As far as the work team was concerned, Shen had already proven himself to be thoroughly unreliable. The big vote which he received did not speak well for the judgment of the men in his neighborhood, nor did it speak well for the educational program carried on there by the team. When they met to discuss their work that night, the team cadres spent several hours reviewing the weaknesses that had shown up in the southwest section. But no one had a convincing answer to the problem posed by the dissident Catholics, who, it was generally agreed, had taken advantage of the spreading political apathy to win a place in the sun.
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The frustration felt by the team cadres over Shen’s near triumph was offset, at least in part, by a letter which arrived that day in the village office. The letter came from Resistance University, the military training school that had once been housed in the Long Bow mission compound. It read as follows:
Lucheng County
Long Bow Village
To All Members of the Peasants’ Association
From the Third Group of the Military and Political Training School
Has the land reform been completed? How is the spring sowing coming? Having parted from you for more than one year, we still clearly remember the help you fellow countrymen gave us even though you were very busy in production work and in the fanshen movement. This help, up until the time that we left, we never rewarded. Now we send you this letter to make our apologies and to express our gratitude for your help.
The most shameful thing that we must admit and ask pardon for is that at the time quite a few of our cadres and members of the general department of our school, influenced by landlord and rich peasant thinking, neglected the suffering of the peasants and misappropriated some of your struggle fruits.
Now, in the land reform study, every comrade has made a serious and deep examination of this matter. All feel and recognize that such mistakes are extremely grave, in fact inexcusable. Such acts violate the land reform law and those who are responsible should come in person to apologize to you face to face. Due to the pressure of work we cannot come personally, but we are sending back all the things that we have here that belong to you. As for those that have been damaged, we are sending back money instead. These are all the articles that we have found and that we can remember. Probably there are some omissions. We sincerely hope that you will point out those things that we have forgotten and we shall accept your opinion with all our hearts. From now on with your help and advice we shall strengthen the education of our cadres and try to be good servants to the masses, serve them wholeheartedly, take an active part in the present fanshen movement, and never violate the people’s welfare.
With our sincere apologies,
(Signed with the seal of the Political Department
of the Third Group of the Military and Political
Training School, April 13, 1948.)
This letter was read aloud at all the election meetings held that day and made a deep impression on the peasants. It had been delivered by a carter who brought with him all the articles mentioned. These were put in the village warehouse pending the final distribution of property after the establishment of the Village Congress. There was nothing of great value in the shipment—a roll of white cloth from the church linen closet, a landlord’s silk gown, several pairs of shoes, a brass candelabra, a length of rope, an iron hammer—but the fact that the staff and students of Resistance University on their own initiative and without any request from the village, had actually taken the trouble to gather these things together and send them back moved everyone deeply. Their action demonstrated that concrete results could be expected from examinations at the gate, from self-and-mutual criticism. It also demonstrated that the movement in Long Bow was not some isolated phenomenon but part of the great wave of land reform and Party consolidation that was sweeping the whole of North China.
48
Class Differentiation Repeated
We must explain, discuss, report, evaluate, classify, post results, explain, discuss, and report again and again. This is very troublesome, very difficult, very time consuming. But the people do not find it troublesome because it fixes their fate. This is the most important work of the whole movement. He who leads the classification holds the knife in his hand.
Secretary Ch’en
Lucheng County Party Committee
RAIN!
Rain fell heavily in the middle of May. Each succeeding downpour came as a blessing. Rain blessed the young shoots and the seeds in the ground. It brought moisture enough to insure lusty growth well into the summer season. Rain blessed the toil-exhausted peasants. It gave them time to rest. Rain also blessed the work team. It provided the cadres with a chance to call meetings and push ahead with the program of fanshen which had already been delayed far too long.
Nobody went outdoors while the rain was falling because nobody had any protective covering. Very few had even an extra set of clothes to change into should they be caught in a sudden downpour. To get wet in the rain was to court pneumonia, to flirt with death.
When the rain stopped, it was still necessary to linger indoors. All shoes were made of cloth. They soaked up water from the wet ground after only a few steps. Rain also turned the structureless soil of the Shangtang plateau into a quagmire. It was no use trying to hoe, thin, plant, or plow in the mud. Cultivation had to wait until the sun dried everything out. Rain in the morning meant a day of enforced leisure. Rain today meant rest tomorrow, a welcome double holiday.
The first time that it rained, Hou climbed the church tower and called on all the poor and middle peasants to gather for an afternoon of study devoted to the new classification standards. This session continued right through the following day and into the evening. The second time it rained, the Poor Peasants’ League groups began to classify the families in their respective sections. Later in the week a tremendous downpour so drenched the land that no one could go out for two or three days in a row. Then these groups had a chance to finish up their work.
The apathy which had all but stalled the village since the team returned from the County Conference seemed to recede as work on classification began. A few protested that it was all a waste of time, but the mounting interest shown by the majority bore out Secretary Ch’en’s prediction: “The people do not find class differentiation troublesome because it fixes their fate.”
