Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  Unwilling to believe his ears, Ch’un-hsi went on loading manure.

  The tirade continued.

  “Really, the Church belongs to us Catholics. We built it, but they deny it to us. The sons of bitches! I’m not afraid of them. They struggled against Wang Kuei-ching and Shih La-ming (Catholic landlords). That was a mistake. If they get in my way again, someone is going to get killed.”

  This was too much for Ch’un-hsi. He put down his long-handled ladle and stepped to the gate. There, all alone, stood the peasant Kenpao, a striking figure at any time of day.

  Ken-pao had a rugged frame—stocky and squat like a judo wrestler—calloused hands, a weather-beaten face, eyes that were fixed in a perpetual squint from working under the sun, and the walk of a man who knows hard labor. All this was typical of many Long Bow peasants, but what made Ken-pao unusual was the wild look in his eyes, the fact that the towel on his head was always a bit askew, and a disorder about his dress that indicated a total disregard for convention. It was as if he pulled his clothes off and on while still asleep. These external signs of eccentricity were reinforced by the strange behavior of the man. He habitually talked to himself, broke into violent rages, and beat his wife with a single-mindedness that bordered on madness. Little wonder that the villagers regarded him as slightly queer, if not hopelessly deranged.

  “What was that you said?” Ch’un-hsi asked.

  Ken-pao, taken by surprise, refused to reply.

  “Well, you needn’t repeat it, I heard it anyway,” said Ch’un-hsi. “What did you mean by those words?”

  “Never mind what words I said. I’ll swap my life any day for the lives of several cadres.”

  With that Ken-pao leaped at Ch’un-hsi, grabbed his thumb and tried to break it with one swift, backward jerk. T’ien-hsi and Man-hsi, working the village-owned vegetable garden nearby, were startled by Ch’un-hsi’s scream of pain. They came running, threw Ken-pao down, tied him up and took him to the District Office.

  Magistrate Li thought it very unlikely that Ken-pao’s strange soliloquy was entirely self-generated. Though the man had actively attacked the landlords in 1946 and had received a fair share of the “fruits,” as soon as the Draft Agrarian Law was announced he began to curse the cadres and loudly proclaim that the poor had not fanshened. “We fought to build this ‘kingdom,’” he said, “but only the cadres got the benefit.” After the second County Conference in July, 1948, his line of attack suddenly shifted. He openly questioned the expropriation of the landlords, particularly the Catholic landlords, and denounced the “Settling Accounts Movement” of the past as a bad and cruel thing. Every day he quarrelled with his wife. Their pot was empty, but instead of working to fill it, he stole. Only that week he had been released from the district lockup for selling shovel blades that did not belong to him.

  Did such a man have the wit to respond to policy changes as quickly as he had lately been doing? The magistrate thought not. It was much more likely that someone had put him up to it.

  Two hours of questioning failed to pry anything out of Ken-pao, however. He belied all preconceptions concerning his native wit by answering every question with cunning evasion. When Magistrate Li asked if he had ever threatened to kill anyone, he said:

  “If you send me to jail, I will have to risk my life and kill someone.”

  “Who then will you kill?”

  “I can only kill myself. I have lived in Long Bow all my life. How could I kill anyone here?”

  When Magistrate Li repeated this question, Ken-pao finally admitted that he had made threats, but he blamed it all on his wife.

  “I threatened to kill the village leader and four or five others, but I only said such words because I am crazy. It is my wife that drives me crazy. I can’t even stretch out a leg in the house without her permission. Now she wants all my wages from the harvest season, and she threatened to go to the village office for help. That’s why I cursed the village head.”

