Mao Tse-tung
25
Cosmic Wei Ch’i
O wait for the pure sky!
See how charming is the earth
Like a red-faced girl clothed in white!
Such is the charm of these mountains and rivers
Calling innumerable heroes to vie with each other
in pursuing her.
Mao Tse-tung
WINTER IN North China is a radiant season. Clear skies often follow one another in unbroken succession for weeks at a time. Day after day the sun, no bigger than a ten-dollar gold piece, slides across a translucent sky and bedazzles all the visible world with light so bright that one has the feeling of living at a great height, of existing on a high plateau from the edge of which one can well look down on all the less-favored, nether regions of the universe. Adding substance to this feeling is the barrenness of the landscape. Surely, only on the moon are such vast expanses of hill and mountain so desolately bare of trees, so stripped of brush, so plucked of thorn or scraggly heather.
In the loess regions of the Yellow River bend this other-worldliness is accentuated by the contouring and terracing by means of which men, through countless generations, have transformed the dome-shaped heights. Like the drooping petals of many-petalled flowers, the fields of loess overhang each other. And though, in reality, they are all made up of the same ochre-brown, wind-blown soil, the play of light and shadow on the many-surfaced knolls and ridges brings to the countryside an ever-changing pageant of color.
A stranger travelling here is startled to see smoke rising from the ground. Is it possible that the blanket of loess on the earth’s crust also serves as cover for volcanic furnaces? No. The smoke comes from the kitchen fires which the peasants have built in their cave homes. The cavernous native dwellings burrow horizontally into the perpendicular walls of earth that drop from the edges of the terraced fields and line the sides of water-gouged ravines. From the innermost recesses of these caves, flues rise to the slopes above, emitting smoke that bears witness to domestic life in places seemingly devoid of human habitation.
From such a cave as this, lost in the badlands of North Shensi, Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the Communist Party of China, surveyed the continent that surrounded him in the last weeks of December 1947, and discussed what he saw with those colleagues of the Central Committee who had remained with him on the western side of the Yellow River.
Superficially, their position seemed perilous indeed. In March the Nationalist General Hu Ts’ung-nan, famous for his celibacy and his concentration camps, had invaded the Yenan region with 300,000 men, all crack troops that had never been risked in battle against the Japanese. These forces quickly occupied Yenan itself and then moved north to take Yenchuan and Suiteh. By autumn General Hu held most of the county towns and all of the main highways of North Shensi. Mao, with a small headquarters group, played hide and seek with the enemy’s scouts while the 25,000-man Northeast People’s Army enticed the main body of the invading forces into a hare-and-hounds trek through the hinterland. To observers in Shanghai and Washington, this looked like the last of the annihilation campaigns of the 1930’s with the revolutionary forces completely encircled and the Communist leaders in danger of capture.
The balance of forces was assessed quite differently by the Communist Party. Mao summed up the Party’s estimate in an address entitled “The Present Situation and Our Tasks” which was delivered on Christmas Day, 1947. Mao later called it “a programmatic document in the political, military, and economic fields for the entire period of the overthrow of the Chiang Kai-shek ruling clique and the founding of a new democratic China.”* It was a speech so extraordinarily calm and confident in tone that it is hard to believe, even now, that it could have been delivered from hidden heaquarters by a leader with a price on his head.
In the preceding decades, Mao had covered most of China’s 18 original provinces on foot. As he prepared this speech he must have recreated, in his mind’s eye, the whole sweep of his vast country and tried to envision entire, in all its variety, in all its contradictory and dialectical motion, the ebb and flow of the great struggle then in progress in China. In the context of such a panorama, the predicament of his headquarters group came into focus as only one facet of a many-sided nation-wide campaign, the outcome of which could not possibly be decided in the badlands of North Shensi, but ultimately only on the plains of Manchuria and in the great basin of the Huai River in Central China.
In order to clarify the military aspects of China’s revolutionary war, Mao had more than once compared the Chinese sub-continent to a vast board marked out with intersecting mountains and rivers as if for a game of wei ch’i (known in Japan as go). In this game, which is played with hundreds of uniform chips, enclosures may be formed not only around unoccupied spots but also around the adversary’s unprotected men which are then taken, their empty places being transformed into conquered territory. In wei ch’i, unlike chess, the interest is not concentrated in one spot, around the king, but is diffused all over the board. Every single spot is equally important in affecting the outcome and counts in the grand total which represents the position of each side at the end of the struggle.
Refusing to “match pearls with the dragon god of the sea” (that is to match force with superior force in head-on collision), Mao had traditionally maneuvered his relatively scarce red chips—the armies, brigades, and regiments under his Party’s command—in such a way as to encircle and wipe out, one after the other, the enemy’s far more numerous white chips—the armies, brigades, and regiments under Kuomintang, later Japanese, and then again Kuomintang command. “Preserve ourselves, annihilate the enemy”—such was the primary requirement of the struggle.