The man-hours spent in study alone were prodigious. Hundreds of people spent dozens of hours in discussion and practice before the actual work of judging their neighbors even began.
On the most crucial of all issues—the division between middle peasants and rich peasants—solid progress was made. Some of the peasants soon mastered not only the definitions but also the methods for calculating net income, gross income, percentages of exploitation, and fixed and variable expenses. Kuo Yu-tzu, a middle peasant who had had enough schooling to enable him to read the classification documents, soon found himself acting as teacher to group after group. As a guide in simple cases, Kuo made up and hammered home a formula of his own: lao li p’eng lao li (match labor power against labor power). To make clear the nature of net income he acted out the role of a middle peasant dividing up his harvest. First he scraped a pile of dust together with his hands and called this his harvest or “gross income.” He then set a section of the pile aside “for seed and fertilizer” and pushed another section to the other side “for wages and food for the hired man.”
“This pile, the one I have left, that’s the net income,” said Kuo triumphantly.
His listeners, a group of pipe-smoking peasants who squatted round him in a circle, had little trouble understanding such graphic lessons.
***********
Careful preparation made the second classification far more precise and scientific than the first, without detracting in any way from the human interest which any review of the people’s life was bound to bring to the surface. As a matter of fact, with their newly acquired knowledge of the principles involved in
class analysis, both cadres and peasants were able to probe more deeply than before into every aspect of village affairs. Rules which had seemed dry and difficult when studied in the abstract at the county seat suddenly took on lively new dimensions when they were applied to concrete cases.
Since the emphasis was now on repayment, all those families that had ever been attacked as gentry were now studied with particular care. One example will suffice to illustrate the method: the family of Kuo Ch’ung-wang.
During the base period there were nine people in Ch’ung-wang’s household. They lived on the produce of 23 acres, five of which were rented out. The family had 40 sections of housing, two draft animals, two carts, and three able-bodied men, two of whom worked full time on the land, while the third worked about half the time.
When Kuo Ch’ung-wang was attacked as a landlord in 1945, he and his wife ran away. His brother Fu-kuei stayed behind only to be beaten to death when he refused to reveal where his buried wealth lay. Six other members of the family lived on in Long Bow with leftover assets approximately equal to the poorest of all the poor peasants. These six now claimed that they had always been middle peasants, not landlords. They demanded that their land and property be restored in accordance with the new regulations.
On the basis of comparative labor power Ch’ung-wang’s heirs seemed to have a case. They claimed that the elders of the family had never hired more than 40 days of labor a year, exclusive of harvest help, and that therefore the family income from exploitation was a mere fraction of its earned income.
When they brought their case to the southwest group of the League, stolid Ank’u, husband to the young Party member, Little Mer, recalled that he had worked for three solid months on Ch’ung-wang’s land in 1944. When others confirmed this, the peasants decided to take Ank’u’s labor, rather than the 40 days claimed by the family, as typical of the base years. Then, with Kuo Yu-tzu’s help, the economy of the family was analyzed as follows:
This was less than one quarter of the gross, but Ch’ung-wang owned more than twice as much land per capita as the average of the village. Therefore, the income from exploitation had to be doubled. This made it 30 hundredweight or considerably more than the limit allowed.
Kuo Ch’ung-wang was classed as a rich peasant. The expropriation of his property had not been a mistake.
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A second important objective of this classification was to determine how many new-middle-peasants had been created in Long Bow and how many poor peasants still remained. To accomplish this required a close look at all those previously classed as poor on the basis of their holdings during the base period. Those who had since received enough in the various “struggle movements” to support themselves were henceforth to be called new-middle-peasants.
This was a designation which no family welcomed. To be called new-middle-peasants meant for that family that the Revolution was over, that it had received its due. Most families so designated fought hard to reverse the stand of their neighbors and indignantly denied that they had everything necessary for an independent life. But the reality of “no more oil” intervened against them. Since most of the more prosperous families had already been downgraded, it followed that among the poor there must be some who must be upgraded. With very little property still in the hands of the village administration and little else that could be seized, the definition of fanshen itself had to be trimmed. Talk about the need to possess everything necessary for a prosperous middle peasant life gave way to talk about the minimum necessary to support a family on the land. As time went on, even this minimum tended to shrink.
The kind of struggle this trend aroused was illustrated in the case of Old Kao, a veteran from the Taiyueh region who had retired in Long Bow on land allocated by the distribution committee.
Because he was single and a veteran, Old Kao had received four acres of land. This was much more than the average and more than he could till by himself. He always had to have help from his mutual-aid group. But because he had nothing else besides this to his name except one bare room—no animal, no cart, no implements, not even a wife—Kao still considered himself a poor peasant.
“But you have four acres of land. Surely you are a new-middle-peasant,” said several.