  Magistrate Li took the problem to the Party branch. The branch, in turn, recommended that the standing committee of the Congress call Ken-pao before a mass meeting. With the whole village assembled, it might be possible to tell who supported him and who opposed him and thus expose those who had added fuel to his hatred. When Magistrate Li took this suggestion to the Congress committee it was accepted, but the mass meeting which followed proved nothing. Nobody came to Ken-pao’s defense. His wife, amid uncontrollable sobs, told of the terrible life she led with him ever since his return from the army. She revealed that he wanted to get a divorce by going, not to the civil authorities of the Border Region, but to the Catholic bishop in the Cathedral at Taiyuan. Since the Catholic Church was unalterably opposed to divorce and since Taiyuan was in traitor domain, the people all cursed Ken-pao and sided with his wife. Ken-pao begged their pardon and asked for a chance to reform, but the decision of the meeting was to send him to the village lockup, at least until the motives behind his behavior became clearer.

  Ken-pao, rooting like a mole in the dirt, twice escaped from the earthen-walled lockup and was twice recaptured. When the militia got their hands on him for the second time, they tied him up very tightly with rope and wire and put him in the home of their captain, Szu-har. The next day the committee of the Congress met to decide his future. He was released on condition that he do 15 days’ extra labor for some soldier’s family and find three guarantors who would see to it that he did not beat his wife or curse or swear at anyone.

  On the morning of his release I was sitting with the work team cadres beside the village street. We were eating the millet gruel served out at the District Office for breakfast. Ken-pao came plodding along with his son at his side and his hoe over his shoulder, all prepared for work on an absent soldier’s field. He grinned self-consciously as he passed our group.

  Ch’i Yun called out to him, “Do a good job.”

  Ken-pao nodded and proceeded on his way.

  Extreme democracy was definitely on the way out in Long Bow.

  ***********

  Considering the seriousness of the crime, the punishment meted out to Ken-pao was mild indeed. A year earlier he could well have been severely thrashed, driven into exile, even beaten to death. Now his counter-revolutionary talk was treated more as a joke than a problem, and the punishment he received for physically assaulting the village head was no worse than he might have expected for stealing grain. In effect, what the Congress offered him was an opportunity to reform. This magnanimity was a reflection of the confidence which the revolutionary forces felt in their cause and of its support among the people.

  That a dissident faction still existed seemed obvious. Ken-pao could hardly have acted on his own. Who was it then that egged him on? There seemed to be only one logical answer: that group of disgruntled Catholics who gathered at carpenter Li Ho-jen’s house and rallied politically behind Shen Ch’uan-te. On them surely the blame must be laid for the assault on Ch’un-hsi and also for that earlier, much more serious assault on team cadre Little Ch’uer. Absence of concrete evidence made it difficult to prove any such allegations, however, and the general upsurge of confidence that followed the election of the Congress made it unnecessary to do so. The injustices on which dissidence fed were fast being done away with. In the place of “merciless blows,” the Congress had substituted a policy of “love, protect, educate, remold, and unite.” Behind this policy was the idea, so often stated and restated, that poor and middle peasants, regardless of their views, their past, and their present, could be won to the Revolution if—and this was the crux of the matter—they were treated as potential allies and given time to change their views.

  The leniency shown to Ken-pao was a concrete expression of this outlook.

  ***********

  Ken-pao’s case delayed but did not sidetrack the main business before the Congress. Having disposed of it, the delegates tackled the next big job at hand, the “filling of the holes.”

  A rough matching of needs against goods and land
available led the delegates to believe that a final settlement would not be too difficult. They tallied up almost enough housing to go around, and although they were short seven acres of land, they knew that they could count on the return of some fields from middle-peasant families who did not have enough labor power to cultivate all they owned.

  Since top priority in any settlement had to go to wrongly expropriated peasants, a meeting was called on August 2nd to which were invited all those middle- and poor-peasant families who had been victims of attack. The meeting was held in the old clan temple on the village square. This temple boasted a loft from which one could look down on the village pond and the courtyards all around it.

  The middle peasants and their wives or widows came into the building with some trepidation. The former puppet Tseng Chung-hsi even hesitated at the door when he saw that all the people present were relatives of “struggle objects.” The thought apparently flashed through his head that the struggle was to begin all over again. But since there was no way to withdraw at that point, he moved cautiously in. I gained the impression that Chung-hsi’s reservations were shared by others. All the people present were nervous and silent as the meeting began.

