Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  The proportional features of the law also paralleled the United States income tax provisions. Families harvesting an average amount of land per capita paid 25 catties of millet, or approximately 20 percent of the yield on all taxable standard mou, but families who held more than the average amount of land and hence harvested more than the average paid a proportionately higher tax.* Those who harvested twice the per capita average of the community paid as high as 40 percent of their income in taxes. Above this the rate did not go. A higher rate was hardly needed. After land reform there were very few households that harvested more than twice the per capita average.

  All of these features together—the exemptions, the standard mou method of calculating the tax base, the deferred taxation of improvements and the proportionate increases for higher incomes—combined to develop a tax system reasonable in the eyes of the peasants. It was clearly designed to guarantee subsistence, reward effort, and discourage laziness and neglect; and it definitely helped to stimulate a tremendous movement to improve and reclaim land and raise production.

  Before mutual aid and the new tax regulations could stimulate a truly mass movement, other important subjective and objective problems had to be overcome.

  Some people had to be convinced of the need for winter work. Having harvested from their own land more grain than they had ever seen before, they tended to be complacent. One peasant said, “In the past when I earned two bushels of millet and three of corn I thought I was well off. This year I harvested between 15 and 20 bushels and I said to myself that I would relax for a few months and enjoy myself and stop worrying about food and clothes.” But a group of neighbors meeting to figure up family accounts soon stripped him of any illusions of prosperity. They found, after careful calculation, that in order to live until spring he would need at least five bushels more than he had. A second peasant said, “There’s no use figuring for me. There’s no question but that in one year I have harvested enough food for two.” Skeptical neighbors added his totals and found that he hardly had enough grain to last the winter, not to mention salt, cooking oil, and other essential staples which still had to be bought.

  Other families, fully convinced of the need to produce, were discouraged by lack of capital. Here mutual aid, by pooling the meager resources of several poor families, solved part of the problem. But credit from the local co-op or the newly organized People’s Credit Bank of Lucheng County was also important. The bank didn’t wait for the peasants to come to it. Bank managers and clerks travelled through the villages of their neighborhoods and made first-hand surveys of the people’s needs. The limited funds which they had to lend were thus channelled into the hands of those who needed them most. Traditional banking practices, such as loaning money only to good risks who could guarantee collateral, were sharply condemned by the revolutionary press which gave wide coverage to the experience of Comrade Ts’ao of the Pinghsun Credit Bank. This energetic man personally visited every village served by his bank. In one hamlet he found eight families who, although they had received some land and housing in the distribution, had no surplus whatever that they could use for winter production. Four of them were soldiers’ dependents and two were widows with children. He loaned each family 100,000 Border Region dollars ($35). They immediately invested these funds in a hemp shop and a transport brigade that provided work for all. They told Ts’ao, “Our government is really concerned with people. Now bankers bring money right to our homes and see to it that our problems are solved. We will do our best to produce.”

  Just as the provision of credit was not left to the profit calculations of private entrepreneurs, so the supply of raw materials for spinning and weaving was not left to the vagaries of local weather and its influence on the cotton crop or to the ability of women and children with scant resources to purchase fibre. Ginned cotton from the plains of Hopei was advanced to mountain communities through their Women’s Associations, thus guaranteeing a large spinning and weaving movement wherever hands lay idle.

  At the same time the dampening influence of middlemen’s high profits and speculatory manipulations was mitigated by the creation of a vast network of village-controlled and financed consumer cooperatives. These popular institutions provided staples at low prices and an outlet for rural produce at a fair return.

  An expanding market was also greatly aided by the growth of transportation facilities. Easy credit stimulated transport by carrying-pole, wheelbarrow, bicycle, pack animal, and two-wheel cart. So did the improvement of roads and highways. Most striking of all was the construction of a narrow gauge railroad which, under the direction of the embryonic Railroad Bureau of the Shansi-Hopei-Honan-Shantung Border Region Government, pushed halfway through the Taihang Mountains from the east.

