Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  If Yu-lai had any doubts about his self-proclaimed mission, they were easily stilled by the gains that accrued to him personally while his anti-agent campaign lasted and his colleagues still believed his accusations. He silenced all critics and solved all personal problems in the same monotonous manner. When he was criticized for refusing to do rear service, he attacked his critic as an agent. When one of his neighbors questioned some joint production accounts, that neighbor was declared an agent. When the parents of his son’s “bought and paid for” fiancee tried to delay the wedding because their daughter was under age, he called them agents too.

  This latter accusation and the forced marriage that resulted became a famous case in Long Bow and led eventually to Yu-lai’s own removal as a cadre. The girl, Shen Hsien-e, was without question the most beautiful teenager in the village. She had perfectly proportioned features, lips like twin cherries, jet-black almond eyes under thin arched brows, a glowing olive complexion set off by a delicate cascade of bangs that reached halfway down her forehead and a long black braid that hung to the middle of her back. Her feet, though unbound, were small, as small as many bound feet, and her hands, delicate and slim-fingered, moved with the grace of a butterfly in flight. Animating this outward beauty was an irrepressibly saucy spirit, full of song, laughter, temperament and mischief. Hsien-e was like some mountain flower, exquisite in shape and bright in color, that had somehow blown in and managed to blossom amid the dirt and squalor of the dilapidated, war-wrecked community. There was no man so old, so sick, or so busy that he did not turn his head when she went by.

  Yu-lai did not need his glasses to spot feminine beauty any more than he needed them to unearth alleged subversion. He had picked out Hsien-e for his son during the famine year when she was still a little girl and had offered her father, Shen Hsi-le, $90 and 40 catties of millet in return for a promise that she would become Wen-te’s bride when she came of age. On that money and grain Hsi-le kept his family alive through the terrible winter of 1942. In 1946, although the girl was still only 14, Yu-lai demanded that she marry his son without delay. Hsi-le refused to let her go. Yu-lai demanded his money back with interest. Hsi-le set out to raise the money. Afraid of losing the girl, Yu-lai changed his tactics and accused Hsi-le of being an enemy agent. Since the poor man had actually helped Father Sun escape and was among those Catholics who returned to the church at Horse Square for mass on that famous Easter Sunday, it was not hard to make this accusation stick. Yu-lai arrested Hsi-le, strung him up and beat him with a mule whip until he himself confessed that he was in fact an agent. To make doubly sure, Yu-lai also arrested Hsi-le’s nephew, Hei-hsiao, a boy from Hukuan, where Hsi-le had orginally lived and where his daughter, Hsien-e, was born. Hei-hsiao was beaten by Wen-te until he confirmed the story told by his uncle. Then Yu-lai put it up to Hsi-le—either give up his daughter or face investigation by the county police. Hsi-le agreed to the match.

  When Wen-te took his fiancee to the district office for a marriage license he told her to lie about her age if she valued her father’s life. She said she was 16. The license was issued and the marriage duly consummated by carrying the bride to her husband’s home in a red sedan chair. Once they had her there, her husband and father-in-law never let the captive beauty out of the house. They worked her like a slave in the traditional manner and beat her frequently. Because Yu-lai had such power in the village, even the Women’s Association dared not intervene.

  Yu-lai’s closest neighbor, Ch’ou-har, had reason to believe that the father and son beat the young bride most severely when she rejected her father-in-law’s advances. Ch’ou-har told some of his cronies what he suspected. When wind of this got back to Yu-lai, he sent his son, Wen-te, to thrash Ch’ou-har. The son did his job well. He beat the old man with a plow handle until he fell unconscious, and when Ch’ou-har came to on the ground, Wen-te beat and kicked him some more. From that day onward Ch’ou-har also wore an agent’s cap.

  Seeing just how ruthless Yu-lai could be, the cadres all gave him a wide berth. Since nobody could positively prove that his charges were false, and since it was common knowledge that counter-revolutionary conspiracies did exist, Yu-lai’s growing blackmail went unchallenged for a long time. When the vice-chairman of the Peasants’ Association issued orders, people thought twice before refusing them.