As the Civil War of the late 1940’s spread across North China, even little children soon learned to grasp the lethal arithmetic of this strategy. Lists of enemy soldiers killed, prisoners taken, and guns and bullets captured were tabulated on conspicuous walls in every liberated village. As the tallies mounted, it became obvious that at a certain point all the terms of reference must change and that qualities must be transformed into their opposites. The few must become the many and the many must become the few. The weak must become the strong and the strong must become the weak. On front after front the defensive must evolve into the offensive, and the offensive must decay into the defensive. Eventually a dynamic revolutionary China must replace a stagnant, counter-revolutionary China.
In the military sphere only one thing could undermine the success of the revolutionary forces: the abandonment of the wei ch’i-like fighting tactics refined by Mao Tse-tung out of the raw experiences of 20 years of revolutionary warfare. As long as the commanders of the People’s Liberation Army addressed themselves to the annihilation of enemy combat power and not to the capture of cities, as long as they avoided battles of attrition and obtained quick decisions by concentrating three, four, even five or six times the forces arrayed against them in any given battle, as long as they replenished their units with most of the manpower and all of the arms captured in such battles and thus made the front, as well as the rear, their recruiting ground and supply base, the People’s Liberation Army was bound to win every major campaign and ultimately victory in the Civil War. Thus did Mao project the military future in his Christmas Day speech.
But war is only an instrument of policy, a continuation of politics by violent means. Without a valid political line no volunteer army could long hold together, no military strategy long succeed. To the problem of over-all policy, therefore, China’s revolutionary leaders had always devoted the bulk of their attention. Applying wei ch’i-like tactics to this sphere as well, the revolutionary forces aspired to occupy as much political space as possible, to win as large a section of the social fabric as could be won, to neutralize those sections that could not be won over, and so isolate the genuinely hostile sections that they could be overwhelmed. As Mao put it, the political line of his Party was one of “developing the progressive forces, w
inning over the middle forces, and isolating the die-hard forces.”
By “progressive forces” Mao meant the workers and poor peasants. By “middle forces” Mao meant the middle peasants, small independent craftsmen and traders, students, teachers, professors, and free professionals. He also meant all those capitalists who had not yet been swallowed up by the four big families of the Chiang clique and the foreign business interests to whom they were linked. These two latter groups, plus the landlords, made up the “die-hard forces.”
The “middle forces” could not be won over if the “progressive forces” insisted on socialism as the immediate goal. More basic still, the objective conditions required for a transition to socialism, for the abolition of private ownership in the means of production in all fields, did not exist in China. Mao therefore proposed as the goal of the Civil War an intervening stage of society to be characterized by a mixed economy and a multi-class government. He outlined in three sentences how such an economy should be created: “Confiscate the land of the feudal classes and turn it over to the peasants. Confiscate monopoly capital, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Soong, H. H. Kung, and Chen Li-fu and turn it over to the new democratic state. Protect the commerce and industry of the national bourgeoisie.”
Upon the three-fold foundation of this proposed public, co-operative, and private-enterprise economy, Mao called on the Chinese people to erect a coalition government in which many groups and parties would share power with the Communists. Such was the basic program of the Chinese Revolution put forth by Mao Tse-tung on the eve of 1948.
“Develop the progressive forces, win over the middle forces, isolate the die-hard forces”—the whole of this political line, and not some single aspect, was vital to success. Yet warping pressures constantly arose. Reports from widely scattered areas indicated that tendencies toward Left extremism in land reform and commandism in leadership were all too common. From below came the impulse for an all-out struggle which would ignore the “middle forces,” destroy private commerce and industry, expropriate middle peasants and re-order the world in the interest of the poor peasants and workers alone. At the same time the reports showed a strong Right tendency on the part of certain middle-level cadres and some key leaders in the villages. They were thwarting the just demands of the poor peasants and workers and advocating compromise with the gentry because they feared the Kuomintang offensive and hesitated before the prospect of massive U.S. aid to Chiang Kai-shek. Mao and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party waged an unending battle against both these impulses, either of which could lead to disaster. The emphasis, however, at least at the beginning, was against rightism, for rightism undermined the very will to fight.
In the countryside the “middle forces” were predominantly the middle peasants. These independent small holders numbered close to 100 million in the nation as a whole and comprised 20 to 40 percent of the peasants in any given community. Their support was absolutely essential to any realistic program of social change.
In his Christmas speech, Mao outlined a balanced peasant policy very concisely: “First, the demands of the poor peasants and farm laborers must be satisfied; this is the most fundamental task in the land reform. Second, there must be firm unity with the middle peasants and their interest must not be damaged. As long as we grasp these two basic principles, we can certainly carry out our task in the land reform successfully.”
