Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  Not infringement of the rights of middle peasants, not indiscriminate violence, not confiscation of private commercial and industrial holdings, not “sweep-the-floor-out-the-door” excesses, not commandism, favoritism, and hedonism, but a basic decision to remake the world, the actual fanshen of the poor peasants, and the uprooting of feudalism constituted the main content of local history since 1945.

  As for the actions of the work teams since their arrival in the villages in March 1948, this could not be negated either. In spite of the faulty evaluation which the teams brought with them to their work, in spite of unrealistic promises made to the peasants, in spite of the exaggerated emphasis on the poor, in spite of the unwarranted harshness of the effort to remold the village Communists and cadres, a more realistic picture of the true condition in the villages had been fashioned. The population in the villages had been painstakingly classified, hundreds of people had been mobilized and educated, the worst abuses of the cadres had been exposed, those responsible had begun the process of reform, and the tide of democracy had swept into every sphere of village life. These were solid achievements. They constituted the main-aspect of the work.

  Once “basically right” replaced “all wrong” as the cadres’ estimate of the past, their own mistakes and the mistakes of the Party fell into place as part of a dynamic process. This way of looking at things had already been summed up by Mao Tse-tung in a talk delivered to the staff of the Shansi-Suiyuan Daily on April 2nd. Among the editors and writers on that paper were several who had openly espoused the poor-peasant line. When they realized their error, they were as demoralized as the majority of the full-time cadres at Lucheng had been after hearing Secretary Ch’en’s report.

  To these newspapermen Mao spoke as follows:

  When we are correcting deviations, some people look on the work of the past as utterly fruitless and wrong. That is not right. These people fail to see that the Party has led a huge number of peasants to obtain land, has overthrown feudalism, consolidated the Party organizations, and improved the cadres’ style of work, and that now it has also corrected the Left deviations and educated the cadres and the masses. Are all these not great achievements? We should be analytical with regard to our work and the undertakings of the masses and should not negate everything. In the past Left deviations arose because people had no experience. Without experience it is difficult to avoid mistakes. From inexperience, one must go through a process. Through the struggles against the Right and Left deviations in the short period since June of last year, people have come to understand what struggle against Right deviations means and what struggle against Left deviations means. Without this process people would not understand.

  These words provided a realistic and convincing framework for evaluating the past in Lucheng County. Not a restatement of faith in the future, but a detailed and concrete analysis of the mistakes and detours of the past against the background of the victories won provided the foundation for a true revival of morale.

  It would be wrong to give the impression that this revival took place in one great leap. The level of understanding expressed by these words of Mao was not attained by all the Lucheng cadres in the course of this one conference. What did take place was uneven progress towards such understanding. Some men and women grasped the essential point immediately. Others, only partly convinced, remained more or less doubtful. An unconvinced minority continued to express bitterness and bewilderment at the very real injury they had suffered from criticism at work and retaliation at home during the period when the poor-peasant line prevailed.

  In the long run, however, neither the bitterness of this latter group nor the wavering of those who still had doubts could suppress the surge of optimism which the final evaluation unleashed. During the last days of the conference the old mood of gloom gave way step by step to a new mood of buoyancy, and the vast majority of the cadres prepared themselves to tackle with confidence and enthusiasm the fanshen tasks that still remained.

  ***********

  Secretary Ch’en and Assistant Secretary Chang outlined the tasks of the future in a series of long reports.

  First, the excesses of the past had to be corrected by resettling all landlord and rich peasant families who had been “swept out the door,” by repaying all middle peasant families who had been expropriated, and by returning to the original owners all commercial and industrial property that had been taken from them.

  Next, after a final evaluation of all village cadres before the gate, a government responsible to the electorate had to be chosen in each village.

  Finally, a large-scale production movement had to be initiated and carried, by detailed organization and encouragement, to new heights.

  This last was the central task. Everything else must be subordinated to it. The correction of past errors and the establishment of democratic rule were seen as essentials to the primary goal—an unprecedented upsurge of production. The foundation for such an upsurge had been created by the destruction of the feudal land system and the fanshen of the poor and hired peasants. It could only reach its full potential, however, when the grievances of all classes were settled and a democratic atmosphere of free give and take prevailed.

