On the Ground in China

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 Tongzhimen,

The Great Leap Forward had incredibly noble goals, and by all national Party accounts, it was able to deliver upon many of those. Land has been collectivized, grain procurement quotas have been on the rise in most rural areas, and our great nation has moved towards industrialization. The Chairman’s goal of surpassing Great Britain’s level of steel production, a concept which was only a distant dream a few short years ago, moved within our grasp. However, whispers of tragedies – ones that are almost too horrible to name – befalling the people of China have also swirled about. I received an assignment to travel to as many different provinces as possible in order to get a clearer picture of the realities that people are facing, in the city and in the countryside alike. Exports and the Party’s grain procurement quotas have risen steadily over the past three years, so I expected to find a countryside of abundance. As I traveled from village to village, collecting testimonies and reading documents, however, I was confronted with stark conditions I found that some areas of our great nation have been plagued by chronic crop failure, violence, corruption, disease, famine, death, and suffering, and my heart breaks for the areas affected by this turmoil [Zhou Xun, 3]. I believe that the Chairman and the Party will lead all members of our society back to prosperity in due time, yet after witnessing local conditions firsthand, I also have some worries that certain consequences of the manner in which the Great Leap was implemented will linger on for years to come.

Family life and the lives of children have been disrupted immensely in the past three years, and I believe that the disruption of the lives of China’s new generation will have a reverberating impact on our nation for many years to come. In January of 1959, a report about conditions in Gaoguanzhai township, Zhangqiu county stated that “many villagers had no choice but to abandon their homes and become beggars. Some had no other option but to sell their children” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 1, Page 4]. Families have been displaced from their homes, children have been displaced from their parents, and such a destruction of the familial unit will impact China’s demographic and social realities for decades to come.

Due to malnutrition, many women of childbearing age in Gaoguanzhai have stopped menstruating, babies have been born with serious birth defects, and babies have starved to death because their mothers quickly stopped producing milk to breastfeed them with [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 1, Page 6]. Furthermore, surviving babies and children are subjected to heartbreaking neglect. One of the core aims of the Great Leap Forward was to mobilize all members of the community, including women, to work outside of the home on localized agricultural or industrial projects. Mao has previously said that “the youth and women are happy about the new…system,” but the stories I heard from women and children about the disastrous impacts of mobilizing mothers to work without providing any systematic form of childcare paint a drastically different picture [Mao, Talks at Beidaihe, 164]. As a report on relief work in Sichuan Province from 1961 states, “since the Great Leap Forward, many women have been encouraged to go into full-time employment, leaving a number of children at home with no one to care for them…Some children were simply left to crawl on their own and to find food to eat from the floor” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 23, Page 53]. In 1962, children in Chongqing city developed myriad health problems, including parasitic diseases, as well as over 167,000 children cases of malnutrition or rickets, caused by a combination of poor diets and a lack of exposure to sunlight, since “mothers lock up their children indoors because they have to go to work” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 23, Page 54].

Orphaned children in particular face perilous and harrowing conditions. At the Gaoling district orphanage, employees “failed to feed the orphans regular meals, leaving the children starving” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 16, Page 48]. Out of desperation, some orphans “regularly… [rummaged] around local market restaurants for leftovers. Some also went to look for wild grass, dead fish, shrimp, and toads to eat,” causing several deaths from food poisoning [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 16, Page 48]. Stories from the Hongqi orphanage indicate widespread physical abuse of orphaned children [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 16, Page 48]. Some families in Yinging offered orphans in need of a roof over their heads a place to stay, only to “[deprive] them of food, [beat] them, [scold] them, and [eat] up the orphan’s grain ration” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 18, Page 49]. All of these accounts of women and children being subjected to inhumane conditions during the past three years leave me worried that we have failed the up and coming generations.

I am also immensely worried about the long term consequences of a collapse of a trusting peasant and cadre relationship, an issue which has befallen many villages due to blatant cadre abuses. I learned from an old friend located in Wanxian county that local cadres “unlawfully set up private courts, jails, and labor camps,” and employed cruel methods of torture which are essentially beyond one’s worst imagination [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 3, Page 21]. Reports from other villages have painted a similar picture. According to a 1959 report from Guangdong province, for instance, “‘private prisons’ run by the commune are widespread in many regions. In most cases these private prisons are used to deal with ‘the people’ rather than ‘the enemy’” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 7, Page 28]. I am immensely worried about the idea that cadres are shattering their relationships with the common people by ruthlessly abusing them, because this could lead to a general lack of trust in the Party and its policies in the future and a complete deterioration of the mass line.

