Third Blog Post

The people are speaking, the body is turning, and a new China has emerged. Since my last transmission in Yenan, The People’s Republic was founded only two years ago, and the ruling Communist Party has implemented a new campaign collectively known as Land Reform. The Party has adopted a policy of persuasion and action; calling on the intellectual elite to journey into the countryside, live among the working poor peasants, and harness their energy towards overthrowing the wealthy landlord class, who according to Chaiman Mao have exploited rural peasants for millennia.

Two ideas promoted by the chairman have been crucial to the land revolution. First, he has promoted the mass line, where all members of society would be organized to participate in revolution, where leaders of the party listen to the peasant classes, to harness and promote their desires towards revolution. This strategy has proved to be highly effective in accomplishing the party’s goal of systemic structural change by making the peasants feel empowered to become active agents in their struggle. The mass line coupled with Mao’s saying that revolution is not a “dinner party” forms the second piece of revolution, where violence was one of the primary mechanisms to achieve change achieve systemic change. The concepts of the mass line and empowerment through violent struggle was the definition of revolution according to Mao. If the Communists forced the peasants to adopt their polices this would run counter to Mao’s theory and represent a continuation of the practices of the old system, where there was an embedded top down hierarchy that imposed their will on the rural masses.

Empowering the masses started in the countryside. Work teams assembled of young intellectuals ventured to rural areas to educate the masses on Mao’s policies, to listen to the concerns of the peasantry, and to work with local cadres and single out wealthy landowners. Wen Cai’s approach to educating peasants often left many feeling mystified and bewildered by Marxist theory. However, many uneducated poor peasants have easily understood the differences between themselves and landlords. After all, many poor peasants aspired to move up in society. Work teams teach the peasants to speak bitterness to the landlords, often resulting in large public demonstrations where the landlord is publicly humiliated. One notable example is when Tang Zhankui was publicly beaten and condemned to death by the masses because of his high status as a landlord. For the first time in Chinese history peasants have felt they can express themselves and air their grievances with thei oppressors. Women have felt empowered to speak out against oppressive husbands because of the Party’s liberating position on women’s rights. Land Reform has successfully turned the body and accomplished Fanshen. Most of the landlord class has been abolished, property has successfully been redistributed to the peasants who in turn feel they have become active agents in their own lives.

Larges changes often come with large consequences, and violent revolution in the countryside has had devastating effects on many including my own family who were landlords. At first, we were labeled “evil,” and the peasants spoke bitterness against us. The masses have failed to understand that my grandfather was able to build a business predicated on class mobility, where the poor aspired to become the wealthy. Now my family has fled the country; without contact it is unclear if I will ever reconnect with them again. I have stayed behind as an intellectual who has joined a work team, and I have been able to successfully fly under the radar. Some villages have proved hard to reform because they do not have wealthy landlords or rich peasants. Unfortunately, we picked some middle peasants for humiliation, and I even heard of an exceptionally brutal leader, Duan Mingzhu who tortured many in the village. Party officials did not direct us to tone down the violence, which was incredibly scary because we had no way of stopping the revolutionary forces we stirred up. Many women have been failed by party officials where double fanshen had limited success, through marriage equality, participation in political affairs, and through the rights to initiate divorce. In practice, many women were not trained properly on how to work the fields, and the party supported men more than women in their push to reinstate a productive family and village unit. This has myself scratching my head because it feels like the party returned to Confusion values of patriarchy and filial fealty vis a vis supporting men in the village but on the other hand land reform successfully redistributed wealth and property, rose the standard of living of the peasanty and empowered the masses. The question remains if this will be the Party’s only attempt at revolution.