  In the 11 “basic villages” all of this work was to be carried out as rapidly as possible by the work teams. On the other hand, in the remaining villages in the county, the so-called “production villages,” only the correction of past errors was to be handled right away, and this by a short cut. Instead of classifying the whole village according to the latest standards, only those families who had been attacked were to be classified. All those who turned out to be middle peasants must then be repaid. All those who turned out to be landlords or rich peasants must be resettled. In this straightforward manner the land reform was to be completed. Only later on, during the slack winter months, would those many villages attempt to consolidate their Party branches by setting up gates, or form new village governments by holding popular elections.

  PART VII

  Untying the Knot

  Victory will go to the exploited, for with them is life, the strength of numbers, the strength of the masses, the strength of inexhaustible resources of all that is unselfish, high-principled, honest, forward straining, and awakening for the task of building the new, all the gigantic store of energy and talent of the so-called “common folk,” the workers and peasants. Victory lies with them.

  V. I. Lenin

  57

  Disaster

  And the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt; there was hail, and fire flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very heavy hail, such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. The hail struck down everything that was in the field throughout the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and the hail struck down every plant of the field, and shattered every tree of the field.

  Exodus

  A STRANGE thing happened in the sky. It was several days before the end of the county conference. The cadres of the various work teams were scattered throughout the courtyards discussing one of Ch’en’s reports. I was sitting, as usual, with the team from Long Bow. Suddenly the afternoon sun faded. We looked up to see an enormous dark thunderhead rushing toward us from the west. Lightning flashed inside it. Great cauldrons of vapor rose and turned as thunder rumbled from its dark center. As we watched this drama in the sky, a furious wind tore at the courtyard, whirled madly through the temple gates, and whipped the ubiquitous North China dust high into the air above the roofs that encircled us. Then, as quickly as it had come, the wind receded. The air became absolutely still. This, I thought, must be the eye of the storm. Surely now, at any moment a most terrible hurricane would break upon us. But instead the unexpected happened again. A cool and gentle rain began to fall. It dropped quietly for half an hour. Then the sky cleared. The sun shone forth again as if nothing had ever threatened the peace of the afternoon. The participants at the conference dismissed the strange wind and cloud from their minds and turne
d back to their discussion. I did the same. It never occurred to any of us that we had witnessed the enactment of a terrible disaster.

  We remained in blissful ignorance until the middle of the supper break when Village Head Ch’un-hsi of Long Bow strode into the temple yard mud-flecked and panting. He had run the whole ten miles of valley and mountain that separated Long Bow from Lucheng. Tears coursed down his cheeks as he stood before the county magistrate and described how a terrible hail storm followed by a flash flood had ravaged his village. Twenty sections of housing had already collapsed. More than half the crops on the surrounding land had been laid waste. The water in the center of the village had risen so high it poured over the door sill of the District Office. Hailstones as big as walnuts had smashed the wheat beyond recovery. The people were weeping openly in the streets.

  The Long Bow team sat in stunned silence as they listened to the news. Of all the villages in the county, Long Bow had the poorest land, had enjoyed the least favorable growing conditions that year and had raised the worst crops. Now even those poor seedlings had been destroyed. How could the people recover from such a blow? How could morale ever be restored? The whole team wanted to rush back immediately to help organize relief and lead in the reconstruction of the village but Secretary Ch’en would not let anyone go. He asked the team to wait a day or two until the conference adjourned. In the meantime he promised that he would do what was necessary to start relief grain moving and render such assistance as might be necessary.

