Author: William Lapham (Ai Weiwei)

The amazing country we live in is a result of one man’s blood, sweat, and tears. Comrades, despite the fact he is no longer with us, we must keep in mind the revolutionary experiences he has benevolently gifted us through his reforms. We cannot let work accomplished in the past decades since the great victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the corrupt nationalists go to waste just because we no longer have our guiding light. 

The last act taken while Chairman Mao was alive was the Cultural Revolution. Two of the goals were to close the gap between the countryside and educate the new generation about the revolution and indate them with revolutionary experiences. Both of these were a great success, as expected of plans made by Chairman Mao. May he rest in peace. 

The next generation, despite not living through Yenan formed the Red Guard and enacted Mao’s vision, rooting out the capitalist pigs from the party. This made it easy for Chairman Mao to dispatch them to the countryside in order to learn from the peasants why Chairman Mao fought so hard. The educated youth had to suffer ostracism from the local peasants, hunger, and revolutionary living conditions that were a far cry from the stable conditions found in the cities they came from. All this was to forge their fighting spirit the only way Chairman Mao knew how. 

All of this was made possible by the peasant families who took in these young intellectuals for revolutionary training. As you all know, taking on another mouth is no small feat for a household, but as we are all filled with revolutionary spirit, the Peasants found a way. At times, this caused conflicts stemming from the mistrust between the revolutionary peasants and the intellectual students stemming from mistrust due to the Young intellectuals being branded as the children of banished cadre members or being the reason extra food went missing; however, it is just a byproduct of the situation we are facing as a nation. 

However, despite the education of the new generation, the gap between cities and the countryside did not shrink. The countryside has seen massive changes under the leadership of Chairman Mao, but the countryside also had the most to grow when compared to the cities. Cities had preexisting facilities, health care, and businesses that were folded well into new party policies. The countryside went through many plans, such as land reform all the way to the Great Leap Forward. The countryside was also hit with many natural disasters all while doing its best to support the needs of those in the cities. That being said, Chairman Mao introduced Barfoot doctors as a way to supplement the countryside’s lack of health care so peasants could get much-needed medical attention, as well as forged new instructors to create the necessary farming implements for peasants to use on a larger scale. Maos for planning has helped the quality of life in the countryside skyrocket and boosted the morale of the people but has not gotten rid of the gap between the standard of living in the cities and the standard of living in the countryside. However, I am sure that there is a plan in the works to address that issue more thoroughly.

 

My dear readers, I have been writing to you for a long time. Starting back when our great leader Chairman Mao fought off the capitalist government that was doing their absolute best to ruin China. The building of the CCP in Yenan, Land reform, collectivization, and then most recently the great leap forward. However, I have led you astray as it is not my turn to repent and write a self-criticism for remarks I have made when I obviously wasn’t educated enough on Chairman Mao’s view to be giving an opinion let alone inform your opinion, dear reader.  

Long before Chairman Maos thought was so readily available to study thoroughly in the little red book I went home for the first time since the war against Japanese aggression and when I arrived I saw my first struggle session against the foul landlords who took advantage of the righteous people of China and I couldn’t help but question the violence that ensued with the beatings of rich families and the death of many landlords. 

This was a temporary lapse in judgment stemming from many scenes of violence and brutality etched into my mind from a time my new comrades did not experience and from a time before the availability of Chairman Mao’s thoughts. It was hard being in the trenches with Mao at Yenan and reporting on what was going on in the surrounding areas and the violence made me tired. However now with Mao’s thoughts written down in such a beautiful understandable manner I see that a nation’s struggle is indicative of a Class struggle and that violence is part of that struggle. I also understand that the peasants needed to rise up and fight their landlords in order to overthrow the mental shackles as the peasants had experienced years and years of mistreatment economically and politically. It is all thanks to the more recent distribution of Mao Zedong though that I now have dedicated myself to understanding things I was unable to comprehend before because our great leader Mao sees the whole picture of events in China where I have only seen the places I have been. All my simple questions have been answered by the concise chapters of the Little Red Book and Mao has enlightened me to be a better comrade than I ever have been before this point. 

My dear readers. When we last spoke China was moving forward under the leadership of Chairman Mao.

