by Philip Short
In far-off Jiangxi, however, the practical effects of Moscow's support were diluted. Previously, Mao and He Zizhen had lived with several other Central Bureau leaders in a fine old stone-built mansion, with a sturdy tiled roof and soaring eaves at its four corners, which its landlord owner had abandoned – not to escape the communists but because a woman had died there and the place was considered unlucky. The leaders lived on the first floor in rooms opening on to a covered wooden gallery around a central inner courtyard, decorated with intricately carved beams and delicate latticed windows and screens. Zhou and Ren Bishi, the two full Politburo members, had the best accommodation; Mao had a slightly smaller room, with clay walls and a brick-tiled floor, next to Zhou's; while Zhu De and Wang Jiaxiang occupied the far end. Between them was a conference chamber where bureau meetings were held.40
Bo Gu's arrival, and Mao's eclipse, meant all this now abruptly changed. While still a Bureau member, Mao was politically so isolated that sometimes days passed without him seeing his colleagues. Zhou and Zhu De were at the front, and that spring Wang was severely wounded by shrapnel from a mortar shell. The others ostracised him. ‘I was like a totem that stank, a wooden bodhisattva immersed in a cesspit,’ he said later. ‘All I was allowed to do was eat, sleep and shit.’41 In April, his exclusion became even more pronounced. The nationalists began regular air raids against Yeping, and Mao and other ‘non-essential personnel’ were ordered to move to Shazhouba, another village about ten miles to the west. There, his only social contact was with his brothers and with He Zizhen's sister and parents, themselves under political pressure as a result of their relationship with him.42
Time weighed heavily on Mao's hands. In the rare intervals of calm on the Jinggangshan, he used to discuss poetry with Zhu De and Chen Yi. They would cap each other's quotations with lines they had learned by heart as young men from the works of the great Tang dynasty writers, Li Bai, Han Shan and Du Fu, in the golden age of Chinese poetry, a thousand years before. He Zizhen remembered how Mao's face would light up when literature was mentioned. Reading was such an addiction that he had especially large pockets made on his jackets, big enough to slip a book inside. Usually, she said, he spoke little, but when the subject turned to literary topics he would talk animatedly for hours on end. Once he sat up arguing all night with her about his favourite novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, which, characteristically, he interpreted as a struggle between two factions within a great and powerful household.43
Through the summer of 1933 and most of the year that followed, Mao found himself with a surfeit of leisure in which to read and talk, but, beyond his immediate family, no companion with whom to share it. Once again, he could only wait, hoping for better days. This time there was less certainty than ever that better days would come.
As Head of State and government – Chairman of the Republic, and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars – Mao had had overall responsibility, from November 1931 onwards, for civil administration in the base area. This involved the drafting and promulgation of immense numbers of laws and regulations, intended to endow the new Chinese Soviet Republic, notionally at least, with all the administrative machinery necessary for a modern state.44
In practice, Mao's chief concern was with the economy. His speeches throughout this period were full of patriotic appeals to the peasantry to ‘carry out the spring vegetable planting well’, and warnings that ‘there must be absolutely no more opium cultivation; cereals should be planted instead.’45 His job was to ensure that the base area provided the Red Army with food, clothing and other basic supplies, and to control the black-market trade with the White areas in essentials such as salt, which had to be smuggled in from outside. A Red postal service was set up. A People's Bank, headed by Mao's second brother, Zemin, issued banknotes denominated in guobi (‘national money’), printed in red and black ink on crudely made grass-paper, with an effigy of Lenin in the centre against a frieze of marching workers and peasants with carrying-poles, striding triumphantly forward to a bright, new communist future. The currency was backed by silver, initially expropriated from landlords but later increasingly derived from taxes, imposed on a sliding scale so that the brunt was borne by merchants and rich peasants, and from the forced sale of ‘revolutionary war bonds’.46
The key economic issue was land reform. In rural China, the possession of land gave life: if you had fields, you could eat; without fields, you would starve. Among a nation of 400 million, 90 per cent of whom were peasants, land redistribution – taking from the rich and giving to the poor – was the primary vehicle carrying the communist revolution forward, the fundamental point of divergence between the CCP and the Guomindang.