  The new railroad was not the only form of public enterprise that grew up alongside the extensive private and co-operative forms already mentioned. The government also went heavily into mining, smelting, and munitions manufacture, to mention but a few important areas of public production. Even in Long Bow a munitions plant was established that soon rivalled the community’s two distilleries in size and volume of output. This produced nitrates from organic ash. The nitrates were used to arm the explosive shells that the People’s Liberation Army was demanding in ever increasing numbers. Changing tides at the front had brought massive windfalls of captured American equipment. Gradually the peasant-style rifle-and-hand-grenade army was being transformed into a modern force that boasted both tanks and artillery.

  Twice a year, by government decree, every peasant in the Fifth District was required to bring five catties of ash to the new plant housed in an empty building on Long Bow’s eastern rim. For this ash the peasants were paid a standard price. The demand for organic ash soon mushroomed far beyond anything that could be satisfied by the embers of the peasants’ cooking fires and stimulated an endless search for waste material. Over the hills and valleys of the district arose wisps of smoke that were visible for miles, as young and old burned the leaves, weeds, roots, and trash that would make it possible to blast Chiang Kai-shek, “The Old Root of Reaction,” right out of Nanking.

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  Whether or not Chiang Kai-shek could ever actually be blasted out of Nanking depended in large measure on the uninterrupted progress of this production movement and the solid basis which it alone could provide for a new politics and a new culture. Yet, as the months passed, many signs indicated that all was not entirely well on the home front. The full potential of the economy was being undercut by several negative trends, all of which arose from the same source—the very thoroughness with which the drive of the poor to fanshen had smashed down all feudal barriers and then gone on to “level the tops and fill the holes.”

  One of these trends involved a clear violation of policy. In spite of repeated warnings by the Central Committee, in spite of the clear language of the May 4th Directive, the expropriation proceedings against the gentry had not stopped with feudal property. To the young activists in the villages a landlord was a landlord, a rich peasant was a rich peasant, and an exploiter was an exploiter. They did not recognize any such phenomenon as a dual personality—a landlord capitalist, or a capitalist landlord. When they attacked they took everything—land, housing, stock, tools, buried treasure—and also business ventures. As a consequence, in the whole of Lucheng County, very few enterprises of a private nature survived the 1946 campaigns. Most of them had either been destroyed by a division of their assets or had been taken over by various mutual-aid groups to be run as co-operatives. The over-all effect of such expropriations was to stifle private initiative, a drag on production which the underdeveloped state of the economy could ill afford. While co-operative efforts filled a great need, they could not, on their own, provide all the capital and incentive necessary to an all-around development of production. For this, private enterprise was considered essential.

  An even more serious drag on expansion was the growing reluctance of those families who had been attacked as e
xploiters and those of their more prosperous brethren who feared such an attack, to produce with zest. While the poor who had fanshened went at production with unprecedented enthusiasm, those who had helped to make their fanshen possible, or feared that they would be called upon to contribute to it later, hung back. The “chive-cutting thought” that had sprouted in the spring of 1946 spread with accelerated speed in the following fall and winter. At a time when the majority were doing their best to create wealth and make themselves as rich as Li Hsun-ta, a substantial minority hesitated.* They did only as much as was necessary to feed their families and guarantee another year’s crop. In the meantime they waited to see what the shape of the future might be.

  Most serious of all was the political friction which the deepening of the expropriation drive and the broadening of its target produced. The excesses of the movement divided the peasants as surely as its over-all objectives had united them. And it was this tragic division which served as seed-bed for the growth of all kinds of abuses of power and arrogant misbehavior on the part of some leading cadres and militiamen when they began to be confronted with apathy and opposition from unexpected quarters.

  23

  Abuses of Power

  Some comrades have committed mistakes of commandism, adventurism and closed-door-ism. … They did not believe that it was the masses who were emancipating themselves. Instead they stood above the masses to fight in their stead, to bestow emancipation on the masses, and to issue orders. … Especially when doubt and dissatisfaction had arisen among the masses because of slogans that were too advanced or policies that were too “left,” they tried all the harder to carry on the work by issuing orders, by coercion or even by punishment.