Although we continue to follow party policy in the hopes of not just moving forward but leaping forward. Things are bleak. I am still in Shaanxi with my family. I have not seen a smile in my house for years. We are all starving. My grandfather passed away after giving his food to my grandmother and now my grandmother is sick with malnutrition and most likely won’t make it. My father had to close his general store and is made to work in the fields. My mother who used to never leave the house now has to abandon my sick grandmother in order to tend to the children of the village. Once she tried to stay home to tend to my grandmother and was slapped by a party cadre for not showing up to the commune. The basis of our family has been broken by these party policies. I used to see my family every night for dinner but now we can only eat in the collective dining hall and it is not the same. 

I work in the fields with my sister where we work long days with little food and are encouraged to implement farming methods thought of by party officials who I believe have been misguided. While not everyone has been a farmer the party’s ideas for how to plant crops seem strange. The idea of deep farming and planting the seeds deep underground to make stronger plants is possibly counterintuitive to Chairman Mao’s harvest goals and anyone who is educated and most with general experience knows that this will just kill the plant before it gets a chance to sprout. 

We all follow these policies anyway because of our faith in Chairman Mao and his policies. He hasn’t led us astray yet and I hope this indescribable suffering is just in north China and that Chairman Mao is attempting to gather relief for us and replace our unreliable cadre as quickly as possible. We only wake up and get through the day because of the loudspeakers and posters showing us that these policies are working in other parts of China. The paper contained a photo of children standing on top of strong plants and we hope to achieve the same results if everything can run as Chairman Mao intends them. However, my confidence in these matters has been shaken. I wonder who approved these strategies for large-scale implementation. I am sure Chairman Mao is using China’s best and brightest to affirm his plans before the guidance is pushed to the peasants. 

I hope beyond hope for a miracle to happen although I have no idea what can be done so that people will feel the effects fast enough to stop the suffering. I hope this is just a problem in the north of China and that the party is trying their best to solve it however only time will tell. I hope you are all with your families and that you are having a better time than I. 

Dear readers. It has been a while since my last report. In just a few short years, the group I reported on in Yan’an under the leadership of Mao Zedong has come to power in China. The country has finally rid itself of the Japanese infestation and forced the corruption of the Nationalists to flee to Taiwan—an excellent Victory for China.

I spent most of the past few years at Yan’an or hopping around to settlements close to it, but now that the war is over and it is much safer to travel, I have decided to go home to see my sister and family in Shaanxi Providence. But I did not go straight there; I went to Beijing first to stop by my old college, hoping to see how other intellectuals were adjusting to Mao’s ideas. When I was there, I met some of my old friends who were accumulating “revolutionary practice” by heading to Shaanxi as part of a work team to enact the next step in Mao’s revolution, “Land Reform.”

I traveled to Shaanxi with the work teams, watching as the group got smaller and smaller. The work teams seemed to drop party members off at every single village along the way, no matter how small or poor the village was. If this trend is true for the rest of the country, then Mao is mobilizing party members on a scale never seen before. By the time we got to Shaanxi, I had made friends with most of the work team members. Most were college graduates or journalists like myself; all mobilized after the May Fourth Directive. Once arrived, we went our separate ways. The work teams went to gather information from individual peasants, and I went to my father’s shop.

I have not been home since I went to college years ago. So much has happened since I left. To put it all into perspective, when I left, Confucianism was the dominating school of thought, and that prevented my father from being looked on favorably because he was a merchant. Yet now he is doing well for himself, selling all the necessities people need without swindling them like some of the other shops do. My grandfather passed away while I was gone, but other than that, my family has survived the war and political revolution primarily unscathed. 

Later on that week, we were all gathered in the center of the village by the work teams for a Struggle Session. Xié’è bi, the most powerful landlord in our village, was brought to the center stage, and the atmosphere was tense. Even before the war with Japan, he had been taking advantage of the poorer peasants; some had even died directly due to his greed. But he was untouchable because he held the livelihood of so many in his hands. But seeing him on stage with the Work Team in control, he looked like a regular old man. One of the peasants with whom the work teams had spent much time spoke up first. The woman told a story of how Xié’è bi took advantage of her and promised to absolve her husband of his financial debts but never did, which led to her daughter being sold off. After this tale, the atmosphere was sad and angry. You could feel the emotion building, but imagine my shock when a Work Team member whacked Xié’è bi over the head with a stick and asked, “Who next?” One by one, the peasants whipped into a frenzy came forth to share their experiences and blows rained down upon Xié’è bi until he was beaten within an inch of his life. 

