Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  Land reform, by creating basic equality among rural producers, only presented the producers with a choice of roads: private enterprise on the land leading to capitalism, or collective enterprise on the land leading to socialism. The choice between them still had to be made, and there was as yet no unanimity on the question. Only the most advanced among the peasants had even considered it.

  Land reform had broken the patriarchal rigidity of the family by granting property rights to women. With property of their own they were able to struggle effectively for equal rights. But there was still a great gap between the potential and the actual degree of equality which women enjoyed.

  One had only to think of such problems as illiteracy, the almost complete absence of medical care, and the primitive methods of cultivation still in use, to realize what a long road lay ahead for the village and its people before they could claim full citizenship in the twentieth century.

  If one considered the development of democracy in the village, it was clear that here too much remained to be done. Through Party consolidation and the establishment of a popularly elected Congress, serious tendencies toward commandism, hedonism, and personal privilege had been checked. The vast majority of the people had found a voice and a vote. Political life would never be the same again. But could it therefore be said that the problems of village administration had been solved for all time? Certainly not. New temptations, new abuses, new oppressions were bound to arise. Methods of popular supervision over cadres had to be constantly improved. To get rid of the narrow selfishness of the past and create the open-minded dedicated men and women of the future could not but entail a long struggle.

  In learning to use self-and-mutual criticism, the people had arrived at a new stage in the conduct of the struggle. The days of coercion and beatings, of cops and jails as everyday sanctions of law and order were gone forever. But in mastering this new method the people still had a long way to go. The quality of objectivity necessary could only be the end product of a persistent, long-term effort.

  But if one step and one step only had been taken toward a truly revolutionized society, still, because this was the first it was perhaps the hardest step of all; and the fact that the people had taken it seemed, in retrospect, nothing short of a miracle.

  It was not hard to recall how the countryside had looked to me when I first entered the Liberated Area in the middle of the rainy season one year before—soggy land, bursting crops, adobe villages under their canopies of trees, women spinning in the dooryards, and the naked children splashing in the muddy ditches that served as roads. The isolation, the primitiveness, the timelessness of the scene was what had struck me then. It seemed as if peasant life had never changed, was not changing, and could never change.

  Nor was it hard to recall the days of frustration that we had lived through between the two county conferences, when all the organizing and mobilizing effort of the work team, the village Communists, and the village activists seemed to lead nowhere, when the momentum which the people had themselves imparted to the Revolution seemed to stall in a contradictory mass of petty self-interest. At that time one could not help but wonder what the future held in store—if, after all, the creation of a new life was not something beyond the power of these earthbound people.

  Yet now, a scant 12 months after crossing the line and only two months after attending the second County Conference, I could not doubt the outcome. I had a notebook full of concrete evidence of change. My head was swimming with facts and figures, words and faces, stories and incidents, all of which added up to a basic transformation of Long Bow’s rural society. How had it all come about?

  Certainly not by any miracle, but only by hard work, by the conscious effort of scores of people who took the situation as it was and, with the human material at hand, struggled to remold themselves and their environment. Multiply this by tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands as layer after layer of people in one area after another became active, and the full extent and depth of the revolutionary storm sweeping China became clear.

  But the participation of millions could not by itself explain success. After all, there had been earlier rebellions, other massive efforts to abolish the gentry base of rural life in China and free the nation from foreign oppression. All of them had failed. What made the difference this time?

  Ch’i Yun and Hsieh Hung argued convincingly that given the situation as it existed—given a people ready to do battle against progressive impoverishment, corrupt and incompetent rulers, and foreign conquest—it was the “proletarian leadership” provided by the Communist Party that made victory possible. Leaving to future study the prickly question of whether the leadership provided by the Communists was “proletarian” or not, it was obvious to me then that without it the Chinese people might well have struggled in vain. The military potential, the productive capacity, and the political genius of the peasants had to be cultivated, mobilized, and organized, not simply “liberated.” Experience in Long Bow had certainly demonstrated this. Without the Communist Party the poor peasants could easily have carried the Revolution so far to the Left as to convert it into its opposite, a restoration from the Right. Without the Communist Party the poor peasants might well have divided everything right down to the last bowls and chopsticks on the farmsteads and the last gears and shafts in the factories and in so doing would have destroyed the only productive base on which they had to build. Without the Communist Party the poor peasants might well have driven all their more prosperous allies into the arms of their enemies and rejected, perhaps even destroyed, the most militant, the most devoted, and the most able leaders they had produced. Such mistakes could only have broken the peasant population into factions based on kinship, religious affiliation, personal influence, and gang loyalty, and could only have led to never-ending feuds between these factions. In the end, the peasants could well have gone down to defeat betrayed by a vision of justice and a program of action that was impossible of fulfilment in an economy of scarcity. The vision: absolute equality; the program: extreme levelling; the result: complete restoration of gentry rule.

