The new Draft Law also served as a yardstick by which to measure the political position of every revolutionary, of every Communist Party member, of every government functionary, every leader of a mass organization, and every individual teacher, peasant, student, peddler, worker, soldier, tradesman, or intellectual who opted for progress and a new, democratic China. On which side do you stand? Do you stand with the poor peasants and hired laborers, the most oppressed and exploited people in the nation, or do you stand with the landlords, the rich peasants, and the feudal exploiters? Do you intend to carry the Revolution through to its end by creating a new system of land tenure or do you intend to stand in the way, to act as a brake, to stop things halfway?
With the promulgation of the new Draft Law, a “thunder and lightning, drum and cymbal” attack was launched on the remnants of traditional exploitation and on the residues of landlord and rich-peasant thinking in the revolutionary ranks throughout the Liberated Areas of North China.
In honor of the campaign, red flags, which had entirely disappeared during the years of the Japanese War, suddenly blossomed over streets, courtyards, and village gates. The Chinese sun on a blue field, symbol of the Anti-Japanese United Front, vanished from the badges that adorned many caps and lapels, and in its place the red star and hammer and sickle emblem reminiscent of the Red Army of the 1930’s reappeared. Down from the compound walls came the six-feet-high slogans of moderation and defense, and up in their place went the flaming words of the offensive: “Equally Divide the Land” and “Drive to Nanking; Capture Chiang Alive!”
The Lunar New Year—traditionally an occasion for week-long feasting, relaxation and Chinese opera—was transformed that winter, into a mass demonstration of support for the Chinese Communist Party, the Draft Agrarian Law, and the leadership of Mao Tse-tung.
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In Changchih City, the main urban center of the South Shansi Highlands, local residents and peasants from the surrounding villages turned out by the thousands to celebrate 1948. The city was decorated from one end to the other. In front of every shop a bright red flag, replete with gold hammer and sickle, proudly waved. Across the streets and alleys on all but invisible strings fluttered countless pennants of colored paper. Each bore a slogan supporting the new land law or denouncing Chiang Kai-shek and his bandit gang. From a distance these pennants looked like red and blue confetti dancing in the sun. Along three of the four main streets—north, south, and west—stages-large enough for full-scale theatrical performances were set up on heavy timbers and hung with red silk.
Peasants, pouring through the recently-levelled gates of the walled town, jammed the roadways with their animals and vehicles. From the valleys came mule carts with iron-shod wooden wheels four feet in diameter. From the mountain heights came ridiculous little donkey-drawn vehicles with platforms three feet across and wheels the size of cooking pots. On the wooden framework of these carts, large and small, sat mothers, grandmothers, and children of all ages, dressed in bright silks and many-colored cottons.
Among the attractions which drew them to the town was the yangko dancing. A small parade preceded the performance of each yangko team. In the lead came young men with red banners bearing the name of the club, block committee, or Peasants’ Association which they represented. Behind them came the musicians with their drums, cymbals, gongs, and pipes. Next came the acting group and then a long column of dancers.
When the group arrived at a likely spot—any place where large numbers of people stood around waiting for something to happen—the dancers started to form a big circle doing the yangko rock (three steps forward, one step back) the body swaying in time to the music, the arms swinging gracefully. The girls all carried wide scarves of silk that were tied to their waists with large red bows. They held the two free ends in their hands so that the silk waved and fluttered with each movement of the arms. Like shimmering butterflies they wove figure eights and clover leaves and other intricate patterns and finally formed a circle inside of which the actors assembled to perform the plays and skits which they themselves had written.
The most popular theme of these many plays was land reform. The two points which most of them hammered home were the need to depend on the poor-and-hired peasants and the importance of uniting with the middle peasants. Many groups portrayed a villainous landlord who tried to sabotage all land division, a rich peasant who schemed with him, a middle peasant who worried lest the new land law be used against him, and a village political worker who sold out the poor for favors from the rich. But a hired laborer with the help of a Communist Party member always won the confidence of the people in the end. The landlord and his running dog cowered in disgrace, the poor peasant danced a merry jig with the middle peasant, while the boys and girls of the dancing brigade burst into joyous song and began their yangko all over again.
Other skits had to do with the national and international scene. Chiang Kai-shek came in for much buffeting about, as did the Soongs, the K’ungs and the Ch’ens—China’s three other ruling families. These men were represented in typical fashion—Soong always with a Western-style hat, Ch’en in a black landlord’s gown, Chiang in preposterous military regalia, and K’ung, the banker, always clutching a large briefcase stuffed with money.
Adding to the merriment and confusion of sound were other groups performing stick dances. The participants carried bamboo rods about three feet long that were decorated at each end with bells and tassels. To a very fast beat these sticks were struck against different parts of the body and with each blow the bells jingled. When 20 or 30 people did this in perfect unison, the rhythmic effect stirred the feet of every bystander.
