Hello Intellectuals,
Mi Man Tian here again to give some updates on the nation of China. Since our last communication a lot has taken place. The People’s Republic of China is here, and the nationalist party has been destroyed. One of the first big transitions that Mao and the Republic have promised to bring forth is already in effect. The policy of tudi gaige has been in place for about a year now and I was interested in finding out how people were feeling about the policy, whether or not they were in favor or if that had any positive or negative things to say about the policy. I took to the streets and read a couple of Mao’s speeches as I usually do to do my reporting and I have found honestly quite an unexpected mixed bag or response. I personally think that the CCP has chosen to implement land reform on a mass scale because of two reasons: mobilization and participation and social cohesion. Mobilization and participation because the mass approach allowed the CCP to involve the population. By having the population participate in the land reform process the CCP mobilizes the population with the party principles. The party can both educate the masses on communism and let the masses have a sense of ownership in the process, a feeling that they (the masses) have made this change, instead of it just happening, forced upon by the government. In a speech that chairman Mao gave in 1943 he said “If any work or mission lacks a general, universal slogan, the broad masses cannot be moved to action, but if there is nothing more than a general slogan and the leaders do not make a concrete, direct, and thorough application of it with those from a particular unit who have been rallied around the slogan… there is then the danger that the general slogan will have no effect” (Cheek 118). This has been shown to work as many groups of the mobilized masses have attacked landlords and rich peasants to take back their land. Social cohesion was a reason the CCP implemented land reform on a mass scale because the trust between the local peasants and the party leaders was needed to push the broader communist agenda. By involving the masses in the implementation, the masses got to feel a sense of togetherness, that they were reforming land ownership together and thusly become more aligned with the party and their beliefs. Another quote from Mao says, “Two methods must be adopted in accomplishing any task; the first is to combine the general and the particular, and the second is to unite leadership with the masses” (Cheeks 118).
Some of the dangers that this mass campaign of land reform has had on the nation in general are the economic disruptions and the amount of violence that the masses were able to perform in large fashion. The economic disruptions came about in the fact that factory owners now do not want to hire workers in some cases of getting accused of exploitation. This in turn lead to slowed production because the lack of workers. These factory owners are also being villainized by the party, “The campaign also included propaganda against landlords, exploiters, and other bad” (Dietrich 153). My father is struggling with this currently as after he retired from teaching, he started a steel factory and is utterly terrified of being labeled as a bad element after seeing what the masses have done to the landlords. The violence that the masses are capable of is not to be understated. Peasants and local party officials alike would often turn physical when trying to weed out the bad elements. The attacks on these class enemies, as they are often referred to as, ranged from the public struggle sessions and anti-rightist campaigns that take place as murders and exiles masked as thought reform and getting rid of the people that want to hurt the blossoming utopia of the people’s republic. It is evident that this violence was not only allowed but encouraged to an extent with the only caveat being the cadres weren’t to get involved, one women from a rural village I interviewed said Mao himself wanted the cadres, if they saw violence against bad elements, to not interfere with the violence inflicted upon them. A man I interviewed said that the result of land reform and the cadres moving into the villages was widespread, violent attacks on the wealthy farmers and local elite, even though this type of treatment was supposed to be reserved for only “extremely wicked traitors and public enemies.” This in conjuncture with Mao’s want for the cadres to not get involved, shows that Mao knows about the mass violence and is doing nothing to stop it.