Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  From the day of its founding in April, 1946 the whole branch operated in the strictest secrecy. The danger of the possible reconquest of the area by the Central armies and the certain reprisal that would have been visited upon all Communists if this had taken place, made this absolutely necessary. Because of this enforced secrecy many elaborate excuses had to be made at home to account for the frequent absence of branch members from family chores and family gatherings. This was particularly true of the women whether or not their husbands were also in the Party, for women were traditionally not supposed to go anywhere, speak to anyone, or have any business outside the home. All self-respecting families enforced these bans quite strictly. Fortunately for the Party, among the very poor who had no property to protect or to pass on, families were not so well established. The poor peasant women who had to fend for themselves in order to eat came and went of their own volition.

  Strict secrecy in regard to the Party also meant that whatever prestige individual Party members earned by their good work and whatever notoriety they won by their mistakes was reflected not on the Party as such but on the administration, the whole group of active cadres, Party and non-Party alike, who served as responsible leaders in the village office, the militia, the Peasants’ Association, and the Women’s Association. There was no question but that the Party members were the backbone of this whole structure, but since the average peasant did not know this, it was the whole structure that took the credit or the blame and not just its guiding core.

  How important a role the Party played can be seen by an examination of the activity of the Party members in the main village organizations. All of the branch members belonged to the Peasants’ Association. Cheng-k’uan, one of the first recruits to the branch, was its chairman. (The vice-chairman, Wang Yu-lai, was not a Communist.) All the women Party members belonged to the Women’s Association. A woman comrade, Hu Hsueh-chen, was its secretary. Three other Party members were group leaders among the women. All the male Communists were enrolled in the militia. Li Hung-er, a Party member, was its captain. Hsin-fa, whose recruitment into the Party was described in the preceding chapter, served as educational director of the militia. As for the village government, its cadres were divided about equally, half of them Party members, the other half not. A Communist, Fu-yuan, was village head. Another Communist, Kuei-ts’ai, was assistant village head. (The secretary, San-ch’ing, was not a Party member.) Tien-ming, secretary of the Party branch, was in charge of all police work. The rest of the Party members—more than half the branch membership—held no leading posts at all. They were simply rank-and-file peasants who were expected to take the lead in any work they were asked to do, inspire others to greater effort, and study and make known the needs of their colleagues and neighbors.

  20

  Contradictions, Internal and External

  Comrades! If the masses were all conscious, united, and free from the influences of the exploiting classes and from backward phenomena as some people imagine, then what difficulties would still remain in the Revolution? Such influences of the exploiting classes not only existed long before the Revolution but will continue to exist for a very long time after the victory of the Revolution and after the exploiters have been kicked out of their position of political power by the exploited classes.

  Liu Shao-ch’i

  TO LEAD successfully the struggle against the gentry, the Communist Party in Long Bow had to combat not only the splitting tactics of the enemy, but also the centrifugal tendencies constantly generated among the people, the landless, the land-poor, and the middle peasants. Combating enemy disruption proved to be the easier of the two tasks. Once the Party members realized just what the gentry was doing and why, they were usually able to neutralize its effects by education among the people or by a change in policy.

  When the question of “air raid shelters” became serious, District Leader Liang, who was in touch with the work in 18 villages, soon realized that attacking poor families who had been persuaded to hide property only played into the gentry’s hands. As soon as he convinced the Communists in Long Bow of this, they persuaded the Peasants’ Association to change its tactics. Thereafter, instead of suffering attacks, the “air raid shelters” were rewarded for turning over hidden property with a share of the property itself. Those who had already been punished were given compensation for the damages. As soon as this was done, quantities of clothing, jewelry, and other goods that had once belonged to landlords were brought to the Peasants’ Association headquarters without a struggle and the ranks of the peasants were strengthened rather than split.

  In those incidents where rank-and-file peasants had been seduced or bribed into a lenient attitude toward some exploiting family, the Party also advised education and persuasion rather than punishment and ostracism. Chang Ch’un-hsi, the hired laborer who was so infatuated with his former employer’s daughter-in-law that he would not join in any attack on the landlords of Long Bow, was chosen to attend a district-operated training class for just such “backward elements.” There the students studied the feudal system by recalling their own past lives. Listening to classmates whose situations had been so close to his brought all the bitterness of Ch’un-hsi’s past before his eyes. He remembered how he had been forced to drive his own mother away from the gate in the famine year, and wept. Seeing this emotion the other students focused their attention on him. They ridiculed his love for the landlord’s daughter-in-law. They pointed out what a shame it was to fall for a girl who had treated him like dirt in the past and now used him only as a shield for her family. In the end he resolved to give her up. When he returned to the village he joined actively in all the campaigns that followed and before long was himself enrolled into the Party branch.

