Author: Ari Rogowski (Ran Ang-Rui)

Tongzhimen,

I feel incredibly lucky to still have a platform like this to speak to you all about what is happening in China. To be involved in the cataloging of the many accomplishments of our late Chairman Mao was such an honor and has made it so important that I stay up-to-date on what is happening in our country and its Communist Party. My status as a long-time reporter has given me early access to an upcoming memoir by a man named Liang Heng about his and his family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. 

I feel that it would be a disservice to the country to not explicitly call out the Cultural Revolution as the period of terror that it was and for this reason I implore all of you to get your hands on Son of the Revolution when it comes out to understand, if one does not already, the violence and struggle our people had to endure because of this campaign. The Liang family began as faithful to and productive within the Communist Cause but slowly fell apart physically and emotionally because of this campaign. Liang Heng’s father was particularly loyal to his country and its government and remained so until his death, despite having been struggled against and demoted himself. The example of Liang Heng’s father encapsulates how the Cultural Revolution has decimated an entire generation of those loyal to the Cause; people who tried to do everything right and live according to the teachings of Chairman Mao were left behind, if not directly attacked, by the very country they were devoting their lives to serving. 

A particular moment that struck me while I was reading the memoir was from the time that Liang Heng and his father spent in the countryside after his father was sent there to work as a cadre for re-education purposes. He threw himself into the responsibilities associated with this job and tried his very best to serve the people whose lives he was overseeing. Determined to guide the masses into a communist lifestyle, “Father” probably thought himself ready for anything… leading to his devastation when orders were coming through that he knew would directly harm the peasants he was living with. Can raising and selling livestock for a few eggs really be an example of treacherous capitalist tendencies? Should these peasants, with their limited furniture and back-breaking labor, really be punished for trying to survive? Surely they could not be equated to the landlords we suffered under so many years ago, nor could they be included in Mao’s “Four Olds.” To his credit, Liang Heng’s father tried pleading with his higher-ups and stayed sure that Chairman Mao never meant “‘for his policies to harm the peasants,’” but his opinion was ignored and these peasants suffered as a result.

This moment struck me because it demonstrates how the Cultural Revolution punished even the most loyal of communists, people who just wanted to realize Mao’s vision of helping the peasant masses. Essentially, nobody was safe from being struggled, regardless of how deserving one actually was. All Liang Heng’s father wanted to do was help his people and he was ignored in the name of pursuing misguided plans pertaining to eliminating capitalism; surely there were more threatening and pressing issues than poor peasants trying to survive and pay off their debts. The flawed extremism and promotion of violence that marks the Cultural Revolution turned us against one another and distracted us from what really needed to be done. I hope that we as a country can learn from this chaotic period in our history to make sure we channel our energy toward helping those in need and only targeting those who actually seek to undermine our communist vision.

Thank you for following my blog for the last few decades and trusting me to provide you with the unadulterated truth of the glory of the Chinese Communist Party as well as our fearless leader, Chairman Mao. With the guiding lights of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, I thought myself immune to the pestilence of capitalist greed. Regrettably, I was wrong, and my apparent lack of revolutionary fervor has left me unknowingly susceptible to the ills of society that I was supposed to be warning and fighting against. 

Rather than “immerse (myself) among [the masses],” I instead mistakenly believed myself to be some form of authority and selfishly clung to my position as a reporter (LRB 56). Despite being born a peasant, I left my people behind for school in Beijing when it came to rebuilding China in the hopes of bettering only myself. I have spent my time writing, as I foolishly thought this would be more beneficial to society than working hard in the field or a factory to feed the country and make it prosper. I have inadvertently led the masses astray with my misleading mentions of supposed flaws in the Party, misconceptions borne from my own misunderstanding and miseducation rather than the actual actions of the CCP. I did not allow myself to “learn from [the masses]” and thought myself worthy of guiding them, relying on my own flawed reason rather than the genius theories of our Chairman and his Party (LRB 57). 

I published divisive ideas about the position of women and portrayed the Party in a sexist manner, a title which their egalitarian legislation and campaigns have proven they do not deserve. I naïvely criticized the Cause’s use of violence, as if there was any other acceptable response to the years of oppression our people have faced and would have continued to face if the CCP did not carry out an “armed struggle” (LRB 28). Any perpetuation of doubt regarding the capabilities of Mao and the Party was completely unintentional, but this ignorance is no excuse when the path to liberation and enlightenment was made so easily accessible to me through the many educational campaigns carried out by the CCP.

