13. Dig Out the Rotten Root of Feudalism
14. Wang Laihsun Is Next
15. The Fruits of Struggle
16. Half of China
17. Counter Measures
18. Founding the Village Communist Party Branch
19. Peasants or Workers?
20. Contradictions, Internal and External
21. All Out War—Retreat
22. Organizing Production
23. Abuses of Power
24. The Blackmail of Wang Yu-lai
Part III The Search for the Poor and Hired
25. Cosmic Wei Ch’i
26. To the Village
27. The Work Team
28. Those with Merit Will Get Some
Those without Merit Will Get Some
29. Self Report, Public Appraisal
30. Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggarman, Thief
31. The Revolutionary Heat
32. Brothers
33. A Curved Road
34. Drama in the Fields
Part IV Who Will Educate the Educators?
35. Confrontation at the Gate
36. The Village Leader Bows his Head
37. “I Dare Not Say I Have Finished”
38. Days and Nights
39. A Summing Up
40. The Lucheng Road
41. In the Dragon Hall
42. When Poverty Outranked Heaven
43. Unity Through Struggle
44. When I Get My Share
45. Unite Real Friends, Attack Real Enemies
Part V Recapitulation
46. The Native’s Return
47. Both Ends Sun Unseen
48. Class Differentiation Repeated
49. It Is Too Slow!
50. Who Dares Man the Second Gate?
51. A Young Bride Leads the Way
52. The Gate in the Church
53. Upgrading
Part VI Drastic Reappraisal
54. On the Eve of Victory
55. We Tried to Be God!
56. Who Is to Blame?
Part VII Untying the Knot
57. Disaster
58. Revolutionary Steeling
59. Mutual Aid
60. The Village People’s Congress
61. A Final Determination
62. The Midnight Raid
63. Hsueh-chen Dissents
64. “Illegal Fruits” Returned
65. Arrests and Restitutions
66. “Self Report, Public Appraisal” Solves the Tax Question
67. Long Bow Tsai Chien
Appendix A: Basic Program on Chinese Agrarian Law
Appendix B: Supplementary Measures for Carrying
Out the Basic Program on Agrarian Law
Appendix C: How to Analyze Class Status in the Countryside
Index
Maps and Tables
Long Bow Village
Changchih-Lucheng Area
North China in 1945
Changes in Landholding by Classes (1944-1947)
North China in 1947 (December)
Changes in Landholding by Classes (1944-1948)
North China in 1948 (November)
West and away the wheels of darkness roll,
Day’s beamy banner up the east is borne,
Spectres and fears, the nightmare and her foal,
Drown in the golden deluge of the morn.
A. E. Housman
Prologue
China is a vast country. “When night falls in the east, the west is still lit up; when darkness covers the south, the north remains bright.” Hence, one need not worry about whether there is room to move around.
Mao Tse-tung
ALL THROUGH the spring season the earth’s canted axis swings ever closer into line with the sun. Each day more heat is concentrated on the crust of the northern hemisphere until, with the arrival of the summer solstice, the full force of the solar fire is turned on the seas and mountains, the deserts and the plains of the temperate zone. This heat bakes the rocks until they flake, sets forest and tundra steaming, vaporizes the surface of the lakes and oceans. In the vast turbulence of the atmosphere thus created, gigantic mushrooms of hot air push skyward from the heart of continents and suck inland beneath them the cool, rain-laden sea winds that break the spring drought.
So vast is the continent of Asia, so immense the winter-stilled and frozen wastes of Mongolia, Sinkiang, Kazakhstan, and Tibet, so chilled the deserts, of the Gobi and Takla Makan that the solstice has come and gone, the arctic pole has already turned from the sun, and the days have already begun to grow shorter before the accumulated heat of Central Asian sand and rock can reverse the seasons and bring on the monsoon.