  ***********

  Early in 1947, Chang T’ien-ming, Shih Fu-yuan and Chang Kuei-ts’ai, the three most able and experienced cadres in the village left Long Bow to help organize land reform and winter production in other communities. The promotion of these three to full-time district work no doubt strengthened the administration of the Fifth District as a whole, but it was a severe blow to progress in Long Bow itself.

  The men who replaced the three all lacked prestige, experience, and political understanding. Either they were wanting in strength of character or else they were very self-interested. Not only did they prove unable to reform the political climate, but under their novice leadership all the excesses, transgressions, and abuses of power characteristic of the militia under Hung-er, and the political blackmail carried on by Yu-lai and his son grew to even more alarming proportions.

  The tall, handsome Hsin-fa, who had for some time been educational director of the militia without achieving any remarkable results, replaced T’ien-ming as secretary of the Party branch. Unlike T’ien-ming, however, he did not have the prestige of an underground anti-Japanese fighter to draw upon in leading the people. Nor was he strong-willed enough to make a fight for the principles in which he believed. He preferred rather to keep on good terms with everyone and become known as a lao hao jen or “old good fellow.”

  Ch’un-hsi, the hired laborer, who had refused for a long time to join the attack on the gentry because of his love for his former employer’s daughter-in-law, was chosen to take Fu-yuan’s place as village head. He not only lacked prestige; he lacked confidence in his own ability, wanted above all the good opinion of others, and therefore, although he worked hard, was unable to criticize, correct, or lead others.

  An older man, Wang Hsi-yu, a close friend of Wang Yu-lai, replaced Kuei-ts’ai as deputy village head. Hsi-yu had been active in all the campaigns of the Settling Accounts Movement but at heart was a self-seeker. His father had exploited the whole village in the old days as a licensed middleman—a person officially designated to act as a go-between in business transactions, extracting a commission whether or not he performed any service. Perhaps because of this background Hsi-yu still exhibited a strong tinge of middleman’s opportunism on which he relied to advance his personal fortunes at the expense of the rest of the community.

  Yu-lai’s son, Wen-te, by a natural promotion, took T’ien-ming’s place as head of public security. He was very young, very strong-willed, very interested in women—he outdid even Hung-er with his liaisons—and very much under the influence of his father. With Wen-te’s promotion, Yu-lai’s foothold in police work soon became a stranglehold upon it.

  Hung-er, with all the faults previously mentioned, remained captain of the militia.

  This left Wang Yu-lai, still deputy chairman of the Peasants’ Association, as the oldest, most experienced, and strongest-willed of the cadres. Even though he was not a Communist, he easily dominated the others and set the tone of public life. The chairman of the Peasants’ Association, the ex-Catholic Cheng-k’uan, the one man who by his rank and position could and should have kept Yu-lai in check, was no match for him. Cheng-k’uan was sincere, good natured, hardworking, but he had no conception of the evil Yu-lai intended and was easily misled. He was the type of man known to the peasants as lao shih or honest. Wang Yu-lai well knew how to impose upon such “honest” peasants as Cheng-k’uan.

  With such a constellation of leaders it was hardly a coincidence that the Chinese New Year, which fell in February in 1947, began with a shocking incident. A large group of militiamen, who for convenience were still quartered in the North Temple, decided to celebrate the coming of the long-await
ed holidays in the manner of old-time rural guards. They chose Man-hsi to go to the puppet Chief-of-Staff Chou Mei-sheng’s home, seize his daughter-in-law and bring her to headquarters for their collective enjoyment. There in the temple they stripped her and possessed her, one after the other.

  It was likewise hardly a coincidence that after the promotions of January the spring recruiting drive degenerated into a farce which brought political life in Long Bow to its post-liberation nadir. When the Border Region Government issued its third call for an enlarged army, Party members and militiamen were asked to take the lead as before. Hung-er, whose two brothers were already in the army, went to Ch’un-hsi, the new village head, with a frown on his face. “Look here,” he said, “You’ll have to decide whether I should go or not.”