Mao's views on this crucial topic were extremely radical. On the Jinggangshan, he had ordered the confiscation of all land without exception, even that owned by middle peasants. Everyone, child or elder, man or woman, rich or poor, including men who were absent serving in the Red Army, was then allotted an identical share, regardless of class background or any other factor. Ownership was held notionally by the state, and once the distribution had been made, the sale or purchase of land was forbidden.
The system of equal distribution according to the number of mouths to feed had the merit of simplicity, Mao argued, and ensured that even the poorest families could survive.47 Li Lisan and Bo Gu both disagreed, one finding it too ‘leftist’, the other, not ‘leftist’ enough. Li called for land to be distributed on the basis of each family's labour power (which in practice favoured rich peasants). Bo wanted class origin to be the criterion (which had the contrary effect).48
Both methods had disadvantages. The rich peasants, having more capital and farm animals, were the most productive villagers. Yet in class terms, they were landlords in the making, struggling (as Mao's father had done) to heave themselves one more rung up the ladder, to a more prosperous and, necessarily, more exploitative position. Politically they constituted, in Mao's phrase, ‘an intermediate class’ in the countryside, which, if squeezed too harshly, would instantly switch allegiance.49 If the communists adopted moderate policies, the economy in the base area boomed, but class struggle faltered; if a class approach were followed, the economy faltered and food shortages ensued. Caught between these conflicting imperatives, policy lurched first one way, then the other, in accordance with the prevailing political wind.
That, however, raised a further problem.
If graduated policies were to be applied, as was the case from the end of 1928 onwards, a method of assessment had to be devised to distinguish poor, middle and rich peasants, and landlords. Was a rich peasant one who used hired labourers? Or was usury also a criterion? Should the whole of a rich peasant's land be confiscated? Or only that portion that he could not cultivate himself?50
For hundreds of thousands of families, the answers to such questions were, in the most literal sense, the touchstone of survival. Slightly more flexibility here, a slightly harsher policy there, might require no more than a displaced comma in a Party document. In the villages it could make the difference between a family just managing to scrape by, and having to sell a child whom otherwise it could not feed. Mao himself reported, after an investigation in southern Jiangxi:
[In a] village consisting of 37 households … five households had sold sons … All five had become bankrupt; consequently they had to sell their sons to repay their debts and buy food. The buyer was either a member of the gentry … or a rich peasant [who wished to purchase a male heir]. There are more gentry buyers than rich peasant buyers. The price of a boy ranges from a minimum of 100 [Chinese] dollars to a maximum of 200 dollars. When making this transaction, neither the buyer nor the seller call this business ‘selling’; rather they call it an ‘adoption’. But the world in general calls it ‘selling a child’. An ‘adoption contract’ is also commonly called a ‘body deed’ …
[When the sale takes place] more than ten relatives and friends might be present [as go-betweens] and are paid a ‘signature fee’ by
the buyer … The ages of the boys sold range from three or four years old to seven or eight, or [even] to 13 or 14. After the deal is made, the matchmakers carry the boy on their back to the buyer's house. At this moment the biological parents of the boy always weep and wail. Sometimes couples even fight with each other. The wife scolds the husband for his uselessness and his inability to feed his family, which have forced them to sell a son. Most of the spectators weep too …
A child of four or five brings the highest price because such a child can easily ‘develop a close relationship’. In contrast, the price of an older child … is lower, because it is difficult to develop such a relationship and the boy can easily escape from his adoptive parents …
On hearing that a borrower has sold a son, lenders will hurry to [his] house … shouting cruelly: ‘You have sold your son. Why don't you repay me?’ Why does the lender act like this? Because it is a critical moment for his loan. If the borrower does not repay [him] after selling a son, the lender knows that he will never have another chance to get his money back.51
The problems of China's peasants fascinated Mao. After his landmark survey of the peasant movement in Hunan in the winter of 1926, he returned to the subject again and again, on the Jinggangshan in 1927, and from 1930 onward in Jiangxi, when he was developing his arguments against the ‘rich peasant line’ advocated by Li Lisan and favoured by many provincial cadres. It was better, he wrote in May of that year, to investigate one place in depth, than to make a superficial study of a larger area, for ‘if one rides a horse to view the flowers … one cannot understand a problem profoundly even after a lifetime of effort’.52
The most detailed of these rural investigations was carried out in 1930 in Xunwu, a border county at the junction of Jiangxi with Fujian and Guangdong.
