Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  Within an hour after our team arrived in Lucheng, Secretary Ch’en had called Comrade Hou and Little Li into his headquarters and questioned them about the arrest of Yu-lai, Wen-te, Hsi-yu, and Hung-er. He pronounced the arrests a mistake. He pointed out the bad influence which the action had had on the whole region. Somehow a rumor had started that the four arrested cadres had been tried before a mass meeting and shot on the spot. More than 100 li (30 miles) away, peasants were repeating “eyewitness” accounts of the execution. The effect of these rumors was to confirm the guilt of the four men in the popular mind and divert any effort to look more deeply into the case. Yet no firm evidence had come to light that the arrested men were actually responsible, and thus the county police had already decided to release them.

  Secretary Ch’en did not stop there. He went on to criticize Hou and Li for holding the district cadres under house arrest at the accounts examination meeting, for disarming T’ien-ming, and for unreasonably attacking and harassing the whole Party branch. All of these actions added up to extremism, Left extremism, he said.

  A document that amplified this criticism was assigned as required reading for all the teams. It had been prepared by the Third Administrative District of Taihang Subregion. It pointed out that radical Left tendencies had caused many teams to seek support only among the poor peasants, to neglect the middle peasants, to ignore and suppress all old cadres, to treat Party members as if they were class enemies, and to underestimate the extent of the poor peasants’ fanshen. Here was a poor peasant point of view elevated to the status of a “line,” a “line” that was in opposition to the Party’s expressed policy.

  Secretary Ch’en’s broad censure and the critical tone of the sub-regional pamphlet all but destroyed the élan of a team that had maintained morale only with difficulty. What hurt the cadres from Long Bow most was the charge that they had unreasonably oppressed the members of the village branch. Up to this point they had felt that their gate, for all its shortcomings, had been a success. They might have been misled by Old Shen concerning who were the honest poor peasants, wasted time in an accounts examination meeting, falsely arrested four innocent men, wrongly detained three others, failed to establish a solid Poor Peasants’ League, and mistakenly treated the village as Type III; but all this had to be balanced against the fact that they had succeeded in mobilizing the Party members and the people for the purification campaign, that the Party members’ self-criticism had uncovered real problems and had paved the way for real reforms, and that morale in the village, both inside and outside the branch, had picked up sharply thereafter. Now even these achievements were called into question.

  42

  When Poverty Outranked Heaven

  Men are products of circumstances and upbringing and... therefore changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, [but] circumstances are changed precisely by men and …the educator himself must be educated.

  Karl Marx

  WHEN THE Long Bow cadres gathered on the bricks under the bell tower to review their work, the local men, Hou and Little Li, Han, Liang, Li Wen-chung, and Chang-ch’uer were in an angry, bitter mood. If it was wrong to arrest the four cadres, then Secretary Ch’en must share the blame, they thought. After all, the Secretary himself had approved the arrests at the time and the county police had ordered Team Leader Hou to drop everything for an investigation into the crime. As for the district cadres who had been held for questioning about the village accounts, they had not really been arrested. They had only been asked to eat and sleep together for convenience’s sake, so that they would be available when needed. Nobody had stood guard over them. They were free to come and go in the village.

  As these opinions were expressed and debated, the mood of the cadres gradually changed. They began to understand how deeply they had been influenced by an exaggerated reliance on the poor. They laughed as they remembered the first few days in the village, how they had dropped their bedrolls and gone looking for poor peasants while not daring to speak to anyone who looked at all prosperous, and completely ignoring the Party that had led the village for three years. The image they had in mind of the poor peasant they were looking for was of a man dressed in rags with a torn towel around his head, scratching lice and flea bites. If any peasant said he had fanshened they thought he was dishonest. If he had no grievances against the village cadres, they dropped him. Many peasants had obviously seen through this right away. They hid their quilts, their pillows, and their better-looking clothes and dropped wild herbs and chaff into their cooking pots while they waited to see which way the wind would blow.

  “When I arrived in Long Bow,” said Little Ch’uer, still pale from the effects of the assault upon him, “the only thing I had in mind was the poor-and-hired-peasant line. I thought that poor peasants were everything. I looked only for poverty. Poverty outranked heaven. As soon as I had some idea of who the poor peasants were, I ordered the old cadres to arrange for me to eat in their homes and especially in the homes of those who had been called agents or were suspected of dishonesty. Right away I met Shen Ch’uan-te and I believed everything he told me. Now I realize that I was wrong. I looked only at a man’s living conditions. I paid no attention to his character. That was mechanical.”

  As they talked, the cadres also began to see how concentration on the poor and avoidance of the Communists in the village Party branch had been linked.

