Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
seven-story pagoda.” My heart melted at his elegant Liu-style calligra-
phy. I had always admired and envied people who were expert at the
Liu style, which I had imitated in vain in my school days. Such elegant
calligraphy reduced to such abject circumstances! What had the nation
come to, the nation that tirelessly flaunted its ancient culture! When
the others were not looking, I handed Lao Liu a pancake. He gobbled
it up in no time.
“You don't know how good it tasted, Lao Wu,” he told me in his
Hunan accent the next day when he was being removed to the cell set
aside for the sick, whose continued presence in the regular cells the
offers thought was demoralizing to the other inmates.
(Wu 1993, 134-35)
During the heady euphoria of the “backyard furnace” fiasco in late
1958, Mao himself never seriously doubted the inflated production
figures. The enthusiasm and creative energies of the masses
unleashed during the Great Leap Forward were more important
to him than strictly accurate production reports. The serious nation-
wide shortage of food in December 1958 was unknown to Mao
because “no one was willing to tell him the truth” (Li 1994, 283).
When he did finally learn the terrible truth about the Great Leap
Forward, he refused to assume responsibility for it. Mao subscribed
to the popular traditional Chinese idea that the emperor could do
no wrong himself; he could only be deceived and misguided by
his advisers and court officials. “As the emperor, he believed in
his own infallibility. If wrong decisions were made, wrong policies
introduced, the fault lay not with him but with the information
provided him. The emperor could not be wrong, but he could be
deceived” (Li 1994, 296).
By the summer of 1959, everyone in China realized that something
had gone disastrously wrong with the Great Leap Forward, but very
few people dared say so openly for fear of offending Mao and his
supporters. One person who did dare say that the emperor had no
clothes was Peng Dehuai, a general with a reputation for bluntness
who had been with the Chinese Communists since the Long March
days and was a hero of the Korean War. At a meeting of the Politburo
(a small and powerful core group of high-level leaders within the
Chinese Communist party) held in the summer of 1959 in Lushan,
Peng Dehuai circulated a letter that was scathingly critical of Mao's
policies and the disastrous results of the Great Leap Forward. Mao
was offended at the tone and content of the letter and was aghast to
learn that Peng had probably circulated it at the suggestion of Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev. Peng's blunt criticisms forced Mao to
