When the peasants began the attack on his own mother and brother, he thought that they didn’t understand the Ts’ai family at all. When they beat his brother to death and drove his mother and grandfather away, Ts’ai almost lost his mind. For weeks his thoughts stood deadlocked. All logic, all reason, all the mature ties of his adult life, his work, his colleagues, and his Party demanded that he stand with the peasants, but all his emotions, all his childhood loyalties, all his love for his parents cried out to him to save his family and his land.
Ts’ai finally resolved this personal conflict in favor of the Revolution. To him it became a question of his family and its way of life or China and her future. The landlords as a class had proven time and again that they were incapable of building anything modern in China. They could not even defend their homeland from conquest at the hands of a paltry 70 million Japanese. Many of them had even betrayed her. What future could there be for any Chinese if China herself lay prostrate?
That the destruction of Ts’ai’s family was wrong and unnecessary, the result of a brand of Left extremism that took “sweep-the-floor-out-the door” as the standard for successful expropriation, did not make the tragic consequences any easier to accept. To that which is inevitable a man can reconcile himself. But the shock of the accidental, the excessive, can be withstood only with the aid of profound conviction, only by a commitment which is both rational and total.
Ts’ai Chin could not have resolved this conflict in this way had it not been for the great wartime cheng feng, or Party Consolidation Movement initiated by Mao Tse-tung in 1942. The movement was designed to solidify in all Communist cadres the kind of revolutionary outlook and class position necessary to cope with the sudden shift in class relations which a victory over Japan was sure to bring. Ts’ai Chin was delegated to take part in this study movement in March 1945. For a whole year thereafter—a year during which the Japanese Army surrendered and a nationwide Civil War began, was called off, and began again—he sat in school, read, transcribed his thoughts, and talked. During that period he minutely examined every facet of his past, his outlook at various stages of maturity, the decisions he had made, both in his personal life and in the course of his work, and the class stand he had taken. All this was discussed and analyzed with the help of classmates whose background was similar to his own. He discovered that much of what he had done lacked a clear-cut class character, that he had often acted empirically, in accordance with the pressures of the moment and the prejudices of the past. Slowly and painfully he built for himself a new class outlook, a new code of loyalty.
In 1927 Mao had made clear to the revolutionaries of China the choice of roads that lay before them in relation to the peasants:
To march at their head and lead them? Or to follow at their rear, gesticulating at them and criticizing them? Or to face them as opponents?
Every Chinese is free to choose among the three alternatives, but circumstances demand that a quick choice be made.
In 1945, Ts’ai made his choice. He would march at the head of the peasant rebellion and help lead it if he could.
58
Revolutionary Steeling
When Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and remedies his incompetencies.
Mencius
TS’AI CHIN began work in Long Bow with an effort to find out what really lay behind the collapse of Party morale. He took it for granted that the Party was the key to the situation. As long as the Communists themselves remained passive and sullen, little could be accomplished. If he could get the Party moving again, its members would swing the rest of the village into action.
Ts’ai’s colleagues on the work team soon traced part of the trouble to the status of the three Long Bow men who had been working as full-time district cadres. Fu-yuan, T’ien-ming, and Kuei-ts’ai were all at home, and rumor had it that this was no coincidence. They had all quit as full-time political organizers, so the gossips said, because they saw no future in it. It was also whispered that the former team leader, Hou Pao-pei, and Li Wen-chung of the Long Bow team had quit for good. If these men saw no future in full-time work for the Party and the government, what incentive was there for the local Communist Party members to keep working?
The rumors did not coincide with the facts. Hou Pao-pei and Li Wen-chung had returned home to help with the wheat harvest on their own land. Fu-yuan, ex-village head and brother to Ts’ai-yuan, the storekeeper, had come back to Long Bow for the same reason. T’ien-ming, the founder of the Long Bow Party branch, was at home convalescing from an illness. As soon as he recovered he intended to report for work once more. Only Kuei-ts’ai, the man who had once been the most daring and active of all the poor peasants in the village, was sulking at home because he was disillusioned with outside work.
But Kuei-ts’ai, it turned out, had prestige enough to influence many minds. Disgusted with political work himself, he tried his best to discourage others. After every meeting he sought out the active local people and asked what kind of a discussion they had had. When they told him about disagreements and quarrels, he said, “It’s no use at all. The policy changes too often. I myself don’t want to go out and be a cadre again. It is better to stay at home.”
