Month: October 2023

Dear Readers,

I now well understand that there is indeed strength in numbers. We have seen from the CCP’s recent successes in forcing the Nationalists to Taiwan and gaining significantly more control. Although Mao was at the helm of this movement, and remains in charge, it was the millions of people backing him that also made it possible. Its because of this that we have routinely seen groups becoming more powerful than any given individual. However, if the masses are not together and unorganized around their specific mission, they are not a group, rather they merely are a mass of individuals. And that is what they have unfortunetly been. Although yes, there is general strength in numbers, but if these numbers of people are divided between each other over uniting with a common cause, then this exposes their fragility and underlining weakness. To get rid of any weakness and gain strength, we must unite with a purpose, understand the potential problems and setbacks of our specific plan, enabling us to become an impactful group instead of individuals by the masses. This should have been the way of ensuring successful land reform.

I was fortunate enough to interview Cheng Houzhi, a recent graduate of Qinghua’s Politics Department, thus argued that before land reform, peasants were bereft of political awareness and “lack organization, lack strength, and do not dare to consider landlords as enemies.” It was because of this need to organize and rally behind a agreed mission that served as the primary reason to develop this mass campaign instead of simply ordering the immediate confiscation and redistribution of land.

Another reason for our more strategical approach to accomplishing land reform, was that the peasants, specifically poor and middle peasants were unprepared. I spoke with Yang Rengeng, a Peking University professor, who said: “ I emphasize[d] that peasants are waiting for their help… the party published a flood of materials on the campaigns, ensuring that the final and largest rounds of land reform were carried out by teams well versed in the narrative of peasant emancipation through fierce class struggle.” Everyone needed to be on the same page for nearly every step! The process should have begun from the groups thoughts to communication, to strategic plan, to action, to backup plan. It is this level of ill preparedness that cost us capable of achieving great success.

Many benefits however, have emerged from this strategic decision. Our peasant groups were far more organized than previously, and nearly all were motivated and organized from the material benefits which greatly incentivized them and gave them a specific purpose. Specifically, “for liberated peasants, [it was] the first time they labor on their own land, their desire to produce increases dramatically. They work from morning till night, forgetting their pain, and create their own happy life.” In the general sense, and writing as a middle peasant member, I see there are now far less blood sucking landlords, allowing the most of the middle and lower classes to now gain the feeling of progress.

That progress was trimmed since these benefits were coupled with immense problems. A report found, “the party faced an intractable problem in regard to giving the peasant masses true economic liberation: there was not enough land and property to go around. This issue plagued the entire land reform effort.”

The negatives are summed up in this PRC study’s findings: “While “land investigation” campaigns did mobilize the masses and attack some forms of feudal power, they also “severely encroached on the interests of the middle peasants, excessively attacked landlords and rich peasants, injured a good number of cadres, and ruined agriculture production.” More specifically, women’s problems were far from solved. A study found: “Many women did not actively participate in land reform. This proved to be an enduring problem.” My heart goes out to all women and we should not lose all hope. I do also want to share that this hope has extended to my families luck. My parents have a very small amount of land that they labor themselves, and it has only been minimally damaged, and all crops and father and mother are safe. My family and I, are extremely blessed, however many other middle peasants I know are severely suffering.  Even for the lucky ones that attained more land, or protected and preserved their minimal portion of land,  I predict future problems to emerge: such as their inability to operate and manage the land. Being a peasant is much different than being a landlord, I know from being a peasant. It is from this story of land reform, that serves as a great lesson for us to unite as a group, and comprehend and solve the challenges and expected problems with the mission before going all out.

Stay safe out there!

-No Pah King

Hello, intellectuals. I am currently living in one of the many small villages undergoing land reform, reporting on the Communist Party’s strategies for redistributing land more equitably. The simple and fast approach of taking and redistributing the land by force seems appealing. However, I believe the Communist Party has decided to implement land reform as a mass campaign for significant long-term benefits. The involvement of peasants in land reform mobilizes the peasants and fosters a revolutionary spirit and cohesion among rural populations. This involvement aligns with the Communist Party’s goal of obtaining the widespread support of the people.

After arriving at the village, the work team would organize and explain the land reform campaign, instilling communist ideas about class, oppression, and the proletariat and bourgeoisie among the villagers. To establish a connection with the villagers, the members of these work teams would try to cultivate relationships with villagers, encouraging them to “speak bitterness”. A key part of the Communist Party’s land reform strategy is giving historically oppressed peasants a way to express their anger and frustrations. These stories exposed the landlords’ abuses and built solidarity among the peasants suffering under the landlord. Small group meetings are organized to mobilize villagers to voice their issues with their powerful landlords who are afraid to do so publicly. After categorizing the people of the village into classes, struggle sessions would be held against those deemed as the ruling class. Led by community members oppressed by the landlords, struggle sessions teach peasants that they were not born to be oppressed and they can stand up against their oppressors. By centering land reform around the poor peasants, who now have been given power for the first time, the Communist Party is sending a powerful message that they will listen to those oppressed. 

