ABSTRACT
The Great Leap Forward officially ended in mid-1961 when the central government decided to disband commune mess halls. About half a year later, the CCP held the well-known “Seven Thousand Cadre Conference” in January 1962 in Beijing to comprehensively reflect on the problems of the GLF. Cadres coming from around the country were encouraged to speak their minds about what had gone wrong in the past several years. Liu Shaoqi, Vice Chairman of the Central Committee of the CCP, made a famous assessment of the Great Leap Famine: natural disasters can be blamed for 30 percent of the fault, and human mistakes 70 percent (Zhang 2007: 148-156). Encouraged by the spirit of this conference, the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the CCP, under the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the CCP, held a meeting in February of 1962 in a similar fashion to reflect on the mistakes of the province. Judging from what they had heard about the “Seven Thousand Cadre Conference” in the previous month, Liao and several other cadres felt that the center had not yet been informed of the high mortality in Sichuan in the Great Leap Famine, and that the main leader of Sichuan Province, Li Jingquan, had not
yet fully reflected on the suffering of the people in Sichuan. They agreed that it was their responsibility to inform the center of the huge loss of life. The initiative was taken by Yu Kesu, Deputy Secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League. Yu wrote an anonymous letter to Mao. To avoid any risk of being found out, he had the letter typed, instead of handwriting it. He simply put “A Communist Party member” at the end of the letter. The typist of the Municipal Committee, according to Mr. Liao, would not be able to leak anything because he was a dumb person. But they dared not mail this letter from Chongqing, because they were afraid of being monitored. Eventually this letter was mailed in Wuhan, a city in the middle Yangzi River region, by a cadre who traveled there for business. They did not have any idea of the fate of that letter until June 1962 when Liao went to Beijing to attend a conference of provincial leaders of the Youth League organized by Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Youth League. He first talked to Hu about the mortality in Sichuan. Hu became alert to the severity of such an issue and arranged for Liao to report to Yang Shangkun, Director of the General Office of the Central Committee of the CCP on June 28. That Hu and Yang were apparently first alerted by what he reported confirmed that the center was not clear about the death toll in Sichuan. Even in Beijing Hu took careful measures to insure the secrecy of Liao’s report. In order to excuse himself from the ongoing Youth League meeting Liao pretended to be ordered to work on drafting the documents of the Youth League. Liao and Yu, the writer of the anonymous letter, went to Zhongnanhai, the location of the Central Committee of the CCP, to meet Yang. In the meeting, Liao realized that Yang’s knowledge of the famine situation in Sichuan was primarily based on two anonymous letters-one from a Sichuan native who had fled to Shannxi Province, with the title of the letter “yizi yilei su chuanqing” (Telling the truth about Sichuan with every word soaked in tears), and the other was a recent one which Yang considered was well written. Liao assumed the second letter Yang mentioned was the one written by Yu. Beyond the two letters were some anecdotes that involved Yang’s relatives in Sichuan (Yang was a Sichuan native) in need of liangpiao (ration vouchers) from him. The meeting focused on how many people died. Yang said that the center asked Sichuan to report, but Sichuan had not reported yet. Then, the center got an estimate of the death of 4 million from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and another estimate of 8 million from the Ministry of Public Security. Yang was suspicious of those two figures. Liao came up with the figure of 10 million. Liao based his number on Sichuan Province’s population statistics from a provincial document and huji nianbao (annual report of household registration). He deducted the population of 1960 (62,360,000) from the population of 1957 (72,157,000) to get the number of about 10 million. He also said that the actual death toll should be higher than this because of new born babies during the three years. Liao also described the death tolls in several hard-hit areas such as Fuling Prefecture and Yingjing County of Yaan Prefecture. The death toll should be around 12 million. Nonetheless, Liao
considered the figure of 10 million a reliable one. Listening to Liao’s explanation, Yang slapped his thigh and said, “We take your number as the official one!” Liao also discussed Li Jingquan. He listed Li’s five problems. First, Li did not carry out many policies of the central government in making adjustments. Second, he ordered an elimination of the custom of resting rice paddies in winter, and insisted on planting wheat instead, causing a decline in grain output. Third, he lied to the central government and forced the people to cover up sufferings caused by plunders. Fourth, with a dictatorial manner, he persecuted cadres with different opinions. Since the Great Leap Forward about 380,000 cadres were attacked and ill-treated. At the end of the meeting, Liao raised his concern about their safety. He said, half jokingly, that he would have a hard time if he was found out by the Provincial leader. Yang assured him that this issue would be handled carefully. He had good reason to worry about retaliation. Li Jingquan was vociferous in crushing opposition. The following incident left Liao with a deep impression. In the Lushang Conference held in July 1959, Peng Dehuai, Minister of Defense, wrote a letter to Mao to articulate criticism of the GLF, but was attacked by Mao as being part of a conspiracy of rightist-oriented opportunists. Answering Mao’s call, Li Jingquan became one of the most fierce attackers of Peng in the Lushan Conference (Li 1998). After returning to Sichuan, without revealing Peng’s “mistake,” Li tested the loyalty of his subordinates by asking them to comment on Peng’s letter. Those who did not see through the trick and expressed agreement with Peng were labeled “severe rightist-oriented opportunists” and got in trouble. However worried he was, Liao had confidence in the center, particularly in Mao. As a result of their report, several cadres were sent by the General Office of the Central Committee of the CCP to Sichuan. Xiao Feng, a primary investigator from Beijing, conducted an investigation for a week in Chongqing. He wrote the report in August and turned it in to the General Office in September 1962. But Xiao’s official report never gave rise to any official response, because the political climate changed in September 1962 from rectifying the mistakes in the GLF in the “Seven Thousand Cadre Conference” in early 1962 and recovering from the famine to intensifying class struggle. In the tenth plenum of the Eighth Congress of the Central Committee of the CCP held in Beijing in September 1962, Mao famously raised demand to the whole Party and the country: “We must never forget class struggle.” The hope of action taken by the center to criticize Li for his mistakes all but evaporated. Worse, in 1963 the anonymous letter written by Yu fell into Li’s hands. Li launched an investigation first in the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the CCP by means of the public security bureau. It took a while for him to realize that the letter had been written by someone in Chongqing, because the letter mentioned twice the situation of Ba County under Chongqing, and because no Provincial officials had been to Chongqing in the previous period. By making references to Ba County, the letter resembled the bulletin of the meeting which, as mentioned previously, had been held in Chongqing in reflecting on the problem of the Great Leap Forward, shortly after the “Seven Thousand Cadre Conference” in Beijing.
