The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Read Online Free PDF Page B

surveyed by the Bureau for Statistics the trend was clear: average living space shrank while the rent crept up. In the Wuchang Shipyard, included in Table 2, rent rose from 271 yuan in 1948 to 361 yuan in 1952, then doubled to 721 yuan in 1955 and reached a phenomenal 990 yuan in 1957. 20
    Malnourishment and poor health were also common in schools. The Youth League, after a wide-ranging survey of middle-school students, declared that ‘their health is very bad’. In Wuhan, each received 300 grams of vegetables and 150 grams of bean products a month. Rough grains and sweet potatoes constituted the rest of the diet. In the entire province of Henan, no vegetables were served for a full month, with the food consisting of nothing but noodles. In Mianyang, Sichuan, students captured their diet in a popular ditty: ‘Rice is rare, it’s soup we get, the more you eat, the slimmer you get, the food is bad, the taste the same, there is no salt and there is no oil.’ In Liaoning province, one in three students was undernourished. In Yingkou, the busy port where the province’s maize, soybeans, apples and pears left by sea, students would regularly faint with hunger in physical education classes. Strict rationing was justified in the name of morality, as ‘eating too much grain is wasteful and lacking in communist virtue’. Those who went hungry were told to drink water: ‘boiled water also contains calories’. In Xinmin, a city just outside the provincial capital Shenyang, four out of ten students suffered from night blindness, a condition caused by malnutrition, in particular lack of vitamin A found in fish oils and dairy products. Some classes were held in temples or abandoned churches, although there never seemed to be enough light. Even in daytime, it could be ‘as dark as in a prison’. 21
    There were other setbacks. The regime was determined to eradicate disease and eliminate all pests, but this laudable goal was not always well served by mass campaigns that mobilised millions across the country. When people were given a quota of rat tails to be delivered to the authorities, they started breeding the rodents. The whole idea of a military campaign against epidemics, in which people were deployed in battalions, banners unfurled and bugles blaring, ran against common medical practice. This was the case with the drive to eliminate schistosomiasis. The number of people infected by the parasite increased every year after liberation, especially in parts of east China. The leadership ignored the issue. They were more interested in fighting the wasps and butterflies suspected of being infected with germs by enemy agents during the Korean War. Only after the Chairman had been shown the debilitating effects of schistosomiasis during a visit to Zhejiang province in November 1955 did the disease finally win attention from the party. Mao wrote a poem, grandly titled ‘Farewell to the Plague Spirit’, and in February 1956 he gave the order to start a mass campaign: ‘Schistosomiasis must be eliminated!’ 22
    Millions of farmers were taken to lakes, crawling through the mud to catch the snails which transmitted the infection. But, all along, leading medical authorities had warned that any attempt to eradicate the disease simply by collecting snails was hopeless. The snails were merely the host of shistosome worms invisible to the human eye. Farmers and cattle who came into contact with the worms were at risk of infection, as the worms propagated themselves in the veins and liver of a parasitised body. Human and animal waste laden with worm eggs was then released back into the lakes, where the cycle was completed as the eggs hatched inside the bodies of the snails. The advice of experts was dismissed at best, denounced as bourgeois at worst. Snails were dug out and collected by hand by whole platoons of villagers. New irrigation canals were opened up in order to block existing ones and bury the snails. The campaign relied on huge