This ancient lag, this ever-recurring cosmic overlap of heat and cold, cold and heat, brings a violence to the climate of all North China that is incalculable in its effect. From February to June cold winds blow from Mongolia outward toward the sea, gripping all the land from the Yangtze to the Amur in drought. Then, after weeks of hot and pregnant calm, the skies reverse themselves. Fierce torrential rains sweep in from the Pacific, flash floods carve up the earthen hills of Shansi and Shensi, swell the rivers with mud-clogged water, and inundate the flat plains bordering the sea.
These plains are, in fact, a creation of this cycle. But for the silt flung into the rivers and deposited over the millenniums on the ocean floor, the Yellow Sea would still lap the Taihang Mountains on Shan-si’s border and Shantung’s hills would still be, as they were in ancient times, an island range.
The great coastal plain of China, mother to a tenth part of the human race, is thus herself the child of a monsoon which never ceases to harass the world it has created. The very winds, upon which all rains and hence all life depend, periodically threaten the very existence of that life. Drought and flood, flood and drought, alternating in perpetual procession, yearly call the Chinese people to battle against the waters that sustain them.
The year 1947 was no exception. If anything, the rains that summer came earlier and fell more heavily than usual. Even before the end of June the drought-cracked fields of Hopei and the sun-baked soil of Shansi’s mountain valleys had lost their structure completely and dissolved into mud. Carts bogged to the axles. Mules, their sweating flanks stained red from the earth thrown up by their churning hooves, strained in the harness, lurched forward and fell back panting. Along a million once solid tracks connecting village to village, field to field, in a network that covered the countryside like a filigree of lace, the battle between the carters and the husbandmen spread with ever-increasing intensity. At each mudhole the carters tried to detour onto the more solid, crop-firmed soil of the fields themselves. But the peasants, determined to defend their developing harvests, countered with deep pits dug beside the road to keep the carts in line. As the season wore on these pits grew into a system of interconnected moats and trenches until the countryside took on the appearance of a plain prepared for war. This contest, as old as the wheel itself, never slackened as long as the rains continued to fall. Nor could there be, by nature of the combat, any final victory or defeat but only an infinite series of minor catastrophes—here a cart overturned in a water-filled trap, there a field of green corn mangled in the mud.
And while this persistent battle between man and man intensified, a larger struggle between man and nature unfolded week by week. With each succeeding rain the hollows and the low spots of the land filled up with water. The muddy overflow spilled onto the crops. Small gullies that ten months of the year lay dry and dusty suddenly bulged with flowing water. Whole villages were threatened. Between and around all this the rivers, the Yungting, the Ying, the Chin, the Hutou and the Wei, rose and swelled and rose some more to menace whole counties. Meanwhile to the south, from the gap in the mountains called San Men, the great Yellow River itself, “China’s Sorrow,” lapped at the top of its dykes, and spread fear throughout three provinces.
Throughout the Liberated Areas of the north country the battle of the rivers was joined.* Along threat
ened dykes vast armies of men, women, and children toiled day and night, carrying earth in wicker baskets, firming it down with rope-flung tamping stones, and fixing in place the rock-laden mats that could halt a breakthrough. At night one could follow the course of the waters by observing the fires set at intervals by flood watchers who huddled in mat shelters to keep out of the weather. They constantly filled and lit their pipes in order to stay awake, and every hour measured the height of the dark waters that glided so silently, so menacingly past their emergency stations.
As with the battle of the fields, there was in this struggle neither ultimate victory nor final defeat, but only an endless series of tactical gains and losses—here a dyke that held, a whole county saved, there a river run riot, a million people left homeless and hungry.
But even this battle, gigantic and far-flung as it was, was dwarfed that year by yet another conflict, a Civil War almost as cosmic in scale as the monsoon itself. From the borders of Siberia to the mouth of the Red River in the South China Sea, armies Red and White marched and counter-marched, encircled and counter-encircled, besieged and broke siege in turn until over vast areas of countryside every nursing child, every worried mother, every grandfather filling his pipe by the village gate, every young man with a hoe on his shoulder and every young woman with a needle in her hand had experienced this war.
