Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  ***********

  In the North China countryside poverty had for so long been so universal and so chronic that a glazed china bowl counted as an important possession. Many peasants ate out of the same bowl from cradle to grave and passed it on to their offspring. If a bowl broke, the pieces were taken to one of the itinerant bowl menders who followed the market day fairs around the county. These craftsmen cleverly drilled pottery fragments and stapled them together with bits of brass. Like the proverbial cat, these oft-resurrected bowls came to have nine lives and through long-continued usage became closely identified with their possessors.

  This close personal relationship between each peasant and his bowl had made possible the electoral procedure by which the largely illiterate members of the Provisional Poor Peasants’ League finally elected their delegates to the gate. These were the first formal elections to take place after the arrival of the work team in the village and probably only the third or fourth elections ever to be held there. As such they aroused great interest.

  In each Poor Peasants’ League group 12 men had first been nominated from the floor for the seven male delegate seats. Each of these nominees then set his bowl on a long bench that had been placed in the center of one of the larger courtyards. One at a time left the area. The voters, each of whom held seven black beans and five white ones in hand, then filed past the bowls and dropped a bean, black or white, in the bowl of whichever candidate was absent. A black bean meant a vote for the man, a white bean a vote against him. After this process had been repeated 12 times, the beans in the bowls were counted by a committee of three.

  In order to insure that the women won more than token representation among the delegates, six women had been separately nominated, and three voted in by the same method.

  The work team cadres, who had found in the village more resentment than they had expected and had underestimated the results of two weeks of education, had been surprised when the elections produced a clearcut defeat for the tough line, and especially for the dissidents of the Catholic clique. In the southwest group of the League, Li Ho-jen, the real leader of the dissidents, got but one vote. Old Shen, with his goatee and his silver pipe, was not even nominated. Kuo Yuan-lung, helped no doubt by the fact that Li had opposed him, won by far the largest vote. Five of the six men elected with him turned out to be like-minded reasonable young peasants, known, if at all, for their reticence. The sixth, Old Pao, whose quarrel with his wife has already been described, could be called a maverick who transformed every issue into a personal challenge and was therefore unpredictable. In the election, for example, he cast a lone bean for Li Ho-jen out of spite simply because Li Ho-jen had opposed his own nomination. In the elaborate code of face to which he adhered, this return of good for evil meant a loss of face for Li and a gain in face for Pao. Thereafter, the latter lost no opporunity to inform all and sundry just whose vote Li got and why.

  Among the women the tough line had fared a little better. Although the very open-minded widow, T’ai-shan’s mother, got the most votes, Old Lady Wang came in second, and Chin-ming’s wife third. The northern and eastern groups did not follow suit however. All their women delegates, like their men, adhered to the reasonable position. Outstanding among them were Ch’ung-lai’s wife and Wukuei’s wife, two women who intuitively identified their interests as poor peasants with the interest and vitality of the Communist Party.

  After the delegates had been provisionally elected in the village’s three sections, the League groups met together in a great mass meeting to pass on one another’s selections. At this meeting the proponents of the tough line made one last effort to change the composition of the delegation. Li Ho-jen himself challenged the right of Party members’ relatives to act as “gatekeepers,” a challenge aimed at the northern group which had elected both the wife and the cousin of Chou Cheng-lo, a Communist member of the militia corps, and the brother of Hsiao Wen-hsu, another Communist militiaman.

  The northern group countered this challenge by pointing out that the poor peasants of the southwest corner had themselves elected a Communist’s husband to serve at the gate. This was An-k’u, husband of Little Mer, whose Party membership still seemed so incongruous as to be disregarded by her neighbors.

  The question of Party members’ relatives was finally settled by majority vote. Cheng-lo’s wife and cousin were voted down. An-k’u, a very diffident but honest peasant, was approved 81 to 31, as was Hsiao Ch’ing-hsu, a teenager:

  The northern group members, for their part, were not too pleased with the election of Old Lady Wang and Old Pao. “Old Lady Wang is too selfish,” they said. “Her temper is so short, if you cross her she jumps three feet in the air. And as for Old Pao, he can’t even get on with his wife! How can he represent the rest of us?”

  These two controversial figures were asked to stand up and speak before the meeting. Old Lady Wang outdid her critics. “I am so selfish,” she said, “that when I am paid a quart of grain I want a quart and a half.” Old Pao merely agreed with his. “I can’t solve my family affairs, how can I solve the problems of this village?”

  This was equivalent to saying, “We don’t want to run.” But the peasants decided to put them in office anyway and passed them both by a big majority vote.

  That same evening the sectional groups had met singly once again to gather opinions and grievances against those Communists who were to come before them the next day.

  Now, with the meeting already underway; they appeared confident and ready.

  When the stir occasioned by Delegate Spokesman Yang’s asides subsided, Comrade Hou asked if anyone else wanted to speak. Nobody volunteered. Hou waited a long interval to make sure, then called on Chang Ch’un-hsi, suspended village head and one of the best known village cadres in the whole Fifth District, to begin his self-examination.