After everyone shared their grievances, the leader of the Work Team, a journalist, came forward and, to his credit, explained. Land reform didn’t make intellectuals feel like they were being talked down to, but it was simple enough for peasants to understand as well. After a few more days, everything was settled, and land deeds were handed out as well as the goods that Xié’è bi owned, and these were called struggle fruit. 

It was nice to see some of the people I have known since I was born to receive justice and land; however, I am unsure how this will quickly pull them out of poverty, but maybe Mao will have another plan. I was shocked by the initiation of violence by the Work Teams. I am probably more pro-violence than most, but I believe the country has seen enough violence after fighting three consecutive wars and is still fighting the Americans in Korea. The work teams say revolution requires violence. I just hope this does not become a trend and that my family won’t one day be the target of their greed. 

 

Ai Weiwei

Dear readers, Just as I have feared, our country has not modernized enough to fight off the invading Japanese, and our Chaing Kai Shek is more concerned with fighting the communists than dealing with the Japanese, embarrassing China once again. It seems our greatest hope to stand up against foreign invaders comes from the communist safe haven of Yan’an, where Mao Zedong and the communist party are preaching the way to defeat the enemy isn’t with firepower alone but with total reform. 

It is easy to see why people from all over the country are coming to Yan’an. It seems to be the center of a feeling of nationalism. Many are looking for a better life, and Mao sees the peasants and farmers as essential to the Chinese reform and fighting off the Japanese. Mao is urging intellectuals and artists to “Become one with the masses,”  and is educating these intellectuals by having them live, work, and fight with the uneducated peasants. This level of cooperation between classes and the people of China would have never happened in the old government. 

  In a Yan’an Newspaper Mao tells intellectuals of his own time since school and how he learned for himself during the revolution and the long march that clothing is clothing and that just because it is from a soldier doesn’t make it dirty and that the peasants and soldiers aren’t dirty, and that manual labor is not something to be ashamed of.

 Even more, peasants are fleeing from the Japanese as they pillage, kill, and rape their way through China in an attempt to root out communists, and Yan’an is a safe haven for all walks of life. 

This resonated with the peasants and soldiers from Chaing Kai-Shek’s army who have been mistreated. There are stories told by the ex-nationalist soldiers about starving conditions and five or six men being tied together to discourage escape. All of these men were drafted into the Nationalist army in order to fight for the homeland and fend off the Japanese. However, the soldiers who ran away from the Nationalist Army talk of having no food to eat and no clothing to fight in because of corruption and were very shocked to see the state of Mao’s Red Army. 

Unlike Chaing Kai-Shek’s army, Mao disciplined his army and ordered them not to steal or loot from the poor peasants, which boosted his support from the people.  In Yan’an, Mao had trained his army to do three things, all of which furthered the army’s popular support one was to struggle to death against the enemy, Two was to arm the masses, and three was to raise money to support the struggle. In creating these rules and enforcing discipline, the people saw Mao’s army move further and further away from the armies of the warlords, Chaing Kai Shek or the Japanese. Seeing the Army as a protector of the people that would defend China’s proletariat and peasant population saw many migrate to Yan’an to join the Red Army in the hope of helping reform the country.

My name is Ai Weiwei. I was born on November 12, 1908, with my sister Fen Weiwei in northwest China Shaanxi Providence. My family wasn’t wealthy, but my father ran the town general store and was well-liked by the community; we lived comfortably in a large house where my grandparents lived with us. My mother seldom left the house as she cared for my sister, grandparents, and myself while preparing all the food and doing all the housework. My father always wanted change, and after we lost to the West economically and then lost to Japan militarily, he turned to me to start reform in my generation, so I was sent to college.

I am now studying public affairs in Beijing. I hope to bring about reform in my country to bring China back to being the center of Asia and push the foreigners out. I also hope we modernize our military to prevent any further losses to Chinese pride and as a deterrent for our small neighbor who is militarizing right next to us..  I took this reporting job as a way to build connections and increase the amount of information available to others who agree with me.