His thoughts had run in such channels ever since the day that he had been detained in the village for the accounts examination meeting and had been disarmed by Cadre Hsu. He thought then that he was under attack for having been so active in the past and he could not think it through. “Was I wrong to struggle against the landlords?” he asked himself. His inability to answer this question served as an excuse for doing what he most wanted to do in any case—raise food for his family. Like Li Wen-chung of the Long Bow team, Kuei-ts’ai had only recently married, and the sudden assumption of responsibility for wife and home pushed all collective demands on his time and energy into the background.
In addition to all this, Kuei-ts’ai had syphilis. The penicillin that was needed for a cure was expensive, and he didn’t see where the money was to come from if he did not raise crops at home. Swayed by all these considerations and embittered by the attack on his past record, Kuei-ts’ai convinced himself not only that he should quit and stay home but that everyone else should follow his example.
Kuei-ts’ai’s bitter words would not have disrupted the Long Bow Party branch if its members had not been in a receptive frame of mind. Material difficulties and political disillusionment had already prepared a rich seedbed for sprouts of discontent. All the Long Bow Party members had been hit hard by the storm, all of them had accepted opinions before the gate that were not really fair, and all of them felt that their past records had been too harshly attacked. Hsin-fa, for instance, said to Team Leader Ts’ai, “I have some worries too. During the Purification Movement many opinions were raised against me. Some of them were correct but some were very unfair. I accepted all of them without any differentiation. I agreed to hand over some fruits which I didn’t really seize illegally. And now that my wheat has been destroyed, where will I find the grain to pay back all that I promised?”
In addition to these aggravating personal problems, the village cadres had to face mounting difficulties posed by the new atmosphere of freedom that had been growing ever since the work team first came to the village. This new atmosphere had made possible the upsurge of political activity that had produced two gates, numerous elections, and many lively classification sessions. That was its positive side. There was also a negative side. The new atmosphere had stimulated the growth of “each-man-for-himself’ tendencies, which acquired the name of “extreme democracy.” This was an expression in political life of the “extreme equality” which was already disrupting economic life.
By the end of June 1948, “extreme democracy” had grown to such proportions
in Long Bow that very few peasants could be found who were willing to undertake public service. As a result, the whole burden of stretcher bearing, message carrying, and grain delivery fell on the Party members, on those 28 peasants who had undertaken to be the active heart of the Revolution, come what may. Ever since the gate their sincerity had been on trial, so to speak, before public opinion. Consequently, they alone could not make excuses, shift burdens onto others, avoid responsibility. The burden that they bore thus developed from an ideological and organizational one into one that was overwhelmingly physical. From symbolic “oxen of the people” they had been converted step by step into real ones.
Ch’un-hsi, the acting village head, had seven acres of his own to till but hardly ever got to the fields because of the pressure of public duties of all kinds. In the first week of July he was called to the county seat for a production meeting that lasted several days. On the evening of his return a wounded soldier arrived in the village square on a stretcher. It was the duty of the Long Bow residents to take him ten miles to the north where he would be passed on to another group, and then to another until finally he reached home. When Ch’un-hsi tried to find two men who would carry the stretcher, peasant after peasant refused and every one of them had a good excuse. Finally Ch’un-hsi and the Communist Szu-har had to shoulder the suffering human burden themselves.
Ch’un-hsi’s mother was so upset by the fact that her son never had time to work on his own land that she decided not to cook for him any more. She saw no reason to feed a man who did nothing to advance the fortunes of his own family. When he got hungry, he had to boil up millet himself, a chore which cut still further into his working time.
“I can’t see any solution to it,” Ch’un-hsi said. “In the past anyone who dared refuse would have been arrested. But now if we speak a strong word, they criticize our attitude and register a grievance against us. The only way out is for us to go in their place. But even though we don’t mind doing all the work, we can’t. I myself have only two hands and two legs.”
Hu Hsueh-chen had a different sort of problem with the women. She was responsible for the spring cotton loan which the County Co-operative Society had made available as a form of work relief for destitute families. All those who applied were given several catties of cotton without charge. After 30 days they were expected to return a certain amount of spun thread. The extra thread they kept as payment for their labor. Earnings were ample. But 50 days after the cotton was delivered Hu Hsueh-chen was still unable to collect payment from most of the women. A man from the County Co-operative headquarters visited her to inquire about the thread. She herself made a special trip to Lucheng to ask for an extension. She called on each of the delinquent spinners several times but still was not able to collect. Finally, on July 1st, the Co-op gave her three days more. But when she told the women about the deadline, they said they had to have at least two weeks.
