Land Reform, Work Teams, and the Real Peasant Struggle

Dear Readers,

I apologize that it has been quite some time since my last post, I have been busy with Party activities and doing my part in building a new China. Last year I was called upon to work with the masses. I have taken leave from teaching just outside the city to join a work team, and I am now in my second village. The mass campaign to implement land reform is something that I have been working on intensely during my time in these two villages. Some may think that it might have been easier to confiscate land from the wealthy landlords and redistribute it to the peasants, but the Party believes in a different approach. 

When I was in university, we read Mao’s 1927 “Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan”. I believe that much of the Party’s policies on land reform and mass campaigns extend from this movement. After discovering that “almost half the peasants in Hunan [were] now organized” and the same was occurring in other counties, Mao believed that “it was on the strength of their extensive organization that the peasants went into action and within four months brought about a great revolution in the countryside, a revolution without parallel in history”. After the peasants organized, we watched “the privileges the feudal landlords have enjoyed for thousands of years” be “shattered to pieces. Their dignity and prestige… completely swept away”. Peasant associations gained power over their oppressors through organization and the willingness to fight for their cause. Mao and the Party watched these peasant revolutionaries take the countryside with force. Peasants were mobilized to right the wrongs that have occurred for generations, and showed that violence may be necessary for revolution. 

After noticing the success in a peasant uprising, it was clear that land reform needed to be a mass campaign, rather than the confiscation and redistribution of land, because power is in the hands of the people, the masses, and the way to harness that power is to remind the people of the cause they are fighting for. 

I remember nearly a decade ago, we took part in a mass study campaign to understand the struggles of the proletariat and the stance of the party. But theory can only take one so far, so I agreed to aid the peasants and put policy into practice. Prior to traveling to my first village, I attended training and educated myself on working with peasants and how best to communicate party ideals to them. One professor I spoke to, Yang Rengeng, told me of his experiences working in land reform and made it clear “that peasants are waiting for [my] help”. Thus, I set off to educate local leaders. 

I found this task more difficult than the professors and party members had led us to believe. In my first village it was extremely hard to relate to the villagers, and they did not seem to understand why we were there and what our mission was. One approach that we were told worked best was finding “bitterness” in their life stories. I was inspired to do this when I read The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River. When speaking to a poor peasant named Liu Man, Yang Liang “learned the man had once been a village cadre until he was pushed out of the local party branch by hooligans seeking to protect the scheming landlord Qian Wengui”. He and his fellow work team members then assembled the peasants and enough collective rage was incited to go after the landlord. Helping peasants find their “bitterness” worked in the first village I traveled to. After my conversations with individual families I helped lead struggle meetings to share their grievances with the rest of the village. 

My second village was where I began to see the darker side of land reform. Namely, the lack of a fight for women’s rights. During struggle sessions with groups of women, or in the workplace when they were creating textiles, I heard of their plights. Their plights were not just with the landlords, but with their husbands and the patriarchy. When coming into villages to assist peasants in coming together to create our new China, we promised women “a ‘double fanshen’: one as a peasant and one as a woman”. I read in the newspaper about Guo Shuuzen, who in a 1947 land reform campaign “received land, two horses, a mule, and a cart”. Once her life had changed as a peasant, she could now become a feminist. “Politically awakened during land reform, she joined her local party branch, headed her local women’s association, organized literacy classes, and took a leading role in organizing production”. Her story was extremely inspiring to me, and I hoped to be able to help other peasant women in the same way. 

As land deeds were handed out, I noticed that only divorced or widowed women received their own land, as married women were property of their husbands. The women who did receive their own land often did not know how to farm it. Myself and other female party members plead with the party “to provide peasant women with adequate agricultural training”, yet no one listened. Some nuns were even forced to take husbands! A few women opened up to me and other female party members about the oppression they face in the household. They are forced into submission, beaten, and constantly disrespected. How are these women supposed to help with land reform and class struggle when their main struggle is within their homes? I confess that it is hard for me to leave this village feeling that women had achieved fanshen. For a number of years now I have followed party doctrine, but after my experience in the villages I’m not sure if party policy is working. 

Until next time,

Miao Kuo shuo