One morning three ragged little girls, black eyes shining, long braids dancing in the wind behind them, ran up to take me by the hand. They half dragged, half pushed me to the eastern edge of the village shouting, “The play has come.” Sure enough, there in the middle of a large field a stage was rising, a stage of long pine poles bound together with rice straw rope and overlaid with boards.
This mushroom-like apparition turned out to be the creation of the Lucheng County Drama Corps, now on tour. The corps was composed of 50 members, most of whom had been poor professional actors until they received land in the great distribution of 1946. Now they worked their land half the year and gave plays the other half—from harvest time in the fall until spring planting came around again. They received no pay for their work but did get millet tickets from the county government for room and board. They carried on because they enjoyed acting and wanted to tell the story of the Revolution to as many peasants as possible. They moved to a new village each day and performed every afternoon and evening. They ate in village homes, as we did, and lodged with their mealtime hosts. Props, travel expenses, and incidentals were all paid for by the county government. Performances were free.
In contrast to the traditional Chinese opera, which was performed on a bare stage, this traveling troupe went in for realism. They provided a curtain, props, colorful scenery, and sound effects that included singing birds, croaking frogs, chirping crickets, pattering rain, and howling wind. These radical innovations, even though they sometimes shattered the illusion of reality which it was their purpose to create, were extremely popular. So was the modern content of the plays. People travelled for miles to see the performances and often followed the company through two or three villages.
With this exciting attraction in town for the day, all other activities ceased. Three one-act presentations in the afternoon followed by a full-length modern opera in the evening kept both cadres and people from whatever work had been planned.
The afternoon plays were comedies. In the first one a young Liberation Army soldier, home on leave, pretended to be a deserter. This so upset his wife that she tried to commit suicide. Only after the neighbors arrived to honor her husband’s battlefront heroism with a large red carnation did she realize that he had been fooling her in order to test her revolutionary ardor. The second play portrayed an army cook who overslept and did not have time to steam the bread which was his unit’s staple fare. Calamity was averted by an old peasant woman who stayed up all night to prepare the much-needed rations.
In the interval between plays a troupe of brightly-costumed boys and girls performed lively k’uai bar or singing rhymes spoken to the accompaniment of bamboo claques. These rhymes dramatized themes of current interest such as the Draft Agrarian Law, the production drive, and the impending Party purification. All this was only a buildup however, for the evening’s pièce de rèsistance—a four-hour-long modern opera entitled “Red Leaf River.”
As night fell thousands of peasants moved onto the level ground before the stage, each one carrying a brick or a stool to sit on. By the time the curtain rose, the whole area was solidly packed with people sitting knee to back and shoulder to shoulder in animated yet orderly expectation.
“Red Leaf River,” the name of a village as well as a stream, told the story of Old Wang and his neighbors, poor peasants who had gone to the mountains to reclaim waste land just as Li Lao-szu of. Long Bow had done. After years of root grubbing and terrace building, they created a habitable settlement only to learn that their wild mountain was now claimed by a landlord. He demanded heavy rents and feudal exactions but very cleverly allowed his agent to pressure the tenants for payment while he himself played the charitable gentleman. This landlord wore a long, fleece-lined gown, smoked a water pipe, washed his mouth out with boiled water which he spat on the floor to settle the dust. Whenever anyone offered him a cup of tea he carefully wiped off the rim that his lips were about to touch. After eating his fill of delicacies he picked his teeth with grotesque disregard for the sensibilities of others and belched contentedly. Each of these gestures created a commotion in the audience, for the peasants recognized in this man an uncanny likeness to Long Bow’s own Li Tung-sheng.
Old Wang, desperately in debt, thought if he could only get past the agent and speak to the landlord, he might win some relief. He shed these illusions quickly enough when the landlord raped his daughter-in-law, outlawed his son for throwing a rock through the mansion window, and destroyed Wang’s hut. The grief-stricken daughter-in-law committed suicide. Wang’s son ran further into the mountains to join the Red partisans. Old Wang himself, now a landless beggar, stoically waited for the wheel of fortune to turn.
As the tragedy of this poor peasant’s family unfolded, the women around me wept openly and unashamedly. On every side, as I turned to look, tears were coursing down their faces. No one sobbed, no one cried out, but all wept together in silence. The agony on the stage seemed to have unlocked a thousand painful memories, a bottomless reservoir of suffering that no one could control. It was a scene not easily forgotten—a makeshift stage of pine poles set under an enormous vaulted sky, a night so dark that even the brightest stars seemed faint and far away, and below the stars nothing but utter blackness, not a flicker of flame visible anywhere except on the stage. There a single kerosene lamp cast a pale yellow glow on actors and scenery alike. It was as if the attention of the whole universe were focused on that small space. And, in the very center, a young girl, her song more a wail, more a sob than a song, spread her arms wide in despair and asked, “Why? Why? Why?”