  36

  The Village Leader Bows His Head

  The adoption of the [open meeting] method for reorganizing and purifying the ranks of the Party... will, on one hand, enable participating non-Party masses unreservedly to criticize and examine the Party members and cadres whom they oppose or approve, and enable them to feel that they have linked up with the Party of Mao Tse-tung. On the other hand, the leaders of the Party can, according to the opinions of the masses and the situation within the Party, consider questions from all sides and distinguish right from wrong, the degrees of seriousness, and mete out justly due punishment and reward so that both Party and non-Party masses will feel satisfied.

  Directive of the Central Committee of

  the Chinese Communist Party,

  February 22, 1948

  AS CHANG CH’UN-HSI stood up, a hush settled over the room and soon spread even to the rowdy crowd outside. The formalities, the speeches, the explanations were now over. The actual struggle to purify the Party had begun. Nobody wanted to miss a single word.

  Ch’un-hsi helped to extend the silence by speaking very softly, so softly that we had to strain to hear him. As he spoke, wrinkles furrowed his forehead and he looked somewhere over our heads toward a spot on the wall behind us. I was struck by his youth and his good looks. Like Hsin-fa, the secretary of the Party branch, he was tall and lean and moved with a grace that belied his rustic origin. Like Hsin-fa also, his head was closely shaven, but here the resemblance ended, for this did not lend him an air of severity but on the contrary seemed to accentuate the gentle features of his face and to exaggerate the pallor of his complexion. If Hsin-fa looked like a man of action, Ch’un-hsi struck one as more of an intellectual, a student, perhaps even a poet. The manner in which he spoke heightened this impression, for he took his past seriously, examined his motives as well as his actions, and judged himself very harshly, much more harshly, in fact, than his record warranted.

  His very first words set the tone. “I hope the delegates will help me to correct my bad behavior,” he said. He then began a brief review of his life history that was suffused with diffident self-criticism. “My family are nativ
es of Chih-chou, but I was born here. My grandfather was a middle peasant, but my own father was a poor peasant. I studied two years in primary school. Then I became a hired laborer and worked for others until Liberation. Under the leadership of the Party my whole family fanshened, but I took advantage of the people’s struggle, and I will say later how much I got from the movement. At the time of Liberation I was working as a hired laborer in Kao Settlement. The landlord there offered me money and tried to buy me off. I was tempted. I took the money and stayed with him. Afterwards many friends talked with me. They persuaded me to leave the old money-bags.

  “Then I got almost an acre of land. Later I was offered land in Long Bow and came home. But my thought was still wrong. I was afraid the Kuomintang would come back. I was not active. Later I learned more about the politics of the Communist Party and joined the militia. Because I could read a little the cadres asked me to take charge of financial work in the village. Then I became proud. During the first distribution I was selfish. I chose the best piece of land for myself. The year before last, when the government ordered tax grain, we cadres did not talk it over with the masses or discuss with them how to collect it. We just consulted among ourselves and then ordered the people to hand out the grain. It was very unfair.”

  The delegates, impressed by the speaker’s manner, remained silent. Ch’un-hsi, on his part, gained confidence with practice, and as his confidence grew, his voice became louder. His audience was able to relax a little.

  “After I took charge of the financial work I became proud,” continued Ch’un-hsi. “I looked down on others. I made false reports. I behaved badly, grafted money, and beat people.”

  It was hard to imagine this slender quiet man doing all these things, but nobody contradicted him.

  “Last May I was chosen as leader of this village. Everyone wanted me to serve the masses, but I only became more arrogant. I thought I had become an official, just like a leader in the old society. I could order anyone in the village about. Because Yu-hsing was a struggle object, I ordered him out of his house and occupied it myself. I borrowed BRC 10,000 from the co-op and paid back BRC 5,000 with grain tickets that weren’t mine. I grafted five pairs of shoes that the women made for the soldiers at the front. Last year three cadres went with me to the storehouse. We wanted cloth to make flags for the village school. But while we were there, we each took a pair of pants. I struck Old Pao when I found some of the grain in the storehouse missing. He was supposed to be in charge. During the Enlarge the Army Movement last year I helped send older people, all former puppets, to the recruiting station. This was worse than the Kuomintang. Of course they were sent back. The Army had no use for them.”

  At this point one of the Party members who was sitting in the front row interrupted. “Don’t give us every little detail. Just review the high points, the important things.”

  “Yes,” chimed in Old Lady Wang, to whom the forced recruitment of over-aged men was obviously a minor matter. “Tell us how you yourself fanshened. Tell us what you grafted!”

  “In the fanshen I got more than the masses,” said Ch’un-hsi, glad of some hint as to what the delegates regarded as important. “I got ten hundredweight plus one peck of millet. Also some wheat. As for clothes, I got ten pieces of good quality and two short bolts of silk. Last year when I went to Hukuan on village business, I spent BRC 600 for cigarettes and collected this money from the District Office as expenses.”

  “What were you thinking of when you grafted it?” asked a Party member, trying to bring to light the motive behind the deed.