My past behavior is inexcusable, but I hope I will be given the chance to prove myself loyal to the great Communist Cause and do my part in spreading the revolution across the world so that all can be as liberated and advanced as China under Mao and the Party.

Hello Tongzhimen,

The past few years have been far from paradise for our beloved country. Our valiant effort to industrialize China and begin a future of prosperity has included many challenges, which will of course pay off through the wise guidance of Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, but I am worried about the lasting effects of the struggles we have all become so familiar with. It seems as though the general consensus among the Chinese people is that common problems like famine and flooding are only being experienced by one’s own village, but, in the continued spirit of spreading truth, I am here to tell you all that these issues are much more pervasive, and devastating, than one may think. 

One cannot deny that the mass mobilization of peasants in the countryside was a genius idea of Mao’s, for China would be able to feed all of its people while financing industrial growth and paying off our debts to the Soviet Union. However, the actual mobilization that was carried out has proven to be a little less than perfect. It makes sense that Mao is calling for an increase in China’s population as we simply do not have enough people to sustain both our industrialized and agricultural economies; even with women entering the workforce and going out into the fields, there is not enough people to effectively sustain both our backyard steel furnaces and our farms. Especially with the relocations of farmers to build dams and irrigation canals, there are even fewer hands cultivating the fields. If we had more loyal comrades willing to work hard to produce wheat and steel, maybe we would be better off. We would also be able to finish the many architectural projects that now lay abandoned or are nowhere near the quality they should be. Of course there are more obstacles though, like the natural disasters and shifty cadres who have been taking our hard-earned resources for themselves and lying to the Party about what we’ve produced, as if our best effort isn’t already enough.

Yes, that’s right, you heard me, the local cadres have been lying about our crop production to the Party, completely abusing the trust that has been put in them, which is why so much of our grain is being taken away from us. The famines are not isolated incidents only felt by individual villages, it is a widespread problem that is debilitating our country. I have traveled through multiple villages in the countryside, coming across true horrors in the hopes of discovering the truth about our country’s plight. The lack of food has forced people to turn to food substitutes like leaves, weeds, and even mud; those who are able to sustain themselves off of these end up with destroyed intestines anyway and are still malnourished. During my time in the Gaoguanzhai township, I passed by countless people dragging their swollen bodies to the fields to try and continue working as well as exhausted, extremely skinny peasants who collapsed in front of their homes, probably on the way to work to scrounge up more work points for food. It would be a disservice to not also mention the corpses just left on the sides of roads as well, right where their bodies finally gave out. Peasants do not even have the strength left to bury their own dead! Some bodies do disappear but no new graves are added, I have heard terrible rumors of people having to make use of these bodies for the nourishment of their crops and, sometimes, even themselves. 

Birth rates drop lower and lower as the number of deaths in the countryside rises. Women are barely able to get pregnant, let alone carry the pregnancy to term or take care of their child once it is born. The orphanages are absolutely bursting with small, malnourished children with bowed knees and sallow skin. The hospitals in Guangyuan are completely run down, with patients being left alone to suffer amongst each other while doctors steal food and medicine to keep their own families alive. I have no doubt that Chairman Mao and the Party will be able to save our country, but my heart aches for the people who will die before they can be helped as well as the children and families forever traumatized by the losses they have endured already. These damages may be irrevocable and I’m not sure if the Party understands the extent to which its people are suffering, due to the false reports by the cadres. Even the land seems permanently changed, what with our forests being cleared to fuel the steel furnaces and some soil being rendered infertile by the unlucky floods sweeping China.

I implore all of you to hang on as long as you can, the new China will need strong people to lead it into prosperity. Just as the Long March proved to us, suffering can turn into immense success and simply brings out our perseverance. Put your faith in Chairman Mao, whose guidance will bring us out of this slump. Surely the Cause we revolted for, that countless people have died for, is not the problem. We have built our new society on the foundation of Mao Zedong Thought, so it must be that the problems wracking China have been caused by what we built and not our socialist basis… right?

