These life stories reflect but a small fraction of the chronic social tragedy that permeated the community and the society at large. The extreme hardship borne by Shen Fa-liang and Wang Ch’ung-lai and his wife did not surpass in degree the sufferings endured by many other poor peasants in Long Bow, in the neighboring villages, and in thousands of similar villages scattered throughout China. The following are only a few incidents culled at random from the life stories of peasants with whom I talked.
• There were three famine years in a row. The whole family went out to beg things to eat. In Chinchang City conditions were very bad. Many mothers threw newborn children into the river. Many children wandered about on the streets and couldn’t find their parents. We had to sell our eldest daughter. She was then already 14. Better to move than to die, we thought. We sold what few things we had. We took our patched quilt on a carrying pole and set out for Changchih with the little boy in the basket on the other end. He cried all the way from hunger. We rested before a gate. Because the boy wept so bitterly a woman came out. We stayed there three days. On the fourth morning the woman said she wanted to buy the boy. We put him on the k’ang. He fell asleep. In the next room we were paid five silver dollars. Then they drove us out. They were afraid when the boy woke up he would cry for his mother. My heart was so bitter. To sell one’s own child was such a painful thing. We wept all day on the road.
• I almost starved to death. One day I lay on the street. A cart came along. The driver yelled at me to move. I was too weak. I didn’t care if he drove over me or not. He finally had to drive around me.
• During the famine we ate leaves and the remnants from vinegar making. We were so weak and hungry we couldn’t walk. I went out to the hills to get leaves and there the people were fighting each other over the leaves on the trees. My little sister starved to death. My brother’s wife couldn’t bear the hunger and ran away and never came back. My cousin was forced to become a landlord’s concubine.
• I and the children worked for others thinning millet. We got only half a quart of grain. For each meal we cooked only a fistful with some weeds in it. The children’s stomachs were swollen and every bone in their bodies stuck through their skin. After a while the little boy couldn’t get up. He just lay on the k’ang sick with dysentery and many, many worms, a whole basin full of worms crawled out from his behind. Even after he was dead the worms kept coming out. The little girl had no milk from me, for I had nothing to eat myself, so, of course, she died.
People could not speak of the past without weeping. Nor could one listen to their stories dry-eyed. Yet, as the details piled up, horror on horror, one’s senses became dulled. The barbarity, the cruelty, the terror of the old life was so overwhelming that in time it ceased to shock. One began to take for granted that worms crawled from dying children, that women and children were bought and sold like cattle, that people were beaten to death, they they fought each other for the leaves on the trees. The impossible took on the aura of the commonplace.
The most terrible thing about the conditions of life in Long Bow in those days was not any single aspect of the all but universal misery; it was that there was no hope of change. The fearful tragedy played and replayed itself without end. Insofar as things did change, they changed for the worse as the crisis of China’s social system deepened. For the majority of the peasants who, like Shen Fa-liang and Ch’ung-lai’s wife, were caught in the downward drift, conditions became more and more intolerable as time went on.*
Some of the decline can be attributed to the economic dislocations and social disorders generic to periods of dynastic decay. More important was the unprecedented intervention from abroad which began around 1840. One immediate consequence of intervention was a whole series of wars which sapped the country’s reserves. These wars, defensive in nature as the Western powers invaded, became fratricidal as these same powers backed one warlord against another for spheres of influence, or their favorite of the moment against popular resistance. The trading and investment concessions accruing to the victors enabled foreigners to transfer substantial quantities of real wealth from the “underdeveloped East” to the advanced industrial West and Japan.
This bleeding away of sorely needed capital was aggravated by the simultaneous destruction of capital formation in important handicraft industries. Large-scale importation of cheap, machine-made goods undermined one sector of the economy after the other. This was especially true of the textile trades. Millions of weavers, unable to compete with the power-driven looms of Lancaster, Tokyo, and later Shanghai, lost their main means of livelihood and were thrown into the swelling stream of those bidding for the scarce and already depleted land.
The rising tide of landless and destitute people enabled landowners to stiffen the terms of tenancy, to raise rents and jack up interest rates. It enabled grain dealers to force harvest time prices lower and winter and spring prices higher. It enabled merchants to widen the gap between farm produce and industrial products. Not only the laborers and tenants but also the land-owning middle peasants felt the squeeze more and more. To maintain bare subsistence they had to increase working hours, get up earlier, finish later, and work harder on the job. Even then they could not make ends meet. They had to go ever more frequently to the money-lender and, once saddled with debt, found it impossible to break free. It was an exceptional family in Long Bow that did not owe the equivalent of several years’ earnings.
People said, “The debts of the poor begin at birth. When a boy is a month old the family wishes to celebrate; but they have to borrow money in order to make dumplings and so, before the child can sit up, he is already in debt to the landlord. As he grows the interest mounts until the burden is too great to bear.”
