(5 of 9)
"To confess is better than not to confess" (a Lo phrase) became a handbook slogan for party workers. In cities like Shanghai (pop. 7,000,000), the terrorists made sure that people would know about "the way of death" by staging machine gun executions on the paddyfields, and sending through the streets open wagons bearing people bound hand and foot. Then one spring night in 1951 the sirens wailed in Shanghai, and all night long the police wagons sped about the city. Next morning there was nothing in the newspapers to indicate what had happened, but as people began checking with friends, horror spread through Shanghai: it was reckoned that 100,000 people had been arrested that night. Presumably, most of them were people who had chosen the "way of life," and confessed.
Red newspapers were not silent about arrests and executions in other parts of the country. Month after month the Hsiao Mieh totals were issued, almost always in round figures: 1,150,000 in the central-south provinces, 1,176,000 in "four administrative regions," 300,000 in the five northwest provinces, and so on. Said Lo calmly: "A large number of people with blood debts have been executed."
Struggle Meetings. Sure that publicity would have its terrorizing effect, Lo launched in October 1949 his successive purges. He called them "campaigns." The "Five-Anti" (sometimes called the "Five Vices") campaign was ostensibly waged against bribery, tax evasion, cheating in contracts, theft of state property and state economic secrets. Under its cover, businessmen and industrialists were pressured with endless "struggle meetings" (brainwashing) and forced to pay fines and "back taxes" of fantastic sums. Many were arrested, killed, or detained for days and nights by activists among their own employees. Literally hundreds of thousands committed suicide. At one time in Shanghai, the Bund on the Whangpoo River was roped off, the roofs of tall buildings were guarded to prevent suicides, and residents developed the habit of avoiding walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them from the rooftops.
An anti-U.S. campaign (during the Korean war) gave Lo's men an excuse to arrest Chinese doctors, technicians and professionals educated in the West (and therefore suspected counterrevolutionaries) and to pick up servants and drivers who had worked for foreigners. An anti-Christian campaign was conducted under cover of the Communist-backed Three-Self movement, designed to cut the local churches off from the rest of Christendom, but failed when Roman Catholic authorities refused to bend to a rump Catholic Church that the Reds tried to organize. So Lo went ahead arresting missionaries, priests and clergymen as spies, or harried them into leaving the country. Of China's 6,475 foreign missionaries, only eleven priests (eight in prison and three under house arrest) and 14 Franciscan Sisters now remain. Of China's 4,000,000 Christians, only a few thousand worship freely today, and in their churches the Chinese red flag hangs above pulpit or altar.