Dear Readers: 

 

How times have changed in China since I started keeping my blog! I never thought such drastic changes would occur in my own lifetime for me to witness and, as my job requires, record. In the spirit of keeping everyone educated on the things going on in this country, I have traveled around the country to report on the key points of China’s political upheaval; the story of Communist China and its ongoing revolution would not be complete without the inclusion of the CCP’s ambitious campaign of land reform in the countryside. As you may remember, I spent quite some time in the countryside in Yan’an in the CCP’s satellite but returned to Beijing with other intellectuals after the PRC was officially established to finish my education. However, I have been called back to the countryside to continue my reporting for the Party as a guest of one of the work teams being sent to educate the peasants and guide them through agrarian revolution. 

Mao has adamantly pushed for the participation of the masses in the revolution in general, noting in his 1927 Hunan Report how the “strength” and “extensive organization” of the peasants in the countryside demonstrated their capability of “action.” The power of the masses has long been heralded by the CCP as the driving force behind the revolution in China, so it makes sense that the Party would funnel the unstoppable force of the people into achieving their agenda. It seems that the societal roles have been flipped, with work teams of intellectuals being sent to learn from these unstoppable peasants rather than the other way around. Learning from books just doesn’t cut it anymore in the PRC, and understanding the state of the country as well as its possibility for reform cannot be accomplished “without social practice” obtained from living and working amongst the masses. With so many people working toward land reform, especially those as passionate about the revolution as the oppressed peasants, an immense amount of progress can potentially be made in a shorter amount of time and, since it’s coming from the ground up, changes would actually be happening rather than just being decreed and never enforced. 

I can’t help but be excited about the idea of a government that actually wants its people to do rather than just sit back and have things done to them. The peasants I’ve met with the work team seem to be enthusiastic about this as well. I recently met a woman in the countryside named Ge Yang who joined the Party because of this powerful message; communism meant that “the people would be masters of the country,” and it was being realized by the people, “a mighty storm,” themselves. This, however, means that the Party has to educate every intellectual in the work teams who then have to educate every peasant that they’re responsible for. It’s quite an intense process and the intellectuals in my team have had a hard time letting go of their biases toward the peasants as well as using language that they would understand. Although getting off to a shaky, unconvincing start, peasants began to respond to the work teams, vocalizing “bitterness” and realizing how they had been exploited for years by their landlords.

I am happy to report that land reform has done its job. There is surely a more equal distribution of land amongst the peasants in the countryside (even for women and children) as well as tools which has made production more efficient and plentiful all around from what I’ve seen. However, the methods of obtaining this land and wealth have left a pit in my stomach. The violence I have witnessed in the countryside in the name of land reform has completely unsettled me. I have seen peasants pull the limbs off of landlords and heard the screams of those accused of secretly harboring more wealth being buried alive. These people have taken the work teams’ proclamations of exploitation and suffering to heart and, while there is obviously truth to these condemnations of landlords, I can’t help but think the Party has taken all of this much too far. Peasants are encouraged to be violent and there are no repercussions for the killing or torturing of landlords or richer individuals who are accused of hiding wealth but in reality have nothing more to give. And, seeing as how this revolution has been put into the hands of the masses rather than a few elites, this means that land reform has perpetuated extreme amounts of violence and death. I have heard people whispering about there already being over one million people dead as a result of land reform and I can’t say that I don’t believe it. Not to mention those being taken advantage of or sexually assaulted by the corrupt cadres, or even the peasants themselves who have taken the wives and daughters of struggled landlords for themselves! With there also not being enough land to go around for everyone in China, I’m worried about what will happen when some peasants don’t get what they were promised.

I can’t help but think of my own family, more well off than the others in our village. I can only hope that they have been assigned as “middle peasants” through their work teams’ arbitrary systems and will only have to redistribute some of their belongings rather than lose their lives. I am almost scared to go back home, in case I come back to find crude graves where my home is supposed to be. I avoid speaking about my family now so that nobody interprets my fear as sympathy for the landlord class. I am glad that less people are suffering in poverty now, I am, but I’m not sure I can accept the idea that all of this violence was the only way for China to reach this achievement.

That’s all for now.

Dear Readers:

I hope this post finds all of you safely despite the chaos that is our country currently. With Japan forcing themselves down our coast and further inland, there are only so many “safe” spaces for our people to go. The Nationalists’ government has proven themselves ill-equipped to deal with this threat and I can’t help but think of my poor parents back home who still so vividly remember the 1911 Revolution and their idol, Sun Yat-Sen, who freed China from the imperialism and foreign influence that is now, once again, ravaging entire villages and leaving countless people dead. 

