Huan-ch’ao became sullen. He did not show up for work at the co-operative carpentry shop the next morning. When the carpenters sent one of their members around to find out what was wrong, he growled, “Just because of this iron pounding they call me a middle peasant. Yet my cart, my house, and a third of my land I got only during the distribution. I won’t pound iron any more. Anybody who thinks it’s so easy better try it himself.”
The work team and the Poor Peasants’ League Committee had to take into account not only the opinions of those who objected to the class they had landed in but also the opinions of those who disagreed with the way others were classed. Beneath the official list on the wall a suggestion box was placed. In it many notes were found. One of them read:
“Old Lady Wang, Li T’ung-jen, Ch’en Chun-fu, Kuo Feng-tzu, Lu Ken-ti poor peasants? We disagree. Land, tools, draft animals enough!”
This note was from the northern group.
When Old Lady Wang heard about this, her mouth began to twitch. She already felt that her neighbors were ganging up on her. This was the last straw. Not only had they failed to elect her to the Poor Peasants’ League Committee, not only had Li P’an-ming asked a heavy price in return for the use of his donkey and cart in the corn field, but also the mother of her son Jen-pao’s bride-to-be had suddenly announced that her daughter no longer wanted to marry. Behind this most grievous blow she knew was an effort to extract more money for the match.
The bride’s brother, it seemed, had recently died. His family now wanted Old Lady Wang not only to find a dead girl that could be buried alongside him, not only to pay half the expenses of the posthumous wedding ceremony, but also to buy a coffin for the dead girl and pay half the expenses of the dead pair’s funeral. Only then would they allow the dead man’s sister to marry Jen-pao.
The price was far too high. Old Lady Wang wanted to call the whole thing off. But delay could spell even greater trouble. With only three in her household, people could argue, just as those in the northern group were doing, that Old Lady Wang had property enough.
Old Lady Wang stopped Team Leader Hou in the street and shouted at him so that all her neighbors could not help but hear, “I lack land, tools, housing, and labor power. I received nothing in the whole movement. Yet they want to call me a middle peasant.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hou, trying to calm her. “It has not been decided yet. There are still two rounds of classification to come.”
“Do I have a right to say anything?” asked Old Lady Wang, trembling with rage.
“Of course! If you have an idea speak it out,” said Hou. “As if anything on earth or beneath it could stop you!”
“Don’t worry about it,” he added, putting a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it! How should I not worry about it? Anybody can see that there is no hope of getting anything!”
“We’ll solve it some way.”
“How? Is anyone going to give me a house? Where are they going to get it from? The holes are many, the patches are few. I don’t think I’ll go to any more meetings. It’s no use.”
“But we’ll solve it, I tell you. If the masses work together, they can solve anything,” said Hou patiently.
Old Lady Wang did not wait to hear him out. She turned abruptly on her crippled feet and hastened back into her courtyard, cursing under her breath.
49
It Is Too Slow!
Certain young cadres... often complain that this place is no good and that place is no better; that this kind of work is no good and that kind of work is no good either. All the while they are looking for some kind of ideal place and work so as to enable them to smoothly ‘change the world.’ However, such places and such work do not exist except in their wishful thinking.
Liu Shao-ch’i
DESPITE real or imagined shortcomings, the class list, as posted, served as a basis for the next step—the formation of a Provisional Peasants’ Association. This Provisional Association was finally established on May 28, 1948, after several days of discussion, a review of the qualifications of all poor and middle peasant families, and another round of elections—this time with written ballots. The minority who could write wrote their own. The majority, who could not read or write, went to certain mutually acceptable ballot writers and told them for whom they wanted to vote.
Most of the Poor Peasants’ League Committee were elected as officers of the Provisional Peasants’ Association. To this core was added a representative complement of middle peasants that included several from each section of the village. The final roster of elected officers represented the poor peasants, the new-middle-peasants, and the old-middle-peasants in almost equal proportions. This was as it should be, people said.
A great mass meeting was held to celebrate the establishment of the Provisional Peasants’ Association, but somehow it proved anti-climactic. These organizational steps, since they no longer served as way-stations on the road to an all-out struggle against a still dominant gentry with wealth to hand over, were transformed into a shadow play, a form of rehearsal-in-reverse, a demonstration of the way in which things should have been organized long before. Consequently, they lacked vitality.
The response of the people was more apathetic than ever. Morale continued to drop and every day brought more problems. Wherever Ch’i Yun, Hsieh Hung, and I went, people came with their woes great and small and asked for help.
On June 2, we went to eat at the home of a peasant named Lai-tzu. The family was weeping. Lai-tzu’s newborn child was dying, and Lai-tzu’s mother could not get off the k’ang. The child had been born into a washbasin on the floor three days before. Because the child’s mother was dumb, she could not describe her condition to anyone. When she felt the baby coming in the middle of the night, she climbed from the k’ang alone. Her mother-in-law awoke just as the baby dropped into the basin used by Lai-tzu to wash his feet. The old woman jumped up, retrieved the thrashing infant, and held it all bloody to her naked body, As she did so, she ordered her son to fetch the midwife.
