Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  But what if the strategic estimate of the situation turned out to be wrong? I found it hard to suppress a shiver of apprehension for the future of the village Communists and in this I was by no means alone.

  When the last strains of the song had died away and everyone had once again found a place to sit, Comrade Hou, dour and serious as always, briefly outlined the purpose of the meeting. He then called on Hsin-fa, secretary of the branch, to speak for the local members. As we had not seen Hsin-fa or any other leading Party member before, Ch’i Yun and I looked at him with intense interest. The secretary was tall, lean, graceful, a man in the very prime of life. His well-proportioned face was burned a deep bronze by the spring sun. It contrasted sharply with his scalp, which, because it was ordinarily covered by a hand towel, remained light, almost white. The skin of his scalp was so closely shaven that it shone like the pate of a bald man and added a touch of military severity to an otherwise genial countenance. As Hsin-fa spoke, a prominent Adam’s apple moved up and down in his throat. His hands, long and supple, inscribed wide arcs in the air to emphasize his words. He obviously had some skill as a public speaker, but at this moment his words did not come easily.

  “Comrades, honorable delegates …,” he began, then stopped, uncertain as to how to proceed. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple jumped above the tight collar of his padded tunic.

  Hsin-fa was nervous, we realized, because he did not know how this day was going to turn out. For weeks the Party had been meeting to prepare for the ordeal at the gate; yet now that the proceedings were about to begin it seemed as if all the preparations had been inadequate. Comrade Hou had assured them all that the spirit of the reorganization was one of “kill the disease and save the patient,” but how well was this understood by the peasants?

  Had not Comrade Hou himself, the Border Region Press, the drama “Red Leaf River,” and certain angry poor peasants, not only in Long Bow but in the market towns as well, all said that large numbers of the poor and hired had not fanshened, and that this was the fault of the local Communist Party members? Did not the peasants now believe that most Communists were actually landlords and rich peasants who only posed as revolutionaries or were opportunists who had sold out to such impostors? Was it not repeated a hundred times a day that these unscrupulous people had seized property and land that by rights belonged to the peasants? And had all this not long since moved from the realm of talk to the realm of action? Had not all cadres been removed from their posts, ostracized completely, and denied admission to the Poor Peasants’ League or any other organization of the people? Had not this discrimination already reached their relatives and those neighbors who still remained friendly to them? Had not loose talk of beatings—“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”—run through the village and helped to fan an atmosphere of struggle against the Party members, a struggle in which they could be as harshly attacked as collaborators and gentry had earlier been? Faced with such a prospect it was easy to let fear take over.

  Doubts and fears Hsin-fa had certainly known in the last few weeks. When T’ien-hsi, a leading militiaman, had lamented, “If we had never joined the Party, we could now be members of the Poor Peasants’ League and basic members at that,” Hsin-fa had agreed with him. When Cheng-k’uan, suspended chairman of the Peasants’ Association, threatened to throw himself into his well, Hsin-fa had not tried to dissuade him but had returned home to survey his own well. When Hsiu-mei lost her appetite, vomited everything she tried to swallow, and became so weak that she could not rise unaided from her k’ang, Hsin-fa had expressed his sympathy. He knew that it was no common dysentry that had brought her low, but fear, fear of this gate manned by the people which each Communist had to pass. “Even if I die the very next day I must pass this gate,” said Hsiu-mei as she was carried to one of the preparatory meetings. Inadvertently she expressed the feelings of all the members of the branch.

  The attack on the young work team cadre, Chang-ch’uer, had only heightened the Communists’ fears. While many peasants blamed dishonest cadres for the attack, the Party members felt certain that it was meant as a blow against the Party and had been organized by the Catholic minority. They were afraid that once their names were read aloud, dissident villagers would take whatever means for revenge came to hand. Those who had committed serious crimes dared not walk out on the street alone.

  Such had been the situation inside the Party when Cadre Hou first met with its members. He blamed them for the inadequate fanshen. He then outlined for them the basic principles of the coming movement—to examine impurities in class composition, impurities in ideology, and impurities in working style within the Communist Party. He impressed upon them the fact that they must objectively review their class background, their motives, and their past acts. They must listen to the people’s delegates, accept all valid criticism, and overcome weaknesses. Those who did not could be punished, even expelled from the Party. Those with a record of serious crime who refused to reform could be sent to the People’s Court for trial. Hou stressed again and again the glorious future that lay before those who spoke out frankly, corrected their mistakes, and resolved to serve the people well. But though Comrade Hou stressed both aspects of the gate, the main thing that registered in the minds of the Party members was the demand that they accept responsibility for the fanshen situation, receive criticism, and bow their heads. Most of them felt even if they spoke frankly, they could never expect to pass. The people so clearly wanted revenge, and what was more important, were demanding “oil” to fill the numerous gaps in the peasants’ inventory of necessities. Since the landlords had long since been dispossessed, some new source of fruits had to be found. Now it looked as if the revolutionary cadres would be that source. Under the circumstances how could mere recognition of past mistakes ward off the blow?