  Village Head Ch’un-hsi, who had been asked by the Congress to chair the meeting, carefully explained the policy of repayment. His listeners had heard of it before, but it was one thing to know about it in general and quite another to stand there and be told that it was going to be put into effect immediately. Up until that moment few of the people in the temple believed that they would ever be repaid.

  Ch’un-hsi asked each family head in turn to tell how much land and property was needed. The peasants then put forward some very modest requests.

  Wang Hua-nan, the middle peasant whose wife and brother had both been killed in the uproar over the discovery of 2,000 silver dollars buried in his back courtyard said:

  “I need a few sections of housing, nothing else.”

  But Ch’un-hsi was skeptical.

  “How much land do you have?” he asked.

  “An acre and a third for four people.”

  At this many people laughed out loud.

  “That’s not possibly enough!”

  “But I can work out as a hired laborer and support the family that way,” said Hua-nan.

  This offer was ignored.

  “Better speak out what you want, what you need.”

  But Hua-nan was still reluctant to ask for anything. It almost seemed as if he feared some trap.

  “If I said everything that I wanted it would be too much.”

  “Never mind.”

  Hua-nan finally screwed up his courage and said, “I want another acre and a half, five sections of house, and a few things to cook and work with.”

  This demand was modest enough considering the size of his family. The fact of the matter was that ever since the expropriation of the Wang family, Hua-nan had not even had a pot to cook millet in or a hoe to break ground with. Now he was supposed to be repaid not only enough to make him an average middle peasant but enough to restore his family to its original prosperity.

  When Hua-nan realized that his request was not considered excessive, but on the contrary was more meager than the village leaders had expected, he began to smile.

  “Ever since the struggle I have been worried,” he said. “But after the classification, when I was called a middle peasant and the group leader praised me in the meeting for my hard labor, I felt better. Now if I can get some land and housing, that is fine. I can certainly live a comfortable life, for I am strong and I can work.”

  Shen-nan’s widow, son, and mother constituted the other branch of the family. Village Head Ch’un-hsi suggested that land as well as housing be given to the son and that his mother and grandmother share the house. As for the land, until he was old enough to work it himself, his uncle Hua-nan could till it for him.

  Hua-nan agreed to this. “I was thinking the same thing myself,” he said.

  When they asked the old woman, Shen-nan’s mother, if that was all right with her, she could not speak. She broke into tears, tears of relief and tears of sorrow for the tragedy that had occurred.

  Shen-nan’s widow tried to comfort her. She herself was smiling. “Really, ever since the struggle I have never dared make a plan for the future,” she said. “I thought, who can tell? When will they attack us again? So I planned only for the next meal and ate whatever was in the house.”

  Fortunately for the Congress, not every family wanted land. Several even wanted to give some up. Among these was Shen Shuang-niu. He had seven acres for six people and worked at the village inn full time. He preferred his work at the inn to labor on the land and found seven acres far too much to handle.

  The same proved true of Shang Shih-t’ou’s widow. Her husband had been killed by the Eighth Route Army because, as puppet village head, he had refused to co-operate with the guerrilla forces and had instead hunted them down. Without any able-bodied men left in the family, she found the land a burden.

  Another former puppet leader, Kuo Chao-ch’eng, had land and housing enough but wanted some grain to tide him over the summer. From a whole acre planted to wheat, he had harvested only a peck and a half and was left with nothing to eat. “When I was expropriated,” he said, “I was very frightened. But later I realized that if I hadn’t worked for the enemy I never would have been attacked. It wasn’t because of my wealth. Since then I have worked hard. I bear no grudge, for I deserved the treatment I got. Now all that is past, and all I have to do is to work hard for a good life in the future. Nevertheless, in the last few years I have been very upset, and I worried myself sick.”