As most of you know, I was formerly a student in Beijing before Japan took over the city in mere days back in 1937. Forced to flee, a few fellow students and I had to quickly decide where we would have even a chance of survival. We didn’t necessarily trust the Nationalists to protect us anymore with how little they seemed capable of against the Japanese, leaving us with one other option: Mao Zedong’s communists. As a reporter, I fervently followed news of the notorious Long March purely in the interest of knowledge and pursuit of fact, so I was aware of the community the Communists had set up in Yan’an. It is commonly said that the Communists are more committed to the anti-Japanese efforts than Chiang Kai-Shek and, please be understanding when I say this, but I would rather be part of a Communist country than a Japanese satellite.

Upon arriving in Yan’an after our own tumultuous journey, my friends and I were stunned by what has been coined as the “Yan’an Spirit,” one of utmost optimism and “exuberance.” I felt that if these people, despite the extreme hardships they had already faced, were this positive and passionate about their mission then, surely, this mission must be one of quality. While the rest of China was fighting hopelessly, the Communists had something they were fighting for proudly. I offered my reporting services, guessing correctly that the community would love the chance to have their story told, and this is how I was able to earn a spot among the Communists despite not being one myself, exactly. My friends and I knew we could not be completely honest about our backgrounds to the Communists, scared they would reject us if they learned of the privileges we had, so I emphasized to the first ones we approached how I had come from a peasant family. This is when I learned I was from the same part of China that Mao’s own family hailed from and this earned my friends and I considerable respect from the Communists in Yan’an.

Mao in general has continuously surprised me throughout my years living among the Communists in Yan’an because, though he is evidently the leader of the community, you would not be able to tell just by observing him. While certainly admired, he is treated with the same amount of respect as any other person in the community is and is afforded the same resources as the rest of us. I myself have shared (meager) meals with Mao, have been in his humble cave, and have watched him sit “inconspicuously in the midst of the crowd” as just another Communist devoted to the Cause. Mao lives just as everyone else does in Yan’an and while this way of life seems far from perfect to me (and probably to Mao, considering we came from the same, slightly more privileged background), I’m sure some of my peers have never felt so taken care of in their life before coming to Yan’an. This must be close to the egalitarian society that the Communists envision for all of China, with people working together to provide for everyone in the community and making sure no one starves or freezes.

I must also report on the position of women in Yan’an. I left the countryside years ago for a reason and was weary about returning, weary about the kind of life I would be told to live in Yan’an. I was mentally preparing myself for the feudalistic, sexist society I left behind and told myself I could survive an arranged marriage if it meant escaping the Japanese. However, the Communists in Yan’an have found a way to bring some of their progressive thinking to the countryside. I feel more respected as a woman here in Yan’an than I did back home… as long as I stay close to the Communists and farther away from the less-devoted peasants in the community; while Mao and his people are working to reform their thought, the ways here are still bordering on traditional. Women work amongst men and stand up to contribute during meetings or discussions but we’ve had many accused of being “too feminist” or “divisive”; marriages are a happy thing here, not something to fear or a symbol of oppression, but many peasant couples that were married before the Communists’ arrival do not have an egalitarian dynamic. I often see a woman named Wang Xin-lan walking hand-in-hand with her husband, chatting and laughing as they work, but also hear many stories of women being hit by their husbands. These husbands are usually punished now, though, which never happened in my experience back home. They are encouraging women to help the war effort with textile jobs (my reporting exempts me from this) and while this may not seem a lot to some, I’m sure my sisters-in-law would have loved this choice when they were my age. One of my classmates that came with me is even considering enrolling in the Army’s medical school, an opportunity few of us could ever dream of before coming to the cities. I’m not naïve enough to think that  “among (Communists), men and women are equal” completely, but they are taking steps toward that standard that few have taken before in Chinese history. I just hope that this progressive thinking prevails and does not lose priority within the Cause.

That’s all for now, everyone. Stay safe out there.