  Here was the root of the problem, and Hsin-fa, as he stood before the delegates that morning looking anxiously into their faces, had quite obviously found no solution. In conversations with Team Leader Hou he had already admitted that many poor peasants had not fanshened. But, he had asked himself again and again, was that his fault? Was it the fault of his comrades in the Party or of the non-Party cadres? Had they really seized large amounts of property? Had any of them become rich? As for himself he had one wooden bowl and one basket that could still be said to be public property since no committee had ever allocated them to him. But could any peasant complete his fanshen with a wooden bowl and a basket? And what about all the work the Party members and cadres had done? The endless meetings, the guard duty at night, the searches, the arrests, the interrogations? Could anyone in the village have faned half a shen without all that effort so freely given? The very thought of the traitors and puppets now flocking into the Poor Peasants’ League to sit in judgment on the Party had made him flush with anger.

  But when Hsin-fa looked out over the crowd in the room in front of him that day he saw not one collaborator’s face. Hou Chin-ming’s wife was there, but whatever her husband might have done to help the priest escape, she herself was but a young girl, sold right out of the Catholic orphanage. How could she be held responsible for her husband’s politics? Having no object on which to fasten, anger was out of the question. Hsin-fa stood alone, face to face with that hard necessity—the Party’s demand that all its members publicly examine their records, expose their own mistakes, and accept the correct opinions of the people.

  “Comrades,” said Hsin-fa, starting over again, “on behalf of the Party I welcome you, the delegates of the people, and I hope you will all speak out clearly and fearlessly what you think. Certainly you need not fear any reprisal. As for me, in the past you made me a cadre, but I forgot my poor friends after I myself had fanshened.”

  This was short and to the point. The delegates were impressed and showed it by halting most of their private conversations to listen.

  As Hsin-fa sat down, the middle-aged poor peasant from the northwest group, Yang Yu-so, rose to speak for the delegates. Yang, l
ooking neither to the right nor to the left, spoke out loudly but much too rapidly. Like a small boy running through the Confucian classics in shouting school, he gave every syllable of his memorized talk the same emphasis.

  “I am a poor peasant chosen as a delegate to help purify the Party,” recited Yang. “I hope every Party member will examine his past honestly. I cannot speak much. We are here because the poor peasants want us to help the Party so that we can all fanshen thoroughly.”

  As he sat down, his forehead was covered with bright beads of sweat. He turned to a friend in the row behind him and said, “I was so worried I couldn’t sleep last night. I felt as if I had bought something I couldn’t sell. I wanted someone else to be spokesman, but it was too late.”

  “You did fine.” “You said what was on our minds.” “If you sweat that’s only because you aren’t used to speaking.” These and other remarks came from the peasants on the benches all around him. They seemed to spring from a genial, confident mood that belied all of Hsin-fa’s fears. There was certainly no hint of revenge, no current of violence lurking beneath the surface of the emotions that swayed the delegates that day.

  ***********

  The reasonable tone that prevailed was the result of many days of detailed preparation. If the Party members had practiced for this confrontation, so too had the poor peasants of the League. Mass meetings of the whole organization, meetings of the three sectional groups, and meetings of activists especially chosen by the work team for intensive education had all preceded the final election of the delegates. Night after night, dozens of people had crowded into meeting places that were often too small for a single family to live in with comfort. K’angs, benches, stools, doorsills, and the earth floors of these peasant dwellings had been packed with men and women made bulky by extra layers of heavily-padded winter clothing. The air they breathed was soon saturated with the now familiar odor of garlic and tobacco smoke. The smoke added its own peculiar haze to the atmosphere and so subdued the flame of the single, wick-in-oil lamp that only those faces nearest the light could be seen at all. Voices from other parts of the room came disembodied out of the darkness.

  Under conditions such as these, four major questions had been discussed. What is the Communist Party? Is the Communist Party good or bad? If it is good, how can it contain bad members? What should be done with the bad members?

  As for the Communist Party itself, most of the peasants had come to understand that the Party was not Chairman Mao in Yenan, but hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers in every village and town in the Liberated Areas. More difficult to grasp was the fact that not every village, district, or county cadre was a Communist Party member. Everyone said that the Communist Party led. If it led, its members must be the leaders and the leaders must be its members—such was the logic of the peasants. It was very hard to clear up this question as long as the names of the Party members remained secret. That there were women members in the Party also had to be stated again and again. Women did not find this strange, but men shook their heads and said, “Ah.” They obviously did not believe that women could lead anyone to fanshen.

  Nobody had argued that the Communist Party was bad. The fact that so many people had fanshened very little or had fanshened only half way could not erase what was obvious—that the general conditions of life had improved for everybody and that this would not have been possible without the Communist Party.

  But if nobody had attacked the Party as such, some people had attacked all of its members, which amounted to almost the same thing. The Catholics, still smarting under the agents’ caps imposed by Yu-lai, made up the core of this group. Old Shen, in his artless way, was their most vocal spokesman. Every time he opened his mouth he condemned the village Communists. He said, “The Party ordered its members to serve the people and lead them to fanshen. But only the members really fanshened. They became officials just like the feudal ones. They climbed onto our heads and did everything they wished. So we must throw them down. We are the masters now.”