The result was an astonishing document, 60,000 words long, which described in mesmerising detail the daily routine of rural life in the county town and surrounding areas.53 Xunwu xian, a walled town with 2,700 inhabitants, had 30 or 40 brothels, 30 bean-curd stores, 16 general stores, 16 tailors’ shops, 10 inns, 8 barber shops, 7 food stores, 7 herb shops, 7 wineshops, 7 jewellery stores, 5 salt shops, 3 butchers, 3 blacksmiths, 2 tobacconists, 2 umbrella-makers, 2 coffin-makers, a furniture-maker, a fireworks maker, a tinsmith and a watch repairer as well as innumerable street stalls, tea-houses, restaurants and periodic markets. Mao omitted opium dens, presumably because they had been closed after the communists took over. He did include, however, a meticulous enumeration of all 131 different types of consumer goods available in the shops, from nightcaps to suspenders and safety razors to conch buttons; of the thirty-four kinds of cloth, from gambiered gauze to raw silk; and the dozens of different seafoods, fish and vegetables, some, like dried star-fruit and cloud-ear fungus, so rare that only a few pounds were sold each year. He listed the goods which the county exported to neighbouring districts – 200,000 US dollars’ worth each year of rice, tea, paper, timber, mushrooms and camellia oil – and the tracks and paths by which porters and mules transported them. Almost every shopkeeper was identified by name, and his family circumstances, political views and even social habits carefully itemised: thus, the owner of a certain food store ‘liked to whore in the past, but now he has stopped on account of his wife (her bride-price was 250 Chinese dollars)’; the proprietor of the town's largest general store ‘also likes to use his money for whoring and gambling’.
Prostitutes, who accounted for 6 per cent of the town's population, merited a section of their own. Mao listed the fourteen best-known by name. Most were young, he noted, and came from the district of Sanbiao: ‘The people of Xunwu have a saying: “Whores from Sanbiao; glutinous rice from Xiangshan.” This means that the women of Sanbiao are very pretty.’ The reason there were so many brothels, he explained, was that more and more sons of gentry families were being sent to the new Western-style schools: ‘The young masters break away from the warmth of their families when they go to town to study; so they feel quite lonely, and leave a lot of footprints leading to the brothels.’
In the county as a whole, 80 per cent of the inhabitants, including almost all the women, were either wholly illiterate or knew fewer than 200 characters. Five per cent were able to read a book. Thirty people had attended university. Six young men had studied abroad: four in Japan, two in Britain.
