China's Bloody Century

Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900

R. J. Rummel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412806701
• eBook ISBN: 9781351528757
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Except for Soviet citizens, no people in this century have endured so much mass killing as have the Chinese. They have been murdered by rebels conniving with their own rulers, and then, after the defeat in war of the imperial dynasty, by soldiers of other lands. They have been killed by warlords who ruled one part of China or another. They have been executed by Nationalists or Communists because they had the wrong beliefs or attitudes or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In China's Bloody Century, R.J. Rummel's careful estimate of the total number of killings exceeds 5 million.

How do we explain such killings, crossing ideological bounds and political conditions? According to Rummel, the one constant factor in all the Chinese mass murder, as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, is arbitrary power. It was the factor that united warlords, Nationalists, Communists, and foreign armies. The author argues that whenever such undisciplined power is centralized and unchecked, the possibility exists that it will be used at the whim of dictators to kill for their own ends, whether the aim is ethnic-racial purity, national unity, development, or utopia.

The book presents successive periods in modern Chinese history, with each chapter divided into three parts. Rummel first relates the history of the period within which the nature and the amount of killings are presented. He then provides a detailed statistical table giving the basic estimates with their sources and qualifications. The final part offers an appendix that explains and elaborates the statistical computations and estimates.

While estimates are available in the literature on the number of Chinese killed in Communist land reform, or in Tibet, or by the Nationalists in one military campaign or another, until this book no one has tried to systematically accumulate, organize, add up, and analyze these diverse killings for all of China's governments in this century. For

1 Introduction and Overview

R. J. Rummel

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

—Joseph Stalin

No other people in this century except Soviet citizens have suffered so much mass killing in cold blood as have the Chinese. They were murdered by rebels conniving with their own Empress and then, with the defeat in war of the dynasty, by soldiers and citizens of many other lands. They were killed by mini-despots— warlords—who ruled one part of China or another. They were slaughtered because they happened to live where nationalists, warlords, communists, or foreign troops fought each other. They were executed because they had the wrong beliefs or attitudes in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were shot because they criticized or opposed their rulers. They were butchered because they resisted rape, were raped, or tried to prevent rape. They were wiped out because they had food or wealth that soldiers or officials wanted. They were assassinated because they were leaders, a threat, or potential antagonists. They were blotted out in the process of building a new society. And they died simply because they were in the way.

These poor souls experienced every manner of death for every conceivable reason: genocide, politicide, mass murder, massacres, and individually directed assassinations; burning alive, burying alive, starvation, drowning, infecting with germs, shooting, stabbing; this for personal power, out of feelings of superiority, because of lust or greed, to terrorize others into surrendering, to keep subjects in line, out of nationalist ideals, or to achieve utopia.

China began the century with a weak and corrupt Chinese dynasty on the verge of collapse and beset by European imperialism; ninety years later China has become truly independent and sovereign, but is now in the grip of an alien, totalitarian ideology that allows little room for personal rights or individual freedom. Democracy, an ideal that motivated many of those who worked to bring down the dynasty and create a republic in the early years of this century, seems even less possible today than it did then.

Between the extremes of a very traditional, authoritarian dynasty and arbitrary, totalitarian rule, the Chinese people have in one region or another gone through multiple governances. After the Dynasty fell in 1911, China was governed by an ineffective and disunited Republican government. And after General Yuan Shih-k’ai died in 1916, the one unifying leader of this government, China was largely divided by warlords, who governed their separate regions as though sovereign and independent countries. Many were absolute dictators, fighting hundreds of wars to gain more power or protect their territory.

In the midst of this political anarchy rose two forces. One was that for national unity and self-determination, directed democracy, and socialism or modernization; the other for revolutionary communism. The first force was led by Sun Yat-sen and the party he founded, the Kuomintang. At first this party combined both forces—the communists and those non-communists who were seeking to create a modern, national state—into one driving to defeat the warlords and unify China.

