who almost invariably were condemned to death. Everyone participated in the executions, shouting out "kill, kill" to the Red Guards whose task it was to cut victims into pieces. Sometimes the pieces were cooked and eaten, or forced-fed to members of the victim's family who were still alive and looking on. Everyone was then invited to a banquet, where the liver and heart of the former landowner were shared out, and to meetings where a speaker would address rows of severedd heads freshly skewered on stakes. This fascination for vengeful cannibalism, which later became common under the Pol Pot regime, echoes a very ancient East Asian archetype that appears often at cataclysmic moments of Chinese history. At a time of foreign invasions in 613, Emperor Yang of the Souei dynasty avenged himself on one rebel by pursuing even his most distant relation: "Those who were punished most severely were broken apart, and their heads were displayed on stakes, or they were dismembered and shot full of arrows. The emperor then ordered all the state dignitaries to eat the flesh of the victims piece by piece." The great writer Lu Xun, who was an admirer of Communism before it became imbued with nationalism and antiwestern sentiments, wrote that "Chinese people are cannibals." Less popular than these bloody orgies were the actions of the Red Guards in 1927 in the temples and against the Taoist monks. The faithful painted the idols red in an attempt to save them, and P'eng P'ai himself began to benefit from the first signs of deification. Fifty thousand people, including many peasants, fled the region during the four months of the soviet's reign.