  Toward Party members and village cadres who wavered in their stand, the attitude of the Party was more strict than it was toward the rank-and-file peasants. Inside the branch much time was spent analyzing the class position of those who, out of lust for material gain, or just plain lust, gave protection to their class enemy. They were asked to change their ways. Seeing how despicable their actions appeared to others, some members voluntarily confessed to illicit affairs with gentry women and broke off such relationships. Others continued these affairs in spite of this education, the most notorious being Hsin-fa, who could not bring himself to break completely with Pu-ch’ao, the rich widow’s daughter. He rationalized this on the grounds that she was herself a poor peasant by marriage, even though it was obvious to others that by the favors she granted him she helped protect her mother from attack and expropriation. Since Hsin-fa was by that time a leading member of the branch, he went his own way in spite of sharp criticism.

  Finding superstition still a powerful weapon in the hands of the landlord class, the Communist Party organized a special campaign throughout the district to free the minds of the people from bondage to geomancy, astrology, spirit talking, and mud idols, and to convince them that they themselves could remold the world according to their own desires. An important breakthrough in this campaign came in Sand Bank, a village several miles northwest of Long Bow. There stood a shrine to the god Ch’i-t’ien, a very powerful Buddhist deity who, when displeased, could curse one and all with dysentery. Since people only too often died of this disease, Ch’i-t’ien was greatly to be feared. Many a stick of incense was burned before his image and many an offering of food was left for his spirit to eat. The Party members of Sand Bank decided to attack Ch’i-t’ien just like any landlord. They figured up just how much money they had spent humoring him over the years and discovered that it was enough to have saved many lives in the famine year. When they took these calculations to their Peasants’ Association, many young men and women got very angry. They went to the temple, pulled the god out of his shelter and carried him to the village office. Before a mass meeting they “settled accounts” with him by proving that he had squandered their wealth without giving any protection in return. Then they smashed his mud image with sticks and ston
es. Some of the older people tried to stop them. They prophesied that everyone involved would die of dysentery within a few days. But the young men and women went right ahead. When no one fell ill that night nor throughout the whole of the next day, the hold of Ch’i-t’ien on the village collapsed. Only a handful of old women ever burned incense before his ruined shrine again.

  News of this victory quickly spread to other villages. When the Party members in Long Bow heard of it they decided to deal with a similar god of their own—a god who was supposed to have the power to cure sickness. His image sat in a little temple on the southern edge of the settlement. Sick people traditionally burned incense before him, made obeisance by touching their foreheads to the ground, and then scraped up a little dust from around his feet, mixed it with water, and swallowed it. His devotees were lucky if they did not add dysentery to their other ailments after this “cure.”

  The Communists first freed their own minds of dependence on this god by a long discussion in the branch and then led a similar discussion in the Peasants’ Association. Before long everyone was laughing at the “muddy water cures” of the discredited god. When a militiaman knocked the god’s mud head off, only a minority of old people were dismayed.

  By such means the bonds of specific superstitions were broken down.

  The success of the Settling Accounts Movement had a general effect that reinforced these intensive efforts. Once the gentry had been overthrown, it became obvious even to the slow-witted that the configuration of the “eight ideographs” at birth or the position of one’s ancestral graves no longer determined one’s fate. People took less and less stock in ancestral spirits who prophesied the immediate return of Chiang Kai-shek or in rumors that red sunsets symbolized the decline of the Communist Party. As their faith in superstition declined, their trust in the Peasants’ Association, the Eighth Route Army, and the Communist Party increased.

  Since Long Bow was not a Border Village, the local Party branch did not have to mobilize people physically against those murderous forays of the Home Return Corps that in many places lent substance to the dire prophesies of the gentry. The Long Bow Communists, however, did combat the fear of a “change of sky” by reporting the victories of the armed working groups organized by the Party in Border Counties where the Revolution had no recourse but to meet the white terror of the gentry with a red terror of its own. Dressed in civilian clothes, the bravest and most skillful guerrilla fighters on the borders raided Kuomintang-held villages at night. Notorious counterrevolutionaries and landlords who had been responsible for the assassination of underground workers were kidnapped from their homes, tried in the fields for their crimes, and executed on the spot. This irregular war on the borders grew in bitterness and scale as time went on in spite of the fitful peace that prevailed on most of the battle-fronts under the auspices of the Marshall mission. The situation resembled very closely the border war in Kansas in the days of John Brown, and the peasants of Long Bow took as much heart from reports of small successes as did certain abolitionists of New England when they heard the news of Ossawatomie.

  Everyone realized that the real test would come if and when the truce ended without an agreement on peace. Then the future of China would be decided by the armies in the field. Thus the strengthening of the Eighth Route Army, renamed the People’s Liberation Army in mid-1946, became a major concern of the Communist Party in Long Bow. A second area-wide recruiting drive was launched in the spring, and Party members were urged to lead the way by volunteering themselves or getting other members of their families to volunteer. Three Party members went in the second drive. Kuo Cheng-k’uan got his brother to go. Tien-ming did the same. Li Hung-er saw both his brothers off. Ch’eng Ai-lien, who had stopped her husband’s blows by going to the Women’s Association and who was now a Communist, persuaded her new husband Chin-sui to enlist. Altogether another 25 young men signed up. Again several were sent back because of ill health, but more than 20 were accepted and went on to become fighters in a rapidly growing army of peasant volunteers who had won land at home and meant to hold onto it.

