Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  “Yes, when she thought she was safe.”

  “But this new donkey is old and torn,” protested Wang, her lover, rushing to her defense.

  At this all the women burst out laughing.

  “How can a donkey be torn?” they asked.

  This upset Old Wang very much.

  “Of course a donkey can be torn,” he said. “Why do you want to make out that the donkey is sound when he is really falling apart?”

  His words fell on deaf ears. The peasants knew that Old Wang would defend his beloved to the end. They did not deign to argue the case. Instead they held a ke ts’ao and there decided that the widow was a rich peasant.

  ***********

  The discovery of one rich peasant still in possession of some wealth was small solace to the members of the Provisional League. In the course of their investigations they had unearthed a total of 174 families who had been poor peasants during the base period, only 72 of whom had as yet fanshened. This meant that there were over 100 families in the village who still faced great difficulty in making a living. The problem was not primarily a shortage of land, for there was enough land to give every man, woman, and child almost a full acre. The problem was the shortage of livestock, carts, implements, housing, and manpower. For even though most of the draft animals had already been shared among four or more families each, there were still dozens of households that did not even own one leg of a donkey, not to mention a spoke in the wheel of a cart. There were also large numbers of widows and old people who had no one to help them in the fields. How to make middle peasants of all these people was the problem that faced the Provisional Poor and Hired Peasants’ League. On the face of it, the problem seemed insoluble.

  The work team had no more idea than the peasants of what to do about this discrepancy, but proposed, as a first step, that the Provisional League be enlarged to include all honest poor peasants. At the same time the work team launched an examination of the village accounts in order to determine where all the “fruits” had gone. This idea came from a newspaper story that described just such an “accounts examination” in another village. Perhaps in that way enough property could be unearthed to fill some of the gaping holes. In the absence of landlords and rich peasants this examination tended to focus attention on the cadres as possible “objects of struggle.”

  The enlargement of the Provisional League proved to be a slow process. The standards used for classing a family were, by their nature, objective. One had only to look at the per capita holdings and measure the proportion of the family income derived from exploitation to arrive at a decision. But the standards for deciding who should or should not be members of the League included the words “honest” and “hardworking.” About such concepts there was plenty of room for argument.

  Some of the women, and especially Old Lady Wang, were sticklers for moral purity.* They had vetoed Li Hsin-ai because she had eloped and they had vetoed Hsiao Lao-chang, a life-long laborer, because he lived with a widow as if she were his wife. Now in the interest of expanded membership the women finally decided to offer Hsiao a big concession. If he would only break with the widow, he could join the Provisional League. A message was sent to him to that effect.

  Old Hsiao turned the tables on them. He was too honest to promise to do better, which was the attitude that many others took. He said instead, “Unless I can marry the woman, I’ll never join the League. What’s the use of your old League if it can’t help me get what is good for me?”

  For this alone they might not have rejected Hsiao, but he went on to attack all the rest of the membership.

  “Everyone’s face has a smudge on it,” he said. “All pots are black; in and out of the League it makes no difference. Help me marry the widow and I’ll join up with you.”

  “How can we possibly do that?” they asked one another.

  They took it for granted that Hsiao Lao-chang must remain a widower and his paramour, Tzu-ming, a widow. The fact that the lovers were fond of each other, faithful to each other, and wanted to marry had nothing to do with the case. By tradition a wife was supposed to remain loyal to her dead husband until her own demise. That this was impossible for most people made no difference. A widow who married brought disgrace on her husband’s whole family and lost all claim to her children into the bargain. All children were considered to be the heirs of the male parent alone. On them devolved the duty of caring for ancestral tablets and maintaining the family line. Their mother was only a convenience, a chattel, a servant brought in to provide male heirs. If she chose to leave, she left alone and in disgrace. That is why, instead of second marriages, there were so many illicit liaisons between widows and bachelors in Long Bow.

  Only if the male partner agreed to take the woman’s married name did the situation change. Such a couple were allowed to marry because the alliance constituted no threat to the in-laws, gave the husband no right to the children, and posed no threat to the ancestral tablets. There were several such matches in Long Bow. One of them was the alliance entered into by Chin-chu, the irascible, oft-cuckolded shepherd whose difficulties with Militiaman Shen Yu-hsing have already been described.

  But poor Chin-chu was long denied membership in the Provisional Poor Peasants’ League even though legally wed. Men regarded the surrender of his family name as a crack in the solid front of male supremacy, a crack that threatened the status of all males. Women looked down on him for “dancing to his wife’s tune.” “If she says a few sweet words to him, he forgets his own birthday,” they gossiped. They also disliked his wife. Rumor had it that she frequented market-day fairs in order to solicit business as a prostitute. And she not only slept with strangers for money, she regaled them with stories. Anything that happened in Long Bow would sooner or later be relayed by her to villages far and wide.

  Men like Lao-pao, who mistreated their wives, men like T’ao-yuan, who had a reputation as rascals, all notorious former puppets and their relatives were also barred from the League. The only people about whom questions formerly had been raised but who were now admitted with alacrity were those dissident Catholics who had once been called agents. Most of them lived in the southwest corner. A few had been included in the League from the very beginning. They saw to it that the rest were invited.