It took more time than is needed to eat a meal for Lai-tzu to return with the midwife. Throughout that long wait his mother, shivering with cold, clutched the baby to her stomach and tried to keep it warm without ripping the umbilical cord that still bound it to the placenta inside its mother. To relieve tension on the cord she had to stoop far forward.
The midwife, when she finally arrived, cut the child’s cord with a pair of rusty scissors. By that time the distraught old woman was locked in a jacknife position and could not straighten her back. Her son had to lift her bodily onto the k’ang. There she lay immobile with her eyes staring at her bloodstained knees.
They did not wash the baby for three days. They carefully buried the placenta vertically in the ground outside the door in such a way that the end of the cord protruded as far out of the earth as the matching end of it protruded from the baby’s navel. But in spite of these precautions against the “six day wind” (navel ill), the child fell ill.
When Ch’i Yun and I came to the house the baby was gasping for breath and wailing piteously. Lai-tzu’s mother told us between sobs that he had not slept since the sun set the night before. She begged Ch’i Yun to save him, but Ch’i Yun knew that it was already too late. The rusty scissors, gruesome symbol of the old society, had doomed the newborn infant as soon as they touched the cord.
Lai-tzu himself had recently quarreled with a neighbor named Hsi-yu. The two families had dissolved a bean curd manufacturing co-operative without settling all their accounts. Now Hsi-yu threatened to hang himself in front of Lai-tzu’s door unless the latter paid what he owed, and Lai-tzu’s mother begged Ch’i Yun to intervene. Until tempers cooled there was little that Ch’i could do about this either. We left the household stunned.
On the same day, Pao-ch’uan’s mother accused the stubborn cuckold, Chin-chu of outrageous wage demands for planting her corn. Criticized for quarrelling over so minute
a matter, Chin-chu took out his frustration on his wife and started beating her again. Meanwhile, Pao-ch’uan’s mother fell ill. Since she didn’t have enough millet to buy herbs at the medicine shop, she walked out to the long-abandoned temple of the god of health, scraped up some dust and ate it. When Team Leader Hou criticized this superstitious act from the top of the church tower through his megaphone, a “god board” appeared in front of the temple.* The following words were scratched on it:
Heaven fear not, earth fear not,
Hou Pao-pei also fear not.
The “god board” set tongues wagging and families quarreling throughout the village.
When the Committee of the Peasants’ Association met a few days later to consider which families needed relief grain, its members were shocked by the length of the list they finally drew up. As if this were not problem enough, the southwest section reported four babies born in as many days and four more on the way.
“That means we need eight additional acres,” said a spokesman. “Where can they all be found?’’
“Speaking of lacks, Old Kao lacks a wife,” said Little Mer.
“And Hung-chou lacks a finger,” said Huan Ch’ao, the blacksmith. “There are some lacks we just can’t do anything about.”
Frustration in the face of needs everywhere without the wherewithal to satisfy them caused even the most steadfast members of the work team to lose heart. One day Little Li came to Hsieh with an inflamed eye. Hsieh told him he should see a doctor. Little Li said doctors in China were no good. In fact, he said, nothing in China was any good. He wanted to leave China and go to the South Seas; he wanted to leave Asia and go to the Soviet Union. If not that, then he wanted to leave the countryside and go to the city, leave Lucheng and go to Taiyuan.
“I am discouraged,” said Little Li. “Ten years ago when I began to work as a cadre people said, ‘When the Japanese are defeated, then the Revolution will succeed.’ But the Japanese surrendered and war continued. Now ten years have passed. It is too slow. Where is the industry we dreamed about?”
All these incidents were straws in the wind. They indicated a social squall arising. Some problems, like the tetanus that was killing Lai-tzu’s baby, flowed naturally out of the terrible poverty of the past and tended to strengthen in the peasants a burning desire for change, a categorical demand for another way of life. But the problems that sprang from the new life itself were more elusive, more subjective. In a period of discouragment such as this they tended to raise doubts as to goals, direction, and method. They eroded the optimistic spirit and mutual trust that had accomplished such miracles in the past; and in the wounds opened up by this erosion, ugly sprouts of individualism continued to sink roots and grow.
This was an atmosphere that played into the hands of the four who had returned from jail. Individualism was a phenomenon which they well knew how to exploit. Nursing a grudge at having been falsely arrested, very much aware that the whole village wished them ill, and actually frightened by it, they concentrated on enhancing as much as possible their reputation for audacity and ruthlessness.
Yu-lai did this by a particularly outrageous act. He went to a village warehouse that had formerly been under his supervision and removed from it a valuable log. The log had been confiscated from a peasant hitherto regarded as rich. Its owner had fled the village under attack and all his property had been turned over to the Peasants’ Association for safekeeping. Now Yu-lai claimed that the log was his in lieu of wages still owed him by the refugee. Without asking anyone’s permission, he took it. By this act he served notice on the whole community that he considered himself more than a match for the lot of them.
“A man capable of doing that is capable of doing anything,” people said.
It was not a very auspicious reaction for a village that must soon man a gate to examine Yu-lai’s record and the record of each member of his clique.
50
Who Dares Man the Second Gate?