  “My attitude toward the Communists was very severe,” said Li Wen-chung. “I criticized them relentlessly and tried to force them to admit crimes. Otherwise, I thought, they will think I am afraid. But the result was not so good. Many Party members were gloomy and their self-criticism was not all honest. As for the accident, I thought, ‘The landlords and rich peasants have all been beaten down. No feudal element would dare commit this crime. It must be the Party branch.’ So I said to the Communists, ‘We must uncover this matter and find which one of you is guilty.’ I thought they were worse than the puppet troops. I attacked Chao Ch’uan-e over and over again. I made her review all her rascal behavior and insisted that she had slipped into the Party and seduced important cadres only to protect her family. The other Party members joined in the attack. That night Chao Ch’uan-e refused to come to the meeting. She lay on her k’ang and wept. Then she tried to hang herself. Fortunately, someone saw her and stopped her; otherwise I would be responsible for her death. This was certainly leftism.”

  Comrade Hou agreed and went even further than the others in his analysis of what had happened. “We kept telling them that they were still poor because the cadres had taken all the ‘fruits,’ “he said. “But really, how much did they take? And if it were all divided up, what difference would it make? It could still never fill all the holes that remain. Surely the problem must be solved in the future by production. But we kept saying, ‘You have not fanshened, you have not fanshened, the cadres are bad!’ So of course the peasants are ready to go after the cadres for whatever can be taken from them, and they are ready to call middle peasants rich peasants so that their property too can be taken. Meanwhile, everyone wants to be a poor peasant so that he can get something. But where is it all going to come from?”

  ***********

  When the conference convened again in the big temple, the teams all reported on the sectarianism that marred their work. Once again the men and women from Long Bow realized that they were not alone.

  Here, for instance, are a few passages from the report of Chia Village:

  At first we found some poor peasants who could speak well and had many grievances against the cadres. They opposed the cadres blindly, and we relied on them because we thought all the old organizations bad.... We were in a big hurry and thought we could understand the whole village within three days. We avoided the Communist Party members. We accepted the poor peasants’ request and ordered the Party members to live and eat together—ch’ih ta kuo fan (eat out of one big pot).... But the Party members were very upset, and many of them wept. The villa
ge chairman’s wife swore at her husband. “You stupid ass, wasn’t being head of the whole village enough? Why did you have to go and join the Communist Party as well?”. … We repeated our work several times over. We visited, explained, and visited again. Many poor peasants got tired of it. So did we. We couldn’t find much to do and thought we ought to go and find another village, but when Secretary Chang came and asked for material, facts and figures, we had very little to give him!

  From these reports, two questions emerged. Where did the poor-peasant line originate? Why had they all adopted such extreme measures? At a small group meeting the following day, the local members of the Long Bow team all agreed that they got their poor-peasant line at the Lu Family Settlement meeting, the big month-long education conference that preceded the departure of the Lucheng County teams to the “basic” villages. At the meeting, Secretary Ch’en himself had set the tone. He had declared that the poor of Lucheng County had not fanshened. He had said that any cadres who could not find poor peasants in the villages didn’t deserve to eat. He had held the cadres before him responsible for the abortive fanshen movement and insisted that they all examine their shortcomings and make public statements of their conclusions.

  Liang Chi-hu recalled his own reaction to that meeting. Here was a cadre whose service to the Revolution could not be ignored. He had faced the Japanese Army as a militiaman at the age of 18. He had led his militia detachment in the battle for Long Bow and then had helped liberate Changchih. As head of the police department of the Second District, he had ridden herd on the reactionaries and helped to guarantee the fanshen of thousands. “Yet,” said he, “when I learned what was expected of us I was very afraid. I worried all the time and wondered if I could pass the gate.* I even lost my appetite and grew very pale. I had to look back over the years. Was I active or not. What was my attitude during the land reform? What mistakes had I committed? I finally admitted four mistakes. I had protected two rich peasants who were neighbors of mine. I had kept in my home property that belonged to a family that everyone believed to be gentry. I had helped to expel from the Peasants’ Association a man who criticized us all for taking more than our fair share of the ‘fruits.’ I had received an acre of land that was not allotted to me by any distribution committee. That was because I was away when the land was parcelled out. When I came back there was very little left. I protested and was given an acre by the other cadres.

  “In my heart I thought, ‘All these mistakes are not mine alone. Others were also involved.’ But it was a sorry business to blame others. I took full responsibility. I asked for punishment and received a warning from the Party Committee. This warning went on my record. After that I was troubled. I thought, ‘All these things were not done by me alone, but I have taken punishment for all of them.’ Whenever I fill out a form in the future I must write ‘Received Punishment.’ I was very upset.”**

  The pressure at the Lu Family Settlement meeting had been such that many cadres did as Liang had done. And because the record was thus distorted beyond reasonable resemblance to reality, they felt oppressed and despondent. While, on the positive side, the meeting had burned into every heart the seriousness of graft, corruption, influence peddling, nepotism, and maneuvering for personal advantage no matter how small, on the negative side it placed a burden of guilt on the shoulders of the district cadres which they were not able to bear. It now became clear that when these cadres came from the Lu Family Settlement meeting to the “basic” villages, they came prepared to examine the village Communists as severely as they themselves had been examined. In Long Bow, the attack on Little Ch’uer only gave further impetus to this determination. The Party members were blamed for the crime as a matter of course.