  As a result of exclusion for the above-mentioned reasons, almost half of the poor peasants in the village were not invited to join the Provisional Poor and Hired Peasants’ League. A full month after the work team arrived, nothing lasting could be said to have been accomplished in this direction.

  The meetings set up to examine the village accounts also bogged down. Comrade Hsu, the intellectual from the University, undertook to head up this work because he had a good head for figures. He selected a committee of poor peasants to help him. Among them was Shen Ch’uan-te, the talkative Catholic whom Ch’i Yun and I had interviewed on our first day in Long Bow. Shen and the others selected by Hsu were convinced that the village cadres had misappropriated vast quantities of “fruits,” but all their efforts to gather facts bogged down in confusion. They went at the problem like a board of judges. They called one cadre after another and bombarded each with questions. When the answers led to contradictions or indicated that someone else was responsible they threatened their witnesses with dire punishment, swore at them, and put them under house arrest. Cheng-k’uan, former head of the Peasants’ Association, became so distraught by this treatment and by his inability to provide the committee with satisfactory answers that he tried to commit suicide by jumping in the well behind his house. Fortunately, he was discovered before he took the plunge.

  When it became clear that the local cadres could not answer all questions concerning the fanshen accounts, the committee decided to interrogate those who had already left for work in the district and the county. Kuei-ts’ai, former revolutionary vice-head of the village, came home to visit his wife and was detained. T’ien-ming, former public security officer and founder of the Party Branch, returned to Long Bow for a
production meeting of the Fifth District and was also detained. Fu-yuan, former village head, who was working on a land reform team in another village, was ordered home by mail. All were asked to stay in one courtyard until their interrogation was completed.

  But neither Kuei-ts’ai nor Fu-yuan nor T’ien-ming helped clear up the accounts. Although they were able to answer many questions, they would admit to no large amount of graft and gave reasonable explanations for the disappearance of such valuables as the church candlesticks. Old Shen took the lead in suggesting that they go to the ex-landlords for information concerning the wealth that had been taken from their homes. Comrade Hsu supported him but Team Leader Hou recognized the move for what it was—an attempt to convict revolutionary cadres with information solicited from their class enemies. Hou called in both Hsu and Shen and sharply repri manded them. Such a move could only open wide the door to chaos. It would give the landlords a heaven-sent opportunity to split the peasants’ ranks with false charges.

  Old Shen was stunned by the criticism. He insisted that his only aim had been to get at the facts and that he had completely forgotten how the landlords had falsely fingered people in the past. But the more he denied it, the more the suspicion took root and grew that he was not entirely innocent in the affair. Crestfallen, he took a back seat on the committee.

  With the impasse at the accounts examination, the work of the Long Bow team reached a stalemate on all fronts. The morale of the team members, including that of the intellectuals from the University, dropped sharply and so did that of the villagers.

  Many people began to suspect, though no one said it openly, that there simply was no “oil,” either in the form of surplus property remaining in the hands of the prosperous or in the form of misappropriated “fruits” in the hands of the leading cadres. Continued fanshen on any significant scale was therefore out of the question. Meetings were still held to enlarge the Provisional League and to survey cases of extreme hardship resulting from the depletion of grain stocks as spring approached, but they were poorly attended and indifferently conducted. Nobody seemed to know what was wrong or what to do.

  The Party Secretary of the Third Administrative District of the Taihang Subregion arrived unexpectedly in the midst of this stalemate. I was favorably impressed by the man who wore that exalted title. Secretary Wang was obviously well educated, yet he had none of the arrogance so typical of many Chinese intellectuals and so amply demonstrated by Comrade Hsu. Nor did he put on any of the airs of the old-style Chinese bureaucrats. He projected instead the warm extroversion of a hard-working peasant. He wore a faded blue-grey cotton jacket, arrived in the village on foot, and departed on foot when his work was done. He made it easy for the team cadres to tell him their problems because he listened patiently and questioned calmly. As he listened his broad face took on a serious but never severe demeanor; he nodded often but did not interrupt. He smiled often, spoke slowly, and emphasized his meaning with expressive motions of his hands.

  All morning and most of the afternoon he listened. In the evening he suggested what amounted to a completely new approach. He advised the team to drop the accounts examination meeting immediately. It was not going well, he said, because it was premature. The Poor and Hired Peasants’ League had not been consolidated, there was no mass base, no democratic platform from which to examine the past work of the cadres. To set up an accounts examination off in one corner could never bring good results. Only the active participation of the whole village could ever straighten out the record of the past. This could become possible only when the people became well organized and themselves took the work in hand as a major task. Nor were the accounts the heart of the problem; they were only one aspect of the old cadres’ life and work. At the proper time the whole of the cadres’ existence, their “style of work,” their willingness to serve, their outlook, their honesty, everything—not just how many items of property they received—must be examined.