  “Wait a minute,” replied Ch’un-hsi. “Don’t get excited. Maybe there is some other way.”

  Egged on by Yu-lai, who had old scores to settle and did not fancy sending his own son off to fight, they decided to fill the village quota with some of those “sour and slippery” characters who had given the new administration the most trouble from the very beginning. With Man-hsi’s muscular help, the outstanding puppet leaders and the disaffected Catholics who wore invisible “agent’s caps” were hauled to the village office and told to prepare for a trip to the recruiting office.

  Li Ho-jen, the leader of one dissident clique, had himself just returned from a term as stretcher bearer at the front. He brought back with him a discharge paper stating that he had been sent home early because of illness. Despite this paper Yu-lai charged him with deserting the stretcher corps and ordered him to enlist at once in the army. Shen Ch’uan-te, Ho-jen’s mouthpiece and chief admirer, although well over 40 years old, was likewise instructed to report for duty. So was Chin-chu, the slow-witted peasant whom Yu-hsing, for one, wanted out of the way, the better to court his free and easy wife. Chin-hung, a middle peasant whose career as a member of the puppet Self-Defense Corps had been especially notorious, “volunteered” when Yu-lai said to him, “You were eager enough to serve the foreign devils; how come you are afraid of battle now?”

  Altogether a dozen or so “sour and slippery” characters were collected. Along with a few genuine volunteers, they were packed off to the recruiting office in Lucheng. Old Shen, whose hair was already turning grey, looked around him as they marched off and said, “This is indeed a father and son army”—a play on words which the local cadres did not find funny. (The People’s Liberation Army was commonly called by the affectionate title of “Brother and Son Army.”)

  When the Long Bow contingent arrived at the county seat, the recruiting officers were shocked by the advanced age and bedraggled appearance of the majority. They questioned the recruits closely and soon discovered that they were not volunteers at all. They thereupon sent them home together with an investigator whose task it was to find out how such a motley crew had ever been assembled in the first place.

  A second drive was organized with great difficulty. In the end another dozen young men were found who really wanted to go or were persuaded to do so. Among these was at least one who had little choice. This was Li K’ao-lur, a young immigrant from a Nationalist-held village in Hopei province. He had eloped only a few weeks before with a girl of the same surname who was a resident of his home village and a distant cousin. He had fallen in love with her, and she with him, but according to local custom the match was out of the question. Not only was a match between cousins considered incestuous, but both the young people had long since been promised to others. When they defied the whole community and ran away, they were sentenced to death in absentia. They fled to the Liberated Area of the Taihang Mountains and finally arrived in Long Bow where young Li had an uncle to whom he appealed for help. This uncle let the young couple live in his house temporarily, but word of their refuge somehow reached their home village. A representative was sent by the Li clan to bring them home for trial and punishment. When the representative arrived in Long Bow, he went straight to the village office and demanded that the runaways be turned over to him. Ch’un-hsi stalled for time by pretending that he had never heard of the two lovers. Then, hard up for recruits, he made a bargain with Li K’ao-lur. If Li would join the army, Ch’un-hsi would deny all knowledge of his whereabouts, send the clan representative home empty-handed, and recommend to the Peasants’ Association that the pair be given land and housing in Long Bow. With his life, his marriage, and his future assured, Li K’ao-lur agreed. The army got a fine recruit.

  This recruiting drive only pointed up what had become increasingly obvious for a long time—that the revolutionary cadres and militiamen of Long Bow were gradually alienating themselves from the people by arbitrary orders, indiscriminate beatings, the assumption of special privileges, and “rascal behavior.” Nor was Long Bow the only community in the district where a relatively small number of active young men had “mounted the horse,” as the peasants so aptly put it, and were riding around to suit their own fancy. By the same token the Fifth District was not the only district where such things were occurring in Lucheng County, nor was Lucheng County itself an exception among the counties of the Taihang Region. In the spring of 1947, the government and the Party organization of the Taihang Region took note of the critical situation and launched a “Wash Your Face” campaign designed to put a stop to all such tendencies, and to overcome the opportunist and hedonist attitudes that fostered them.

