Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  In such weather one expected the countryside to be deserted, but that day it seemed abnormally desolate. Not one human being, nor for that matter any other living thing, stirred on the surface of the land. The village we were approaching seemed like some ruin long abandoned to the rats, the field mice, and the wolves.

  Nor was our first encounter in the village any more reassuring than the weather. We found no one on the main street. Quick glances through the gates we passed revealed courtyards just as empty. Then suddenly, from a side alley, stepped a young man clad in a dark blue cadre’s jacket. In his hand he held a revolver, cocked and ready to fire.

  “Comrade,” said Ch’i Yun calmly, “We are looking for the district magistrate.” As she spoke she handed the armed man a letter stamped with the great seal of Northern University. Her black eyes, under heavy lashes, liberated from under the visor of her cap at last, looked boldly at him.

  “I’ll take you to him,” said the man, holding his revolver in his right hand while he turned the letter awkwardly around with his left. Then, seeing us both staring at the gun, he added “Pardon the armament. We had some trouble here yesterday.”

  He turned and led us down the street, glancing into each courtyard and alley as he went, obviously on edge, ready for anything. We passed a high brick wall that cut the large grounds of the former Catholic mission off from the street and turned into one of the outer courts of this extensive compound. This court turned out to be the seat of the district government. In a low-ceilinged, earth-floored room two more blue-clad cadres were seated at a low table. As they stood up to greet us, we could see their breath on the air. Both were armed, as was our guide, with German Lugers.

  One of the men who rose from the table was District Magistrate Li. He took our letter of introduction, read it, welcomed us, and then he too apologized for the guns.

  “We don’t usually carry them,” he said. “But conditions here are exceptional. Someone tried to kill one of us yesterday.”

  “Don’t you know who it was?” asked Ch’i Yun.

  “We’ve arrested four suspects, all of them leading cadres in this village. But who knows? The attacker may still be at large. We can’t take any chances.”

  This Li was a short man with a friendly smile and a gift for lively talk. The second man, taller by a head than Li, was Comrade Hou Pao-pei, leader of the land reform work team. Magistrate Li turned over to him our letter with the suggestion that he arrange for us to visit one or two poor peasant families as an introduction to the village.

  “That is what we are doing now,” said Hou, speaking slowly, as if his every word were weighted. “We have been in the village a week and we have done nothing but visit the homes of poor peasants. We have already found a number of basic elements. If you’d like to talk to some of them, I can arrange it.”

  By “basic element” Hou meant an honest-to-goodness poor peasant.

  Ch’i Yun and I were as anxious to meet some real poor peasants as Comrade Hou was to introduce us to them, even though under the circumstances I felt very much like a visitor at a gallery being led to a hall of living exhibits.

  Team leader Hou strode ahead of us out the door and through the compound gate to the street. He did not bother to draw his gun as he went, nor did he glance nervously around as had our first guide. Although apparently aware of great danger, he faced it stoically. He was obviously not a man to panic easily.

  We turned southward down the main street and then eastward up a narrow lane. It lay so deep in shadow that I wondered for a moment if night had fallen.

  Comrade Hou led us directly to a mud hut that was miserable, dark, almost bare of possessions. Its furnishings consisted of one tall wooden cabinet set against the wall, a low k’ang, and a mud-brick stove. The only utensils in sight were one large earthen jar, three cracked bowls, and one round-bottomed iron pot. This was the dwelling place and these the worldly goods of the poor peasant, Wang Wen-ping.

  Inside the hut the still air was as cold as the north wind that blew down the open alley outside. Wang’s iron pot sat on the stove, but there was no fire burning there, nor was there anywhere in sight any fuel from which a fire could be made. That fire was not a complete stranger to this dwelling was indicated by the paper on the single window. This had not been renewed for many years and had been stained dark brown by smoke. In two or three places the paper was badly torn, but these breaks did not add chill to the interior because there was no door across the entrance in any case. Once our eyes got used to the darkness we saw also that all four walls and the wattled ceiling overhead were black with layered creosote.

  On entering this hut our nostrils were assailed by an indescribable odor—organic, sharp, yet not foul. This was an odor that we were to become familiar with as time went on, the odor of raw garlic from the throats of the occupants of the house. When one came close enough to catch the air that one of the garlic eaters had just exhaled, the stench was overwhelming, stinging, rank, but diffused as it was in this cold room, it hung like some memory of decay and puzzled us both.

  We sat down on the edge of the k’ang. Wang’s wife huddled into a corner and covered herself with the only ragged quilt that the family possessed. Wang himself squatted by the doorway, his back to the wall opposite us, and used the sill as a convenient obstacle against which to knock his pipe to remove the ashes. This pipe he constantly filled, lit, puffed, and filled again, thus infusing into the garlic-tainted air an acrid tinge of tobacco smoke.