Weighed down by high interest rates, harassed by heavy taxes, caught in the snares of a rigged market, many landowning peasants went bankrupt, sold out their holdings strip by strip, and ended up with the yoke of rent around their necks, or left for the city hoping to find some work in industry or transport that would keep them alive. Others became soldiers in the armies of the warlords or joined local bandit gangs.
“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him,” wrote R. H. Tawney in 1932.* The Fifth District of Lucheng County was such a district and Long Bow such a place.
4
Three Pillars of Heaven
A man is poor,
Ever thinner, ever blacker,
Goes to borrow fifty coins,
Is asked a hundred in return,
Turns to go,
Knows he’s taken for a thief;
A man is rich,
Ever fatter, ever whiter,
Goes to borrow fifty pieces,
Has a hundred pressed upon him,
Turns to go,
Is urged to stay and drink.
Shantung Chant
DROWNING MEN are prone to violence.
With so many of Long Bow’s peasants on the verge of ruin, how did a handful of landlord and rich peasant families maintain their system of exploitation? How did they enforce the payment of rent and interest through years of famine and war? How did they protect their hoarded wealth from looting and seizure by their tenants and hired laborers who, after all, needed only to join together to bring the whole system down?
To answer this question one would have to examine the whole superstructure of China—political, military, religious, and cultural—and beyond that, the policies of the imperialist powers who propped that superstructure up with loans and arms, even while they attacked with modern industry and commerce the economic foundation upon which it rested.
There is no space here for such an exhaustive study. I can only try to describe in brief how a small group of gentry dominated Long Bow Village itself. The reader must keep in mind that at all times much greater power than could possibly be mustered locally hovered in the background in the shape of coun
ty, provincial, and national officials and the armed forces under their control. Helpless as they proved to be in defending the country against external attack, they were usually adequate to the task of crushing internal revolt and could always be called upon to protect the interests of those few families who stood to gain from the preservation of the old agrarian system.
That a few families ran the affairs of Long Bow Village was well known to the whole population. In the 1920’s, the village even achieved a certain notoriety because of the “Eight Squires” who cooperated with a group of foreign priests in an effort to make converts to Catholicism. These eight were Yang, Li, Wang, Kao, Sheng, Liu, and the two Fans. By the early 1940’s Kao and Liu were no longer influential, having been replaced by Shih, Ch’eng, and Kuo, but there were still eight or ten powerful families and they still dominated the village. By consulting together, by acting in unison when that counted most, and by the backing they gave to whomever they chose to openly manage affairs, this group maintained a virtual monopoly of power. This is not to imply that they were all equally active, that they acted without friction and jealousy among themselves, or that they ruled without allies among other strata of the population. Four families took the lead. These were Sheng, Fan, Shih, and Kuo. They had the backing of the other families of means and brought certain middle peasants and even poor peasants into the ruling circle to carry out routine tasks and to share, to some extent, in the spoils. As for the rest of the population, they occupied the position of the mighty stone tortoises who stood in front of the grave mounds of the gentry, bearing forever on their backs the stone obelisks which the wealthy loved to erect for their dead. The policy of the gentry toward them was to deceive, intimidate, divide and rule.
The rule exercised by this group of gentry rested on several pillars, not the least of which was tradition. Several thousand years of Confucian teachings had established a climate of opinion in which no one, or at best only a few persons in the whole village, questioned the system as such. Rich and poor alike looked on land ownership as the most important form of property, the foundation of family life, and the basis for the proper observance of ancestral rites, as well as the security of future generations. The more land the better. Everyone wanted to own land, bought additional land when he could, and if he succeeded in buying more than he could work, saw nothing wrong in renting it out. Success in this scramble for land was regarded as a reward for virtuous living and right thinking.
Viewed in this frame of reference the expropriation of a large part of the wealth of Long Bow by a few families—which was in essence a form of armed plunder—presented itself as a demonstration of moral law. And if this was too hard for the land-poor to swallow (the virtue of the gentry was often most conspicuous by its absence), they could always blame the fates. The rich were rich, so their tenants were taught to reason, because they were born under a lucky star; and the poor were poor because the heavens were out of joint when they emerged from the womb. This could be determined by an examination of the eight characters.* An even more potent variation on this theme was belief in geomancy, or the magical influence of burial grounds. The rich prospered, it was said, because their fathers were buried in auspicious places in relation to flanking hills, flowing water, and the prevailing winds. The poor were poor because their fathers were buried in the wrong places. Since the rich, with the help of professional geomancers could often pick their spot while the poor had to be content with whatever sorry ditch they were thrown into, this fate had an inevitability that was hard to beat.
The squires of Long Bow did not leave the propagation of such attitudes to chance. They actively supported all the various ways and means by which “right thinking” could be impressed upon the people. A village school for that small minority able to attend emphasized the study of The Four Books and The Five Classics of Confucius; operas at New Year’s drove home the theme of the contrasting rewards of virtue and vice; a Confucian Association promoted ancestor worship and provided mediums who could converse with the spirits of the dead; a temple society kept Buddhism, with its passive acceptance of fate, alive. In later years the Catholic Church, with its centuries of experience in the defense of European feudalism and feudal remnants, became a most stalwart bulwark against social change.