The streets overflowed with yangko and stick dancers, each orchestra trying to play louder than the last, each group of dancers striving to step out more vigorously than the one in front of it, each actor attempting to outdo in gesture and voice the others in the cast. Add to this the thousands upon thousands of country people milling about; the peddlers vending hot mutton soup, candy, peanuts, and pears; the hundreds of carts going and coming; the red banners and the colored paper spinning and twirling in the air. It was a scene of immense vigor and public rejoicing such as that ancient county town had rarely if ever witnessed.
And, as if all this were not enough, the three great stages on the three main streets presented a continuous succession of plays, each to an enormous changing crowd. Farther on, at the fairgrounds on the east side of the town, a commercial circus displayed the talents of trained monkeys and trick riders, while, from the platform of an abandoned temple, a traditional opera troupe sang to an audience of thousands.
For two days and nights the festivities continued without letup.
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I observed the tumultuous New Year activity in Changchih as a member of the faculty of Northern University, the educational and cultural center of the Shansi-Hopei-Honan-Shantung Border Region. I had come to China one year earlier as a tractor technician with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and had been sent to the Communist-led area of South Hopei to supervise a project there. When UNRRA closed down all over the world in the fall of 1947, the tractors under my care were put in storage for lack of gasoline, and I accepted an invitation from Northern University to teach English in South Shansi.
The University was a guerrilla institution which moved according to the dictates of war. It was housed at that time in a huge expropriated mission compound at Kao Settlement, a village in the Fifth District of Lucheng County, ten miles north of Changchih. I had no sooner settled down to teach there than half the faculty and students of the institution departed to join the land reform movement, an exodus that occurred a few days after the New Year celebrations. Hundreds of volunteers from the University joined an equal number of local county and subcounty (district) cadres* to make up work teams that were assigned to key villages throughout the region. In groups of 10 or 12 these cadres went out to survey the true condition of the peasant po
pulation and carry the land reform through to completion.
The excitement generated by the departure of so many of its students and staff members electrified the whole University. Young men and women in blue ran back and forth tying up belongings, rolling their quilts into tight bundles, fastening shoulder straps to improvised bedrolls, singing snatches of song and talking excitedly to one another. Many who had not been chosen to go stood around with wistful expressions, revealing how much they too would have liked to be on their way to the countryside.
When, at last, all the volunteers were ready, they assembled in the street with their bundles on their backs and a bright red flag flying over them. The President of the University, the famous historian Fan Wen-Ian, lean, slightly stooped, peering with failing eyes through thick glasses, gave them a gentle, scholarly farewell talk. Then, to the accompaniment of rolling drums and clashing cymbals, the adventurous brigade strode off. At the first crossroad it split into two columns, one marching east, the other south. Last farewells were said and handshakes quickly concluded. One student grabbed the staff of the red flag and waved it high in the air. Others put their caps on their walking sticks and whirled them triumphantly overhead.
The swiftly-moving volunteers gradually merged into the landscape, leaving only two streaks of wind-whipped dust hanging over the paths they had taken. In the wide, bright sky, clouds like puffs of cotton sped southward on the wind. The mountains in the distance were white with the year’s last snow. At least it seemed to be the last, for the breath of spring in the air that day made one forget winter. Soon the peasants would be out plowing, and before the time to plant arrived, ten million ragged, landless families would join that vast army of those who already owned their own good earth.
Standing in the road, watching the dust kicked up by the students’ departure gradually settle, I was overcome with longing to join the great adventure. My job at the University was to teach English, but how could the teaching of English compare with the remolding of the world through land reform?
I walked directly from the edge of the village to President Fan’s office on the second floor of the enormous Kao Settlement monastery. The President was in. Quietly, with sympathetic attention, he listened to my plea.
“Here is one of history’s great moments,” I said. “I want to see and take part in it more than I have ever wanted to do anything in my life. Can’t I join one of the teams, at least as an observer, and learn at first hand what the land reform is all about?”
President Fan could not give me an immediate answer. He had to consult with the subregional and county authorities. Three days later he called me in and said that I could go to one of the nearby villages where a land reform work team was already stationed, on condition that I continue to teach a few English classes each week. He assigned a young woman instructor, Ch’i Yun, to accompany me and to act as my interpreter.
The village nearest to Kao Settlement that had been chosen as a base for the work of a land reform team was a community named Long Bow. It lay approximately one mile to the south. I had already walked through it several times, had even had a bowl of hot soup at the village inn there on one occasion, but had heretofore paid very little attention to the place. It was, outwardly at least, no different from a thousand other hamlets that dotted the valleys of South Shansi. As a matter of fact, I was a little disappointed that the land reform which I was to observe was to take place right at the doorstep of the University. It would be more adventurous to walk to some distant place, to work in some isolated valley that I had not yet seen. But I had no alternative. Since both Ch’i Yun and I had to teach, we either had to choose the nearest village or not go at all.
