The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [38]
The people starved. Twenty million people starved to death in three years. Many more died of malnutrition-related diseases in the years following. And more than half of the dead were children.
That was our “New China,” Xao thought, a land where we starved our children.
He could never shut his eyes without the sights coming back to him. His nightmares were not of the war with all its various horrors, but of those years, of the emaciated mothers—too weak to walk—who lay beside the road, trying to feed rice husks to babies who were already dead. Or of the children begging him for food, staggering toward his staff car on spindly legs, their rheumy eyes asking him questions for which he had no answers. If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang.
I will see you in hell, old friend. You and I will both be there, because I, too, posed for the cameras in the “model villages,” those sham communes that received the money, the fertilizers, and the pesticides. I, too, posed beside the huge piles of grain, the fattened hogs, and the smiling peasants with fat and rosy-cheeked children. I, too, congratulated their leaders and held them up as an example to the rest, even though I also knew that their figures were lies. Even with all their resources, they had to lie. And the rest of the country had to live up to the lie, and send out more grain, and starve all the more. Oh, I will join you in hell, old friend.
Finally the slaughter became too much for some of the higher Party members, who braved the Chairman’s wrath and forced him to put a check on the insanity. Collectivization was modified and slowed down. Some land was freed up to private agriculture. A few of the experts who had survived the purge were returned to their posts. A slow, painful recovery began as the professionals took over from the politicians and pragmatism took precedence over ideology. By 1965, food production reached its normal levels. There was still hunger, but starvation disappeared. And the Chairman sulked and bided his time.
You gave us barely a year, old friend. One year of peace and prosperity and you started it off again. Chaos: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Xao chuckled at the sheer insidious brilliance of it. The Chairman succeeded in defining success as treason. The experts, the careful planners, the scientists, the intellectuals, the prudent small farmers were all condemned as “capitalist roaders.” The proof? Their very success! The wonderful inverted logic! As if to say that it was impossible to succeed within the system, and that therefore those who did succeed did so outside the system, via the “capitalist road.” They were traitors, and it was their treason that sabotaged the system and made it not work! It was an argument only a child could accept, and it was to children that the Chairman argued it.
In doing so he released a torrent of pent-up adolescent rage. In a society in which repressed youth were taught to respect their elders, the Chairman urged them to overthrow those same elders. With the uncanny radar of the psychopath, he targeted the teachers first. Those Confucian demigods, so long used to blind obedience, awoke one morning to find themselves ridiculed in “big-character posters,” confronted by formerly docile students demanding a voice in the classroom. Granted that voice, the students denounced their teachers for not being “pure” enough, for not being “red” enough, for not loving the Chairman enough. In the end, the teachers were accused of being educated, and once that lunacy was accepted, the floodgates opened.
Officials were denounced for planning, scientists for doing research, journalists for writing, intellectuals for thinking … farmers for growing food. In the “permanent revolution,” everything by definition was to be turned upside down. The only thing that mattered was political fervor. Fervor for what? For the Chairman’s thought. And what did the Chairman think? He thought there should be political fervor.