Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  “After this, if you want land you will have to buy it. Don’t expect anyone to give you any,” Ts’ai Chin warned. He urged the Congress to take great pains and do everything patiently and well. “Only thus can we lay a firm foundation for the future of this village forever. If we are careless and make mistakes we shall plant a seed that can grow and do great harm later on.”

  Once again tzu pao kung yi (self report, public appraisal) was adopted as the basic method for deciding what conditions were—this time, who was in need and how much they should get. The results of these reports in the three sections of the village were brought to the Congress by the delegates. A complete list was then drawn up. This list, read off at last to a mass meeting, was still open for adjustment. Families who felt that they had not received fair treatment could demand reconsideration and could even appeal to the county government if necessary.

  With the needs of the wrongly expropriated taken care of, the next in line were those still classed as poor. Land was allocated to each of these according to need. After 29 poor peasants had divided between them some 15 acres of land and had brought their average holdings up to an acre per capita, other special cases were considered. I found these extremely interesting and report a few of them to show the complexity of the problems which a simple land distribution can produce.

  There was the case of the soldier, Shih K’ao-tzu. He had come home on leave in order to marry. He had brought with him from his unit a “resettlement paper” requesting the village government to give him land, housing, and implements, and help him get started as a new middle peasant in an independent household. This was not an unusual request. In fact, every village had been asked by the county government to set aside some eight or ten acres of land for just such contingencies. The trouble was that in this case Shih K’ao-tzu already owned land and houses and household goods in Long Bow. He also owned an acre of land in Horse Square. What he planned to do was to turn all his original holdings over to his brother and ask the village to resettle him completely with more fertile land and better housing.

  “I have been home more than a month. I turned in my ‘resettlement paper’ weeks ago. But nothing has been done for me. I would have returned to my unit long ago if you hadn’t held up this matter,” said Shih, very sharply. He blamed the People’s Congress for the fact that he was not already back at the front.

  But the Congress delegates and Village Head Ch’un-hsi did not think that he was entitled to any such “resettlement.” “We are only illiterate peasants,” they told him. “We do not fully understand this ‘settlement’ policy, but in our opinion any soldier who already has land and housing need not be given more. If, like Old Kao, you come to us barehanded and want to settle here, then we must give you land and everything else. But that is not the case with you. If you think you have been wronged you can take it up with your superiors, and we will take it up with ours. If they order us to give you land, of course we will give it to you. Otherwise we will handle this the way we have always done in the past, and that is to give people what they lack.”

  Poor peasant Wang Kuei-pao’s problem was entirely different. He was a weaver who owned very little land, less than half an acre per head. Everyone said that he was lazy. Although he was forced to weave to supplement the income from his land, he still didn’t work very hard at his craft and his living conditions were very poor. Hsin-fa wanted to give him another acre and a half. Ta-hung wanted to give him another three acres. But Kuei-pao was very distressed when he heard about that.

  “Your mother’s cunt,” he said. “I can’t handle that much.”

  “Look here!” they said to him. “This is your last chance. Later on you won’t be able to get any land at all. If you should find yourself in difficulty and have nothing to eat, the village won’t give you any relief, for you are an able-bodied man and should raise your own food.”

  Kuei-pao finally agreed to take another acre.

  The most extraordinary case of all involved the Party member Ch’eng Ai-lien. She wanted her land held in a dead man’s name. Ch’eng Ai-lien was the attractive but rather vain young woman whose husband Man-ts’ang had been so severely beaten by the members of the Women’s Association in 1946. He died later of an illness in no way connected with the beating and left his land and other property to his wife. She then married the landless peasant Chin-sui. Chin-sui volunteered for the army and left for the front. His mother moved into Ai-lien’s quarters. According to the marriage contract, Chin-sui promised to forego all rights to the land and houses. The first son that his wife bore was to be considered the son of her first husband, Man-ts’ang. This son would inherit all the property. The children that followed were to belong to the living husband, Chin-sui. They would not be entitled to any land or buildings.

  As the final settlement approached, the mother-in-law, very upset by the arrangement which her son had made, asked for housing and land enough for two. She found living with Ai-lien impossible. The young woman was very strong-willed and, as the owner of the property, had completely turned the tables on her new mother-in-law. “Now you are living in my house, and eating off my land,” she reminded the old lady almost daily. “And so you will do things the way I want them done.”

  When this case came before the Congress, the delegates first asked, “What if she has no sons at all?”

  “Then she will buy one or ask a relative to give her one,” said the tearful mother-in-law.

  Team Leader Ts’ai was consulted as to the law. He pointed out that according to Border Region custom the land of a dead husband did in fact belong to his wife. As the legal heir she could do with it as she wanted.

  But the delegates didn’t accept this.

  “Man-ts’ang is already dead. How can a ghost be the owner of the land and house? If they had a male child, the property would belong to the child, but now there is no lawful owner,” said Ta-hung.