  The method adopted in this campaign was to set up a gate or council of delegates, elected by the peasants at large, before which all the cadres had to answer for their motives and their actions. The phrase “Wash Your Face” came from Chairman Mao himself who had many times explained that the thoughts of revolutionary leaders inevitably became spotted and stained by the corrupt habits of the past and the rotten social environment that surrounded them on every side, just as their faces became spotted and stained by the dust and dirt of the natural environment. These spots and stains had to be washed off frequently just as people daily washed their faces to make them clean again. And just as one could not see the dirt on one’s own face without consulting a mirror, so one could not clearly see one’s own bad thinking and bad behavior without consulting the people who suffered as a consequence of both and could therefore reflect a truer image.

  Delegates were duly chosen by the peasants of Long Bow, and the village cadres went before them to review their records and examine their errors, but the movement was not successful. As soon as the district leaders called for criticism, not only the honest majority but also the “sour and slippery” minority came forward with opinions. The opinions of this latter group were destructive, designed to overthrow rather than reform the revolutionary cadres. Those who raised them spoke without thought as to who might be found to replace the objects of their wrath. From such an overthrow only the landlords stood to gain.

  Instead of allowing this storm of criticism to rage and using it to educate the peasants to distinguish honest from dishonest opinions so that the cadres could reform and all the people profit from a living political lesson, the district leaders lost their nerve and retreated. They intervened on behalf of the cadres and in effect suppressed criticism, both honest and dishonest. As a result, although some cadres, getting a scent of things to come, changed their outlook to a certain extent and corrected some of their faults, others, such as Yu-lai, only became more arrogant than before and retaliated against those who had dared to criticize them. Clearly something more drastic was needed if the tendencies which were already alienating the leaders from the people and undermining not only the village administration and the Peasants’ Association, but the Communist Party branch as well were not seriously to undermine and compromise the Revolution.

  ***********

  In January 1948, the future of the whole movement, in spite of its extraordinary successes, was far from certain. In Long Bow the upheaval had swept like a whirlwind through the village, had broken up the old landlord-tenant system, and sma
shed it beyond repair. It was mourned, if at all, by only a small minority. But only bits and pieces of that which was to replace it had as yet been created. Exploitation and privilege, some of it new in form, still existed. Very little had been permanently settled. The oligarchy of the gentry based on centuries of tradition and buttressed with all the sanctions of custom, religion, Confucian ethics, and the naked force of hired guns, had been replaced by an interregnum of young, formerly landless or land-poor peasants. They were bitter, creative, passionate, selfish, full of energy, full of hatred, full of yearning for something new and better, yet easily diverted down paths of pleasure and privilege. Suddenly thrust onto the stage, backed by the rifles of a 100-man militia and supported by the overwhelming majority of the people who had divided the “fruits,” what would they do with their new power?

  Did these leaders, who had climbed from the mud and slime and still carried with them the stains of their origin, possess the vision and the skill to correct the excesses that marred the movement? Could they abolish petty advantages won through the lever of leadership, lead all the poor to stand up, and unite the whole population around that vast program of private, mutual, and public production which alone could lift Long Bow out of the miasma of the past? And if they did not possess such vision and skill, who did?

  PART III

  The Search for the Poor and Hired

  Since powerful imperialism and its allies, the reactionary forces in China, have occupied China’s key cities for a long time, if the revolutionary forces do not wish to compromise with them but want to carry on the struggle staunchly, and if they intend to accumulate strength and steel themselves and avoid decisive battles with their powerful enemy before they have mustered enough strength, then they must build the backward villages into advanced, consolidated base areas, into great military, political, economic and cultural revolutionary bastions, so that they can fight the fierce enemy who utilizes the cities to attack the rural districts and, through a protracted struggle, gradually win over-all victory for the revolution.