  Open discussion of these problems at the County Conference did not automatically lead the Long Bow team to any solution. In fact, the more they talked about it, the more dejected the cadres became. Comrade Hou, always dour and serious, looked beaten. He held his head in his hands and stared off into space. Little Li, who before had always been ready with a joke and a laugh, adopted the dour mien so characteristic of Team Leader Hou, while Han, Liang, Little Ch’uer, and Li Wen-chung fell silent altogether. They contemplated the rubble around them as if the whole world had collapsed and they themselves were derelicts lost in the ruins. With the peasant members of the group in such a mood, the intellectuals also lapsed into unusual silence.

  ***********

  A brilliant four-hour report by Secretary Ch’en on the right way to organize work in the villages and in the village Party branches only deepened the gloom that hung over the conference. At one point in his report Secretary Ch’en charged that in six weeks of work the Long Bow team had done only two things, both of them wrong. They had examined the village accounts without result, and they had oppressed the village Party branch.

  When they met that evening in my room, the Long Bow cadres quarrelled openly for the first time. Little Li blamed Hou for the Secretary’s unfair criticism. “I had all the material,” protested Little Li, “but when the Secretary asked you for facts and figures about the village you told him you didn’t have any! You were so busy with the Party branch that you didn’t even know what we were doing. Yet you tried to answer for everything yourself.”

  “Why didn’t you speak up then?” snapped Hou.

  “Because you always do what you want, no matter what we say,” replied Little Li, glaring at his partner.

  If Han had not spoken at that moment they might have come to blows.

  “The trouble with our group,” said Han, “is that we have a beginning but no end. We have a leader but no follow-up. We have a tiger’s head but a snake’s tail. And so our work doesn’t go well.”

  The team had reached an impasse. The low morale of the local cadres had reached a nadir.

  The time had come for an evaluation on a different level. Up to this point the cadres had been talking about a general line—their relations with the peasants, the mistakes made in estimating the situation in the village, whether or not they had treated the branch members too harshly. The question of their internal relations, the question of personal problems and grievances that might stand in the way of their working together had not been touched upon. Yet these questions could become a greater obstacle to effective work than any other. Unless the inner contradictions that plagued the team and its individual members were exposed, there was little chance that the larger contradictions in the world outside them could ever be successfully tackled. Perhaps an extended period of self-examination could clear the air. If each individual could be granted ample time to think through his own problems, make clear his own thoughts and attitudes, his own reservations, his own gripes, he might then be able to formulate, isolate, and finally lay aside the burdens that distracted him and wore down his energies.

  Secretary Ch’en and his assistant, Secretary Chang, were aware of this problem, On the very next morning, April 26, 1948, they called all the cadres to a meeting in the temple and announced a Party Day. “We call this a Party Day,” said Secretary Chang, then added for my benefit and that of several of the University students, “but everyone can join whether they are Party members or not. What we want to do is to speak out what we have in our minds honestly and sincerely. Even if you try to suppress what is bothering you, it will burst out sooner or later and perhaps influence your work badly. For example, on the Long Bow team many workers didn’t agree with the leader, but they didn’t speak out in the meetings and their morale was low. What started as a problem for two or three soon influenced others, and very soon the work of the whole team suffered. So now, while we have the opportunity, we will examine ourselves and try to wipe out the gloomy atmosphere that has taken hold of some comrades and some teams.”

  Secretary Chang, a plump man whose cheerful temperament contrasted sharply with that of the austere Ch’en, went on to analyze some of the hidden problems which the cadres had not yet discussed in public. He knew these problems well, for the morale of
the Party was his special sphere of responsibility.

  “Part of this gloom is due to the influence of the purification meetings on the cadres. Many of you fear examination in your own villages. You are afraid you cannot pass the gate at home. At the same time, the mutual-aid teams have refused to help your families. You worry lest your children have nothing to eat. But you ought to know by now that if you make up your minds to be honest, serve the masses sincerely, and acknowledge your mistakes, you can pass the gate. As for problems at home, we can also take steps to solve them. Nobody should worry unduly. Let each speak out frankly now and not complain and gripe in the corners later.”

  The mass meeting broke up. The teams spent the rest of the day in self-and-mutual criticism. The Long Bow cadres once more sought out their favorite place, the rubble at the base of the bell tower.