  Liu Shao-ch’i, May 1945

  ONE AUTUMN EVENING when the “Beat Down the Drowning Dog” campaign was at its height, the poor peasant Kuo Yuan-lung worked until after sunset on a plot of land in the middle of the fertile flat southwest of Long Bow. This was the first piece of earth the lean young man had ever owned and he spent every spare minute on it. On this particular evening he was busy pulling the stubble left behind from a crop of millet that had already been harvested. After uprooting the stubble clusters from the ground, he shook the dirt from the roots and piled the truncated clusters together so that he could carry them home for fuel. At the end of a row he straightened up to rest his tired back and heard Kuei-Ts’ai’s megaphone-magnified voice announcing another meeting. The strange sound came, as always, from the top of the church tower. What the meeting was about, who was to be settled with this time, it was difficult to make out. The only words that came clearly across the open fields at that distance were “Come to the meeting—everybody out—meeting tonight—.”

  “Your mother’s…,” said’ Yuan-lung. “Another meeting! Will there ever be an end to meetings?” And he hummed a little jingle that he had heard that day from the disgruntled Li Ho-jen: “Kuomintang shui to, kungch’antang hui to.” (Under the Nationalists too many taxes; under the Communists too many meetings.)

  “They can meet without me tonight,” he muttered. “What’s to come of all this anyway? There’s nothing left to dig up, no oil left to find. We shake the trees again and again, but the fruits and nuts have already been knocked down and the branches are bare. Now that I have land I’d rather work it. Besides, I’m tired,” he added as he leaned down to pick up the last pile of stubble and roots. He carried it across the field and added it to the huge bundle he had been collecting all afternoon. Swinging this enormous burden onto his back he headed down the path toward the village. In the semi-darkness, with only a faint glow in the sky behind him, Yuan-lung and his load looked like a haystack that had suddenly grown legs and started to walk. When he reached his own house, a low mud hovel on the very edge of the settlement, he dropped the roots and sat down for a moment to rest. He took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

  When he opened them, Wang Man-hsi, the militiaman, was standing in front of him.

  “Didn’t you hear the call to meeting?” asked Man-hsi in a menacing tone.

  “I heard it but I couldn’t leave the stubble,” said Yuan-lung, standing up and moving warily back a step.

  “If you heard it, why aren’t you there? Come along now, we want everybody,” growled Man-hsi, moving toward Yuan-lung as Yuan-lung moved back.

  “But I haven’t eaten.”

  “Eat your mother’s…. A struggle meeting has already begun and you talk of eating. I’ll teach you to eat!” and with that Man-hsi hit him across the chest with the flat of his hand. “Come on, get going.”

  Man-hsi, though shorter than Yuan-lung, was far stronger. Over his shoulder he carried a rifle. Yuan-lung had no choice but to obey. He started out the gate. As he did so Man-hsi gave him a kick and fell in behind him swearing loudly.

  “You donkey’s penis! As if we didn’t have trouble enough without rounding up slackers like you. Where do you think your fanshen came from? The Lord of Heaven?”

  They had not gone far when Man-hsi told him to stop. The militiaman ducked into another courtyard and soon came out with a second poor peasant, old Pao, who had obviously been asleep. Under Man-hsi’s orders the two proceeded down the alley. By the time they reached the main street Man-hsi had collected seven peasants. As they turned the corner and headed toward the square they met another militiaman, K’uan-hsin, who came from the other side of the village with five more. In this manner a large crowd was brought together that night.

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  What had happened? Why did the militiamen have to go out and round up a crowd? If the struggle was in the interest of the poor peasants, surely they would have been in the very front ranks of the gathering. A year earlier one could have attributed their reluctance to “change of sky” fears, but to say now that they were afraid would have been only a part of the story. Almost all these people had been very active during the winter and throughout the spring and summer. Why did they hang back in the fall?

  The reluctance of a growing number of landowning peasants and even many poor peasants to continue the struggle grew out of uncertainty in regard to the future. The tremendous gains brought by the Anti-Traitor Movement in 1945 and the Settling Accounts Movement in early 1946 had not been matched by the campaigns of the following summer and fall. The expenditure of a vast amount of time and energy had pried loose a few much-needed dollars, but these dollars had by no means solved the problem of poverty or made any radical change in the over-all fanshen situation.