At the same time Sheng Ching-ho and his peers in Long Bow were not so naive as to believe that the cultivation of “right thinking” alone was sufficient guarantee of their position and property. Sanctions more concrete than the teachings of the sages were needed to maintain the collection of rents and the settlement of debts in Long Bow. A more practical pillar on which the rule of the gentry rested was thus the village government with its power to tax, arrest, flog, fine, and ultimately to execute.
The structure of this government was not complicated. At its apex stood the village head or ts’un chang. He was assisted by several staff members: a village secretary who kept accounts, handled correspondence, and issued licenses and documents; a public affairs officer who allocated labor service;* and a village constable who made arrests, administered punishments, and kept the local lockup. None of these positions carried any regular salary, but they placed a man in a position to make a silver dollar by one means or another.
In Long Bow, with its population of close to 1,000, intermediate levels of organization were also deemed necessary. There were three or four lu chang or neighborhood leaders and twenty odd chia chang or heads of ten family groups.
As a guarantee that the orders of these officials would be carried out, the village maintained a Peace Preservation Corps boasting several dozen rifles shouldered on a part-time basis by chronically underemployed young men who, for a little millet, a few personal favors, perhaps a fix of heroin, and a chance to bully, loot, and rape could be depended on to do the will of the gentry.
From the village head to the ten family leaders all of the officials were locally chosen, but they were by no means chosen by universal suffrage. As a matter of fact, insofar as I could determine, no general election had ever been held at any time for any position in the whole history of the village. The office of village head was simply assumed by one or another of the gentry after consultation with the rest, or was parcelled out, after similar consultation, to some person of lesser means who had earned their esteem. The same method was used in filling the rest of the posts. Once the personnel had been selected they were usually confirmed in office by the district head or the county magistrate who cared not one kaoliang stalk as to their fitness for the work, so long as the local gentry were satisfied with them.
To qualify as a village official one had to be fluent, unscrupulous, ingratiating when dealing with those of superior station and threatening when dealing with poorer and weaker persons. Above all one had to be willing to submit to the whims of the gentry and not feel humiliated when ordered to carry out some business for them.
The peasants had their own less than flattering title for such people. They called them kou t’ui-tzu, which means “leg of the dog.”
It can be readily understood that such an administration did not serve people impartially. As far as the higher authorities were concerned, the main purpose of the village government was the collection of taxes, the supply of manpower for public works, and the conscription of soldiers. As long as the extremely heavy quotas in these three spheres were met, no one cared how they were distributed. The gentry saw to it that their own obligations were as light as possible. They avoided taxes whenever they could and made up the difference with extra levies on the rest of the population; they sent middle and poor peasants to move earth, build roads, and repair the fortress-like walls of important villages and towns, while they themselves stayed at home; they conscripted their tenants and laborers for the army, while their own sons went to school.
These evasions of public duty were all dividends that came with control over the village administration. More important in the long run was the leverage over the peasants which the power to distribute the quotas at lower leve
ls gave to those in control. There were many ways in which an obstinate peasant could be taught to bow his head. He could be ordered to haul grain for some warlord in the middle of the planting season. His only son could be tied up and dragged off to the army. His deeds could be doctored to cheat him of land. Taxes could be piled on taxes until he went under. The Peace Preservation Corps could “accidentally” march through his crops. He could be entered in the special register reserved for criminals and thieves. He could be discriminated against in the arbitration of disputes.
There were always bitter quarrels among the peasants over the use of privies, the ownership of trees, the exact boundaries of fields, the possession of women, and many other matters. A peasant who was out of favor with the authorities could easily get the worst of any settlement. A minor case, picked at random from the life of Long Bow Village, will serve to show how this worked.
One day a fairly prosperous middle peasant and cloth peddler, Li Pao-yu, found out that his neighbor Hsiao-tseng often slept with his wife while he himself was away buying cloth. Since he was older and much less solidly put together than Hsiao-tseng, Pao-yu complained to the village office. An investigation proved the truth of the complaint. The village head thereupon ordered both the wife and her lover flogged. After the flogging the two were hung by the arms from the gable of the village office for eight hours. Then the village head fined them both several silver dollars. Since his wife had no money of her own, Pao-yu had to pay the fine. Even though Hsiao-tseng continued to consort with the woman, poor Pao-yu never complained again. He didn’t want to part with more silver dollars.
To the extent that Pao-yu’s wife was actually to blame, a certain rough justice was meted out in this case, but Pao-yu certainly felt that he had been cheated and so, almost invariably, did other peasants who went with complaints to the village office. Without influence one might as well appeal to a mud wall. And so, when disputes arose among the poor, they were usually settled by force. The strong won the day and the weak “ate bitterness.” Just so long as the quarrel did not affect the revenue of the gentry, no one in authority cared how unjust the settlement was.
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