“I have not seen my father for more than two years, and what I cannot forget most is his back.” When reading this line, many people’s first thought will be of essayist Zhu Ziqing’s “The Back”, whose strong love for his father is shown through these plain words. The same father-son love also permeates his description of his son. In his essay “To My Deceased Mother,” Zhu Ziqing writes, “Mai’er grew up to be so sturdy that he was a head taller than me.” “Mai’er” is Zhu Ziqing’s eldest son, Zhu Maixian.
Zhu Maixian was executed for being a “bandit”.
Perhaps nurtured by his father, Zhu Maixian also had a deep literary background, but instead of following the path of literature, he was compelled by the false theories of the Chinese Communist Party and became a member of it early on. During the War of Resistance, Zhu was assigned by the Chinese Communist Party to join the Kuomintang army and participated in the Guinan Battle, among others. During the Communist civil war, he instigated a successful betrayal of the Nationalist government by the Kuomintang military and political personnel in northern Gui and later taught in a high school.
However, such a loyal man was sentenced to death by a court in Xinning County, Hunan Province, for “banditry” during the “suppression of counter-revolution” campaign launched by the Communist Party in November 1951, and was executed immediately at the age of 33. He left behind three young children.
In 1984, Zhu Maixian’s wrongful death was found to be a wrongful conviction, and the Chinese Communist government restored his reputation, but no one can come back to Life.
The anti-corruption campaign was a massacre
In fact, during that campaign, not a few people like Zhu Maixian were unjustly killed. Not only were a large number of Kuomintang “uprising defectors” branded as counter-revolutionaries, but also those underground armed men who had accepted the leadership of the CCP but had a gray cover were included in the “kill” and “imprison” lists. “kill”, “shut”, “control” list.
For example, the underground CCP organization led by Liu Bolu in Hengyang, Hunan Province, was believed to be led by Liu and the local party organization led by Liu because most of them came from landlords, and because the cadres of the Southern Working Group relied on “forced confession letters” to suspect that there was an “Anti-Communist Salvation Army” in the area. Therefore, they believed that the local Party organization headed by Liu and the organizations led by him, such as the Youth League, the Peasants’ Association and the Li Cui Alumni Association, were the “Anti-Communist Salvation Army” and its periphery, and thus designated Liu as a “bandit leader” and a “bully landlord”. As a result, more than 200 people were implicated, many of whom were beaten to extract confessions. 8 people were shot, 5 were sentenced, 4 were expelled from public office, and the whereabouts of 1 person were unknown.
For example, most of the subordinates of some famous Kuomintang traitors, such as Fu Zuoyi, were suppressed; among those who joined the Communist army because of “uprising and surrender”, 22,000 were expelled from the army and sentenced to imprisonment, reform through labor and control, while a large number of them had participated in the anti-Japanese war to defend the country.
Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party has created unprecedented unjust and false cases and killed countless people in its crackdown. Xu Zirong, vice minister of public security, said in a report in January 1954 that 2.62 million people had been arrested during the campaign, of whom 712,000 were killed, or 1.31 per 1,000 of the country’s population; 1.29 million were sentenced to reeducation through labor, 1.2 million were put under control, and 380,000 were released from Education.
In April of the same year, Mao Zedong stated at an enlarged meeting of the Central Committee that “a total of two to three million people were killed, imprisoned, and put under control for suppressing counterrevolution.” In February 1957, Mao stated at the Supreme State Council, “700,000 were killed between 1950 and 1952, and less than 80,000 in the next three years.”
In 1953, Minister of Public Security Luo Ruiqing said, “The shortcomings and mistakes of the crackdown are most notably the existence of indiscriminate arrests, indiscriminate suppression, torture to extract confessions, exaggeration and falsification of cases.” Yang Kueisong, a researcher on the history of the Communist Party, wrote: “If one notes that in late April 1951 Mao Zedong put the brakes on and politely criticized some places for placing too much emphasis on more killings, so much so that in some places there was apparently under-reporting, the actual number of executions nationwide may well have been much higher than the figure of 712,000.”
It has also been estimated that the actual number of executions during the crackdown was between one and two million, or even more.
Causes of the Crackdown
Why did the Chinese Communist Party launch the “anti-rebellion campaign”? It is important to know that the CCP has never stopped suppressing the so-called “counter-revolution” and “counter-revolutionary activities” before and after its establishment. According to the official statistics of the Communist Party, there were about 2 million people who were collectively called “political bandits”, 600,000 secret agents, and 600,000 cadres of the reactionary party groups, totaling 3 million people. Most of these people had been imprisoned, controlled, or killed during previous campaigns.