  What the Communist Party brought to the countryside in opposition to these trends was a concept of justice linked to the possible, a justice that unfolded in different ways at different levels of social development, each level establishing its own distinctive norms of right and wrong. For the Communists, history unfolded as a process, as the resolution of a series of contradictions. To leap from one end of the series to the other, even to by-pass a given stage, was impossible. One had to accept the process and advance step by step, stage by stage through degrees of limited equality based on degrees of scarcity and abundance toward an absolute equality that could only be based on absolute abundance.

  All the turmoil in the countryside over the right road to fanshen ultimately resolved itself into a contest between these two opposing points of view, the one static, the other dynamic. The first was a form of idealism, a demand for abstract justice in an unchanging world. The second was a form of historical materialism, a demand for justice based on the concrete conditions of human life, a justice which changed as conditions changed. The first was mechanical, focusing on the division of existing wealth and existing means of production. The second was dialectical, focusing on the release of old productive forces and on the creation of entirely new forces in the future. The first considered the demand for equality to be right in itself; the second considered that demand to be right in one context, wrong and harmful in another.

  At Yehtao, as we talked late into the night with Subregional Party Secretary, Comrade Lai, he pointed out to us an important difference between these two points of view. Equalitarianism, he said, was revolutionary when applied against the power and the property of the landlords and rich peasants, but it became reactionary as soon as it was applied against the middle peasants. “Many peasants do not understand about this turning point, and so they make mistakes. Whenever the peasants are mobilized for struggle, they push toward extr
eme equalitarianism, and the cadres are carried along with them. It is just for this reason that the peasants need proletarian leadership.”

  Obviously one aspect of “proletarian leadership” was an ability to define and anticipate turning points. The Chinese Communist Party, through a grasp of history as process, through diligent study of all pertinent social phenomena, through neyer-ending analysis and review of all actions undertaken, had developed this to a remarkable degree. It was therefore able to prepare its adherents in advance for major shifts in the spiral of events or to adjust policies quickly whenever events outran foresight.

  But this ability possessed by the Communists was not enough in itself to enable them to lead the peasants to victory in the Revolution. Leadership also involves method and in China method was crucially important. Those dedicated revolutionaries who in 1927 went out into the universe of peasant life were not holders of state power as their Russian counterparts had earlier been, but hunted men with a price on their heads. They went into the countryside without authority, without arms, without money, without goods of any kind. They brought with them only the clothes on their backs, ideas for mass action, and the nucleus of an organization capable of overcoming the major weaknesses generic to peasant revolts. Only if the peasants trusted them, made these ideas their own, and gave unconditional support to the new organization could the long-drawn-out process of changing the face of China ever gather momentum.

  Under these circumstances, the example which the Communists set in their everyday lives was as decisive as the words which they spoke or the plans which they suggested. In the last analysis, it was the superior moral character exhibited by the revolutionaries, their integrity, their dedication, their willingness to suffer, their honesty in facing mistakes, their acceptance of criticism, and their capacity for self-criticism that moved the peasants. It was because the Communists set public interests ahead of private interests, long-range interests ahead of short-range interests, and the general good ahead of any partial good, and did so in their own personal lives, that the peasants were willing to follow them.

  Patience was also vitally important. The capacity of the Communists to postpone advanced types of action, to educate and persuade until the people themselves were ready and willing to move, spelled the difference between victory and defeat, between the helpless isolation of a small group of radicals and an irrepressible mass movement. The Chinese Communists knew well that their countrymen, and particularly the peasants, could not be told where to go. They could not be driven or dragged into any course of action. They had to see their own self-interest and become aware through their own experience of the many dimensions of their predicament and of the viability of any given plan. Then and only then would they consciously and willingly put it into practice. Then and only then would it have any chance of success.

  “With us,” Liu Shao-ch’i wrote, “everything is dependent on and determined by the people’s consciousness and voluntary action, without which we can accomplish nothing and all our efforts will be in vain. But as long as we rely upon the consciousness and voluntary action of the masses and as long as such consciousness and voluntary action are genuine, then, with the addition of the Party’s correct leadership, every aspect of the great cause of the Party will triumph. Therefore, when the masses are not fully conscious, the duty of the Communists—the vanguard of the masses—in carrying out any kind of work is to develop their consciousness by every effective and suitable means. This is the first step in our work, and it must be done well no matter how difficult it is or how much time it may take.”*

  This all-important development of consciousness could only begin with the state of mind and the level of understanding that already existed. That was why Mao always stressed, “from the masses, to the masses,” a two-way process which he described as “summing up (i.e., coordinating and systematizing after careful study) the views of the masses (i.e., views scattered and unsystematic), then taking the resulting ideas back to the masses, explaining and popularizing them until the masses embrace them as their own, stand up for them, and translate them into action by way of testing their correctness. Then it is necessary once more to sum up the views of the masses and once again take the resulting ideas back to the masses so that the masses give them their wholehearted support … and so on, over and over again, so that each time these ideas emerge with greater correctness and become more vital and meaningful.”**