  This time, not only did the village government give the volunteers a grand banquet and a musical send-off, but each man was also given a brand new shirt and a brand new quilt, and a laquered plaque was hung beside his front door with the words “Glorious Army Family” written large upon it in ideographs of bright red. Many poems composed on the spot and recorded with free-flowing grass characters on large sheets of rice paper were pasted to the adobe walls beside these plaques. A typical one read:

  Glorious are those who volunteer

  To throw down tyrants.

  March to the borders when the millet sprouts.

  Fight for the people!

  Defend our homes and lands!

  Most glorious are the volunteers!

  The biggest problem in recruiting for the army was not to overcome fear of enemy bullets or the hardships of campaigning, but to convince the men that their families would be well cared for and their livestock and crops well tended. The village government undertook to see that this problem was solved by organizing a “Preferential Treatment Committee” which set up a system of taikung or “substitute tillage.” Under this system every able-bodied man in the village was asked to do his share of work for the more than 40 men who had left for the front. Here again the Party branch played a big role. It was the Communists, with individual exceptions, who guaranteed the success of the system by doing their share, or more than their share, and inspiring others to do the same. On the “Preferential Treatment Committee” they led the way in establishing a system of inspection to make sure that all substitute tillage was well done and that all complaints by wives and mothers were promptly looked into. It was preferential treatment for soldiers’ families that really made possible a volunteer army in the first place and gave such a solid base to morale in the field.

  One young woman wrote to her husband, “Since you joined up the neighbors often come to visit me. The three Wangs have all volunteered to do some work on the land. I suppose what worries you most is my pregnancy and you are afraid that there will be no one here to take care of me. But it is already arranged that beside my mother, our neighbor’s wife who is a member of the Women’s Association committee, is to live here with me. And if we haven’t enough millet to get through the year, the village office will supply us. So don’t be downhearted about home.”

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  Checkmating each new move of the gentry was not enough to guarantee victory. The Party branch in Long Bow had to make sure that the ranks of the people did not break down due to conflicts of interest and quarrels between the various groups and cliques that made them up. Since the main strength of the peasants lay in their numbers, it was important that their ranks be as broad and solid as possible. Where analysis showed an objective community of interest the Party tried to bring people together regardless of the subjective animosities and suspicions that divided them. Here the main criterion was class interest. The basic principle taught by the Party was that the class interests of all the poor and middle peasants, while not completely identical, were certainly mutually dependent and that this must, in the long run, override all other considerations. It followed that all poor and middle peasants could be united in a movement for fanshen in spite of splits and divisions arising out of family and clan ties, religious affiliations, erstwhile collaboration, past criminal activity, present illicit love affairs, or any other factor.

  A most serious cleavage was that which existed between the minority of the peasants who had been attacked for collaboration and the majority who had attacked them. Once branded as traitors, the minority earned universal contempt, were often taken advantage of by their neighbors, and treated as second class citizens by the village government. If such treatment were to continue indefinitely, the collaborators would have no choice but to join forces with the gentry. At the suggestion of the district secretary, the Party branch studied this problem and decided to remove
the stigma of collaborator from all those whose role in the puppet regime was minor. This included all the lu and chia leaders, the rank-and-file members of the puppet Self-Defense Corps, and the members of the counter-revolutionary Love the Village Corps who had taken refuge in the fort during the liberation battle.

  T’ien-ming mobilized every Party member to take part in solving this problem. Communists visited each collaborator personally, discussed the past with them, and offered a constructive role in the future to all those who realized their mistakes and sincerely indicated a desire to join the revolutionary ranks.

  “We are all poor brothers,” the Communists said. “The only difference between us is that you were deceived by the puppet officials. Think it over. For whom did you carry the guns? Was it not for the landlords? How come they sat comfortably at home and enjoyed life while you faced the bullets? They feared the Eighth Route Army. They knew that when the Eighth Route Army came the rich had entered upon their last day of rule. So they tricked you and deceived you and sent you to the fort to defend their power. Think it over. Who died when the bullets spattered the fort? Was it the rich or the poor?”

  This was just what most of these young collaborators had been waiting for. They were not at all proud of the role they had played and wanted very much to be forgiven and invited to join the Peasants’ Association. Each was asked to go before the executive committee, speak frankly about his past errors, and explain what was in his mind when he went to the fort. All those whom the committee felt to be sincere in their repentance were admitted to membership in the Association and included thereafter in the “grades” when confiscated property was distributed. In the end no one was rejected.

  The Party branch had no cause to regret this action. Not only did all of these young men actively join the Peasants’ Association, but many of them also became members of the militia, and several eventually joined the Party as well; among them were Shen T’ien-hsi who had served in the puppet Self-Defense Corps and Hsiao Wen-hsu who had been a soldier in the Fourth Column.