  The ex-puppets Tseng Chung-hsi and Li T’ung-jen were dissatisfied with their houses. Each said he lived in a broken-down dwelling. This was certainly true of Tseng’s family. I had eaten there with Ch’i Yun and I could not forget the sick girl coughing on that k’ang or the odor of decay that hung everywhere in that narrow room.

  Further questioning brought out the fact that what really bothered these two families was not their houses as such, but their neighbors. Chung-hsi did not get on well with the widow across the court, and T’ung-jen quarreled incessantly with the notorious Chin-chu. “Often,” said T’ung-jen, “I have thought of building a wall between us and of opening another gate into the yard, but there is only one well, and it belongs to me. If I put a wall around it, other people will call me selfish. So I haven’t carried out my plan.”

  Chung-hsi suggested, half in jest, half in earnest, that he and T’ung-jen swap houses, but the latter did not respond. The village head promised to look into other alternatives.

  The meeting did not last long. It took only a few hours to list all the needs of these people and to listen for a while to their recollections and feelings. Short as it was, however, it had a profound effect. All the statements about uniting with the middle peasants, about coalition of classes, about the need for allies counted for far less than this one meeting where the actual repayment of goods to those families that had been unjustly attacked was begun. People had learned to be skeptical of words, but it was impossible to be skeptical of such deeds.

  When the time came to hand out property, Wang Hua-nan was truly given special consideration. The Congress gave him an acre of corn land and an acre of wheat land from the very center of the best land in the village—the rich peasant Yu Pu-ho’s holdings. They gave his mother and his nephew together an acre of corn adjacent to his own and thus brought the total land under his care to six acres. Two of these had a full crop of corn on them, the only land under crops that was available in the whole village. Everyone envied Hua-nan this stroke of fortune.

  In respect to housing, Hua-nan received seven sections of the “foreign building” (the two-storied structure once owned by Chief of Staff Hsu) for himself and five more for his mother and his nephew, making 12 in all. This was the same amount of housing he had originally possessed. In addition to this, the Congress gave him a well-cons
tructed privy at the end of the “foreign building.”

  Insofar as restitution could ever make up for the attack he had suffered, it was certainly carried out with these decisions.

  ***********

  “In the past we said that the Communist Party loves the poor,” said Team Leader Ts’ai Chin, speaking before a mass meeting of the village. “Was this slogan correct? Well, it was both right and wrong. In the past the Communist Party loved the poor because they were oppressed and exploited by the landlords and the feudal system. But now feudalism has been destroyed, and the land is being divided up. Are we still to love the poor? If we leave aside for the moment the sick and the aged who cannot labor, the only poor in the future will be those who do not want to work, who will not lift a finger to help themselves. Are we to love such people? I think not,” said Ts’ai Chin decisively.*

  “Suppose there is a small hole in this man’s roof. He is too lazy to repair it. Instead he comes running to the village office. He says, ‘Look here, Ch’un-hsi, there is a hole in the roof of my house. Soon the whole building will collapse and bury me alive. What are you going to do about it?’

  “What is Ch’un-hsi to answer?

  “He can only answer, ‘We are very sorry; of course we don’t want to see you buried alive, but if you don’t do anything about it yourself you have only yourself to blame.’ No. In the future we shall not love the poor. We want everyone to work hard and to strive to become a new rich peasant. With the land question solved there is nothing to prevent us all from becoming as prosperous as Li Hsun-ta.”**

  Thus did Ts’ai Chin introduce the final period of work in Long Bow, the general distribution of the land and houses. He made it very clear to his listeners that this was the last time land and houses would be distributed. The decisions made in the next few days had to be final because there was no more property to divide. There were no more landlords, no more rich peasants, and no more cadres with special holdings obtained by special powers. And under no circumstances could middle peasants be asked to give up their holdings against their will. Therefore the land and houses that were to change hands at this time were the last that would ever be redistributed without cost.