The mass land reform campaign has revealed serious dangers. Violence, brutality, and sexual assault are rampant. Land investigation campaigns were often violent. Justice seems nonexistent, overrun by the peasant mob. In some regions, land equalization led to brutal retaliation by Nationalists, thus creating a cycle of violence where Nationalists and the Communist Party would retaliate against the village, seeking to obtain authority and removing perceived threats. This unrelenting violence and chaos during land reform will leave deep wounds of instability. Mao’s broad and strict characterization of landlords as universally oppressive failed to capture the nuanced reality. This oversimplification results in the suffering of the innocent. 

Work teams also face many challenges. Tensions and confusion fill the air during meetings, hindering progress. Language barriers impede communication, and resistance from villages, including poor peasants, created an atmosphere of mistrust and division. Cadres’ corruption further complicated the situation, eroding the goodwill of the people they aimed to liberate. As class labels were introduced, anxiety spread, weakening the bonds that held communities together. Conflicting views within the party on how to treat rich and middle peasants added to the confusion, the constant changing of policy left many unsure of the right path forward.

The legacy of land reform will be mixed, marked by the successful redistribution of land along with the deep wounds of violence, injustice, and the continued peasant poverty. Proving the difficulty of widespread social change.

 

I have been fortunate enough to make the return to my small town in Hunan for the New Year. I arrive on a brisk February morning. I had lost the only winter hat I had during a previous reporting trip and the cold wind could certainly be felt rushing through the village where no building stands tall. I am one of the very lucky people able to make the trip back home. Though middle peasants here in our village, we are lucky. After witnessing life in the big city, the margin between my family and many others is quite slim in comparison. In the village, we are better off than many, but compared to those in the city, we are rather poor. 

 

One morning, my father told me to come with him and the rest of our family as a village meeting had been called at the communal area near the well where we would source the little water we had growing up. We arrived at the little square by the well to a murmur of people all gathered, waiting for someone to speak. This was unusual, rarely, if ever were large gatherings called in the village. I noticed a small group of what looked to be fit and capable civilians dressed in plain clothes huddled in a circle off to the side of the few hundred that had gathered [DeMare 44]. There was a special kind of murmur in the crowd, one of excitement but also curiosity [DeMare 61]. What seemed to be the group’s leader began to drone on and on about Mao’s ideologies and plans. Mao had said in prior years that, “If a school of one hundred persons does not have among its teachers, experts and students a leading nucleus of a few or a few dozen individuals which is formed naturally and not by compulsion) by those who are comparatively the most active, orthodox, and intelligent, the school will be difficult to manage” [Mao Talks at Yan’an and Methods of Leadership 120]. Many in the crowd, however, did not take to this well, and over the course of the hours-long speech, lost all interest [DeMare 61]. 

 

The day following the boring speech, we heard a knock on our front door, I recognized the man at the door as one from the meeting the prior day. My father explained to the man that we were middle peasants, who, did not live an easy life especially due to my 2 brothers being unable to work but were not starving. The man asked my father to share his thoughts on the village higher-ups like landlords, seemingly waiting for my father to speak negatively about the wealthy peasants [DeMare 24]. The man left about an hour of trying to dig up any sort of story that could be used against the landlords and wealthy peasants in the village. Our family stands to gain something from the poor peasants however we also stand to lose the little extra land we have should the large swaths of poor peasants gain more power. 

 

It is becoming more and more clear to me as to why Mao Zedong chose to have poor peasants speak bitterness and turn receive land in this way. Mao Zedong knows that power lies in the hands of the masses, in the case of China, the millions of poor peasants across the countryside. Land reform is far more than just turning land over. Were land reform solely about turning land over, Mao would have done this without any theatrics. However, the goal is to have our peasant population turn their backs on the wealthy peasants and landlords. Mao Zedong himself has said that an extra landlord is an extra enemy [DeMare 106]. By vilifying the landlords, Mao aimed to put the power in the hands of the peasants who would see land reform as far more than just receiving their share of the land. 

 

However, there are issues with the distribution of land here in the countryside. One of the most obvious problems and sources of tension is that there simply is not enough land to go around [DeMare 169]. The reality, dear readers, is that land reform can do a lot to give power to populations such as the peasants, but it cannot solve many of the problems facing China today. In many ways, land reform has been a greater source of problems than it has been of success in terms of moving China forward. 

 

Until next time,

 

Gao An Zhi

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.