- Deng managed the conscription of "some 5 million men and women, sometimes even children" during the Civil War (1945-1949). "[H]e imposed strict quotas for each village and threatened severe punishment when is orders were not met. These pick-and-shovel crews not only provided logistical support, carrying food and material on their backs to the front, but they were also used as human shields, forced to march in front of the troops. Dense waves of unarmed villagers overwhelmed the nationalists. Lin Jingwu, an ordinary [Nationalist] soldier in the trenches, remembered years later that his hands went numb from firing bullets into a sea of civilians."
- While overseeing land reform in southwest China (where he was functionally governor), the Party's cadres killed landlords, their families, and their families' families. There was a brutal cycle of murder, whereby fearing reprisals from the relatives of those purged, the Party preemptively purged yet more people.
- During the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (aka China's Great Terror), "The provinces under Deng Xiaoping, namely Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan, are unlikely to have had killing rates below two per thousand."
- During the Korean War, Deng extracted so much grain and other provisions from southwest China that it pushed the populace into starvation: "As Deng Xiaoping proudly proclaimed his determination that every man and woman should contribute up to 4 kilos of grain in war donations, tens of thousands of people in the county of Ya'an [in Sichuan province] alone were reduced to foraging for roots to eat. In Yunnan, also under Deng's purview, more than a million people were starving, many of the victims stripping the bark off trees or eating mud that filled the stomach but often caused excruciatingly painful death as the soil dried up the colon....In November 1951...Deng announced that farmers in south-west China would be asked to contribute an extra 400,000 tonnes of grain beyond the usual procurements. Six months later 2 million people were starving in the region, with reports of cannibalism[.]"
- Deng led the Anti-Rightist Campaign beginning in 1957, which persecuted more than a half million dissidents after they had been encouraged to criticize the party during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
For a kinder introduction, check out this 2007 blog post from Brad Delong calling Deng "quite possibly the greatest human hero of the twentieth century." How was Deng able to pivot from monster to the architect of Modern China? I am adding Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life and Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China to my reading list.
