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With this army of Communists, Lo and his comrades carried out one of the greatest collections of purges in history. They had the Russian experience to lean upon, and they were thus able to avoid the fumbling experiments in mass liquidation made by the early Soviet Chekists. But they worked with a cold-blooded calculation that the Russians, with their basically Christian sense of guilt (evident in this week's Moscow disclaimers) never achieved. The Chinese Communists were so certain of their moral right to kill for the revolution that they attempted at every opportunity to make the people also a party to their act, e.g., enforced spectator participation in the mass trials. By the end of 1951 and the beginning of 1952 the slaughter had reached such a pitch that the whole of China (as the Communists intended) was shaken to its roots with terror. There was a lull in the next two years, but last year the execution rate perceptibly increased again. The result has been a widespread recognition of the futility of resisting. Lo's liquidation campaign has been a ringing success.
Terrorist Lo had to warn his comrades, as recently as last July, against "boundless magnanimity." He regaled the National People's Congress with horror stories of the resisters still around, then dramatically asked: "Deputies, can any one of you be tolerant with these heinous and inhuman counterrevolutionaries? Can any one who has heard of such horrible conspiracies still comfort himself with the feeling that counter-revolutionaries are nothing but 'a few small fish that cannot create waves?' " Back in 1951, when Lo's army of terrorists set to work, the fish were many and the waves big. Village Communists, prompted by activists, had already liquidated tens of thousands of landowners, rich and poor. Lo's forces carried on the program with scientific thoroughness. Nominally, their campaign was directed against "exploiting landlords," but in practice people were liquidated because their parents or grandparents were landlords, because they were intellectuals, village elders, held religious beliefs, objected to Communism in principle, or simply would not cooperate. The Lo cadres were given target quotas for grain and confiscated land, so that even if a village had few landlords, a necessary percentage of Hsiao Mieh was written up. The announced objective was to redistribute the land among the peasants, and that was actually done. But the real purpose was to break the fabric of economic and social traditions of China's rural population.
Terror in the Cities. With "land reform" launched, Lo turned his attention to the cities. He had one piece of advice: "Two ways are open to all counterrevolutionaries : the way of death for those who resist, and the way of life for those who confess." People were told that by registering their names and stating their past misdeeds (such as having served the Nationalists), all would be forgiven.