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In the 0055th Army Unit, there happened from September to December 1960 three incidents that led quickly to suicides. The first involved a soldier of the Artillery Company, Kung Ho-yu, an excellent League member and a "five-excellence" soldier. On Aug. 25 he stole three yuan ($1.80), and on the 30th of the same month confessed his wrong. Someone, while charging him with previous thefts, cried: "If you freely confess, we shall be lenient with you, but if you deny these charges we shall be very severe." Kung showed that his feelings were deeply and bitterly stirred, and that night, when he was on sentry duty, shot and killed himself with his rifle.
The second was Wang Yu-ts'ai, who stole a pair of rubber shoes. While on a working assignment, he once ate an extra bun stuffed with meat, and the Deputy Commander fiercely shouted at him: "Who gave you permission to eat that extra bun?" Later, his old disease, epilepsy, broke out twice as a result of these emotional disturbances. Wang took his own life.
The third is Chen P'an-t'ing, deputy squad leader of the Machine Gun Company. In September, after returning from a visit to his family, he showed some dissatisfaction with the grain situation, and said: "Some people are saying in China there once appeared a Sun Yat-sen and the grain was piled sky-high." Twenty days later he was reported to the Deputy Political Director for "reactionary remarks." Fearing "some kind of punishment," Chen used a Thompson gun to kill himself.
To readers of the Hoover Institution's anthology, a simple moral emerges for the Red Chinese Commissar: those responsible for educational work in the army should have studied the reasons for these examples of backward thinking and tried to reform them. To that end, the Red Chinese army has developed a series of programs that sound like some sort of ideological drill manual. The "Three Skills Movement" emphasizes "four grasps and one investigation"; there are "five togethernesses" to combat the "five excessives" (excessive reports, excessive documents, excessive meetings, excessive persons in office, excessive general appeal) and two remembrances, which can be applied in the search for "sweetness." Out of it all comes the most powerful of Chinese weapons: the "spiritual atomic bomb," against which no capitalist-imperialist can stand. After all, as Army Education Boss Hsiao Hua wrote in a 1961 treatise, the People's Liberation Army of Red China has a long way to go toward perfection. "Some of the troops have an incorrect attitude toward military service," wrote Hsiao. "They think that they are 'soldiers of peace.' "