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manpower, but as soon as it came to an end people were sent back to work in infected lakes to cut grass or collect reeds. 23
    This happened in Hubei, a central province along the Yangzi studded with a thousand lakes with dabbling ducks, lotus and water chestnuts. A third of the population there remained at risk. Despite glowing reports from local cadres bidding farewell to the plague spirit, more than 1.5 million people were still infected. In Hanchuan county, some 700 cases were cured during the campaign, but over a thousand new cases appeared immediately afterwards. In other provinces too, the archives show that the campaign barely dented the incidence of schistosomiasis. This was a country run by slogans and quotas, with one campaign following on the heels of another. There was little room for patient work in controlling the many dimensions of the disease, including better disposal of human waste. Collectivisation did not help, as people in co-operatives tended to care less for animals that did not belong to them, including the proper disposal of manure. Traditional rules of hygiene, including drinking boiled water and eating hot food, also suffered when people lived at the beck and call of party officials. 24
    In some cases a more frightening gap appeared between the world of propaganda and the reality on the ground. The People’s Republic enacted a stream of praiseworthy policies for the victims of leprosy, including the provision of leper colonies fitted with every possible amenity. Eliminating leprosy would have been an enormously complex task for any government at the time, all the more so since lepers were widely stigmatised. But in the People’s Republic local cadres could barely feed their own workforce. They had many other priorities, lowest among which were disfigured people suffering from a disease erroneously thought to be highly infectious. Prejudice was rampant, and a few educational pamphlets on the disease, distributed by the health authorities, were not about to change that situation overnight. A great deal of evidence buried in the party archives suggests that the situation actually became worse in the years following liberation, if only because the one-party state vested so much more power in local cadres than would ever have been possible in the past.
    As missionaries were forced out of the country, sometimes existing leper colonies found themselves cut off from foreign funds. In Moxi, a deprived area high up in the mountains in Sichuan, they abandoned not only a church that proudly displayed its colourful bell tower, but also a leper colony with 160 patients, who were left to fend for themselves. Nobody came to their rescue, despite pleas for help. Soon some patients started leaving the colony to beg along the twisted, rutted mountain roads. Few were welcome. Some were hounded and beaten by frightened villagers. Several were buried alive. A report from the provincial health authorities stated: ‘Again one leper was buried alive in the summer of 1954 in Yongding county; similar circumstances also appeared in other counties.’ This was not confined to Sichuan alone. In neighbouring Guizhou, often rocked by rebellions from the minority people who lived in the hills and highlands that dominate the province, the number of infections increased sharply after liberation. As panic spread through the villages, some of the local cadres decided to burn the victims to death. This occurred on more than one occasion, one of the worst cases being a village where eight lepers perished at the stake. In some cases the militia acted on the orders of the local authorities: ‘The militia tied up a leper and burned him to death. His parents cried all day and night.’ 25
    But the worst episode was probably in Yongren county, Yunnan, where a hundred lepers were set alight in June 1951. The idea was first proposed in a conference held by the county party committee a month earlier. Ma Xueshou, a high-ranking cadre in charge