Top-level squires and rural bullies fled for safety to Peking, Tientsin, Mukden, Shanghai, and even New York. Second-ranking gentlemen ran to such provincial towns as Taiyuan, Tsinan, Paoting, and Kaifeng. Those of third rank took refuge behind the thick fortress walls of county seats such as Anyang, Yungnien, Kalgan, and Tatung. Lesser fry, lacking the means to get away, threw themselves on the mercy of the newly-empowered Peasants’ Associations and Village Congresses, and lived for the day when the Home Return Corps, organized in the cities by their fleeing brethren, would sally forth to wreak vengeance. These brethren in turn, fully controlling the coastal cities and still able to deploy the manpower of vast areas in South and West China, placed their hopes for victory on supply lines that reached out across the wide Pacific into the streets and workshops of America, where hundreds of thousands toiled to make the weapons with which Chinese might slaughter Chinese.
In this, the Armageddon of Chinese feudalism, the terrible many-layered war of the land revolution, no weapon was overlooked. The very floods of the monsoon became swords in the hands of opposing armies, and silt-swollen rivers were unleashed by both sides in an effort to annihilate the enemy or split his forces asunder.
At Yungnien, a black-walled fortress city halfway between Peking and the Yellow River, a Kuomintang warlord named Yang entrenched himself with flour, wine, and women for a three-year siege. Communist-led militia, driven back when they tried to storm the battlements by frontal assault, raised a dyke around the town and turned the waters of the Wei River upon it. Just before the rising flood burst open the city’s massive gates, bombers, summoned by radio from Peking, blasted the dyke and loosed a torrent that spread havoc through three counties.
Farther north, in Central Hopei, American-equipped troops under General Fu T’so-yi drove south out of Tientsin in the middle of the rainy season and cut the dykes of the Grand Canal just as the crest of the flood rolled down. Five counties west of the canal were inundated, hundreds of people drowned, tens of thousands lost their homes and harvests. By this action General Fu’s armies won a respite of several weeks from partisan attacks in the famed Peking-Tientsin-Paoting triangle, an area the Japanese, in eight long years, had never been able to pacify.
Devastating as these hydraulic thrusts proved to be, they were mere hose-play compared to the return of that fearsome dragon, the Yellow River, to the course from which it had been blasted ten years before in a vain attempt to stop Japan’s headlong drive southward. The re-diversion was carried out in March, 1947, by the Kuomintang Army with the aid of United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration technicians, funds, and supplies, and on orders from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself.
The river, rushing back into its pre-war bed, cut the Liberated Area of Shantung in half, placed half a mile of water between the Shansi-based revolutionary armies of one-eyed General Liu Po-ch’eng in the West and the Shantung-based revolutionary armies of General Ch’en Yi in the East. The artificial flood disrupted the economy of a whole region. Some 500 villages that had housed 100,000 people for more than a decade were submerged within a few days. The high water that followed the summer rains threatened a plain inhabited by five million. When the peasants, by the hundreds of thousands, gathered to repair the long abandoned dykes, Generalissimo Chiang sent bombers to blast the renovated earthworks and fighter planes to strafe the dyke workers.*
Thus did the war grow in ferocity and ruthlessness. As both sides girded for increasingly decisive battle the possibility of compromise receded swiftly into the background. Each day brought new evidence that 1947 would be a year of decision in China’s modern history.
***********
In 1947 the Chinese Communist Party, confident of the strength of the 100 million people in the guerrilla Base Areas of the North, moved from the defensive to the offensive in the war against the Kuomintang. Its military forces, completely encircled on land and without a single plane in the air, confounded friend and foe alike by suddenly thrusting three complete armies southward into the Nationalist rear. In the Center, General Liu’s men drove all the way from the north bank of the Yellow River to the Tapieh Mountains on the banks of the Yangtze overlooking Nanking. In the East, General Ch’en Yi filed down into North Kiangsu and Anhwei to outflank the strategic railway town of Kaifeng. In the West, General Chen Keng forded the Yellow River and swept to the Hupeh border, thus isolating Loyang. By re-establishing three important guerrilla bases in East, Central, and West China these three armies turned the war inside out, converted encirclement into counter-encirclement and disrupted Chiang’s plan to strangle the Revolution in its war-devastated North China redoubt.