“I don’t even have a pot to cook in. How can I be called a middle peasant?” Kao demanded indignantly. And indeed he did not look very prosperous. His padded clothes were soiled and patched and the towel on his head was almost black from lack of washing.
“When you were mustered out you got nine hundredweight of grain. You could have bought a donkey, a plow, and a dozen pots. And the four acres of land were heavy with standing wheat when you got them. From that harvest alone you could have saved enough to buy all that you needed. But no, you spent it all on fancy living. If you aren’t a new-middle-peasant, it’s your own fault,” said acting Village Head Ch’un-hsi.
Old Kao was so upset that he couldn’t say anything more. He grew red in the face, placed a tobacco-stained thumb against one nostril and blew the contents of the other onto the floor. Then he coughed and mumbled something unintelligible. Obviously, “new-middle-peasant” didn’t suit him at all. He regarded the term as an insult.
“Well, what is your opinion?” asked Yuan-lung.
“If the masses think I am a new-middle-peasant, then …”
“It’s not what the masses think. What do you think?”
“I think I have no wife. No one makes clothes for me. I have to buy them. I have nothing but land. I think I am a poor peasant.”
“Well, we don’t want you to bear any burden,” said Hsieh, the interpreter who was representing the work team at the meeting. “But after all, what is wrong with calling you a new-middle-peasant? That’s a poor peasant who has fanshened. It’s no insult. If we call you a new-middle-peasant, will you carry a burden the rest of your life?
“You shouldn’t,” said Hu Hsueh-chen. She was one of those who had already accepted that designation herself and was learning to live with it.
“What do you say, Old Kao?”
“Well, I haven’t any burden. It’s all right with me,” said the sad-faced veteran.
But as he said it he blew his nose again and averted his eyes from those who had done him such an injury. He was obviously still upset, and so were many others who had been classed in the same way.
Their indignation was only exceeded by those few who had formerly been classed as poor but were now upgraded to old-middle-peasant and consequently considered to have always possessed sufficient property to maintain independent life. However, nothing they said caused their neighbors to relent. There simply was no “oil.”
***********
When every family in the village had been reclassified a master list was drawn up. It was posted on the brick wall of the church compound so that it could be read by anyone who came along the main street. The list was so long that it was impossible to read while standing in one spot. A poor peasant who started deciphering the names at the southern end, where the landlords and rich peasants were listed, had to walk northward more than 30 paces before he found his own name among the propertyless.
Certain families at the upper end of the scale who had lived in fear of attack or had already been expropriated were overjoyed when they saw how far down on the list they stood.
Li Pao-yu, the nervous merchant with the date orchard and the licentious wife, found himself listed as a plain middle peasant. He strode up and down the main street, chest out, eyes shining, and told everyone who would listen, “They tried to class me as a rich peasant or even a landlord. But now, in spite of all their tricks, I am a middle peasant. Indeed, who cares what class they put me in. They can call me anything they like. The facts are plain.”
Wang Shen-nan, the man whose brother had been beaten to death when 2,000 silver dollars were found buried in his yard, looked wide-eyed at his name in the middle-peasant section. Then he returned home as if drunk and immediately went out to plow a p
iece of land on the hill that he had not set foot on for four long years. “Whether they repay me or not doesn’t matter. I’m well enough off as it is. I’m a middle peasant and I don’t care what happens,” he told his old mother.
Chao Ch’uan-e, the Party member whose in-laws had previously been classed as rich, also found herself listed with the middle peasants. She appeared on the street for the first time since her rejection at the gate and walked its full length with her head up.
Other peasants were not so pleased. They were the ones who had been upgraded. Without exception they all objected.
Ch’ung-lai’s wife complained bitterly that she had not yet acquired a draft animal or a cart or even one small share in either of these two prerequisites for new-middle-peasant status. Wang Hsueh-shen resented being called an old-middle-peasant because others had received gratis everything that he had received in a lifetime of toil. “My wife and I slaved in the fields for ten years with our backs bared to the sun. If I had known we would end up being called old-middle-peasants I would have stayed home. I would have sat on the k’ang and done nothing,” he said.
Li Ho-jen, the leader of the Catholic clique, and Chang Huan-ch’ao, the blacksmith, were among those raised from new to old-middle-peasant status. This was not due to any extraordinary holdings of capital or land but to the fact that they were both craftsmen. Ho-jen was a skilled carpenter, and Huan-ch’ao, though he lacked skill, was the only blacksmith in the village. In judging their class the peasants added their earnings from carpentry and blacksmithing to their earnings from the land and came up with old-middle-peasant status for both. When Huan-ch’ao pleaded a shortage of land, they told him, “If you till the land you can’t beat the iron, and if you beat the iron you can’t till the land.”
Both men were incensed by the decision. Ho-jen reacted with sarcasm. “Of course I am happy to be a middle peasant. As I drove my cart over the hill today it seemed as if I were flying,” he said.
Fanshen Page 57