  Secretary Wang also advised greatly intensified efforts to enlarge the Provisional League. He estimated that not more than 20 poor peasant families would be found unfit to join. All the rest should be in—former collaborators, cadres’ relatives, immoral widows and all. He pointed out that it was the conditions of the past, the buy-and-sell marriages, the ban on divorce, the restriction against the remarriage of widows that made illicit sex relations common throughout rural China. To set high standards in this regard would not be realistic. Those peasants who continued to object to others on moral grounds should be convinced that the strength of the whole poor peasant community was needed to carry through reform and that in most cases the behavior that shocked them was not an individual matter but the inevitable result of the society in which they were all born.

  “What must be stressed is class,” said Secretary Wang. “The class origin of people and nothing else. Only on the basis of the growth of class consciousness can any of the problems be solved. This includes the religious problem. By uniting on a class basis the most diverse religious elements can be brought together.”

  This brought Secretary Wang to the question of the counter-revolutionary suspects, most of whom were Catholics. Here also he advised leniency. As long as the people involved were poor peasants they could be won over, he said. But they could never be won over if they were isolated and discriminated against; they had to be drawn into full participation politically, economically, and socially. In order to make a dramatic progress on this question he suggested that the work team send for Chin-ming, the young man who had fled in 1946 when charged with aiding Father Sun. If Chin-ming agreed to return home, he should be given a full complement of land, housing, and implements. This would dispel the fears that still lingered in the minds of so many other Catholics and would immensely strengthen the League.

  Finally, Secretary Wang suggested that the dissolution of all the old organizations and the suspension of all the old cadres as if they were all bad, corrupt, or even class enemies, was a mistake. He felt certain that Long Bow Village would turn out to be, not a Type III but a Type II community, a place where much good work had been done and most of the cadres were basically sound politically. If this proved to be so then the work team was on the wrong track entirely. The whole course of its work would have to be re-examined.

  Comrade Hou immediately carried into practice Secretary Wang’s three main suggestions. Hsu’s Accounts Examination Committee was dissolved. The cadres held under house arrest were released and allowed to return to work, but only after each had appeared before the Provisional League and promised to heed any call for future questioning. The new lenient standards for League membership were explained to the existing League groups and within a few days more than 100 families were admitted. The new members included Li Hsin-ai, the girl who had eloped; Lao-pao, the wife beater; and Wang T’ao-yuan, the former dope peddler. Even Kuo Fu-kuei, village head under the puppet regime and the most hated collaborator in Long Bow, was accepted. In addition one of Hou Chin-ming’s cousins was dispatched on foot to Hungtung to explain the new situation to that involuntary exile.

  It was obvious to everyone that a new wind was blowing.

  As if to emphasize the change a whole platoon of students from Kao Settlement suddenly appeared the next day and replaced all the slogans on the village walls. The new slogans, which they painted in huge white characters, dealt more directly with land reform and mentioned the Civil War less. A random sampling translated for me by Ch’i Yun read:

  “All Power to the Peasant Congress”

  “The Communist Party Is the People’s Hired Laborer”

  “Level the Tops, Fill the Holes, Equalize Good Land and Bad”

  “Criticize and Correct the Cadres’ Mistakes”

  “Elect Good Cadres, Remove Bad Ones”

  “Protect and Develop Commerce and Industry”

  “Establish a Democratic, Free, Peaceful and Prosperous New China”

  “Graft and Corruption Is Forbidden. Seized Fruits Must be Returned”
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br />   On one wing of the village school the slogan writers painted a line of characters which said, “Raise Our Cultural Level, Strengthen Our Political Consciousness.” On the other was blazoned, “Combine Teaching, Learning, and Labor.”

  34

  Drama in the Fields

  Since our art and literature are basically intended for the workers, peasants, and soldiers, popularization means extending art and literature among these people, while elevation means raising their level of artistic and literary appreciation. What should we popularize among them? The stuff that is needed and can readily be accepted by the feudal landlord class? Or that which is needed and can readily be accepted by the bourgeoisie? Or that which is needed and can readily be accepted by the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia? No, none of these will do. We must popularize what is needed and can readily be accepted by the workers, peasants, and soldiers themselves.

  Mao Tse-tung

  TOWARD THE END of March, Ch’i Yun and I received permission to move to the village to live. Thereafter, instead of staying at the University to teach and visiting Long Bow daily, we stayed in Long Bow and visited the University two or three times a week for classes.

  The move to the village made us a more integral part of its life. By spending our leisure as well as our working hours there, we soon became much more widely acquainted and genuinely accepted than before. Although for our own safety we were not allowed to board out in peasant homes, the quarters assigned to us were in no way barred to the public. We each had a room in the old rectory behind the Church. Peasants came and went there as freely as they did in their own courtyards. Ch’i Yun soon became the trusted confidante of many poor peasant women, and I established a reputation as “King of the Children.”

  This reputation came about because, besides roughhousing with the youngsters, an activity which most Chinese never indulged in, I fixed all their school slates so that the wooden frames did not come apart at the corners. The trick was to cut strips of metal from old tin cans and tack them across the corners of each frame. Someone else might have done this long before if there had been any tin cans lying about, but tin cans were about as scarce in those mountains as river bottom land. I had some old ones left over from my UNRRA rations and so set up shop. As a result, the children came to me to solve all kinds of problems, to play games, and to relay exciting news.