On the morning of March 6, 1948, the two of us finally set off for the first time on the road to Long Bow and began the long process of getting to know its people, their history, their progress, their mistakes and their complex current problems.
PART I
Sowing the Wind
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?
From Edwin Markham’s
“The Man with the Hoe”
1
Long Bow Village
Times and seasons, what things are you,
Bringing to my life ceaseless change?
I will lodge forever in this hollow
Where springs and autumns unheeded pass.
Tao Yun
LONG BOW VILLAGE lies in the southeast quarter of Shansi Province on the high plateau country that butts against the back of the Taihang Mountains. It is 400 miles southwest of Peking and 100 miles from the gap in the mountains directly to the south, through which the Yellow River flows out onto the North China plain.
The South Shansi plateau, known as the Shangtang (associated with heaven) because of its elevation, is itself creased with barren mountains, but between the ranges are wide valleys containing considerable areas of fertile soil. In the heart of one of these valleys lies the old county town of Changchih. The road running north from Changchih proceeds on the level for seven miles, through and past numerous mud villages, and then climbs gently over a long hill. Just beyond the hill, where the land levels out again, is the village of Long Bow.*
The land revolution in Long Bow began with the retreat and surrender of the Japanese Army and its Chinese puppet forces in 1945. For how many centuries prior to that year this village had endured in this place almost without change I do not know. Certainly for hundreds of years, any tired traveler who paused to rest at the crest of the hill and looked out over the flat to the north saw substantially the same sight—a complex of adobe walls under a canopy of trees set in the middle of a large expanse of fields. These fields were barren, brown and desolate in winter, while in summer they were green, yellow and clothed with diverse crops.
To look down on this valley in January was to look upon a world of frozen immobility. Through most of each day not even a wisp of smoke could be seen curling up from the squat mud chimneys that poked above the gently sloping roofs marking the settlement; the rich, who kept their fires burning day and night, burned a coal and earth mixture that gave off no smoke, and the poor, who burned roots, straw, and wild dry grasses, lit their fires only at meal time, and then only long enough to boil a few handfuls of millet.
In the depths of winter the temperature often went below zero. Rich and poor alike stayed indoors. Only on the main north-south road could any sign of human activity be seen. This was the route taken by the carters who hauled freight out of the mountains regardless of weather. In the stillness of the cold mountain air the crashing of their iron-shod wheels against the frozen ruts could be heard at a great distance. From the top of the hill it sounded like the rumbling of distant drums or the busy pounding of some tireless carpenter knocking together a hollow barrel.
With the coming of warm weather this all but lifeless scene was transformed. From the first cock-crow in the semi-darkness before dawn until the red sun went down behind the western mountains at night, peasants by the hundreds came and went on the land, plowing, hauling manure, planting, harvesting. There were always so many people in the fields that they could talk to one another as they worked without leaving their own plots.
From the hill this scene took on the likeness of some slow-motion ritual dance of man and nature that completely obscured the painful, backbreaking labor that was in progress. The stage never seemed to be crowded. Yet everywhere the eye rested something was sure to move—here a donkey strained at the plow; there a man, stripped to the waist, raked together corn stubble; nearby a barefoot boy spread night soil, three women on their knees thinned mill
et, a child, naked as the day he entered this world, played with some sticks in a ditch. Over the traveler’s head the warm, motionless air hummed and whistled as a flight of swallows swooped low. Birds, people, oxen, sheep, children, dogs—it was like one of Breughel’s marvelously crowded paintings—and always in the background, the heavily laden carts moved in both directions, their iron thunder muffled now by the long-thawed resilience of the loess-like soil.
If the traveler, rested at last, walked on down the hill, he found that the village street was but the continuation of the long gully that had brought him from the heights. During the heavy July rains the run-off from all the higher ground to the south rushed down the gully, poured along the village street and emptied into the village pond, a large natural basin conveniently located at the center of the community. In this way the supply of soft water for washing clothes was periodically replenished, and in the shade of the willows by the water’s edge a few women and girls could always be found scrubbing away on the flat rocks that served as washboards.
Both sides of this gully-like main street were lined with mud walls six to eight feet high, broken here and there by covered gateways that led into the courtyards of the people. Beside each gate was the family privy, hopefully placed at the edge of the public road in anticipation of a contribution to the domestic store of fertilizer from any traveler who might be in need of relief.
Running off at right angles from the main road were several smaller lanes, also lined with walls set at intervals with courtyard gates. From these lanes, still smaller alleys ran off in turn to other entrances so that the whole village was rather like a maze, regular in outline, yet haphazardly filled in with lanes, alleys, walls enclosing courtyards, and low mud houses built against these walls.
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