  Many felt that the effort expended in mass meetings, interrogations, tearing down k’angs, and opening up tombs could more fruitfully have been spent weeding and hoeing, digging privies, and sinking wells. At a time when the Communist Party members and cadres of the village government might have been leading a production movement they had been absorbed in a treasure hunt. Though the rewards of this hunt were not negligible, still the cost seemed far out of proportion. The damage inflicted in terms of people killed, households disrupted, buildings demolished and graves uprooted could not be shrugged off. Meanwhile the tendency to lop off “feudal tails” raised specters that refused to be laid to rest. Where would it all end? Was anybody really safe?

  The peasants supported violence in smashing the old regime. But violence for loot alone, violence that was basically punitive, violence that turned on those who practiced it, turned out to be stark, senseless, repellent. Though no one in the village put it thus in so many words, such thoughts undoubtedly lurked in the recesses of their minds and made them draw back. Yet as more people drew back from active participation in new campaigns, the leaders began to push harder; and so a crack appeared between the dedicated revolutionaries and many rank-and-file peasants who had supported them wholeheartedly up until that time.

  The style of work that developed out of the cadres’ attempt to “keep things moving” in spite of this growing rift was called “commandism.” Without realizing what was actually happening, many leading cadres in Long Bow began to issue orders instead of
educating and persuading people, and because most people obeyed these orders—some because they too thought the redundant attacks necessary, some because they always followed orders, and some because they dared not do otherwise—the leaders did not realize how much support they had lost. Those peasants who did not obey they condemned as backward—suan liu liu te, or “sour and slippery” trouble-makers who needed to be taught a lesson. Some of these were arrested, beaten, and punished with extra work for soldiers’ families, or extra terms of rear service such as stretcher bearing or transporting supplies to the front. Some were even sent off to join the army, but since they went unwillingly the army wisely rejected them.

  The towering war tension of those months coupled with this emerging commandism created an atmosphere in which all the other weaknesses of the peasant cadres as revolutionary leaders took root and grew apace. The individualism, the lack of vision, the impetuosity which characterized these men and women as small producers began to manifest themselves in many of the ways Mao Tse-tung had outlined 20 years earlier.* That strange dichotomy—slack discipline within the revolutionary ranks coupled with harsh measures to enforce obedience among the people as a whole—mushroomed to alarming proportions, and with it, vindictiveness, cliquism, loyalty to persons rather than to revolutionary principles, and ultimately hedonism leading to petty theft, evasion of public duty, wide-spread philandering, and even rape at the point of a gun. Abuses of power characteristic of the political machine of the old regime re-emerged, albeit still in pale reflection. But without that patina of wealth, leisure, culture, and tradition which had long served to obscure the basic violence of gentry rule, these new abuses paraded in stark relief against the background of the people’s Utopian dreams.

  The militia, on whom the main burden of each campaign fell, were quick to slide into certain habits well known to traditional upholders of “law and order.” They developed among themselves a battlefront psychology that served as justification for everything they were tempted to do. Since they spearheaded every drive, led in beating the “struggle objects,” poured out their sweat to dig up the k’angs, courtyards and tombs of the “old money bags,” and above all, risked their lives through the long cold nights as they stood guard against counterattack, they felt entitled to special privileges. Many of them thought it unfair to receive no return for service to the people beyond the fanshen in which all shared. Among them were some who also thought it unfair to be judged by ordinary standards of morality. As heroes of the hour, these began in small ways to help themselves. When some article among the hundreds confiscated from the gentry caught their fancy, they took it when nobody was looking. If some comely woman aroused their passion, they seduced her if she was willing. If she were a “struggle object,” they took her whether she was willing or not. When asked to do their share of labor service, these men began by thinking up all kinds of excuses and ended up with outright refusals. They even shirked work for soldiers’ families and prevailed upon their neighbors to go in their stead.