Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  As soon as District Leader Liang and Secretary Liu of the Fifth District Committee of the Communist Party of Lucheng County decided that the military situation was relatively stable and that a reliable group of vigorous young leaders had emerged in Long Bow, they moved to recruit them into the Party and set up a village branch. T’ien-ming, the most mature and experienced of the village cadres, was an obvious choice as the first member. As T’ien-ming related it later, this is how he himself was recruited:

  I heard about the Communist Party when I was in Hungtung as a carpenter in 1940. At that time there were many underground workers not five li [one li = ⅓ milel from the city. They often talked to us carpenters but I didn’t understand the difference between the Communist Party and the Palu [the Eighth Route Army]. I thought they were the same thing. Once a cadre told me that they were not the same; that though the Eighth Route Army was under the leadership of the Communist Party, it was not the Communist Party itself. Though I didn’t understand how this could be, I knew anyway that the Party was to serve the poor and overthrow the wealthy. When I returned to Long Bow and worked as an underground cadre I heard more.

  After the Liberation, toward the end of the year, I once asked District Secretary Liu, “What is the Party and what is the connection between the Party and the Army, and can I join the Party?” He said, “You had better work hard and later we will talk about this again.” So he observed how I worked and that I was very steadfast in the struggle. Then he called me aside one day and said, “A Communist Party member is not the same as an ordinary person. He must make up his mind to sacrifice his life for the working people and struggle against the owning classes.” Then he told me something about the bright future of the proletariat and the Party. “If all the dispossessed unite together and work hard, the future belongs to us. But if you want to join the Party, you must remember that every Communist Party member must fight for the working people forever and never compromise.”

  In April 1946, I was finally accepted as a member in the Communist Party without any period of probation and after that I worked even harder, both in the struggle and in the work of supervising and educating the other cadres so that they would not falter, take graft, or ask for more than their share of the “fruits.”

  T’ien-ming’s first big task after he joined the Party was to develop a local branch and bring in other members. The basic requirement for new members was that they be of poor peasant origin. In addition to that they must be active in the struggle against the landlords and have prestige with the people. T’ien-ming picked Kuei-ts’ai as his first recruit. Others whom he approached were not so easily mobilized. There was, for instance, the young hired laborer Hsin-fa, a man who had owned neither land nor house in the past. He was brought up by a stepfather and ill-treated at home for many years. When Long Bow was liberated he was working in another village and returned only after the struggle with the landlords had begun. He immediately joined the militia, was honest, hard-working, and well liked. The young cadres decided to make Hsin-fa educational director of the militia, but he was worried about his past record and did not think he was fit to be a leader.

  What worried him was the fact that he had once illegally transported heroin for the landlord T’ang Hsu-wen, a man who, in addition to supervising his many tenants in another village, led a gang of bandits. This gang smuggled heroin through the Japanese lines, and Hsin-fa, who was nothing but a hired laborer, was ordered to transport it. The first time he made a smuggling trip he didn’t know what was on his cart until he reached his destination. After that it was too late. He was already implicated and was forced by the gang to transport heroin many more times.

  “Since I myself committed such crimes, how can I lead others?” asked Hsin-fa.

  But T’ien-ming said, “Never mind, the main thing is to tell the truth about it and to try and understand the root of your mistakes. Even if you had killed someone there might be a reason for it, a reason that would explain it, and the Eighth Route Army will pardon those who speak frankly and are sincere with their comrades.”

  So Hsin-fa told the whole story of his smuggling and T’ien-ming said to him, “Think how dangerous it was for you. You carried the heroin but they got the money. If you had been caught by the puppet police it would have been your head that came off, not theirs. You risked your life and got nothing. You did not want to go. This was not a great error.”

  “That’s true,” said Hsin-fa, greatly relieved. “It was so dangerous that even now, whenever I think of it I break into a sweat. But now the Palu have brought me not only land and a house but they have also made me see clearly and relieved my mind of a great burden. I always thought that was a black mark against me, but now I understand that it is not my fault but that turtle’s egg of a landlord.”

  After Hsin-fa accepted a position of leadership with the militia and had worked as a leader in education as well as in action, T’ien-ming decided to bring him into the Communist Party.

  “What do you think of the Communist Party?” he asked Hsin-fa one day.

  “The Communist Party is good. It has led us to turn over and I myself have turned over. What do you think?”

  “I agree,” said T’ien-ming, “and I want to go find the Communist Party. Will you go with me?”

  “Well,” said Hsin-fa, “I understand that the Communists are good but that word ‘Party,’ I don’t like it. Now we all fight so hard against the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and everyone hates the Nationalist Party. Maybe afterward they will hate the Communist Party just as they hate the Nationalist Party now. If you want to go, go ahead, but I’m happy with my present position. Later, if I should be arrested by the Kuomintang, I can tell them that I am just a villager and though I worked for the Eighth Route Army I am not a member of the Communist Party.”