  Wang’s broad face was heavily accented by two full eyebrows and a ragged mustache. His skin was rendered abnormally dark by a patina of grime that nothing short of an afternoon in the bathhouse at Changchih could remove. His clothes, hanging loose as a lizard’s skin over his gaunt frame, were patched at the arms and worn through in many places so that they revealed, as through a lattice, the soiled cotton padding beneath. This padding had been so mauled and compacted by years of wear that it hardly seemed capable of insulating him any longer from the cold. Yet he appeared to be quite comfortable as he squatted in front of us.

  The room was so gloomy that it was hard even to make out the features of Mother Wang. I recall only a few wisps of greying hair, a toothless grin, heavy lines on a leathery face, and a black tunic spotted with grease.

  Slowly, haltingly, in response to persistent questioning, Old Wang began to tell Ch’i Yun about his life, and she relayed everything he told her to me.

  Wang and his wife had once owned land in Long Bow but lost it to a landlord through default on a small debt. Famine drove them from the village and they wandered many years as beggars. When they finally came home after the war, they brought with them enough money to buy half an acre and received two and a half more as their share of the “fruits,” but since they owned no draft animal and since Wang could no longer work hard, life was still very difficult for them.

  “I belong to a mutual-aid team,” the old peasant said dolefully. “But it seems as if I am always working for others and they never work for me. There are four poor families in the group, and all the work for soldiers’ dependents is done by the four of us. We get no return for that.

  “As for the distribution, I didn’t get much. The cadres said I was an obstinate old man and didn’t give me any part of an ox or a donkey. Others got them all right. I didn’t even get a cart. They didn’t even let me buy a chest that I liked. It was given to someone else. But the cadres got what they wanted.”

  “Didn’t you get anything useful?” Ch’i Yun asked.

  “I did get a long table, a little wooden box, an old pair of trousers, the felt mat on the k’ang, and two ragged suits for the boy.”

  “What about the wooden cabinet?” asked Ch’i Yun, pointing to the tall chest.

  “Oh no, that is not mine. That belongs to the neighbors. They needed room for their loom and had to get it out of the way.”

  “Didn’t you get a house? What about this house?”

  “This is the house I used to live in. It was mine
years ago. I lost it when I lost the land. Now I have it back again,” said Wang without the slightest trace of enthusiasm.

  “What do you think about your class? Do you think you are still a poor peasant?”

  “I think I have really fanshened,” said Wang, “because now I have three and a half acres, a house, food to eat, no debts. But still I am a poor peasant. Everybody says I am poor because I have no draft animal. I have to pay for plowing and when I grind grain I have to push the stone around by myself. My land is poor. None of the land around here is any good. Also I am old. I have no capital for handicraft production though the old lady does do some spinning. But she can only spin two ounces a day. If she does any more her arms ache. For a catty of thread she can get a catty and a half of cotton at the co-op. But that’s a poor rate.”

  Old Wang blamed many of these difficulties on the bad cadres and suggested that all the poor peasants should organize strongly together to protect themselves, “because there may still be some bad elements in the village.”

  Just as we were about to take our leave a second peasant pushed his way through the door. He was in a loquacious mood and extremely anxious to contact the foreigner. A sprightly man of 54, well-muscled and energetic, he sported a combed and clipped grey beard that gave his face the distinguished look of some gentleman in a London club. To add to this effect, his padded pants were made of white undyed homespun in a village where most men wore dark blue or black. This was actually a sign of poverty, an indication that he could not afford dye, but to me the white recalled the cricket club affluence of the colonialists in Shanghai and Hong Kong. His jacket was light blue and very clean. On his head he wore a felt skull cap. Instead of the usual wood and brass tobacco pipe, he carried in his hand a pipe made of silver.

  This peasant introduced himself. His name, he said, was Shen Ch’uan-te and he was a “basic element.” Then he launched into a rambling story that seemed to have no end. There was no need to ask him questions, for the words poured from his lips in a torrent.

  The hardships of his early life closely paralleled those suffered by Old Wang but he did not dwell on them. What he wanted to tell us had to do with events that followed the liberation of the village after the Japanese occupation. The new cadres, he swore, were worse than the old. He listed them all in order of merit, beginning with Hsin-fa, the secretary of the branch, who was tolerable, and ending with Wen-te, the captain of the police, and Hung-er, the captain of the militia, who were both tyrants.

  Exactly what the cadres had done to our informant was not clear. He spoke up, he said, and they called him an agent. Then they denied him his share of the “fruits of struggle.” Almost in the same breath he boasted that he had received three acres of land, some grain, and some clothes. All he had ever done to arouse the cadre’s wrath was to go to Horse Square to pray in the Church there. For that they clapped an agent’s cap on his head. Though he still went to meetings, he did not dare say anything and only sat in a dark corner afraid.

  “Mao Tse-tung,” said Shen, “should not be like this!”

  This poor peasant with the silver pipe and the white cotton pants would have kept us the rest of the day and half the night as well if we had been able to sit and hear him out. Unfortunately, we could not do so. We had to get back to Kao Settlement before dark and so broke off the interview and took our leave of Wang and Shen while the latter was still detailing the grievances so long pent up in his breast.

  As we walked back across the flat at nightfall I asked Ch’i Yun what she thought of the men we had met.