According to Mr. Xin Hao-nian, a Chinese scholar of American history, besides stemming from the murderous nature of the CCP, a series of problems encountered after the establishment of the CCP, such as economic difficulties that made people’s lives difficult, made the CCP decide to launch a large-scale campaign to suppress counter-revolution in order to divert attention.
In March and July 1950, the CPC Central Committee again issued the “Instruction on the Rightward Drift in Suppressing Counterrevolutionary Activities”, asserting that “a serious rightward drift has occurred in suppressing counterrevolutionary activities, so that a large number of the primary counterrevolutionary elements, who have never reformed and who continue to do evil even after liberation, have not been duly sanctioned. “The government demanded that “those who should be killed should be sentenced to death, and those who should be imprisoned for reform through labor should be arrested and imprisoned for reform”. The total number of “counterrevolutionaries” mentioned above had been seriously exaggerated, and since the CCP had to correct the right-leaning bias, a large number of unjust and unjustified killings had been made even before the official suppression of counterrevolutionary movements was launched.
Most of the “counterrevolutionaries” suppressed by the CCP were public education personnel below the level of county governor and up to the level of A-chief of the Nationalist government, while, on the contrary, senior officials could be used as “specimens of the United Front”. Instead of being killed, provincial chairmen and directors were given the name of “CPPCC member” or some other representative to tempt the KMT officials overseas to come back.
In October of the same year, Chinese Communist troops entered North Korea to help the aggressor North Korea confront the U.S.-led United Nations forces. At the same Time, Mao thought that this opportunity could be used to expand the suppression of counterrevolution. Under Mao’s auspices, the CPC Central Committee issued the Instruction on Correcting the Right-leaning Bias in the Suppression of Counterrevolutionary Activities, criticizing the right-leaning in the suppression of counterrevolutionary activities and demanding that the suppression of counterrevolutionary activities be intensified to prevent any fish from slipping through the net.
Mao gives murder targets
In a telegram to the Shanghai Municipal Committee on January 21, 1951, Mao said, “In a big city like Shanghai, I am afraid that within a year, one or two thousand people will need to be executed to solve the problem. …… For Nanjing, please ask the East China Bureau to direct the municipal committee of that city to arrange properly for the detection and interrogation of one or two hundred of the most important reactionary elements to be executed in the spring.”
On January 22, Mao again told the head of the CPC South China Branch in Guangdong Province, “You have already killed more than 3,700, which is good. Kill another 3,000 or 4,000 people. …… can kill 8,000 or 9,000 people this year as a target.”
In February, at Mao’s suggestion, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China met to discuss the proportion of killings and “decided to kill half of this number at a rate of one thousandth of the population, and then make a decision depending on the situation.” At that time, the population of China was 550 million, and half of one thousandth was 275,000 people.
On February 10, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China instructed that “except for the areas in Zhejiang and southern Anhui where more people were arrested and killed, we should stop for a while in order to sum up the experience”, and instructed that “other areas where not enough people were killed, especially in large and medium-sized cities, should continue to let go of arresting and killing a number of people, and should not stop too early. We must not stop too soon.”
On February 21, the Communist Party issued the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Punishing Counterrevolutionaries, which expanded the death penalty to more than ten lines, and the criteria for sentencing were so broad that even “spreading rumors” could be punished by “execution.” On March 30, Mao again instructed “Many places are too fearful to kill counterrevolutionaries with great fanfare. This situation must be changed immediately”.
A frenzy of counter-revolutionary suppression was then set in motion throughout the country, and quick sentences were handed down. As a result, some military, public, and religious personnel from the Kuomintang period, who had already been sentenced by the CCP to imprisonment or three or five years of reform through labor, were retried and shot instantly, without giving any reason.
In conjunction with the circular of the CPC Central Committee on “confiscation of property of counter-revolutionaries”, the CPC looted the property and achieved its goal both politically and financially, so that the people would never dare to think or think of non-Communists again.
Mao was not wrong to insist on the suppression of rebellion
Although he realized that there were too many killings, Mao insisted that there was “nothing wrong” with the evaluation of the anti-rebellion campaign, and refused to vindicate it.
It was not until the 1980s that the Communist Party finally partially acknowledged the fact that “some of those who were suppressed at the time also surrendered to the uprising”.
Conclusion
The most direct consequence of the crackdown was to strengthen the totalitarian rule of the CCP, and to make the Chinese people, after a series of campaigns such as the agrarian reform and the crackdown, start to be silent about the CCP’s rule, which continues to this day.
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