Many grass-roots officials and peasants involved in scenes like this did not believe in the ridiculous boasting, but fear of being accused themselves drove them on. They were carrying out the orders of the Party, and they were safe as long as they followed Mao. The totalitarian system in which they had been immersed had sapped and warped their sense of responsibility. Even doctors would boast about miraculously healing incurable diseases.

Trucks used to turn up at our compound carrying grinning peasants coming to report on some fantastic, record breaking achievement. One day it was a monster cucumber half as long as the truck. Another time it was a tomato carried with difficulty by two children. On another occasion there was a giant pig squeezed into a truck. The peasants claimed they had bred an actual pig this size. The pig was only made of papier-mâché, but as a child I imagined that it was real. Maybe I was confused by the adults around me, who behaved as though all this were true. People had learned to defy reason and to live with acting.

The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people's real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.

This was entrenched by the further regimentation of society. When he first set up the communes, Mao said their main advantage was that 'they are easy to control," because the peasants would now be in an organized system rather than being, to a certain extent, left alone. They were given detailed orders from the very top about how to fill their land. Mao summed up the whole of agriculture in eight characters: 'soil, fertilizer, water, seeds, dense planting, protection, tending, technology." The Party Central Committee in Peking was handing out two-page instructions on how peasants all over China should improve their fields, another page on how to use fertilizers, another on planting crops densely. Their incredibly simplistic instructions had to be strictly followed: the peasants were ordered to replant their crops more densely in one mini-campaign after another.

Another means of regimentation, setting up canteens in the communes, was an obsession with Mao at the time. In his airy way, he defined communism as 'public canteens with free meals." The fact that the canteens themselves did not produce food did not concern him. In 1958 the regime effectively banned eating at home. Every peasant had to eat in the commune canteen. Kitchen utensils like woks and, in some places, money were outlawed. Everybody was going to be looked after by the commune and the state.

The peasants filed into the canteens every day after work and ate to their hearts' content, which they had never been able to do before, even in the best years and in the most fertile areas. They consumed and wasted the entire lbod reserve in the countryside. They filed into the fields, too.

But how much work was done did not matter, because the produce now belonged to the state, and was completely unrelated to the peasants' lives. Mao put forward the prediction that China was reaching a society of communism, which in Chinese means 'sharing material goods," and the peasants took this to mean that they would get a share anyway, regardless of how much work they did. With no incentive to work, they just went to the fields and had a good snooze.

Agriculture was also neglected because of the priority given to steel. Many of the peasants were exhausted from having to spend long hours finding fuel, scrap iron, and iron ore and keeping the furnaces going. The fields were often left to the women and children, who had to do everything by hand, as the animals were busy making their contribution to steel production. When harvest time came in autumn 1958, few people were in the fields.

The failure to get in the harvest in 1958 flashed a warning that a food shortage was on its way, even though official statistics showed a double-digit increase in agricultural output. It was officially announced that in 1958 China 's wheat output had overtaken that of the United States. The Party newspaper, the People's Daily, started a discussion on the topic "How do we cope with the problem of producing too much food?"

My father's department was in charge of the press in Sichuan, which printed outlandish claims, as did every publication in China. The press was the voice of the Party, and when it came to Party policies, neither my father nor anyone else in the media had any say. They were part of a huge conveyor belt. My father watched the turn of events with alarm. His only option was to appeal to the top leaders.

At the end of 1958 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee in Peking stating that producing steel like this was pointless and a waste of resources; the peasants were exhausted, their labor was being squandered, and there was a food shortage. He appealed for urgent action.

He gave the letter to the governor to pass on. The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the number-two man in the province. He had given my father his first job when he had come to Chengdu from Yibin, and treated him like a friend.

Governor Lee told my father he was not going to forward the letter. Nothing in it was new, he said.

"The Party knows everything. Have faith in it." Mao had said that under no circumstances must the people's morale be dampened.

The Great Leap Forward had changed the psychological attitude of the Chinese from passivity to a can-do, get-up and-go spirit, he said, which must not be imperiled.

Governor Lee also told my father that he had been given the dangerous nickname "Opposition' among the provincial leaders, to whom he had voiced disagreements. It was only because of his other qualities, his absolute loyalty to the Party and his stern sense of discipline, that my father was still all right.

"The good thing," the governor said, 'is that you only voiced your doubts to the Party, and not to the public." He warned my father he could get into serious trouble if he insisted on raising these concerns, as could his family and 'others," clearly meaning himself, my father's friend. My father did not insist. He was half convinced by the argument, and the stakes were too high. He had reached a stage where he was not insusceptible to compromise.

But my father and the people working in the departments of Public Affairs collected a great number of complaints, as part of their jobs, and forwarded them to Peking.

There was general discontent among the people and officials alike. In fact, the Great Leap Forward triggered off the most serious split in the leadership since the Communists had taken power a decade before. Mao had to step down from the less important of his two main posts, president of the state, in favor of Liu Shaoqi. Liu became the number-two man in China, but his prestige was only a fraction of that of Mao, who kept his key post as chairman of the Party.

The voices of dissent grew so strong that the Party had to convene a special conference, which was held at the end of June 1959 in the mountain resort of Lushan, in central China. At the conference the defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehual, wrote a letter to Mao criticizing what had happened in the Great Leap Forward and recommending a realistic approach to the economy. The letter was actually rather restrained, and ended on the obligatory note of optimism (in this case, catching up with Britain in four years).

But although Peng was one of Mao's oldest comrades, and one of the people closest to him, Mao could not take even this slight criticism, particularly at a time when he was on the defensive, because he knew he was wrong. Using the aggrieved language of which he was enamored, Mao called the letter 'a bombardment intended to level Lushan." He dug in his heels and dragged the conference out for over a month, fiercely attacking Marshal Peng. Peng and the few who openly supported him were branded 'rightist opportunists." Peng was dismissed as defense minister, placed under house arrest, and later sent into premature retirement in Sichuan, where he was assigued a lowly post.