The most important section of the report dealt with land ownership. Mao listed twenty great landlords, commencing with Pan Mingzheng, known locally as ‘Uncle Shitcrock’, whose capital amounted to 150,000 US dollars, an astounding sum in so poor a region, and more than a hundred lesser landowners, each with a detailed note of their wealth, education, family connections and political standpoint. This last, Mao noted, was not wholly a function of class: some of the middle-ranking landlords were progressive, or at least ‘not reactionary’. At the top of the scale, the big landlords accounted for 0.5 per cent of the population; small landlords, 3 per cent; rich peasants, 4 per cent. Middle peasants made up 20 per cent, and poor peasants and hired hands the remainder. Later the same year Mao obtained similar figures from a survey in Xingguo county.54
On that basis he could argue that the rich peasants were ‘an extremely isolated minority’ and that his opponents in the South-west Jiangxi Party, by exaggerating their importance (and demanding that they receive favourable treatment), were guilty of ‘right opportunism’. The rich peasants, he declared, were ‘the bourgeoisie of the countryside’ and ‘reactionary from start to finish’.55 Not only should their surplus land be confiscated, but the Party must introduce a policy of ‘drawing on the fat to make up the lean’56 – whereby rich households would have to give up some of their remaining good land in exchange for less fertile holdings owned by poorer families.
In the spring of 1931, however, when Wang Ming and his Returned Student allies started to become a major force, this was judged to be still far too moderate.
Stalin was then ratcheting up his anti-kulak campaign, which would lead to the physical extermination of 12 million Russian ‘rich peasants’. Accordingly, with the Comintern's blessing, it was decreed that all rich peasants’ land and property (not just the surplus) should be confiscated. When redistribution occurred, landlord families would receive nothing, which meant that many starved; rich peasants would get ‘relatively poor land’ in proportion to their labour power; poor and middle peasants would get the best land based on the number of mouths they had to feed.57
To ensure that these harsh new standards had been properly applied, Bo Gu ordered a Land Investigation Movement and, in February 1933, shortly after his arrival at Ruijin, appointed Mao to head it.58 There may have been an element in this of making the punishment fit the crime. Mao had been responsible for the previous policy, which was judged to have been too soft: let him now be the one to put it right. But he was in any case the obvious candidate to direct a movement of this kind, for the same reason that Wang Jingwei had chosen him to head the GMD Peasant Institute in 1926, and Chen Duxiu, a few months later, to head the CCP's first Peasant Committee. He knew more than any other Party leader about the dynamics of rural life and was better placed than anyone else to deal with the endless practical problems the land reform kept throwing up.
Rules were needed, for instance, for dealing with ponds; with buildings; with fallow land; with hills and forests; with bamboo thickets; with ‘green crops’, planted but not harvested, at the time of redistribution.
Then there was the question of whether redistribution should be conducted on the basis of the township, the village, or the district. If the village, clan loyalties overrode class and economic interests, and the reforms were blunted. But redistribution on the basis of a district, which might have a population of 30,000 or more, was too unwieldy to win the peasants’ support. And what happened when definitions clashed? What should be done with a small landlord who was recognised as a progressive? Or a poor peasant who abused his class status to become a local tyrant?
That autumn, Mao produced an encyclopae
dic set of regulations, which sought to answer such questions. The key distinctions he drew were between landlords, rich and middle peasants. For a family to be classified as rich peasants, at least one person must take part in productive labour for a minimum of four months a year, whereas in a landlord household none did so; and it must obtain at least 15 per cent of its income from exploiting others – by hiring labour, letting fields, or from interest on loans. A middle peasant household was one that obtained less than 15 per cent from such sources. Schoolmasterly examples were given, to show how the sums should be worked out:
A family with 11 mouths to feed and two people working has 160 dan of fields yielding a harvest worth 480 dollars. They have two parcels of hillside tea-oil fields, which bring in 30 dollars a year. They have one pond, producing 15 dollars, while pig breeding and so on generate 50 dollars a year. For seven years, they have hired a farm labourer, the value of whose surplus labour amounted to 70 dollars a year. They made a loan at 30 per cent interest, bringing in 75 dollars a year. They have a son who is a scholar and who bullies people by relying on influence.
Assessment: This family has two people working itself, but hires a labourer and makes substantial loans. Its income from exploitation is more than 15 per cent of its income. Although there are many family members, they have a good deal of money left over after expenses are paid. They are therefore rich peasants and should be given poor land. The scholar, who is a member of the bad gentry, should be given no land at all.59
