Dear Readers,
It has been some time since I last wrote, and much has changed in our great nation. When I last wrote it was to discuss the success of the Chinese Communist Party’s movement in the Yenan region and why so many people were flocking to the area in order to support the movement. Since then, the revolution I discussed has come to pass! The Communist Party is now the leading group, with Chairman Mao Zedong as the head of the government, and things have already undergone drastic changes. I must mention that the war that was fought between the Communists and the defeated Nationalist forces must be acknowledged as an extremely brutal and bloody affair. I would be lying if I said that the Communists came to power unopposed and without lots of bloodshed, but they have cemented their rule in an attempt to improve China for the people.
One of the ways that the new government has attempted to improve lives for its citizens in the countryside is through a massive campaign of land reform. The Communist Party is a party of the people and at the outset of its rule over China, the vast majority of peasants in the countryside are extremely poor. Much of the countryside was controlled by landlords who had exploited the common people for centuries. Land reform is the first step in the redistribution of wealth that will help raise the standard of living for people in the countryside. Another important part of this campaign was how it involved people not just from the countryside. Work teams composed of volunteers were trained to go out into the countryside, organize middle and poor peasants, and oversee the process [Dietrich, 68]. This was only the beginning, as the landlords would suffer greatly at the hands of these organizations.
Once peasant organizations were formed, the work teams would help the peasants to find the landlords as the source of their hardships, loosely defined as “searching for bitterness” [DeMare, 63]. After whipping the peasants into a frenzy against the landlords, the “struggle” could begin as often theatrical displays of discontent were used to punish the landlords and strip them of their property.
While this policy made sense in theory, it led to an unbelievable amount of violence in the countryside. In many cases, work teams and local village cadres would attempt to squeeze every last drop of wealth out of the better-off citizens of a region, resulting in torture and murder if more wealth wasn’t produced [DeMare, 140]. The violence got so bad in some places that even some middle peasants committed suicide in order to avoid the possibility that they could become the target of a struggle [DeMare, 143].
An issue with parts of land reform that arose on many occasions was that of corruption. I spoke to a member of a work team returning from an assignment who mentioned that in one of the villages his team brought the campaign to, the peasant association was not dissatisfied with their treatment by the local landlords, but with the apparent corruption within the local village cadres and Party officials that supposedly were abusing their power [DeMare, 62.] This work team member also mentioned that in another village, cadres were using their influence to retain the most valuable items that were taken from the landlords for themselves [DeMare, 150].
The Party’s land reform campaign was an impressive movement that transformed the countryside. By allowing the people to carry out these small revolutions in each region, Chairman Mao reinforced his belief that leadership should “come from the masses and go to the masses” [Cheek, 120]. The land reform movement brought the revolution back to the countryside as it involved more citizens in the class war that the Communists wished to wage. The creation of anger against the landlord class allowed the peasants to obtain some kind of class consciousness [DeMare, 147], and therefore bound them more loyally to the party as it was seen as a liberator from the old ways. I am not unaware that I come from a better-off background when compared to many citizens. My parents have made their money through working hard their entire lives, and I am not entirely sure how I feel about this movement. While I am against exploitation, I do not think fairly achieved wealth should be able to be taken away. Because of this, I am thankful that my family lives in a city, because if we were to live in the countryside, I worry that we would have been labeled as enemies in this campaign.
Things are changing, but the danger still seems to be real.
Stay safe my friends,
孙诚