  ***********

  When the Long Bow team members finally did return from the county seat, it was already the last day of June. As I walked along with them I found it hard to believe that any calamity had taken place. Everywhere the crops looked fine. On the flat north of Long Bow the wheat was ripening to a golden yellow. The vigorous young millet was already beginning to obscure the brown soil from which it sprang and cornstalks brushed the knees of any passerby who walked near the edge of the road. It was not until we passed the halfway mark south of the village of North Market and approached the fields of Long Bow itself that we began to see marks left behind by receding flood waters. Here a rapid current had run through the crops and rippled the surface of the soil; there odd bits of leaves and trash lay piled up against the corn stalks. Further on we found the leaves of the corn plants shredded as though they had been attacked with a fork. Wheat stems bent way over as if to pay their respects to the Earth God while the young millet lay flat, half buried in still moist mud. The closer we came to the village, the greater was the desolation. Now the corn leaves looked as if they had been fed through a cotton gin, the road was lined with flood trash, and in some fields only a stalk or two of wheat still stood. All else had been flattened and drowned. This, it turned out, was the worst hit section of the whole village. Some of the fields on the far side of the community had not been so badly mangled. In many places the wheat still stood upright but the health of the stalks and leaves was no indication of the damage the crop had suffered. The hail had threshed the wheat where it stood. Fields that should have yielded 12 or 15 bushels to the acre would thrash out only three or four. The rest of the crop lay scattered in the dirt, impossible to salvage. Beans that had been interplanted in the corn and the millet had been completely destroyed.

  The storm had stunned the whole population. Although a week had already passed since the disaster occurred, we found group after group of people wandering listlessly about. Many were not yet emotionally capable of setting to work to save something from the wreckage. As soon as we put down our bedrolls, we scattered to the four corners of the settlement to visit old friends and catch up with all that had happened while we were gone. I went with Ch’i Yun to see certain of the activists among the women.

  Many and varied were the stories of the storm that we heard that day. Hu Hsueh-chen, chairman of the Women’s Association, told how she had sat in her home spinning cotton. She took little notice when it began to rain, but soon the water started to pour over the threshold of her house. She grabbed a washbasin and tried to bail it out, but it poured in faster than she could remove it and soon flooded the room to a depth of two feet. She then ran to the neighbors in alarm. They helped her carry out her child and her few belongings, and she abandoned the house. Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the storm ended. The sky cleared. Hu Hsueh-chen went to the fields to see what had happened to her crops. One glance was enough to tell her that everything had been destroyed. The wheat, the millet, the beans, and the corn, all gone! She fell to the ground and wept. When at last she recovered enough strength to walk back to the village she found many others groping their way along the streets, their eyes, like her own, blinded by tears.

  Li T’ung-jen’s wife told us a different sort of tale. When the storm cloud first appeared, Li T’ung-jen was a mile from the village on his way home from Lucheng. He had with him his donkey and cart. Soon hail began to pelt him. He looked for shelter but found none. Then, as the hailstones grew bigger and more dangerous, he put his straw hat on the donkey’s head and crawled under the cart. Ch’un-hsi, the village head, found him there as he came over the hill. In spite of the disaster he could not help laughing at the spectacle of the driverless donkey standing in the middle of nowhere with a straw hat on his head.

  Man-hsi’s wife said the storm came up so suddenly that the chicks in her yard almost drowned. The old hen cried out in terror like a human child. Man-hsi ran out to gather in the hen and chicks. A large hailstone almost knocked him down. He put the poultry on the k’ang under a warm blanket but even so, two of the little chicks died.

  Lai-so’s mother, one of the oldest inhabitants of Long Bow, kept shaking her head as she talked. Over and over again she said that in all her 70 years she had never seen hailstones to match the ones that fell that day. They were as big as eggs, they were as big as ripe persimmons. Never had anything so large fallen from the sky before. She thought it was some sort of portent.

  It soon became obvious that the militant spirit built up in the village during the confrontation with Yu-lai had vanished. A sort of lethargy pervaded the whole population. A rumor had started, no one knew where, that the storm was a punishment to the people of Long Bow for allowing their village to be host to the work team. At the time of the first classification an earlier hailstorm had harassed the village. Now a little rhyme made the rounds:

  Twice classify the classes,

  Hail twice beats the masses!

  This time the Party members seemed to be as apathetic as the villagers. In fact, their morale seemed lower than that of the rest of the population. Although at least 50 people showed up on July 1st to celebrate the birthday of the Communist Party, more than a third of the Party members themselves were absent. When a production meeting was called by the work team to rally mutual-aid groups for a program that would overcome the effects of the storm, all 12 mutual-aid group leaders showed up promptly, but only Cheng-k’uan and Hsin-fa appeared to speak for the 30-odd Party members.

