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of rural affairs, proposed: ‘The lepers from the hospital in the fourth district often come out to wash and run about, it creates a bad impression among the masses, and they demand that they be burned.’ ‘We cannot burn them,’ answered the county party secretary. But Ma insisted, and a month later he volunteered to take full responsibility: ‘If the masses want to burn them, then let’s burn them, we should do it for the masses, it is their request, just do it and I will assume responsibility.’ Several others agreed. So the militia assembled all the lepers, locked them in the hospital and set the building on fire. The victims screamed for help, to no avail. Only six of 110 victims survived. 26
    Even when lepers received care, funds mysteriously disappeared. Who, after all, could call to account a few cadres looking after lepers in colonies far from the party centre? In Yanbian, Sichuan, the men in charge appropriated most of the available funds to build themselves spacious mansions. The mud huts for the patients, several kilometres further inland against the mountains, were so ramshackle that they were in imminent danger of collapse. But the problem was also one of scale. In all Guangdong province, by 1953 there were an estimated 100,000 lepers, although the medical authorities could afford to take care of only 2,000 cases. 27
    Lepers were among the most vulnerable members of society, and their needs were not served well by a one-party state that sought to control everyone but answered to nobody. But there were many other needy members of society whose fates came to lie entirely in the hands of local cadres. In some orphanages taken over from non-governmental organisations, the death rate stood at 30 per cent. The blind and the elderly found it difficult to fit into a new society where so much depended on the ability to take orders and earn work points. With the gradual stripping away of most basic liberties – freedom of expression, belief, assembly, association and movement – the majority of ordinary people became increasingly defenceless, as very little stood between them and the state. 28
     
    By 1956 many of the hopes that sprang from liberation years earlier had been dashed. Instead of treating people with respect, the state viewed them as mere digits on a balance sheet, a resource to be exploited for the greater good. Farmers had lost their land, their tools and their livestock in the name of collectivisation. They were forced to deliver ever larger shares of the crop to the state, answering the call of the bugle in the morning to follow orders from local cadres. In factories and shops in the cities, employees were treated more like bonded labour than the working-class heroes featured in official propaganda. They were pressed into working ever longer hours, chasing one production record after another even as their benefits steadily declined. Everybody, except those inside the party, had to tighten their belts in the pursuit of utopia. China was a country seething with discontent. Social strains were about to explode into open opposition to the regime.

Select Bibliography
    Archives
    Non-Chinese Archives
    AG SVD – Archivum Generale of the Societas Verbi Divini, Rome
    Guoshiguan – National Archives, Hsin-tien, Taiwan
    ICRC – International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva
    National Archives at College Park – National Archives, Washington
    PCE – Archives of the Presbyterian Church of England, SOAS, London
    PRO – The National Archives, London
    RGASPI – Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, Moscow
     
    Central Archives
    Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Waijiaobu Dang’anguan, Beijing
     
    Provincial Archives
    Gansu – Gansu sheng dang’anguan, Lanzhou
    91  Zhonggong Gansu shengwei (Gansu Provincial Party Committee)
    96  Zhonggong Gansu shengwei nongcun gongzuobu (Gansu Provincial Party Committee Department for Rural Work)
     
    Guangdong – Guangdong sheng