* For Mao’s catalog of peasant weaknesses, see pages 56-57.
* Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1961, Vol. IV, pp. 157-176.
* A Poor Peasants’ League was an organization composed only of poor peasants and hired laborers. A Peasants’ Association was a much broader organization composed of poor peasants, hired laborers and middle peasants.
* BRC (Border Region Currency): 1000 BRC = U.S. $1.00
** These standards are given in full in the basic definitions of Appendix C.
* She was a remarried widow herself, but she was also a famine refugee, far from home and already separated from any in-laws who could object to remarriage. Under these circumstances she apparently saw no parallel between her position and that of others.
* There were 28 Party members in Long Bow in 1948, but at the time of the gate two of them were in jail.
* In this case the gate consisted of his fellow delegates at the meeting.
** After the Lu Family Settlement meeting, the County Committee reviewed Liang’s record again and withdrew the warning. The damage to his morale was not repaired at one stroke, however.
* This practice was discontinued after the Draft Law was put into effect country-wide. It was an aftermath of the “sweep-the-floor-out-the-door” tactics of the Settlement of Accounts Movement, which deprived gentry families of all property and wrongly refused them the land and buildings necessary for maintaining life.
* This was true, however, only at this stage of the Revolution when the Civil War was being fiercely contended and the outcome of the battle was not clear to most people. At that time the rich peasants sided with the landlords. After 1949 the policy of the Communist Party towards rich peasants changed. Instead of attacking them, the Revolution tried to neutralize them. Their surplus property was not confiscated and their profits were guaranteed. This was a major and very significant shift in land reform policy.
* This was a temporary appointment held by Ch’un-hsi pending the establishment of the Village Congress.
* A “god board” was a piece of wood bearing a written message supposedly left there by the god of the temple.
* In China, documents are “chopped,” not signed. A chop is a small block of wood or stone with the individual’s name carved into one face. Since the ideographs making up the name are hand carved, a chop cannot easily be duplicated and consequently has the validity of a personal signature.
* Evidence of such a plot was given by the secretary of the Lucheng County Party Committee in a report made at the second County Conference.
* All quotes from Mao’s speech are taken from Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, vol. V, pp. 227-239. (Emphasis added.)
* From this it can be seen that the middle peasants, rich peasants, and landlords in Long Bow were better off than the average.
* Ninety-nine percent of the disputes in any Chinese village could usually be settled by the village officers, or failing that, by the Village Congress. Only rarely was there a dispute so knotty that it had to be taken to the courts.
* Members of the rich peasant, landlord, and bureaucratic capitalist classes were deprived of citizenship rights, such as the right to elect and be elected, for an indefinite period after the completion of the land reform. After five years, if they had engaged in productive labor and proved themselves to be co-operative members of the community, they could apply for equal status and win reinstatement if the people considered them worthy of it. This was decided on an individual, not a mass basis, and it was the responsibility of the local Congress to decide each case on its merits.
* Nationwide elections to the first National People’s Congress were held in September 1954, six years after the events described in this book.
* Between the second and third bang two families divided and set up new households. The table includes only families with members still living in Long Bow. Of the original seven landlord families, only one had remaining members. Of the original five rich peasant families, four had remaining members.
* Ts’ai Chin speaks here as if land reform would produce communities composed entirely of new and old middle peasants. This was the outlook of many cadres at the time. It was not entirely correct because although land reform did so rearrange property holdings that middle peasants, both new and old, became a majority in the countryside, after land reform there were still many families who owned only a fair share of land and little else. They were still poor peasants. Ts’ai Chin assumed that as long as they had land, they could, through hard labor, wrest a living from it and prosper. Things did not turn out that way. The poor and the less well-to-do among both old and new middle peasants had to pool their resources and co-operate before they could win security and prosper.
However, at the time when Ts’ai Chin spoke, a production drive based on individual land ownership and mutual aid was the only immediate way out of any and all difficulties. Therefore it was logical for him to stress hard work and the prospect of prosperity through labor.
** Li Hsun-ta was a famous labor hero in the Yenan Region.
* Tsai chien is the Chinese equivalent of au revoir.
* Liu Shao-ch’i, On the Party, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1954, p. 58.
** Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, New York: International Publishers, 1954, Vol. IV, p. 113.
* A special administrative district is an administrative unit below the provincial level, consisting of a number of counties.
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