To make sure that these policies were not only understood but also faithfully carried out, Mao further called for a drastic overhaul of the whole Communist Party organization:
In the Party’s local organizations, especially the organizations at the primary level in the countryside, the problem of impurities in the class composition in our ranks and in the style of work is still unsolved. During the 11 years, 1937-1947, the membership of our Party has grown from several tens of thousands to 2,700,000, and this is a very big leap forward. This has made our Party a more powerful party than any in Chinese history. It has enabled us to defeat Japanese imperialism, beat back Chiang Kai-shek’s offensives, lead the Liberated Areas with a population of more than 100 million, and lead a People’s Liberation Army two million strong. But shortcomings have also cropped up. Many landlords, rich peasants, and riffraff have seized the opportunity to sneak into our Party. In the rural areas, they control a number of Party, government and people’s organizations, tyrannically abuse their power, ride roughshod over the people, distort the Party’s policies and alienate these organizations from the masses and prevent the land reform from being thorough. This grave situation sets us the task of educating and re-organizing the ranks of our Party.
Three days after this speech the Draft Agrarian Law which clearly defined the content of the Communist Party’s new agrarian policy was announced to the whole nation. The road ahead was as precisely marked as law and verbal declaration could make it.
But to define a policy and to carry it out in practice in tens of thousands of isolated villages are two different things. This is especially so when that policy contains within itself some elements of conflict. Mao’s two basic principles on the peasant question seemed clear enough; yet they were difficult to carry out in practice because, to a certain extent, they embodied a contradiction. As has been demonstrated in the case of Long Bow Village, poverty in North China was so all-embracing that the demands of the poor peasants and farm laborers could hardly be satisfied by distributing the property of the gentry alone. The expropriation of at least a part of the property of the less onerous exploiters was necessary if the poor peasants were to gain the minimum worldly goods they needed. In many communities even major inroads into the possessions of such middle families could not guarantee fanshen to all the poor. Yet even the slightest inroads invariably threatened the middle peasants if it did not, in fact, actually dispossess them. To protect the interests of the middle peasants and not harm them in any way apparently meant to disappoint many poor peasants and leave them without such essentials as a share in a donkey, a cart, or a plow.
Here was the hard kernel of the problem, the issue around which, once the landlords had been overpowered and stripped, the storm of the land revolution continued to swirl. On the antagonisms thus engendered, commandism, hedonism, and opportunism fed. If this contradiction was not properly resolved, democracy could hardly be expected to flourish. A major clash between poor and middle peasants might well do away with peasant self-rule before it had a chance to establish itself. From such a denouement only the Kuomintang and its American backers stood to gain.
That is why, in the winter of 1948, the Communist Party organized work teams in all the old Liberated Areas and sent them to representative villages to check on the status of the land reform movement. By concentrating strong forces in a few places the Communist Party and the Border Region Government hoped to obtain an accurate estimate of differing conditions and to work out a program of action suited to the peculiar problems of each area. The guiding strategy here was the point-and-area method by which China’s revolutionary leaders approached all serious problems, investigating and solving them first on a small scale in individual communities, then applying the lessons learned on a large scale to whole districts and counties.
In Lucheng County the Communist Party picked 11 communities. Long Bow Village was chosen as one of these not because it was typical but because it had so many special problems; and these problems had created an extremely complicated, difficult, and potentially dangerous political situation. If the knot in Long Bow could be untied, there were few tangles in the whole region that could not be unravelled.
All this, of course, my interpreter Ch’i Yun and I were quite unaware of when we went to Long Bow to see what the land reform movement was all about. We chose Long Bow simply because it was the village closest to the university where we were teaching, a village to which we could easily walk each day and return before dark.
26
To the Village
The only way to know conditions is to
make an investigation of society, to investigate the life and activities of each social class …. To do this, we should first cast our eyes down and not hold our heads high and gaze skywards. If a person does not care, or does not make up his mind, to cast his eyes down, he can never really learn anything about China.
Mao Tse-tung
ON THE March day in 1948 that Ch’i Yun and I first set off for Long Bow, the weather was far from auspicious. Two inches of snow had fallen in the night, completely obliterating the promise of spring which had so stirred me during the New Year celebrations of the previous week. Instead of puffs of white in an azure sky, an unbroken overcast pressed down on all the visible world. So dark was the underlining of this cloud mass that the new snow seemed to have lost all its whiteness and to have absorbed the dark, near-black of the sky. A cold wind gathered chill as it swept the frozen land. Even the heavy wool-lined greatcoat that was my most valuable possession failed to keep me warm, while Ch’i Yun, who wore only a single woolen scarf about her neck to supplement her worn padded suit, actually shivered as she walked.
Ch’i Yun was not quite five feet tall. In order to see her face I had to stoop. Even then I couldn’t see much of it as her head was bent forward to avoid the wind and she had pulled her soft visor cap so far down over her forehead that only her lips, now drawn and grey, were still exposed. She warmed her hands by shoving each of them into the ample sleeve opposite so that her arms formed an unbroken roll against her chest. Head down, elbows pressed against her ribs, body thrust forward into the wind, she was a lumpy bundle of faded blue that might have been woman, child, or walking panda. I almost laughed, but the cold was no laughing matter. It had, however, one advantage. It kept the snow dry so that our feet, clad in cloth-soled shoes, were not immediately soaked through.
Fanshen Page 33