As that cry carried out across the field, the women, huddled one against the other in their dark padded jackets, shuddered as if stirred by a gust of wind, and something like a sigh moved in a wave from the front to the back of the multitude.
The girl flung herself into Red Leaf River. Abruptly the music stopped. The silence on the stage was broken only by the chirping of a cricket. At that moment I became aware of a new quality in the reaction of the audience. Men were weeping, and I along with them.
The second act brought a complete change of mood and a theme so up to date that one wondered how the company had found the time to write and stage it. Three years had passed since the suicide. The Liberation Army had come to Red Leaf River. An attempt at land reform had already been made, but the landlord was still alive, still belching contentedly, and still in control of the village. He talked now in a very progressive vein, praised Mao Tse-tung, offered to give up four acres, and fraternized openly with the village head, an opportunist who considered the landlord to be a very enlightened man.
Into the plot at this point walked a county cadre of poor peasant origin. His mission was to organize a Poor and Hired Peasants’ League. When he asked the landless people if they had any problems, they all said, “No.”
This negative response caused uproarious laughter in the audience. “That’s the way we treated you when you first arrived,” said the peasants sitting around us.
In time the county cadre gained the people’s confidence, organized a strong League, exposed the landlord’s machinations, and took the lead in expropriating his holdings. The second act reached its climax at a rousing mass meeting where a group of angry peasants led by Old Wang’s son, rushed forward to beat the landlord. He would have been killed on the spot but for the cadre who stopped the attack and suggested that the tyrant be turned over to the People’s Court. A grand, hope-filled finale, in which the entire cast burst into a song of joy for the future, ended the performance.
As the crowd broke up, I listened to the excited comment of the people. They were unanimous in proclaiming the second part of the play more to their liking than the first, although, from a dramatic point of view, the first part seemed to me undoubtedly superior. In fact we had seen two plays, with the second and positive one falling far behind the earlier tragedy in emotional appeal. But the people did not enjoy the tragedy. The pain it recreated was too acute, too close to their own
bitter lives of such a short time ago. They preferred the optimistic final half, the battle and the victory. The only fault they found with the final part was that no one beat the landlord. He was turned over to the People’s Court instead of punished on the spot as the “son-of-a-turtle” deserved.
PART IV
Who Will Educate the Educators?
Why are there such bad things in the splendid organization of our Party? The reason, I think, is very simple. It is that our Party is not a Party that has fallen from the heavens; it is a Party that has grown out of the existing Chinese society. Although in general our Party members are relatively the best Chinese men and women, the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat, they come, however, from every stratum of Chinese society and are still living in this society which is replete with the influences of the exploiters—selfishness, intrigues, bureaucracy and every kind of filthy thing.... Is it anything strange that there are muddy stains on a person who crawls out of the mud and who constantly dabbles in the mud?
Liu Shao-ch’i
35
Confrontation at the Gate
In areas of the first and second category feudal forces have in general been eliminated and the dissatisfaction of the peasants is focused on a group of Party members and cadres who utilize their political position to commit evil deeds and usurp the fruits of agrarian reform. Hence the work of adjusting land ownership in such areas must be combined with the work of reorganizing and purifiying the ranks of the Party. At times it is even necessary to begin the reorganization and purification of the ranks of the Party before the initiative of the masses can be aroused.
Directive of the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party,
February 22. 1948
ON APRIL 10, 1948, under a morning sky that stretched grey and unbroken from horizon to horizon, a group of delegates elected by the poor and hired peasants gathered in Long Bow’s gully-like main street. They had come together to launch the campaign for the reorganization and purification of the ranks of the Communist Party that had so long been promised by the work team.
Sensing the importance of this campaign, a large part of the population of the village turned out to give moral support. As the crowd milled about, a conclave of middle peasants, hastily called together, elected three of their number to join the delegation. Later, amidst a welter of excited talk, laughter, and cheers, the representatives of both classes formed loose ranks and began to march to the meeting place.
Chou Cheng-fu, having been rejected as a delegate, now characteristically sought the limelight. He fell in beside the marching delegates and began to shout slogans. “Support our representatives!” “Work hard for the Poor and Hired Peasants!” “Let the Party members become good hired hands!” These words, chosen by Chou in the enthusiasm of the moment, were taken up not only by the marchers themselves but by many in the crowd that still filled the street.
The delegates, some 30 in number, and carrying along in their wake an equal number of laughing, shouting people, not all of whom were children, passed through the outer court which housed the district office, circled the brick rectory that extended eastward from the massive rear wall of the church itself, and went on to a third courtyard where a long barracks-like building that had once housed the mission school provided an austere meeting place. This was a narrow room some 40 feet in length, paved in undulating grey brick and completely open to the outside air since all five of the windows, frames and all, had long since been removed for firewood. In this room rows of benches had been placed. Some of these were already occupied by the 26 Party members whose fate was now to be decided.* They all stood up at their places and warmly welcomed the new arrivals. As the delegates, with much bustle and confusion, settled on the remaining seats, that variegated crowd of curious children and adults which had followed them through the gate crowded the open apertures in the south wall. Throughout the proceedings which followed, these onlookers engaged in a continuous tumult as they shoved and pushed one another for a better view and added their own gratuitous comments to those of the official participants.