  Was this not a summary of what had happened in the land reform movement between 1945 and 1948? The popular demand for equalization of land ownership that resulted in an explosion against the gentry as soon as the Japanese Army surrendered in 1945 had been studied, formulated as a policy, applied, corrected, reformulated, and applied again until it emerged as something extremly clear, sophisticated, refined, and effective. The several successive stages of the classification standards accurately reflected this distillation process. We had seen the standards evolve from rough guides to action into extremely precise, many-sided analyses of the true complexity of rural life. In the end, they armed the people with enough knowledge to separate with precision that which was feudal and reactionary from that which was democratic and progressive.

  Thus the peasants, under the guidance of the Communist Party, had moved step by step from partial knowledge to general knowledge, from spontaneous action to directed action, from limited success to over-all success. And through this process they had transformed themselves from passive victims of natural and social forces into active builders of a new world.

  This, as I understood it, was the essence of fanshen.

  The more I examined the process of the development of consciousness the more complex it appeared. It worked its leaven on many levels at once—on the individual, on the community, and on the nation—and at each level the process followed its own peculiar patterns.

  When one broke fanshen down to the microcosm, to what happened inside any given individual, it was obvious that no person could break free of the past all at once. The spectrum of a man’s consciousness could not be refocused in one night no matter how earnestly he might desire such a shift. Change had to come first in one area, then spread to others. It had to dissolve old contradictions only to set up new ones. It had to expand the struggle between the new and the old until the entire personality became involved in painful conflict. No one going through such inner strife exhibited a character that was all of one piece. Habits, superstitions, and prejudices left over from the past marred and undermined efforts to act on the enlightened motives of the present. Thus it was not strange to find men who had erased most traces of self-interest from their public lives, but who still treated their wives as chattels in the home, or women who stood together in their battle for equal rights, yet fell to quarrelling over the distribution of relief cotton. People placed their feet on the road to fanshen as soon as they began to have faith in others. As they marched along it they gradually learned the central lesson of our times, that only through participation in common struggle can any individual achieve personal emancipation, that the road to fanshen for one lies through the fanshen of all.

  When one examined the process of fanshen on a somewhat larger canvas, in terms of the whole community, it became clear that, on this level also, change never occurred across the board at the same rate. No social aggregation could advance as a block. Its individual members possessed varying degrees of awareness and varying capacities for learning and growth. In real life one had to depend on the more advanced to lead the less advanced and on the less advanced to lead the backward. When this was done, each successive mobilization had the power to advance the understanding of all. The backward soon reached the level of their teachers, and so understanding spiralled until the whole concept of what was advanced and what was backward had to be revised. When such a process was consciously and systematically unfolded year after year, decade after decade, in a countryside containing millions of people, the total effect was astonishing. The whole people became politiciz
ed, became conscious, became active, and finally did indeed become capable of transforming their world, and, in that process, of still further transforming themselves.

  When one applied the concept of fanshen to a still wider canvas, it seemed evident that the word could be used to describe the rebirth of a whole country. Just as one could speak of the fanshen of the individual and the fanshen of the community, one could also speak of the fanshen of the nation, that process by which a whole people “turned over,” that process by which a whole continent stood up.

  Clearly such a process could not develop uniformly over so vast a country as China. It had begun some 20 years earlier at certain key spots where, because of splits and quarrels, past revolutionary uprisings, or foreign intervention, the power of China’s traditional rulers had temporarily been weakened. Once the Revolution took root on Chingkang Mountain, around Juichin in Kiangsi, and in the badlands of the Yellow River bend, it reached out to influence other places until whole areas were converted into bases. Destroyed in the main in 1934, these bases sprang up stronger than ever after 1937 when the Japanese invaded China, and spread in the wake of foreign conquest to vast areas of countryside in North, Central, and South China.

  The significance of the Taihang Mountain region, which included Long Bow and thousands of similiar villages, lay precisely in this, that it was one of those slowly expanding revolutionary bases from which, in the course of time, the Chinese people would be able to challenge and finally overthrow not only the powerful forces of China’s native gentry, but also the network of compradore capital built up in China by the Western powers and the military might which they threw into battle to preserve this network.

  “Great military, political, economic, and cultural revolutionary bastions”—this was what Mao Tse-tung had called these bases. Was this not exactly what thoroughgoing fanshen had built in Long Bow, in Lucheng County, and in the Taihang Mountains? And now because the Communist Party had built so well, over-all victory for the Revolution was in sight.