But these incompatible forces soon fell out. Subservient to Moscow, the communists sought to dominate the Kuomintang and prematurely organized revolution in the streets. Chiang Kai-shek, the acknowledged leader of the Kuomintang and Republican forces after Sun Yat-sen’s death, turned on the communists in a bloody coup in 1927, massacring thousands of them. From that time on, there would be negotiations, truces, and common fronts, but the fundamental risks to Chinese life and limb were determined for the next twenty-two years. It was a life and death, three-cornered struggle between the centrifugal forces of the warlord dictators and the exclusively integrating, but opposing forces of the totalitarian communists and authoritarian nationalists (as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Party and government became known). As though this deadly struggle was not enough, Japanese forces entered the fray in 1937 to subordinate China to their own conception of a unified Asia, under Japanese guidance, of course. While ostensibly this intervention and the consequent Sino-Japanese War forced the nationalists and communists into a common front, each maneuvered for strategic advantage. Soon Japanese soldiers would be able to enjoy a picnic while watching them kill each other.

The defeat of Japan in 1945 by the United States presaged, after some hesitation and truces, the final struggle between the nationalists and communists for total victory. Warlordism had been virtually extinguished in the previous years, and now only the two antagonistic forces remained. This massive and bloody civil war, involving millions of troops, militia, and peasant laborers; rebellions, massacres and terror; destructive inflation and ruin; ended with the total victory of the communists on Mainland China by the end of 1949.

In all these military struggles from 1900 to 1949, with soldiers of one or another of the hundreds of armies criss-crossing the land, some 8,963,000 soldiers and civilians were probably killed. In this one country this death toll is virtually the same as that for all nations involved in all the battles of World War I.

But our interest here is not in the war dead, but in the innocents and helpless who were slaughtered during, between, or after these wars. This because they happened to live on one side or the other, or were victims of the repression and terror of those armies or governments that occupied their land. Of those killed by warlords little need be said. Although some warlords were considerate of their subjects, ruling benevolently, generally they were tyrants brooking little opposition. Repression was often massive and massacres were not infrequent; opposition usually meant death. The figures on those killed by the warlords are the roughest of all in this book. Putting available information together and making some conservative guesses, however, I estimate that some 910,000 people were likely murdered by the warlords or their soldiers, perhaps even a third more than this.

It is a commentary on China’s modern history that this number, near a million killed, incredible in itself, much more than the battle dead in all American wars since 1775, will look small in comparison to the soon to be mentioned millions killed by the nationalists, communists, and Japanese. Before letting this estimate get lost among those much larger figures, I should reemphasize it here. The warlord toll alone would rank these Chinese dead among the major victims of democide in this century—close in number to the Armenian genocide by Turkey during World War I; greater in number than the contemporary democides in Uganda, Burundi, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nigeria, Argentina, and Equatorial Guinea, to mention the more prominent.

In many ways, the nationalists were no different than the warlords. They murdered opponents, assassinated critics, and employed terror as a device of rule. Moreover, the nationalist soldier, like many warlord soldiers, was considered scum, lower than vermin. They were beaten, mistreated, often fed poorly, and ill paid; and if wounded or sick they were left to fend for themselves, often to die slow and miserable deaths. In tum, soldiers often treated civilians no better. Looting, rape, arbitrary murder, were risks helpless civilians faced from passing soldiers or those occupying or reoccupying their villages and towns.

But killing by the nationalists was also strategic and ideological. After the initial cooperative period, they especially sought out communists or communist sympathizers for execution. When defeating the communists in a particular region and occupying or reoccupying it, they went so far as to kill anyone they felt had cooperated with the communists or had been tainted by them. In one military drive against the communist from 1934 to 1935, they slaughtered or starved to death perhaps as many as 1,000,000 people.¹ Moreover, especially during the 1940s, landlords and former officials who had fled from communists or the Japanese would follow in the train of nationalist soldiers and under military protection murder those peasants who they feared or had a grudge against. While such killing may have numbered a few from village to village, when these victims are added up over all the villages and districts involved for well over a hundred-million people, then hundreds of thousands were probably killed, just from this cause alone.