  This was honest talk. T’ien-ming respected Hsin-fa for speaking frankly but he still hoped to convince him that he should join the Party. He warned him never to mention their conversation to anyone and later sent Kuei-ts’ai to talk with him and test him out.

  “I heard that T’ien-ming visited you and talked with you about joining the Party,” said Kuei-ts’ai.

  “No, T’ien-ming never said anything to me,” Hsin-fa answered.

  T’ien-ming sent three others to test him in the same manner but he told them nothing. They asked him if T’ien-ming was a member of the Communist Party but Hsin-fa answered, “I know nothing about it.”

  Tien-ming decided that Hsin-fa could keep a secret and that he was very honest. If only he understood the Communist Party he would join. Having gone so far, he could not stop in the middle in any case. He sent other members to talk with Hsin-fa. They reviewed the past with him, asked him how he had fanshened, and if it was not true that the Communist Party had led him to his new life.

  “Yes,” said Hsin-fa. “I know the Communist Party is good and leads us to stand up, but I still don’t think I want to go and find it.”

  Then T’ien-ming went again himself.

  “I have already found the Communist Party,” he announced.

  Hsin-fa was amazed.

  “You have found it! Where did you find it? Since you have found it I will go with you, as long as I am not the first.”

  “Think it through,” said T’ien-ming. “Prepare some food and some money and when you are ready we will go.”

  “How much do you think I will need?” asked Hsin-fa eagerly.

  “You’d better think it over thoroughly. We don’t want to make any decisions that we will regret later,” cautioned T’ien-ming.

  But this time Hsin-fa was not to be denied. The very next day he appeared at T’ien-ming’s door with food and money for a long journey.

  “Don’t be anxious,” said T’ien-ming. “The Party is right here.”

  “Where?”

  “I myself am a member,” said Tien-ming, looking closely at Hsin-fa to see if he would get angry as Kuei-ts’ai had done. But Hsin-fa was a much more easygoing man than Ku
ei-ts’ai. “Well,” he said. “If you are a member, of course I want to join. Maybe there will be more like us. I’m not the first but neither am I the last.” With that Hsin-fa too became a member of the Long Bow branch of the Communist Party of China.

  ***********

  As the Party branch grew, women were recruited into it as well as men. Within a year more than 30 peasants joined, of whom seven were women.

  One of the first women to become a Communist in Long Bow was a former beggar, Hopei-born Hu Hsueh-chen, a stocky mother of great physical strength and stamina. Her square jaw, prominent nose, and swarthy skin gave her a masculine appearance which was heightened by her bobbed hair and the loose-hanging pantaloons typical of male attire which she wore. She was the first woman in the village to bob her hair and discard the tapered trousers which most women preferred.

  For 28 years prior to the Liberation she had lived a life that could only be described as a nightmare. As a young girl her father almost sold her to settle a debt. She talked him out of it, only to be married against her will to a pauper. She was then 16. Harried by famine from Hopei to Shansi, she was forced into beggary when her husband became a gambling addict and sold everything in the house, including their only quilt, for gambling stakes. She watched her first three children die before her eyes. One was trampled to death by a Japanese soldier, the second died of parasites and distended belly in the famine year, while the third wasted away in her arms when her own breasts shrivelled from starvation. When the fourth, a girl, was born to her she finally drove her thieving, good-for-nothing husband out and managed to survive the last years of the Anti-Japanese War by begging, gleaning in the fields after the harvest, spinning cotton for others, and hunting herbs in the hills. Without a quilt for a cover she and her daughter slept in a pile of straw through sub-freezing winter weather and somehow survived.

  Liberation and the Settling Accounts Movement were to Hu Hsueh-chen what water is to a parched desert. She won clothes and threw away her rags, she won a quilt and burned her pile of flea-infested straw, she won land and gave up begging, and she won a roof over her head and set up a home for her little daughter. Knowing that all these gains were the result of struggle and not gifts from heaven, she attended every meeting and supported those who were active, even though she herself was afraid to talk in public and afraid to step forward and beat the “bastard landlords” herself.

  Then she met a remarkable revolutionary cadre who helped to make her fanshen complete. This man, the “doctor” in charge of the infirmary at the Anti-Japanese Political and Military College which made the village Church its temporary headquarters, was also from Hopei. His home village was only ten miles from the one where Hu Hsueh-chen was born. He was first attracted to her when he heard the familiar broad accents of his parents on her lips. He came to pay a call. They talked about old times and familiar places. Soon thereafter, through a third person, he asked for her hand in marriage. Hu Hsueh-chen hesitated. She asked for a conference in order to make known to him the whole story of her past. She told him she could not stand any more suffering or oppression at the hands of a man. He, in turn, told her of his own life, how he had been driven from home at the age of 14 by a stepmother who hated him, how he had gone to Peking to work in a shop and later, when the Japanese came, had escaped into the Western Hills and joined the Eighth Route Army as an orderly or “little devil” in the medical corps. All the medicine he knew he had learned in the field caring for the casualties of the “Kill All, Burn All, Loot All” campaigns. He persuaded Hu Hsueh-chen that he was a man of principles and standards far in advance of the peasants whom she had known all her life. Most important to her was the fact that, as a product of the revolutionary army and its Communist education, he believed in equality for women.