  “Old Wang seemed honest enough to me,” Ch’i said. “But he doesn’t understand much. As for that Shen, he likes to blow the cow [boast]. I don’t believe half of what he said.”

  “One thing is certain,” she added after taking a few quick steps in silence. “There are plenty of problems in that village.”

  ***********

  One immediate problem overshadowed all others. This was the need to investigate the attempt to murder a work team member which had occurred the day before.

  Undisputed facts about the attempt were few. They had been summarized for us by the Team Leader Hou as follows:

  Chang Ch’uer, the youngest member of the team, was returning to the District Office from Shen Ch’uan-te’s home after dark when an unknown assailant leaped on his back, pulled him to the ground, choked him into unconsciousness, and dragged him toward a nearby well. Hu Hsueh-chen, the leader of the Women’s Association, heard Ch’uer cry out. She jumped up from her k’ang and ran out into the street, but by the time she got there Ch’uer’s assailant was gone. She found the young cadre lying gagged and senseless a few feet from the deep well. Hu barely had time to take a close look at what she assumed to be a corpse before her Catholic neighbors, Shen Ch’uan-te and Li Ho-jen, came out of their homes. These two immediately ran for help in the direction of the District Office. They returned with several work team cadres, put Ch’uer’s limp body on a stretcher, and carried him off to the hospital in Lucheng. There the county’s sole doctor found him badly bruised and suffering from shock due to partial suffocation but not seriously hurt. He was expected to live, perhaps even to return to work within a few days.

  Who could have made this attack? Both Shen and Li, the peasants who had arrived so promptly on the scene, insisted that Yu-lai and his son Wen-te must be responsible. Were they not former bandits? Had they not made threats against the whole village? Surely none but these two could have attempted a deed so foul. Of course, it was admitted, these two might not have done it themselves. They might have persuaded Vice-Chairman Hsi-yu or Militia Captain Hung-er to carry out their plans. They were all in the same clique, after all, but whether or not they had done it with their own hands, they were surely behind the crime.

  This opinion was shared by a large number of people. Wherever the cadres of the work team asked, they got the same answer—Yu-lai. And so, on that same night Yu-lai, his son Wen-te, and the two village leaders most closely associated with the father-and-son pair were arrested and taken to jail.

  Faced with what appeared to be a flagrant counter-revolutionary act, Team Leader Hou made some rapid-fire decisions. He distributed side arms to all his team. He asked them to sleep and eat together in the District Office, and he arranged for them to drop all other work until they succeeded in tracking down enough evidence to convict the arrested men.

  Hou followed these steps with a drastic reorganization of the village administration. All village cadres, both Party and non-Party, were suspended. All mass organizations such as the Peasants’ Association and the Women’s Association were dissolved. All members of the Communist Party branch were called into secret session for a critical review of their past work. This effectively removed them from all normal activity and responsibility.

  These moves left the village without a government, without any village-wide organizations, and without any guidance from the Party branch which, for better or worse, had decided upon and led every action since midwinter of 1946.

  The only group in a position to fill the vacuum thus created was the work team itself. Of necessity, Team Leader Hou and his assistants had to assume the powers of the village government and take responsibility for all day-to-day affairs; all this, of course, in addition to the investigation and reorganization of the fanshen situation for which they had originally come and the detective work required by a serious crime.

  The latter task continued to absorb the attention of the entire village. Morning, noon, and night the peasants met in gatherings large and small to assemble concrete evidence, to review the circumstances surrounding the mysterious assault, and to reassure one another that counter-revolution could never challenge their new power. Many bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence supported the prevailing opinion that Yu-lai and Wen-te must be responsible for the crime. Li Ho-jen carefully examined the towel that he had removed from Ch’uer’s mouth and found that it was exactly the same as six other towels found in Yu-lai’s home.
Wen-te’s wife, Hsien-e, confirmed the identity of the towels. Shen Ch’uan-te said that Yu-lai and his notorious son had been seen plotting together near the scene of the crime only a few hours before it took place. He even claimed that he had heard one of them say, “Never mind, as long as I am cadre, we can always take revenge.” None of this information, however, could be called conclusive. Most of it was offered by people who had reason to hate the men they implicated. It would not make very convincing evidence in the County Court. Everyone knew, for instance, that almost all the towels in the village came from the same supplier, a Hantan cooperative that embroidered “Good Morning” in English on its wares.

  On March 11, the Party Bureau of the Taihang Subregion ordered Team Leader Hou to turn the investigation over to the police department of Lucheng County, where it belonged, and put his team back to work on the land reform problems which they had come to solve. This Hou did, but with a heavy heart. He felt that he had failed in a very important job and that the days spent on the abortive investigation had been days completely wasted. The other team members shared Hou’s frustration, but Ch’i Yun and I, who walked the long mile to Long Bow each day as observers, felt differently. For us, each visit had widened our acquaintance with the village, had introduced us to new and colorful inhabitants, and most important of all, had familiarized us with the work team in whose hands the destiny of the community now lay.