  The Congress delegates all agreed. The root of the case, as they saw it, was the unheard-of suppression of the mother-in-law by the daughter-in-law. This arose only because the latter owned the property.

  “Chin-sui is no use at all!” said one of the men.

  “How could he ever have made such a bargain?” exclaimed another.

  “He was a poor peasant, one of the basic masses, yet he was so worried that he would not find a wife that he gave up his most precious rights.”

  They all considered Chin-sui to be a hopeless case. In order to rescue him from his own mistakes, they declared the property of the dead man, Man-ts’ang, to be the property of the village. Then they turned it over to the landless peasant, Chin-sui, and by that act gave his mother supremacy over his wife, Ch’eng Ai-lien. Ch’eng Ai-lien regarded the decision as a total disaster.

  The work team did not agree with this decision of the Congress, but there was no way in which to intervene. Only extended education could change the attitude of Long Bow’s leaders towards women’s rights, and this would no doubt be a protracted process.

  ***********

  After all decisions had been made, the Congress delegates added up the land and property available and matched them against the promises made and found that they were one acre short. Worse than that, they found that they had no reserve left for future adjustments or for demobilized soldiers who might choose to settle in Long Bow. The eight to ten acres originally set aside for that purpose had already been allocated.

  The standing committee of the Congress decided to find out if there were not a few middle peasants who would be willing to give up land. A list was drawn up of all those families that actually had a surplus of land in terms of the labor power available to them. Some had already indicated in the past that they might give up some land if it were needed. The list included such people as Ming Lan’s mother, a widow who could not work in the fields herself and often said, “Just because of the land we are poor. For we have to employ hired labor and pay taxes. Too much land is a burden.” And there was Kuei-hua, who wanted to give more
than an acre to Shen Hua-nan because she thought that he would take good care of the ancestral graves there.

  Delegates were sent to talk to all the people on the surplus land list. In the evening they returned to report complete success. All the middle peasants who were visited agreed to co-operate. The land thus given up amounted to more than ten acres. The problem was solved. Not everyone was satisfied in every respect. Nevertheless, the delegates felt that the best and fairest distribution possible had been made. They were all in very high spirits. They made all kinds of jokes as the end of this work approached, and laughed almost as much as they talked. At one point Hu Hsueh-chen, who still had not recovered from her disappointment over Pu-ch’ao’s clothes, asked petulantly what she would do for a privy if she accepted the new home that the Congress had offered her.

  “Use the one you have always used,” said Old Tui-chin.

  But the old privy was two courtyards and three walls away.

  “She’ll have to buy a ticket and take a bus every time she wants to go,” said Yuan-lung.

  “She could take an airplane,” said Ts’ai-yuan.

  They finally decided to give Hsueh-chen housing in a courtyard that already possessed a privy in good condition.

  At another point in the proceedings, the women, who still sat in a circle by themselves, were by-passed on an important matter.

  “I have neglected half of China,” said Village Head Ch’un-hsi.

  He was warmly applauded.

  The only member of the Congress who did not share in all this merriment was Old Lady Wang. She was bitterly disappointed by the whole procedure. In anticipation of her son’s marriage, she had intrigued and schemed ever since the arrival of the work team for more land and houses. She had fought against being called a new-middle-peasant and antagonized half the village with her bitter tongue, only to find that in the final settlement they proposed to give her nothing. In despair she asked for at least enough building material to repair her five sections of house. She was turned down.

  “But her son will get married soon, and there is no place for the young couple to live,” said T’ai-shan’s mother, coming to Old Lady Wang’s aid at the last minute.

  “How can we help that?” asked the others. “Many people are going to be married. Maybe next year she will have a grandson. How can we figure him in?”

  “K’ua le, k’ua le,” (I’m finished, finished) cried Old Lady Wang, and she got up ready to leave the meeting. But this time no one seemed to care, so she sat down again.

  With the problem of land and housing out of the way, the Congress next settled the question of the distribution of movable property and livestock. First the wrongly expropriated middle peasants were given everything they needed. Wang Hua-nan, for instance, got a cart, a donkey, and a plow. Then the left-over items were sold to those who wanted them, and the millet was distributed to the poor peasant families who still had not fanshened. A committee of eight, appointed by the Congress, carried out this action and the distribution which followed.

  66

  “Self Report, Public Appraisal” Solves the Tax Question

  Just one more

  Ear of grain;

  Just one more

  To equal one more bullet

  To stop the enemy.

  Tien Chien

  DURING THE first few days of August the heat was intense. Since it had rained enough in the latter part of July to soak the ground thoroughly, the heat worked miracles with the crops. Corn grew luxuriantly. There were no signs at all that it had ever been damaged by hail. Other crops also burgeoned with unexpected vigor. When the mutual-aid teams went out to hoe, they disappeared completely in the green foliage. One could tell that men were at work only by the snatches of song and conversation that rose from the matted jungle on the land.