  They were married in February, 1946, and Hu Hsueh-chen never regretted having taken this step. Far from opposing her taking an active part in village affairs, her husband encouraged it. He even cooked supper for himself and the little girl so that his wife could attend meetings—a practice unheard of in Long Bow. He talked with her for hours at a time explaining the whole Chinese Revolution, its past and present, and described for her the society called Communism that they would eventually build.

  When the struggle against the gentry reached its height, Hu Hsueh-chen’s new husband saw that she hesitated to lead, dared not speak in public, and dared not join in beating those under attack. He criticized her gently and asked if she wanted to save face for the landlords. “You must know that only after the destruction of the feudal system and the overthrow of the landlords can we poor peasants fanshen. From whence do the ‘fruits’ come? Only through struggle. You ought to work hard and lead the movement to help win fanshen for everyone.”

  She became more active then, overcame some of her fear and shyness, and was elected a group leader in the Women’s Association. This made her husband very happy. He encouraged her to do even more, saying, “I have heard all about your hard life and suffering in the past, so now you should think—where did my fanshen come from?—my land, my house, my freedom to talk, my freedom to marry? Was it not because of the leadership of the Communist Party?”

  A few weeks later the infirmary of the Military College was transferred to the village of Kao Settlement, about a mile to the northwest. Thereafter, the doctor came home only once a week. But when he came he always inquired how his wife’s work was going, and, as before, offered to cook supper so that she could be more active. He said, “Now I work outside and you work at home. You serve the people in your way and I will serve them in mine. Later, when we have time, I will teach you to read and write, just as the Army taught me, and in the future we can help each other a great deal.”

  In late 1946 the Anti-Japanese Political and Military College moved away altogether. As long as he was in the Army, Hu Hsueh-chen’s husband had to move with it, but he regularly wrote letters asking after his wife’s welfare and urging her to work hard. “When you run into trouble don’t be gloomy,” he advised. “For there can be no trouble to compare with the past.” She took what he wrote to heart and became more active than ever in all the affairs of the village. When Militiaman Ta-hung nagged his wife into resigning as secretary of the Women’s Association so that she would pay more attention to her home, Hu Hsueh-chen was elected to take her place.

  Soon after she took up her new duties, Hsin-fa came and asked her which was better, the Communist Party or the Kuomintang Party.

  “Everyone knows the answer to that,” said Hu Hsueh-chen. “It was the Communist Party that liberated us from poverty and led us to fanshen. It was the Communist Party that liberated us from the Kuomintang. As for me, I got house and land while in the past I was nothing but a beggar. I could find no more than half a bowl of millet to eat every day and my children died of starvation. So how could I forget the Communist Party and the Eighth Routers?”

  Later T’ien-ming himself came to talk with her. He asked her if anyone had spoken to her about the Party. She knew that the Party was supposed to be secret so she denied that anyone had come even though T’ien-ming asked her several times. A few days later he returned with an application blank and helped her to fill it out. While doing this he asked her if she would give her life for the Party and obey the discipline of the Party and its leaders. “If you should by chance be captured by the enemy could you keep silent even when threatened with death?”

  To all this Hsueh-chen answered with a firm “I could,” and so she too was enrolled into the Party to which her husband, unknown to her, had long belonged.

  The other women recruited into the Communist Party at this time included two of Hu Hsueh-chen’s assistants in the Women’s Association, two wives of leading cadres who were brought into the branch by their husbands even though they were not active leaders among the women, and two rather remarkable young women, each of whom, though already married, had fallen in love with a cadre and Party member; they were recruited into the organization by their lovers. One of t
hese was Village Head Fu-yuan’s paramour, Shih Hsiu-mei. Her husband, a local carpenter, had left Long Bow several years before and had never returned. Ch’eng Ai-lien, whose husband, Mants’ang, had been beaten by the Women’s Association, was the other. Man-ts’ang had since died from an illness and Ch’eng Ai-lien had married the poor peasant Chin-sui. She had driven a hard bargain with the latter, refusing to take his name and retaining under her own control all of Man-ts’ang’s property. Mistress of her own fate at last, she came and went to suit herself and dispensed her favors as she pleased.

  Of the 30-odd members of the Communist Party branch in Long Bow as it was finally constituted in that period, 80 percent were land-poor peasants or landless tenants and hired laborers and about 20 percent were land-owning peasants such as Fu-yuan. There were no members of rich peasant or landlord origin and there were no industrial workers.

  19

  Peasants or Workers?

  Experience shows that after joining our Party on our terms, most of them (peasants and intellectuals) did seriously study and accept the Party’s education in Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung’s theory of the Chinese Revolution, observe Party discipline, and take part in the practical revolutionary struggles of the people. In the course of doing this they changed their original character and became Marxist-Leninist fighters of the proletariat. Many of them have even sacrificed their lives for the Party’s cause, the cause of Communism in China.