To the women who owed cotton thread, Hsueh-chen spoke with tears in her eyes. “I have to take all the blame. I have to walk all the way to Lucheng to apologize for you, but you who took the loan of your own free will and knew its terms, you do not live up to your promises!”
“Over this cotton loan I have wept twice,” Hsueh-chen said later to Ch’i Yun. “Sometimes I think of the famine year and how my children died one after the other, and now I have land and have fanshened and must work hard. But then I remember that in the ten years that I lived in Long Bow before I became a cadre nobody ever criticized me. I got along with everyone. But now some of my neighbors even hate me.
“All day I am busy with public affairs but when I return home there is just an empty pot staring me in the face and the children are crying for something to eat. So I have thought more than once, ‘Though I have worked hard for the people now I am attacked just like a landlord.’ Why should I go on being a cadre?”
The 19-year-old Wang An-feng, Hu Hsueh-chen’s closest co-worker and assistant, spoke even more glumly. In a private talk with Ch’i Yun she admitted that the Party members came reluctantly to meetings, kept silent while there, and tried their best to forget what had happened when they got home.
“What about yourself?” asked Ch’i Yun.
“My outlook is the same.”
“Why?”
“Because now I think with the others that there is no future for us. In the past, whatever we said, the people obeyed it. If it was right they obeyed it, and if it was wrong they obeyed it. But now they just look at us coolly. In the past the Communist Party had only to announce that there was to be a meeting and everyone came hurrying. But now they have to be asked over and over again. To invite them to a meeting is harder than to invite honorable guests to a feast.”
This girl, strong and square as a village gate, and possessed of tremendous vitality, was the wife of a soldier who had already been at the front for two years. She tilled all the land at home by herself. She was a Catholic by upbringing but had little praise for the Church. Her father had worked 20 years as a teamster for the Cathedral in Changchih only to be laid off in the famine year of 1943. He came home penniless and broken in health and died of starvation within three months. From that day on, An-feng had done the work of a man and showed it by the strength of her body. She also showed it in her speech—direct, to the point, fearless, as befitted one who earned her own living and made her own decisions.
Yet when Ch’i Yun said that popular apathy was due to the mistakes of the past and could be overcome as soon as the mistakes were corrected, An-feng said, “Women are no use. Since the men are not active, how can the women do anything? No one pays any attention to women’s words.”
“If that were so, how is it that you have been elected so often to various posts?” asked Ch’i Yun.
“Oh, that’s because I am not afraid to speak in public.”
But Ch’i Yun did not let it rest there. She argued that in fact An-feng must have considerable prestige or the people would not vote for her at all. If the men would not do anything, it was up to women to mount the stage and start moving. Then perhaps the men would be ashamed and start following them.
An-feng listened attentively to this argument but quickly brought up another problem that had been bothering her. “Hsiao Wen-hsu says that the work team is always asking us to meet and be active but they themselves get 44 ounces of millet a day for their work, while we get nothing but headaches. No one gives us even one tenth of an ounce, and the masses only heap ill words on our heads.”
This was a real challenge. Ch’i Yun thought carefully before replying. “The work that is done in this village is for the benefit of this village. If it is well done, Long Bow’s peasants will reap the benefits. But as for the work team, our work is never done. Though we get enough to eat we profit nothing from all these meetings. As soon as Long Bow has been reorganized, we must move on to some other place and help some other peasants. Nor do we always get a welcome or high praise, for often we have to support unpopular decisions such as the decision to give Police Captain Wen-te another chance. Then the masses heap abuse on our heads.
“You here and your children can benefit by all the progress that is made,” she went on, “but as for us, we do not even know about the fate of our own families. We cannot help them and some of us must even struggle against them if they are landlords. But we all do our best for the Revolution.”
“Yes,” said An-feng, thinking it over slowly. “I guess if all you wanted was clothes to wear and a full stomach you would not have to come all the way to Long Bow to organize fanshen with us. I guess I am rather childish,” she added with a bright smile that spread charm across her rough-hewn face and even produced a dimple in one cheek. “Sometimes I am in high spirits for several days at a time. But as soon as I run into difficulty or overhear some sarcastic words, I become very gloomy.”
The work team noticed that Ts’ai-yuan, Long Bow’s popular war hero, had changed perhaps more than anyone else. Before the second County Conference he had been the most active
member of the branch. Now, when he finally did come to a meeting, he sat by himself in a corner and never said a word. He reacted bitterly to criticism and responded to friendly greetings with only a surly, “Have you eaten?”
Fanshen Page 67
