austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

54 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
In a similar grotesque exaggeration of the truth, Rummel ( 1991) and
others claim that communist China murdered tens of millions of people,
especially during the period 1950-52 (shortly after the communist seizure
of power) and during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. However,
such estimates are largely based on various sources that are either
unpublished or published for propaganda purposes by the Anti-Communist
League of Nationalist China on the island of Taiwan, which
appears to have completely fabricated the numbers (Teiwes, 1997), in
an apparent attempt to ·�ustify" its military attacks on communist China
that continued long after the communists' seizure of power (Associated
Press, 1950). Schuman (1956) even saw and talked with some specific
people in communist China after they were alleged to have been
executed.
More accurate figures are provided by Chinese government sources. In
particular, Grunfeld (1996) has found a substantial amount of evidence
indicating that Chinese government reports in such matters (despite
being cloaked in ideological verbiage) are fairly reliable, especially in
comparison to Western estimates that are often based on limited and
biased refugee claims, "wild exaggerations," or even outright fabrications.'2
For instance, in the 1950-52 interval (at a time when China
was fighting the USA in Korea in a war that threatened to escalate into
China itself), the Chinese government publicly reported (and displayed)
its executions, many of which were also publicized in the USA press at
the time (Associated Press, 1951 ).
The local Chinese government announced a total of 28,332 executions
for one province (Kwantung) during the 1950-1951 interval, and
if that figure were extrapolated proportionally to the rest of the country,
it would imply about 400,000 official deaths (Stavis, 1978). However,
that province was a coastal one near Hong Kong and may have had an
abnormally high number of executions. Other information provided by
Chinese government leaders indicates 135,000 executions nationwide
based on 800,000 official trials and a reported 16.8% execution rate of
"counterrevolutionaries" at the height of the death sentence campaign in
1951 (Meisner, 1999). In addition to the official government death sentences,
there were also many executions carried out independently by
the local peasants, who may very well have killed tens of thousands of
landlords (in retaliation for the prior decades of mass starvation inflicted
INTRODUCTION
upon them) and other perceived enemies such as agents or supporters of
the former Nationalist Chinese government on the mainland (Teiweis,
1997).
There is one Chinese source estimate of 710,000 victims between
1950 and 1952 (Gong, 1994), but that figure may reflect a speech made
by Mao in the 1950s that referred to so many "liquidations" (Stavis,
1978), which the anticommunist propagandist Rummel (1991) himself
admits "could simply mean to remove, deactivate, or make ineffective,
rather than kill." In addition, since there was still some fighting going
on with as many as 400,000 Nationalist Chinese guerrillas or bandits
at the time (Gong, 1994), and since the western and southwestern
parts of mainland China remained under Nationalist Chinese rule until
1951 (Kwong, 1997), it is possible that some of the 710,000 "liquida­
tions" were related to the killing (or disbursing) of soldiers and armed
guerrillas, and some of the actual executions may have been of nonci­
vilian POWs. Moreover, fear of arrest during the 1950-52 strife may
have motivated as many as 500,000 people to commit suicide (Teiweis,
1997), and these deaths may have been included in the 710,000 "liqui­
dations." While the suicides were certainly caused by the communist
Chinese seizure of power and subsequent campaign of public trials,
they could not be considered willful murders (especially given the fairly
low rate of death sentences in the trials). As a result, the true number of
deliberate killings of unarmed civilians is likely to have been far below
710,000 during the 1950-52 interval.
Gong (I 994) cites an official Chinese report of 230,000 people put
under public surveillance and 1,270,000 imprisoned by the communist
Party in the 1950-52 interval. lfthe officially cited ratio of about 1 exe­
cution for every 6 convictions were applied to that data (with the other
5 of 6 convicted people being put under surveillance or imprisoned), it
would indicate about 300,000 executions during that period. However,
�ven that number may be an overestimate, as the official rate of sentenc­
mg "counterrevolutionaries" to be put under public surveillance (32%)
documented by Meisner (1999) was much higher than Gong's (1994)
figures indicate. The differences in the imprisonment rates may be due
to the fact that the latter figures include many people imprisoned for
P�/political corruption (Schuman, 1956) as opposed to "counterrevo­
lutionary" activities. Applying to Gong's (1994) data Meisner's (1999)
55