Yang Jisheng’s father died in the great famine that struck China in the later 1950s, when possibly 45 million people starved to death. Yang shows how
starvation was a prolonged agony. The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were all used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields, starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate.
Cannibalism was widespread.
The Chinese lived through a nightmare in this period. But, just as in the Third Reich, it was not brought on the people by the absence of a Leviathan. It was planned and executed by the state. Zhang Fuhong was beaten to death by his comrades in the Communist Party, and Ma Longshan was the county party secretary. Zhang’s alleged crime was “right deviationism” and being a “degenerate element.” That meant he attempted to instigate some solutions to the mounting famine. Even mentioning the famine in China could cause you to be labeled “a negator of the Great Harvest” and to be subjected to “struggle,” a euphemism for being beaten to death.
In Huaidian People’s Commune, another part of the same county, 12,134 people, a third of the population, died between September 1959 and June 1960. Most starved to death, but not all; 3,528 people were beaten by cadres of the Communist Party, 636 of those died, 141 were left permanently disabled, and 14 committed suicide.
The reason so many people perished in Huaidian is simple. In the autumn of 1959, the grain harvest brought in 5.955 million kilos, which was not unusually low. But the Communist Party had decided to procure 6 million kilos from the farmers. So all the grain from Huaidian went to the cities and the party. The farmers ate bark and mollusks, and starved.
These experiences were part of the “Great Leap Forward,” the “modernization” program launched by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1958 with the aim of using the Chinese state’s capacity to dramatically transform the country from a rural, agrarian society into a modern urban and industrial one. This program required heavy taxes on peasants in order to subsidize industry and invest in machinery. The result was not just a human disaster, but also an economic tragedy of major proportions, all planned and implemented by the Leviathan. Yang’s disturbing book brilliantly illustrates how the Leviathan, which had “the power to deprive an individual of everything,” implemented the measures, such as requisitioning the entire grain production from Huaidian commune, and how they were enforced by “struggle” and violence. One technique was to centralize cooking and eating into a “communal kitchen” run by the state so that “anyone who proved disobedient could be deprived of food.” Consequently, “villagers lost control of their own survival.” Anyone who opposed the system was “crushed,” and the consequence was to turn everyone into either “despot or slave.” To stay alive, people had to allow others to “trample upon the things they most cherished and flatter things they had always most despised” and demonstrate their loyalty to the system by engaging in “virtuoso pandering and deceit”—dominance pure and simple.
Hobbes argued that life was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” when “men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe.” Yet Yang’s description shows that even though all “stood in awe and terror before Mao,” this led to the creation rather than the abatement of a nasty, brutish, and short life for most.
Another tool of governance the Communist Party created was the “Reeducation Through Labor” system. The first document to use this phrase was the “Directives for a Complete Purge of Hidden Counterrevolutionaries,” published in 1955. By the next year the reeducation system had been born and camps set up throughout the country. These camps perfected various types of “struggle.” Luo Hongshan, for example, was sentenced to three years of reeducation through labor. He recalled:
We woke up at 4 or 5 every morning and went to work at 6:30 am … laboring straight until 7 or 8 in the evening. When it was too dark to see, we would stop. We really had no notion of time. Beatings were common, and some detainees were beaten to death. I know of 7 or 8 detainees on the number 1 middle work unit who were beaten to death. And this doesn’t count those who hung themselves or committed suicide because they couldn’t bear the abuse … They used iron clubs, wooden bats, pick handles, leather belts … They broke six of my ribs, and today I am covered with scars from head to foot … All kinds of torture—“taking a plane,” “riding a motorcycle” … “standing on tiptoe at midnight” (these were all names for types of punishment)—were common. They would make us eat shit and drink urine and call it eating fried dough sticks and drinking wine. They were really inhuman.
Luo was not arrested during the Great Leap Forward, but in March 2001, when China was already a respected member of the international community and an economic powerhouse. Indeed, the Reeducation Through Labor system was expanded after 1979 by Deng Xiaoping, the engineer of China’s legendary economic growth over the last four decades, who saw it as a useful complement to his “economic reform” program. In 2012 there were around 350 reeducation camps with 160,000 detainees. A person can be committed to such a camp for up to four years without any legal process. The reeducation camps are just one part of an extensive gulag of detention centers and various illegal “black jails” dotting the Chinese countryside and are complemented by an expanded “community corrections system,” which has grown rapidly in recent years. In May 2014 the system was “correcting” 709,000 people.
The struggle continues. In October 2013 Premier Xi Jinping decided to praise the “Fengqiao experience,” and urged Communist Party cadres to follow its example. The phrase refers to a district in Zhejiang Province that implemented Mao Zedong’s “Four Clean-ups” political campaign in 1963 without actually arresting anyone, but rather by inducing people to publicly monitor, report on, and help to “reeducate” their neighbors. It was a prelude to China’s Cultural Revolution, in which hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of innocent Chinese would be murdered (the exact numbers are unknown and undisclosed).
The Chinese Leviathan, just like the Leviathan in the Third Reich, has the capacity to resolve conflicts and get things done. But it uses its capacity not to promote liberty but for naked repression and dominance. It ends Warre, but only to replace it with a different nightmare.
The Janus-Faced Leviathan
The first crack in Hobbes’s thesis is the idea that the Leviathan has a single face. But in reality, the state is Janus-faced. One face resembles what Hobbes imagined: it prevents Warre, it protects its subjects, it resolves conflicts fairly, it provides public services, amenities, and economic opportunities; it lays the foundations for economic prosperity. The other is despotic and fearsome: it silences its citizens, it is impervious to their wishes. It dominates them, it imprisons them, maims them, and murders them. It steals the fruits of their labor or helps others do so.
Some societies, like the Germans under the Third Reich or the Chinese under the Communist Party, see the fearsome face of the Leviathan. They suffer dominance, but this time at the hand of the state and those controlling the state’s power. We say that such societies live with a Despotic Leviathan. The defining characteristic of the Despotic Leviathan isn’t that it represses and murders its citizens, but that it provides no means for society and the regular people to have a say in how its power and capacity are used. It isn’t that China’s state is despotic because it sends its citizens to reeducation camps. It sends people to camps because it can, and it can because it is despotic, unrestrained by—and unaccountable to—society.