Fanshen as Facade?

Dear Readers, 

It would be an understatement to say that the Chinese countryside has experienced a whirlwind of changes since I wrote my last piece about the CCP’s presence in Yenan. I apologize sincerely to my readers for letting so many years pass in between my dispatches, but during these years, I have been busy on the ground as a member of a work team in a remote village in the North, implementing the land reform campaign in my assigned village, trying to bring what the Party calls fanshen to the poor peasants who live there, while also seeking to experience this fanshen for myself by experiencing the revolution directly. I felt ready to finally “[wake] up from a dream,” as one young intellectual from a landlord family told me would happen to me if I participated directly in land reform [DeMare, 163]. Chairman Mao and the Communist Party have reported consistently that members of the peasant class nationwide have been rising “like a fierce wind or tempest” to “break through all the trammels which bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation,” casting aside the bloodsucking tyrants, just as Chairman Mao predicted would happen all the way back in 1927 [Mao, “Peasant Movement in Hunan,” 42]. In the eyes of the Party, the mass campaign is integral to fundamentally turning the long-established world order and the entrenched peasant mentality upside down. Today, I am seeking to determine whether this grand narrative aligns with the realities which all work teams were met with across the country. 

 

I first arrived in the countryside singing the songs of the revolution and donning a Russian-style jacket as if I were from the opening scene of Love in Redland [DeMare, 40]. During the early days, I met a lot of middle peasants who reminded me of “Old Gu” from Ding Ling’s novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River [DeMare, 38]. They were generally “insular and fearful of outsiders” because they owned the land that they worked, and were hesitant to engage in the process of land reform, worried that us work teams might one day turn against them [Mao, “How to Differentiate Classes,” 138 ; DeMare, 38]. I realized that I had quite the daunting task ahead of me to encourage the poor and middle peasants to speak their bitterness. 

Upon arrival, I moved in with a widow and her children, poor peasants who paid rent on the land they worked and cultivated [Mao, “How to Differentiate Classes,” 139]. The widow told me initially that her landlord was a nice enough man, but I saw right through her attempt at old-fashioned, feudal politeness. She took quite some time to open up to me, but eventually, as I taught her about the economic exploitation that she had undoubtedly been subjected to at the landlord’s hand, and about all the struggle fruits that would be hers as soon as she opened up to me, she finally broke down. She confided that she had been sexually assaulted by her landlord, and she even had suspicions that he had somehow been behind her late husband’s death! For months afterward, my eyes would well up with tears just thinking about all that she told me she’d been through. I convinced her to speak out against her landlord at the village’s next struggle session, which quickly became a rather violent affair as a crowd of villagers spat on him, ridiculed him, placed a dunce cap on his head, and proceeded to beat him [DeMare, 119]. At the time, I felt so proud of these villagers for standing up on behalf of this poor, innocent woman, who received that evil landlord’s best farming equipment as a result of having been brave enough to speak out against him [DeMare, 66].

 

I was optimistic once my village’s campaign wrapped up, and I have since traveled to other villages and received similar glowing reports. I even had the chance to speak with William Hinton, a work team member from Long Bow, about the immense changes that land reform had brought to the countryside through fanshen, not merely economic changes, but political and cultural ones as well. Hinton recounted to me that fanshen meant “to throw off superstition and study science, to abolish ‘word blindness’ and learn to read, to cease considering women as chattels and establish equality between the sexes, to do away with appointed village magistrates and replace them with elected councils. It meant to enter a new world” [DeMare, 152]. Personally, I am most entranced by Hinton’s claim that fanshen can bring gender equality to our society, and I know other women feel the same way. I spoke with a woman named Li Xiuying who told me, “before liberation, women had to do whatever they were told. They had no rights. The government’s first major legislation made women legally equal to men” [A Century of Revolution, the Mao Years, 4:52]. As Li Xiuying said, the Marriage Law promises the abolishment of “the supremacy of man over woman” and the advent of “free choice of both partners,” and “equal rights for both sexes” [the 1950 Marriage Law, 235]. The Party promises a double fanshen for women, claiming that they will finally be freed from both economic and gender based oppression [DeMare, 159].

 

However, I also encountered people who did not have such positive things to say about the implementation of land reform. Some married peasant women reported to me that while they legally received a land deed of their very own, their husband assumed full control over it, so they did not feel as though much had changed for them after all [DeMare, 161]. A female party leader explained sadly to me that many women were “limited by patriarchal norms, few child care alternatives, and inexperience in agricultural production” [DeMare, 162]. Such accounts make me worry that the promise of double fanshen for women has been a mere façade. 

 

I have begun to worry that in many villages, possibly including the very village which I toiled in with my fellow work team members, land reform did not accomplish all that it was intended to accomplish. I have heard reports from many villages that rural poverty still abounds, sometimes even after two or three rounds of land reform [DeMare, 170]. I spoke to many “Old Gu” figures, middle peasants who had worried since the beginning that they would become the next targets of struggle, and I learned that their fears were not always unfounded [DeMare, 38]. Sometimes they were mislabeled as rich peasants or landlords and wrongfully rendered destitute or even executed, as happened to Tang Zhankui in Zhang Ailing’s novel Love in Redland [DeMare, 151]. Poor peasants who still had very little land to call their own sometimes turned their jealousy and bitterness upon middle peasants [DeMare, 169]. 

 

I also learned of accounts that desires for material wealth have plagued the land reform process. A work team member from a village that neighbors my assigned village recounted the cadre corruption that had plagued any attempts at land reform, as the cadre saved the best struggle fruits for himself [DeMare, 171]. Even poor peasants have sometimes gotten carried away, marching into urban spaces in search of absentee landlords and their relatives, imposing “exploitation bills” upon them [DeMare, 170].

 

I have even begun to doubt the validity of the story of the widow whose home I moved into; this weighs heavily on my heart. Anecdote after anecdote about peasants spinning tall tales about all of the oppression they’d been subjected to has awakened me to the fact that “as land reform unfolded, the ability to speak bitterness during struggle meetings often resulted in direct economic benefit. Peasants who claimed to have suffered the most feudal exploitation stood to receive a greater share of the fruits of struggle” [DeMare, 66]. Was this widow a mere opportunist?

 

During the process of land reform, I was only able to see my tiny piece of the puzzle. Based on the experiences that I had as a part of a work team, I believed that the grand Maoist narrative was coming true: the peasants were awakening, the bloodsucking tyrants were being immobilized, and the women were no longer prisoners in their own homes. However, reading revolutionary novels and hearing other accounts from people on the ground have opened my eyes to the possibility that land reform is not all that it has promised to be. 

 

Stay safe, my loyal readers. Until next time, Lei Ju.