Then there was the process of conscription. This was a deadly affair in which men were kidnapped for the army, rounded up indiscriminately by press-gangs or army units among those on the roads or in the towns and villages, or otherwise gathered together. Many men, some the very young and old, were killed resisting or trying to escape. Once collected, they would be roped or chained together and marched, with little food or water, long distances to camp. They often died or were killed along the way, sometimes less than 50 percent reaching camp alive. Then recruit camp was no better, with hospitals resembling Nazi concentration camps like Buchenwald.² Probably 3,081,000 died during the Sino-Japanese War; another 1,320,000 likely during the Civil War—4,401,000 dead in total. Just during conscription.

Although this fantastic total is overwhelming enough, we still must add those who died from famine. Famine was treated as a state of nature for China, something to be expected as an act of God. But where famine was indeed a natural calamity during these nationalist years, the greed of nationalist officials, the continued imposition of impossible taxes, the seizing of all the peasants’ grain, the refusal to provide aid for political reasons, all contributed massively to the death toll. In Honan Province during the famine of 1942 to 1943, nationalist officials took grain by force from the starving peasants to sell for their own profit, and officials in a neighboring province refused to release their store of grain because of a “delicate local balance of power.”³ Quite likely, the nationalists overall were responsible for 1,750,000 to 2,500,000 famine deaths.

While these deaths from conscription and famine may seem to be the residum of a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent political system, the nationalists, in fact, did kill en masse with cold blooded calculation. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this is their dynamiting of the Yellow River dikes in order to stall a Japanese offensive during the Sino-Japanese War. The resulting, calamitous flood likely drowned or otherwise killed 440,000 people, even possibly 893,000 according to a Chinese Social Science Institute.⁴ The flood having washed out a new channel, left the old one for peasants to farm and develop. Indeed, over the following years, villages and towns were established in or near the old river bed. Then, during the subsequent Civil War, nearly nine years later, the nationalists repaired the dikes to create a barrier between two communist armies by forcing the river to flood back into its old channel. As those peasants downstream tried to build dikes against the coming flood, they were bombed by nationalist planes.

From the earliest years to their final defeat on the mainland, the nationalist likely killed from 5,965,000 to 18,522,000 helpless people, probably 10,214,000. This incredible number is over a million greater than all the aforementioned 8,963,000 war dead in all the hundreds of wars and rebellions in China from the beginning of the century to the final nationalist defeat. It ranks the nationalists as the fourth greatest demociders of this century, behind the Soviets, Chinese Communists, and Nazis. This democide is even more impressive when it is realized that the nationalists never controlled all of China, perhaps no more than 50 to 60 percent of the population at its greatest.

Before passing on to the communists, we cannot ignore the Japanese democide in China. Japanese indiscriminate killing of Chinese became widely known and almost universally condemned as criminal in the late 1930s. World opinion was especially horrified over what became known as “The Rape of Nanking.” Nanking was the nationalist capital and the home of many foreign missionaries, diplomats, and newsmen. As a result, when the Japanese army conquered Nanking and subjected the population to monstrous indiscriminate killing, looting, and rape, the news was immediately communicated to the international community. Likely some 200,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers were killed in and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• Part I Transformation and the Nationalist Struggle, 1900 to 1949
• 2 105,000 Victims: Dynastic and Republican China
• 3 632,000 Victims: Warlord China
• 4 2,724,000 Victims: The Nationalist Period
• 5 10,216,000 Victims: The Sino-Japanese War
• 6 3,949,000 Victims: Japanese Mass Murder in China
• 7 4,968,000 Victims: The Civil War
• Part II The People’s Republic of China
• 8 The People’s Republic of China: Overview
• 9 8,427,000 Victims: The Totalization Period
• 10 7,474,000 Victims: Collectivization and “The Great Leap Forward”
• 11 10,729,000 Victims: The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period
• 12 7,731,000 Victims: The “Cultural Revolution”
• 13 874,000 Victims: Liberalization