The military offensive of 1947 was accompanied by an equally important political offensive. The heart of this second offensive was the Draft Agrarian Law, formulated in the fall of 1947 and announced to the world on December 28 of that year. With sentences as abrupt as the strokes of a fodder-chopping knife, the new law proclaimed the death of landlordism:
Article I—The agrarian system of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation is abolished. The agrarian system of “land-to-the-tiller” is to be realized.
Article II—Landownership rights of all landlords are abolished.
Article III—Landownership rights of all ancestral shrines, temples, monasteries, schools, institutions, and organizations are abolished.
Article IV—All debts incurred in the countryside prior to the reform of the agrarian system are cancelled.
With these provisions of the law the revolutionaries of China once again threw down the gauntlet to Chiang Kai-shek and his American backers. They now demanded, not some modified relationship between the classes such as had served to unite the nation against Japan, not a settling of accounts with profiteers and collaborators such as had stirred the Liberated Areas after Japan’s surrender, but the abolition of the rural class system itself, complete, unequivocal, universal. From the Amur to Hainan, from Shanghai to Chengtu, the land must be distributed to those who worked it. The manner of the distribution was set forth in Articles VI and VIII:
Article VI—.... All land of landlords in the village, all public land, shall be taken over by the village peasants’ associations, and together with the other village lands, in accordance with the total population of the village, irrespective of male or female, young or old, shall be unifiedly and equally distributed; with regard to the quantity of land, surplus shall be taken to relieve dearth, and with regard to the quality of land, fertile land shall be taken to supplement infertile, so that all the people of the village shall obtain land equally; and it shall be the individual property of each person.
Article VIII�
�Village peasants’ associations shall take over the landlords’ animals, agricultural implements, houses, grain and other properties, shall further expropriate the surplus animals, agricultural implements, houses, grain and other properties of rich peasants, and these shall be distributed to peasants lacking these properties, and to other poor people, and furthermore an equal portion shall be distributed to the landlords. The property distributed to each person shall be his personal property, thus enabling all village people to obtain proper materials for production and for livelihood.
This new Draft Agrarian Law was destined to play as important a role in China’s Civil War of 1946-1950 as the Emancipation Proclamation played in the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation confiscated without compensation $3 billion worth of property in slaves; put an end to the possibility of compromise between the industrial North and the slave-holding South in the military contest then raging; made the slave system itself, rather than regional autonomy, the nub of the conflict; cleared the way for the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of emancipated black men into the Union Army; and spread the war into every corner of Confederate territory with devastating effect.
Mao’s Draft Agrarian Law confiscated without compensation $20 billion worth of property in land; put an end to all possible compromise between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang; made country-wide overthrow of the landlords and the compradores, rather than the defense of the Liberated Areas, the main aim of the war; facilitated the capitulation and recruitment of huge blocks of Chiang’s soldiers into the People’s Liberation Army; inspired peasant unrest in the far corners of China; and gave impetus to demonstrations of workers, students, merchants, and professional people in urban centers throughout the Kuomintang rear.
Nor was the impact of the new Draft Law confined, as one might suppose, to territories as yet unconquered by the Revolution. Inside the old Liberated Areas, where land reform in one form or another had begun the day the Japanese surrendered, the Draft Law inaugurated a new stage in the continuing struggle. Its provisions served as a yardstick by which to measure the achievements of three years (1945—1947) of more moderate reforms in an area as large as France and Germany combined. Had the land been equally divided? Had the political power of the gentry been broken? Had the poor peasants and hired laborers taken control of village affairs? If not, why not?
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