Dear Readers:

The China we are living in now is a product of the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and released the country from thousands of years of stifling tradition and oppressive governmental rule. It is hard to go a day without someone of the older generation despairing over how they suffered just a few decades ago, especially those in the poor countryside. However, one can still detect a certain discontentment with China and its new government among the people. As someone born after the Revolution, I have to rely on stories from my family and others in my village to paint a picture of what China was like before the emperor was overthrown, but I think it’s obvious why we, as a people, were fed up with the old system. Now, under Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party, some Chinese people have found peace with this new system and believe that the Nationalists are the answer to regaining China’s strength. On the other hand, there are many who still feel unfairly suppressed by the institutions in place and have begun looking toward another revolution, a revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party.

I’ve had the chance to speak to the industrial workers working in Beijing, catching them after their exhausting 17-hour shifts. I met a young girl named Qui Hui-ying whose hands were riddled with burns from her silk-spinning job (that could easily have been me if my parents hadn’t been as lucky as they were back in our small village) who told me about the Communists who secretly spread their ideas to her and her coworkers. She explained to me how she finally felt cared for by the Communist worker, who told her “people were not born to be poor” and that the real reason for their misfortune was “exploitation by others” like capitalists and their employers. After getting my hands on the Communist Manifesto from one of my classmates, I found that it specifically condemns child labor and declares that capitalism encourages the exploitation of children; I’m not an expert on the economy, but I can’t deny the number of injured, hungry children I see walking through Beijing after their grueling shifts and I’m not surprised that this sight would drive people into the Communist Party’s arms.

I also found an interesting section in the Manifesto about the exploitation of women. As someone who barely escaped the prospect of an arranged marriage and had to convince my parents to let me study instead, I am well aware of how traditional China suppressed women and how that tendency has a strong grip on our country even today. One of my progressive friends at school recommended a book to me, Family by Pa Chin, when I started studying here, because of its acknowledgment of how the traditional marriage system and the expectations set for women were particularly stifling. I couldn’t help but see connections between this book and the Manifesto, which claims that men exploit women like any other “instrument of production.” It basically calls women glorified prostitutes and I couldn’t help but think of my sisters-in-law back home, who had to leave their families and home to join mine, therefore making it possible for me to leave home and go to college in the first place. The copy of the Manifesto that my friend lent me has the sentence about the “community of women” underlined and when I asked her about it, she told me that it was proof enough that the Communists knew what they were talking about; it was her opinion that they were acutely aware of the oppression women face and had no plans to silence their “communities”, unlike the more conservative Chinese people.

I wrote to some people back home in my rural village to see if anyone had heard of the Party and its message. My neighbor told me that some people in our neighborhood were still so poor even under the Nationalists, all they had the energy to do was worry about food, and she had to convince her husband that they didn’t need to sell their daughter to survive the winter. My childhood friend Xie Pei-lan very passionately insulted the Nationalists who had not solved the problems of poor peasants like her and made the comment that she wished she could be in Beijing with me to also avoid marriage. She included a sentence about a Communist official preaching a woman’s right to choose who she married, but she crossed this line out, probably worried about how it would make her look if anyone found the letter before it got to me.

It seems that the CCP is particularly appealing to those who have experienced the exploitation the Party claims it wants to free China from. The Party condemns child labor as well as arranged marriages, issues that plague China even now, and one of its goals seems to be filling the stomachs of the poor peasants who starve while others stuff themselves. Readers, what do you think of the Communist Party? Could they be what leads China to its fullest potential? Thanks for reading! That’s all for now.

Hello! I am Ran Ang-Rui, born in 1912. Currently, I am a college student in Beijing, a bit rare for women like me from my hometown. I come from a family of farmers in Shaoshan, Hunan, China who do well enough for themselves. I have three older brothers, the last of whom just got married so my house was getting pretty crowded with both of my parents still alive and grandchildren on the way. One of my brothers just graduated from university and even found his wife while at school, so my impressed parents agreed to let me leave and go to school on the condition that I pay for part of my education by myself, hence me taking this job. 

Coming to the city after spending my entire life in a rural area has been eye-opening to not only the problems China is facing right now but also the possible solutions for them. I’m interested to see how my classes in school support or refute what I’ve been told growing up about China and its history. College has given me the chance to hear many opinions about national issues, even the less conservative ones that don’t usually make it back to my village. The tension in the city is palpable and I’m concerned that this talk of revolution will cause more problems than it will solve for my country. As a woman especially, I can see that some big changes need to be made here but I’m worried about the dangers along the road to a more egalitarian society.