| OCR Text |
Show 187 Nazis in the numbers of victims annihilated. According to one estimate, by 1956 at least twenty million Chinese had been liquidated and another twenty-three million imprisoned in forced labor camps.25 A more recent estimate, in about 1964, put the slaughter at thirty million.26 Ostensibly, a major purpose of the bloodletting was to eliminate landlords so as to aid in the redistri- bution of land among the peasants. of the land was, the same time, scale also, of course, however, The redistribution actually accomplished. At liquidation on such a massive and most importantly, ruptured the fabric of economic and social traditions of China's rural popu- lation. Such social disruption, of course, aided Mao in achieving the main goal of the purges -- the prevention of counter-revolution against his regime. As one of Mao's lieutenants put it in the Peking Current Affairs, "Execu- tion means fundamauzfl.physical elimination of counterrevolutionaries, and is of course the most thorough measure for depriving counter-revolutionaries of the conditions for counter-revolutionary activity." 25Time Magazine, March 5, 1956, p. 27, citing "Foreign Specialists, carefully sifting reports from refugees and other sources." 26Suzanne Labin, Embassies of Subversion (New York: American Afro-Asian Educational Exchange, 22. Inc., 1965), p. |