  Old Lady Wang, who was no Catholic, had adopted a different, but equally severe approach. She worried tenaciously about the “fruits.” As far as she was concerned, the Communists had them all. “During the struggle we fought together,” she complained. “But after the victory they got the ‘fruits’ and some of them just stayed home and did nothing and lived a luxurious life. And some smoked cigarettes and just wandered about. They sold the grain from the struggle and bought delicious things to eat.”

  Objectively her position reinforced that of Old Shen, and when it came to what must be done about it the two saw eye to eye. “All the grafters must be put in prison,” declaimed Shen with the mien of a judge. “All the ‘fruits’ which they grafted must be immediately given up,” said Old Lady Wang. “If they die of starvation that’s not our problem. When they took everything to their own homes, did they care one little bit for us?”

  This chih shemme huan shemme or return-as-good-as-you-got attitude had found considerable support. Remembering the “Wash-the-Face Movement” of 1947, many peasants had little faith in the possibility of human reform and still less faith in public self-criticism as a means to that end. Bad practices soon became habitual, they said, and quoted the old proverb, “Can one stop one’s mouth from eating or one’s two legs from running?” Their conclusion was, “We must beat the bad ones.”

  This had been one pole of opinion—the tough pole. At the other pole were peasants like Yuan-lung, who took a moderate position despite the fact that he too was a Catholic and had suffered severe beatings at the hands of Man-hsi. Fluent of speech and at least partly literate, he had constantly defended the Party and the majority of its membership. He liked to use the poetic images popularized by Mao Tse-tung. Comparing the Party members to swimming fish, he said, “The people are the water. Without water the fish immediately die. Now some of the fish have left the pool and we must help them to return home.” Comparing the Communist Party to a pine tree, he said, “We want the tree to grow high and straight, so whenever we find an ugly branch we must find a way to straighten it or prune it in order to help the tree. Of course there are bad elements in the Party, but we must distinguish between the good and the bad, and in my opinion the majority of them are good. Otherwise, how could they lead us to fanshen? Though we have not fanshened thoroughly, still everyone of us can live with enough food and clothes.”

  Yuan-lung had been supported in this by T’ai-shan’s mother, a prematurely aged, work-worn widow whose unkempt hair kept falling in front of her face as she sewed. “Shall we force the cadres to jump in the well?” she asked, pushing an offending strand of hair from in front of her eyes. “Then we ourselves would be feudal. We want the ‘fruits’ but not the cadres’ lives. What good would that do?”

  Ch’ung-lai’s wife, whose flesh had been cut with scissors when the peasants suspected her of aiding a landlord, felt the same way. “After all,” she said, “we shall find out the truth in the end. As for beating and swearing, that is the feudal method. We must not use it. Haven’t we all suffered from feudal blows in the past? How can we think of treating others that way?”

  This had been the other pole of opinion—the reasonable pole. In between were many peasants who wavered or were inconsistent, first speaking of punishment, then of reform.

  The public announcement on April 8 of the names of the Party members had strengthened the reasonable trend. This was because the list contained two surprises. The first of these was that several of the most feared and hated cadres were not Communists at all. Neither Yu-lai nor Hsi-yu nor San-ch’ing had ever been members of the branch.

  The second surprise was that many rank-and-file peasants, people who had never been cadres, were Communists. The stolid hard-working An-k’u found it hard to believe that his rosy-cheeked bride, 18-year-old Hsiao-mer, could be a comrade. Others felt the same way about Meng Fu-lu and Chou Cheng-lo. To be sure these two had been active members of the militia, but so had 50 or 60 other men, cert
ainly no less devoted to the corps and no less able than they. Then there were the young wives such as Wang Man-ying and Jen Ho-chueh, women who almost never left their own courtyards. Where did they fit in?

  The publication of the list had thus quite destroyed the common assumption that cadres and Communists were one and the same. Much popular thunder was diverted when it was recognized that several of the worst cadres were not members of the Party. The peasants began to think of the Communists as individuals, and certain leaders whose very real prestige had been smothered in the general condemnation began to gather support. Among these were the Eighth Route Army veteran who owned the store on the square, Ts’ai-yuan; the suspended head of the Peasants’ Association, Cheng-k’uan; and the suspended head of the Women’s Association, Hu Hsueh-chen.

  Reading the list had accomplished another important service. It had stripped away that veil of mystery that obscured the Party. The people of Long Bow came face to face with a group of their own kind—peasants so typical of the village that they seemed almost a caricature of it. This caused a sharp readjustment in attitudes. People who had for so long associated the word Communist with Chairman Mao, a god-like figure in distant Yenan, now found it hard to apply the same designation to Little Mer, quarrelsome old Meng Fu-lu, or the muscular but slow-witted Man-hsi. Here certainly were no deities. Yet neither were they devils and none of them could by any stretch of the imagination be called rich. The very poverty and humanity of the Party had undercut vindictiveness.