Good day, tongzhimen,
I now write to you on the move between towns in rural China, where land reform is well underway. While many at Yenan chose to organize in work groups to carry out this grand revolutionary process, I have been documenting this pivotal moment in our nation’s history.
Although the party members sent to villages seem to have enough zeal to attempt this on their own, they have been instructed by the Communist Party to mobilize the masses to bring about land reform. If it was simply an outwardly-enforced activity, it would not be revolutionary; as Mao always insists, the peasants must be empowered and take down their oppressors by force if fanshen is to truly be achieved. To do this, the peasants must first be assisted by the work teams in understanding their situation and how they must change it. Although peasants have been taken advantage of by landlords and others throughout all of our history, in fact, because of this, they have not had the opportunity of education to learn of the true class dichotomy that they have been living under. Demoralized and brainwashed by the Confucian system to accept this fate, rural peasants are in need of instruction and encouragement from the party; this is the importance of the mass line. Such a radical reordering of society and destruction of the dated hierarchy is also essential in transforming the role of women, as land reform can take down her oppressors while giving her land and thus, agency.
However, such an ambitious endeavor as land reform comes with its mistakes. Mao has, many times, brought up his concerns regarding the lapse of understanding between excited young communists and rural peasants, and I have seen issues arise from this in multiple towns. Many on the work teams hail from cities and are commonly educated, in the arts, wealthy, or all three. Their knowledge of the rural peasants’ plight is not based on real experience, but idealized novels from likewise ignorant urban elites such as Zhou Libo. Though their lack of knowledge is through no fault of their own, many enthusiastic party members go into towns with preconceived notions and no nuance. Some towns have a hard time trusting the work teams simply for this lack of understanding and mistrust of outsiders. One woman recounted to me a situation in which
There too are the issues of greed and women’s rights. One peasant woman recounted her tale to me, explaining that all in her village were quite poor already and that the landlord did not bother her or her family. However, when other peasants learned that ‘fruits of struggle’ would be provided to them, they fabricated bitterness against the landlord, who was beaten to death on encouragement of the work team. They tormented his wife as well, which they deemed appropriate as she had remarried after being widowed. The woman speaking of experience said that she and other women in the village who tried speaking bitterness about their abusive husbands were silenced, and received no fruits of struggle as they had not participated in the beatings. In another village, I found that men in the work team had not only pocketed the landlord’s money and jewelry for themselves, but had also been sexually abusing young peasant women. In these towns, nothing was truly achieved for women, and the processes were not truly revolutionary.
Furthermore, I have some concerns about class distinctions. Although the oppression of the peasantry has been endemic in China, prosperity does not always result from exploitation. My father’s ancestors were poor peasants until he began selling farming equipment, not only helping others who didn’t have it but making profit without exploitation. I am worried that, as he was recently able to purchase more land, he will be lumped in with the rich peasants and attacked. Though I have seen more moderate land reform in the North, our village is in the South.