Ch’i Yun and I, along with several members of the work team who had been on the street to watch the procession, squeezed into the room behind the peasant delegates and managed to sandwich our bodies into the meager spaces still available.
We had no sooner settled into place than all the people in the room rose to their feet and bowed their heads three times before a large poster-style portrait of Chairman Mao. This traditional chu kung which once served to honor the Emperor, later the memory of Sun Yat-sen, and now at Party meetings the ideas of the Revolution itself as exemplified by the Party Chairman, was followed by a very unexpected event. Suddenly the Communists began to sing. Standing erect in their places they launched, without warning, into what seemed to be some poorly remembered Christian hymn. One or two of the comrades sang loudly, a dozen more somewhat hesitantly, while the remainder added a note only now and then. The various sounds produced in this fashion did not fall into any one key nor did they congeal into any easily recognizable tune. Nevertheless, after a few bars of this strange and halting disharmony, I realized that they were singing the Internationale and that only Ts’ai-yuan, who had spent eight years in the Eighth Route Army, and Hou Pao-pei, leader of the work team, knew both the words and the tune. The rest of the members of the branch chimed in as best they could, now singing a few words, now waiting for Hou and Ts’ai to give them the lead, until at last they came to the finale, which, because it was more familiar to all, rang out loud and clear. Those last words, “The International Party shall be the human race,” might well have shaken the windows in their frames had there been windows or frames left in the wall.
The song, despite the grave defects of rendition, made a powerful impression upon us all. It revealed in an unexpected and dramatic way the existence, hitherto only conjectured, of a strong, organized center at the heart of village life, a center which followed a well-established tradition—however new or strange that tradition might be—and obviously commanded great loyalty from its adherents. Certainly no coercion could have caused these stolid peasants to attempt in public a song only half learned. With this revelation any tendency that one might have to view the village as “a pile of loose sand” could hardly help but crumble. Here stood in solid if somewhat ragged phalanx the vertebrae of the community’s backbone.
The drama of this confrontation between the assembled members of the Communist Party branch and the people of Long Bow jarred me into acute awareness of the boldness of the method chosen for the reorganization of the Party. The method was simple enough. The Party had declared open its own traditional self-and-mutual criticism meetings. But to declare these meetings open meant to make public figures of all the village Communists, to break with decades of war-enforced security measures, to take a step that could never be undone.
With Kuomintang assassins still roaming the countryside, with the Civil War battlefront still only a hundred miles away, with a massive counter-attack still under preparation by Nationalist generals, who could guarantee the life of a Communist? If Governor Yen’s troops ever returned, every active revolutionary in the village would most certainly be hunted down and killed. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, would also become objects for extermination. Yet here stood 26 peasants, raised in this valley, tied by a thousand threads to its people and its culture, who dared proclaim before the world their militant revolutionary purpose.
True, this was not the first moment that their identity had become known. Team Leader Hou had read off their names several days before. But at the time the names, to me at least, were abstractions. Here stood in flesh and blood the people whose lives were placed in jeopardy by the reading of the list. Just as I suddenly became aware of them as living human beings, so the jeopardy in which they were placed emerged as agonizing fact.
The decision to make grass-roots Party membership lists public in the Base Areas came directl
y from the Central Committee, now in hiding somewhere in the loess hills of North Shensi. It was a measure of the Party leaders’ confidence in the success of the Revolutionary War. It was also a measure of the seriousness with which they regarded the weaknesses so apparent in the rural Party branches, weaknesses which, if not overcome, could themselves undermine the Revolution more thoroughly than defeat in battle. By declaring in favor of open membership, they had assumed a great risk in order to take a giant step forward.
The timing was crucial. Such a decision could not have been made a year earlier because at that time the People’s Liberation Army was fighting a war of strategic defense in which it was often necessary to trade space for time. The victories of the second half of 1947 had made a fundamental change in the military situation. The revolutionary forces were now on the strategic offensive. The necessity to trade space for time had shifted onto the shoulders of the counter-revolution. The relative security thus won made it possible for the Communist Party to operate publicly throughout the Base Areas, to place its personnel under the supervision of the people and thus to strengthen the strategic offensive itself, by making these old Base Areas more unified, more democratic, and hence much stronger than before.
Having discounted the risks and staked the future of the Party and the Revolution on the gains, the Central Committee now boldly declared, “All meetings of all Party branches to discuss problems concerning the interests of the masses, including Party meetings for criticism and review, should be participated in by the non-Party masses. Secret meetings are not allowed so that feelings of mystery toward the Party organization and Party activities can be removed and all the good and bad phenomena within the Party can thus be exposed before the people for supervision and criticism or for support.”
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