Every comrade … should help the masses to organize themselves step by step and on a voluntary basis to unfold gradually struggles that are necessary and permissible under the external and internal conditions obtaining at a particular time and place. Whatever we do, authoritarianism is always erroneous because, as a result of our impetuosity, it makes us go beyond the degree of the masses’ awakening and violates the principle of voluntary action on the part of the masses.
Mao Tse-tung, 1945
DEAR SECRETARY CHANG
We have met with great difficulty in carrying out the second round of Party purification in our village. Now we send you this report to let you know of the situation and our discussion and wait for your instructions.
After Wang Yu-lai, Wang Wen-te, Li Hung-er and Wang Hsi-yu returned from the county jail their attitude was very bad. The ch’i yen (air and smoke) atmosphere they created made the villagers afraid. They threatened the masses, saying, “We were arrested by the county for more than 40 days, but the county police could do nothing to us. What can you do?” They said this on the street, and at the same time they asked who had criticized them and who had accused them. At the meeting of the branch their attitude was also bad. They resisted all criticism from others. All this, together with their past record, has made the masses afraid. The members of the work team have done their best to explain to the people, but no one dares say anything. The people remain silent and say nothing. Some of the villagers say, “We have opinions; we hate them, but we dare not speak out.” Some say, “I would rather die than criticize them.” Most serious of all is the fact that most of the Party members in the branch have the same feeling and dare not criticize them. Though the work team members visited the people and backed them up and gave them strength and called meetings of the active leaders, still the villagers did not believe us. They thought all that the work team could do was to speak beautiful words. In our opinion, after a study of the real situation we think this is not just a common anti-cadre opinion. The real fact is that the behavior of these men has been too bad, especially the air and smoke they breathed after their return from the county jail and the threats they made. This is not blind opposition to cadres on the part of the masses, so we must solve this problem. If we cannot solve this problem, not only the purification work will fail, but also the masses will misunderstand the whole policy of purification and the future consolidation of the Party will be undermined. So we suggest the following action.
(1) Announce to the people that these men are officially removed from their posts right now. Why? Because of their present action and their words since their return and their intention to harm the work of purification.
(2) According to the request of the people, the Peasants’ Association wants to receive a part of the fruits which the Communist Party members promised to give up, these fruits to be kept by the Association until the future “filling holes movement” takes place.’
We wait your answer.
Chopped*
Hou Pao-pei, Leader
Li Sung-lin, Assistant Leader
Long Bow Work Team
This letter, which was carried to Lucheng by Comrade Hou Pao-pei, was a painful admission of failure on the part of the work team cadres.
Inability to arouse the peasants to challenge Yu-lai and his clique had already caused a split among them. Hsieh Hung and Ch’i Yun, responsible now for the whole southwest section of the village where most of the clique’s victims lived, were demanding some sort of decisive action. Though feeling against the four was strongest in this section, so was fear of retaliation. It effectively checkmated all the “education and persuasion” that the two cadres from the University had been able to apply. Hsieh and Ch’i felt that a breakthrough must be made from above, preferably by some tangible evidence of support for the rank and file. The handing over of goods illegally acquired by the cadres and the dismissal rather than the suspension of Yu-lai, Wen-te, Hung-er, and Hsi-yu would constitute such evidence.
Team Leader Hou disagreed strongly. He was
not as worried as Hsieh and Ch’i about the lack of public opposition to the four bad cadres. He felt that more routine mobilization work would eventually move the people to speak out. At the same time he was reluctant to put excessive pressure on former activists and Communists. He felt that the unwarranted arrest of the four had only added fuel to their defiance. Heavy blows such as summary dismissal and the surrender of property on order, at a time when nothing had been settled according to the due process outlined in the Draft Agrarian Law, could only fan the flames and lead to worse difficulties later. The problem was to correct past mistakes and save all the cadres for future work.
The team members argued bitterly over this question. Hsieh and Ch’i accused Hou of shielding the bad cadres. They thought he had a pedestrian, mechanical approach to what was rapidly becoming a very serious crisis. Between themselves they even called him a “right opportunist.” Hou, on his part, accused Hsieh and Ch’i of “anxious heart sickness” (impetuosity). He felt that they wanted to oppress the four cadres unreasonably. Privately, he considered them to be “leftists.”
The other members of the work team were undecided at first. Little Li, the assistant team leader, finally tipped the balance. He sided with Hsieh and Ch’i, took the lead in attacking Hou’s position, and carried the rest of the local men with him. As a result, on June 3rd, Comrade Hou carried the letter, the contents of which he opposed, ten long miles over ridge and plain to the county seat and personally delivered it to Secretary Chang.
Hou came back in the afternoon more depressed in spirit than when he left. Secretary Chang had agreed to let some of the “fruits” be handed over, but he had called the proposal to remove the cadres from their posts “adventurist.” If the work team in Long Bow could not deal with the four men, then the two who were Party members must be sent to Lucheng with a letter detailing their crimes. Secretary Chang would talk with them himself. “It’s not enough to say that the people are afraid. You have to find out why,” said the Secretary to Hou.
Fanshen Page 58