  The hot, sticky August air gave evidence of another kind of labor. It was tainted with a haze that was the result of diffused smoke. All around the countryside one could see great columns of smoke rising to the heavens. They were generated by peasants burning weeds and trash in order to get ashes for the manufacture of saltpeter. Saltpeter had become the lifeblood of the People’s Liberation Army. As guerrilla warfare gave way to mobile warfare and this in turn developed ever more frequently into positional warfare, shells played a growing part in the fighting. Since not enough of these could be captured in battle to insure sustained barrages on widely scattered fronts, supplementary munitions had to be manufactured in small local arsenals and packed with domestic explosives. In the battle for Linfeng alone 17 railroad cars full of shells were expended in one pre-dawn bombardment. Before the garrison there was finally routed, more saltpeter had been used up than all the peasants of Lucheng and Changchih counties combined could create in a year. No wonder the peasants were out in force scouring the hills, the ravines, and the river beds for anything organic that would burn. Not only were they paid a good price in millet for the ashes, but by such labor they could make a direct contribution to victory at the front and guarantee their own fanshen.

  The mass gathering of ashes and the backyard manufacture of saltpeter demonstrated that the very backwardness of the economy had certain advantages. The lack of large-scale industrial nitrogen fixation which at first appeared to be a drawback was turned into a source of strength by virtue of the fact that it stimulated the active participation of millions in munitions manufacture and ultimately deepened their commitment to victory.

  A people’s war cannot be won without the mobilization of all popular energies. In a developed capitalist society, even if the political contradictions standing in the way of such a mobilization could be resolved, its effectiveness would still be hampered by that alienation which separates so many people from meaningful production and substitutes the ubiquitous “cash nexus” for socially valid human relationships. In an agricultural society such alienation is still only rudimentary. How much more direct, how much more personal is the involvement of a people who must burn leaves and trash to make their own nitrates than of a people who need only contribute dollars to a munitions industry they have never seen.

  Throughout the Liberated Areas of North China even the collection of ordinary taxes had this same concrete, personal quality. Taxes were paid in kind, and at least part of the grain which each peasant brought, all winnowed and weighed, to the collection point, was eventually eaten by some soldier at the front. Each taxpayer therefore had the palpable experience not only of contributing something to a cause in which he passionately believed, but also of supplying a living defender of that cause with hand-grown food, instead of simply turning over part of his income to some vast impersonal government apparatus. In the course of making their contributions to “rear service,” these same taxpayers often carried grain directly to the Army and saw how it bolstered the defense of their land. In May, a score of peasants from Long Bow actually transported 20 cartloads of millet to the seige of Linfeng. They spent enough time there to learn at first hand how the battle was going and to see and be influenced by the dedication of the troops.

  During the August heat, cartloads of organic ash and public grain jostled each other in the main street of Long Bow. The former were headed for the saltpeter plant in the eastern section, while the latter were being transported to the collection depot of the Fifth District Finance Bureau. As tax deadlines drew near, grain predominated over ashes. Dozens of horse-drawn, donkey-drawn, and mule-drawn two-wheelers creaked down the rain-softened lanes each day, laden with sausage-shaped bags of clean, hard wheat. Every man in the village who could read or handle a writing brush was called in to help keep records, check and weigh grain, and store it away. Two large brick warehouses on the east side of the village were soon filled to capacity. The district magistrate then ordered the Chur h opened. Three days later the mountain of wheat stacked there dwarfed the dwindling stocks of millet that had seemed so huge when the Peasants’ Association met to confront Yu-lai. In terms of the amount harvested by any one family, it was an extraordina
ry accumulation. Yet, when one considered the needs of a war continental in scale, it was clear that this was not a great deal of wealth to come from one fifth of a county.

  Under the system established when Lucheng County was liberated, taxes were collected twice a year, once in wheat after the summer harvest, and once in millet, corn, and sorghum after the autumn harvest. Because hail had hit Long Bow so hard, the county government had at first considered cancelling Long Bow’s summer taxes completely. But the officials soon discovered that if they did so, other villages would register complaints. After all, the hail was not the only scourge to hit Lucheng County that summer and Long Bow was not the only village to suffer a reduction in its wheat crop. In some valleys huang tan (yellow smut) had damaged the wheat almost as severely as had the hail in Long Bow. Hou Pao-pei, former leader of the work team, harvested so little wheat on his home farm, not ten miles away, that he had to borrow three pecks of grain to pay his taxes. He enjoyed no cancellation. Judging from conditions in Long Bow alone, a flat cancellation would also create almost as many problems as it solved, for it would not benefit all the peasants equally. There were families whose wheat had not been damaged at all. There was no reason why they should not pay their fair share. If all summer taxes were excused, those who had not been hit would enjoy an undeserved bonanza.

  The county government, therefore, estimating that the total damage amounted to two thirds of the crop, set the tax rate at one third of the revenue collected in the previous year and asked the Long Bow People’s Congress to allocate the burden fairly among all the peasants according to the crop they had actually harvested. This was an unprecedented move. No one could recall any government in Lucheng that had ever granted a cut in taxes because of crop failure or for any other reason.