  ‘My thought was very bad. Because my family was a soldier’s family and I a full-time cadre, I didn’t want to labor but only to sit down, eat delicious food, and have others work for me. Because there was a meeting every night, I got up late every morning. That was my excuse. Once someone called me early in the morning and I swore at him …”

  As Ch’un-hsi told one incident after another, I began to think that he must be one of the worst cadres in Long Bow and leaned over to ask Ch’i Yun if this were so.

  “No,” she whispered in reply. “He is one of the best. He is very well liked. That’s why Hou chose him to go first.”

  I tried to keep this in mind as the village head continued his catalogue of transgressions but found it hard to balance such an estimate against the unrelieved picture of wrongdoing which he painted.

  “After I joined the Party last February, my thought became even worse,” said Ch’un-hsi. “I thought I had found a place that could protect me and lead to higher positions, and I thought I could do anything. No one dared punish me, I thought. Every day I work hard. What for? If I don’t spend money and live a little better, what is the use of working so hard?”

  With this frank admission Ch’un-hsi ended his presentation. There remained only the question as to what he proposed to do about it.

  “I will give up all the fruits and land and housing that I got extra. As for the grain, I really want to give it up but I have no surplus grain because I bought half a donkey this spring. I want to pay back the grain after the harvest is in …” Here he paused, thought hard, then added, “I have done so many bad things, I can’t remember them all now. Please give me criticism.”

  The critical moment had arrived. I saw Comrade Hou glance anxiously at Little Li. The meaning behind that glance was clear. Numerous discussions held by the work team had made clear that unless a very delicate balance was maintained, this campaign could easily fail. In work review meetings during the past week Comrade Hou had stressed the need to keep the movement from developing into a “struggle” against the Party and cadres as individuals. The work team must keep in mind the real virtues of those whose records were under review. It must sustain their morale, preserve their sanity, and keep alive in them that spark of courage, energy, and ability which had made them leaders in the past and had made possible the transformation of the village up to this point. On the other hand, Hou had stressed the need to expose the real abuses of the local administration. The work team must make the village Communists aware of the real dangers of commandism, loose morals, self-indulgence, dishonesty, and petty corruption. It must help them root out these dangers completely, irrevocably.

  That was one side, the side of the Communists and the cadres. The other side was the side of the people. This the work team had also discussed again and again. Could the people actually overcome their fear of reprisal? Could they be led to speak out without any reservations? To speak out even if their sentiments were wrong, even if their attacks were completely misguided? Could the mistakes of the Wash-the-Face Movement, when the people took a step forward only to be pushed back again, be avoided? Hou knew that the Communist Party must show that it intended to carry through, must show that the movement really meant what the Party said it meant, and that no favoritism would be shown to anyone just because he or she was a Party member. The history of other political movements in China certainly provided scant precedent for such a thing. Was it any wonder then that many peasants still hesitated and talked of beatings? What was required here was a leap to a new way of handling problems. The trouble was that those who leapt couldn’t always be sure they would land on their feet.

  Hou’s problem was made even more difficult by the fact that the work team was not united in its outlook. There was, at least to a certain extent, a split between the cadres from the University and the peasant cadres from Lucheng County. From the beginning the intellectuals had tended to downgrade the past contributions of the village leaders and exaggerate their mistakes. They had tended to regard the village Communists essentially as opportunists, corrupt and wrong-headed. Thus they had lent an especially sympathetic ear to the dissidents who were full of vindictive criticism and eager for revenge.

  The work team cadres of peasant origin tended to be much more sympathetic to the village leaders. They themselves were, after all, but recently promoted village cadres. They could not downgrade the achievements of the Long Bow men without a
t the same time slighting their own past. Having lived in this area throughout the Japanese occupation, they were also much more involved emotionally than were the University personnel when it came to former puppets, collaborators, and dissident Catholics, all of whom seethed with resentment against the repressions which they had later suffered.

  Now two months of effort on the part of this variegated team, which Hou captained but had not yet been able to unite, hung in the balance.

  Action began in an unexpected quarter. Thin-faced Li Lao-szu, one of the most timid peasants, a man who had never found the courage to stand up to his own sister-in-law, stood up and urged each delegate to voice the opinions that he or she had collected from the people the night before. He himself led off with a question about the public money and grain that Ch’un-hsi had spent while on his trip to deliver tax grain more than a year earlier.

  Ch’un-hsi, contrite as before, tried to explain this matter. “I transported grain together with An-ho and we stayed away more than ten days because it rained without stopping all that time. We spent a lot of money but really only BRC 2,600 of this was public money.”

  This explanation did not satisfy Old Lady Wang, who went right on sewing as she fired questions, like mortar shells, one after another. “You spent a hundredweight and a half of grain just for traveling expenses. When ordinary people transport grain they dare not spend a cent. What were you thinking of?”

  “Fu-yuan said I could take out my expenses.”

  “Why blame it on Fu-yuan? Speak for yourself,” jibed the old lady, punching her awl through the shoe sole on which she was working as if it were graft and corruption personified.

  “This grain belonged to everyone, but you spent it for yourself,” added Chin-ming’s wife, anxious to give Old Lady Wang some support.

  “I have thought it over for days,” said Ch’un-hsi, badly shaken by the sharp attack. “The only thing to do is to give up an equal amount of millet.”