  While before the County Conference there had been at least six or eight leading Communists who took responsibility and met eagerly to carry on work, now Cheng-k’uan alone seemed to care. Hsin-fa, the secretary, and Ts’ai-yuan, the storekeeper, spent their time grumbling. They had to be summoned several times before they would show up at any meeting.

  ***********

  The man whose job it now was to revive morale in the village and to set the population moving again was new to Long Bow. His name was Ts’ai Chin. He had been sent to work in Lucheng County by the Subregional Party Bureau in response to a request from the county secretary for someone to replace Team Leader Hou. The secretary had asked for a man with more experience than Hou, a man with greater education and one with a deeper theoretical understanding. He got what he asked for. Ts’ai Chin was an intellectual, tall, thin, sharp-featured like Hsieh Hung, the interpreter, and brilliant in the same quick, impetuous way.

  In almost every respect, appearance as well as temperament, Ts’ai Chin
was the very opposite of the man he replaced. Ts’ai was high-strung where Hou was placid, quick where Hou was slow, vocal where Hou was tongue-tied, and sharp where Hou was gentle. Ts’ai’s hands were long, thin, and tender. As might have been expected, they were adept at handling a writing brush. Ts’ai let his hair grow. A thick black shock of it hung down over his forehead. One of his characteristic gestures was to brush that forelock back. He rarely stood still, but when he did, he seemed to lean forward from his ankles as if bucking a strong wind.

  If Hou was typical of the peasant revolutionaries that came to the fore by the tens of thousands during the land reform movement, Ts’ai was a prototype of the intellectuals who turned revolutionary in the course of the Anti-Japanese War. Both types had a role to play in the great movement for fanshen, but whereas the former came to the struggle by a process as natural as breathing, the latter came to it only after rejecting much of their past, after coming through a process of education painful enough to leave a mark in the intensity of their eyes and the stormy turmoil of their souls.

  The inner turmoil in Ts’ai came to the surface every now and then in a flash of temper that shocked his colleagues and stunned the peasants. We understood that temper better when we learned that Ts’ai’s own brother had been beaten to death and his mother and grandfather driven from their many-sectioned courtyard and 50 acres of land during the Settling Accounts Movement.

  How had such a man ever become a revolutionary?

  As Ts’ai related his story to me, becoming a revolutionary was easy enough for him; remaining one had been difficult. When the Japanese Army took Peking in 1937, Ts’ai was a middle school student in the capital. With a large group of patriotic classmates he made his way through the battle lines to fight in Central Shansi. He was assigned, through the underground, to an Eighth Route Army unit that operated in his home county of Hohsun, about 100 miles north of Changchih. As a student he had read many revolutionary books. He had been impressed by the Marxian descriptions of the class character of mankind. He had recognized truth in the idea that the attitudes, thoughts, and actions of any individual are a product of the way in which he earns his living. In the landlord-dominated, corrupt, and stagnant China of the 1930’s, he had seen no future for himself. He had acquired a contempt for the luxurious, dissolute lives led by the sons and daughters of the big warlords, landlords, and generals with whom he went to shool. At the front he met and worked with Communists who asked nothing for themselves, suffered what the people suffered, and shared whatever food and shelter was available. When they invited him to join the Communist Party, he did so without hesitation or misgivings. At this time there had not been any conflict between what Ts’ai, as a landlord’s son, wanted for China, and what the Communist Party wanted. The need to liberate their country from foreign occupation united representatives of all classes, and this unity had brought many landlords to the Party. It was only after the Japanese had been defeated, after renewed Civil War had broken out, after the Communist Party had come into open conflict with the gentry over the land question, that Ts’ai began to suffer agonizing doubts. He was convinced that in order to secure the future of China the landlord class must be overthrown, but every time that he thought of his landlord friends and especially of his own landlord family, he had to beat back a great upsurge of affection and pity.