Mass Slaughter

From the outside, there was no way to keep count of the number of victims in Red China's mounting wave of terror. The Communists themselves gave sample figures which, if true all over the country, would place the executions in the hundreds of thousands.

A Communist paper in Hunan province reported: "An everyday scene in the Hunan countryside is the sight of peasant militiamen, armed with spears and rifles, taking landowners to the execution grounds." A Canton paper rounded up the toll by hsien, or counties: "Fifty counterrevolutionaries executed in the last three days in Kwongning hsien . . . -Authorities in Nanhoi hsien are carrying out their movement to clear the local prison of its overflowing inmates. About 20 are being taken out each day . . . for execution . . . More than 300 have been executed during the current month . . . The Military Control Committee of Yanping hsien yesterday carried out the execution of 17 counterrevolutionaries. Before the execution, there was a big meeting for the suppression of special agents with more than 20,000 attending. The corpses were exhibited for public inspection . . ."

Mothers & Sons. Travelers arriving at Hong Kong from Shanghai told of people being hauled off trains and killed on the spot. Many an old grudge was being settled as servants accused former masters, employees denounced past employers, kinfolk bore witness against each other. The terror scorned the traditional Confucian concept of decent human relationship. Older people, heretofore respected for their years, were led through streets to prisons or to execution, and on the way Communist youth spat at them. In one Kwangtung province town a grey-haired man was forced to crawl on his knees, kowtow to groups of Red workers.

In Chungkong, a mass trial attended by 370,000 was highlighted by a young girl student, Chen Kuo-tseng, who denounced her mother. "Secret agents are not human," cried the daughter. "I do not recognize this woman, a special agent who has sabotaged our student patriotic movements, as my mother. I ask the government to execute her, so that she will no longer be a menace to the people."

Elsewhere in Kwangtung, the Communist news agency reported, a father tracked down and turned over to the Communists his own son, with these words: "My son is a criminal to the people. He should be killed." Ten lepers in a leprosarium protested against poor food; they were branded as "special agents" and shot. The terror struck at anyone who received a letter from the U.S., at Christian churchgoers, at those who had been connected with the Nationalists or with foreigners.

War & Hunger. Behind the killing seemed to be a growing fear among the Red masters in Peking. Most China hands in Hong Kong thought the strain of the Korean war was beginning to tell on the Communist regime. Public trials and executions were not only providing circuses for a tired people, but also making excuses for the Reds' failure to win in Korea.

In addition, the land reform program, by all impartial accounts, was faring poorly for a simple basic reason: the root of China's farm problem is not maldistribution of land, but the fact that there is not enough land to feed the people as long as the land is worked by present methods, which will take years to change. For example, after land was redistributed in Honan province, the per capita holding was only six-tenths of an acre. Disillusionment over land reform had certainly given rise to much peasant resentment, contributed heavily to guerrilla activity, especially in south China.

Whatever the explanation, there was no doubt that China was enduring a governmental slaughter unmatched since the liquidation of the kulaks in Soviet Russia.

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