The distribution of valuable labor and resources during the Great Leap Forward is also something which alarms me, as it has the potential to negatively impact our nation’s economic health and growth in the years to come. After seeing the barren fields in many parts of the Chinese countryside with my own eyes, I have come to the grim conclusion that local cadres have repeatedly inflated their harvests in their reports, painting a false picture of prosperity for the leaders at the top of the Party [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 43, Page 87]. Despite the need for China to devote significant time, resources, and labor to the agricultural sector if it wants to produce an abundance of food for its people, agricultural production has generally fallen by the wayside in terms of Party priorities – “agricultural land became wasteland, and unattended livestock died” [Zhou Xun, Page 73]. In recent years, the Party very enthusiastically mobilized people to work in heavy industry production, sometimes to the detriment of other invaluable industries, especially agriculture and consumer goods [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 40, Page 83].

Even though significant resources have been devoted to industrial production, I heard many accounts that these resources have not been allocated as efficiently as they should have been. In July of 1959, Peng Dehuai lamented this lack of carefully coordinated planning, writing, “an excessive number of capitalist construction projects were hastily started in 1958. With part of the funds being dispersed, completion of some essential projects had to be postponed” [Peng Dehuai, 436]. China’s overall steel production has increased significantly over the past few years, but there are a few vital questions we need to ask ourselves: where are the raw materials used to produce this steel coming from, and what are we gaining from this increased production? An investigative report from 1961 in Yongxing, Qi County found that useful household items were melted down and used in industrial production: “peasants were told to ‘contribute’ their private property, including pots and pans, jars, and coffins during the iron- and steel-work campaign” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 31, Page 75]. The steel that was produced had little to no practical usage, yet people from across the entire nation were still instructed to create backyard steel furnaces of their own. Peng Dehuai reflected that “in the nationwide campaign for the production of iron and steel, too many small blast furnaces were built with a waste of material, money, and manpower” [Peng Dehuai, 437].

Hastily conceived and poorly planned construction projects, the emphasis on rapid industrialization, and the neglect of the agricultural sector have all combined to have a particularly virulent effect on China’s environment. Mao has long advocated for close planting and deep plowing techniques, which will have immensely detrimental repercussions on crop yields for years to come [Mao, Talks at Beidaihe, Page 162]. An illuminating report on the destruction of forestland in the northwest of China indicated that as of October 1962, one-fifth of closed forestland had been dilapidated, and as much as one-third of open forests had been chopped down [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 44, Page 88]. The report highlighted the deleterious effects of this deforestation as well, stating that “the destruction of the forest has caused soil erosion and sandstorms and reduced the amount of water resources” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 44, Page 88]. Due to poorly constructed irrigation systems and canals, some farm fields have become waterlogged and alkalized. In Hunan province, I spoke with a peasant who recited a local saying to me: “the drought happens for just one season, but alkalization will last a lifetime” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 45, Page 89]. Some local implementations of the Great Leap have frankly wreaked havoc upon the landscape and the environment, and farmers will surely feel the effects of this for the foreseeable future.

While I have faith that Chairman Mao and the rest of the Party will get our nation back on track, I am saddened that so many people throughout China have experienced such destruction, disease, and death, and I worry about the impacts that this period will have on agricultural production and our youth. I hope all of my loyal readers have stayed safe and healthy during this treacherous time, weathering the storm that has afflicted our nation as of late. I look forward to writing again soon.

Sincerely, Lei Ju

Hello Intellectuals,

 

Mi Man Tian here again to give some updates on the nation of China. Since our last communication a lot has taken place. The People’s Republic of China is here, and the nationalist party has been destroyed. One of the first big transitions that Mao and the Republic have promised to bring forth is already in effect. The policy of tudi gaige has been in place for about a year now and I was interested in finding out how people were feeling about the policy, whether or not they were in favor or if that had any positive or negative things to say about the policy. I took to the streets and read a couple of Mao’s speeches as I usually do to do my reporting and I have found honestly quite an unexpected mixed bag or response. I personally think that the CCP has chosen to implement land reform on a mass scale because of two reasons: mobilization and participation and social cohesion. Mobilization and participation because the mass approach allowed the CCP to involve the population. By having the population participate in the land reform process the CCP mobilizes the population with the party principles. The party can both educate the masses on communism and let the masses have a sense of ownership in the process, a feeling that they (the masses) have made this change, instead of it just happening, forced upon by the government. In a speech that chairman Mao gave in 1943 he said “If any work or mission lacks a general, universal slogan, the broad masses cannot be moved to action, but if there is nothing more than a general slogan and the leaders do not make a concrete, direct, and thorough application of it with those from a particular unit who have been rallied around the slogan… there is then the danger that the general slogan will have no effect” (Cheek 118). This has been shown to work as many groups of the mobilized masses have attacked landlords and rich peasants to take back their land. Social cohesion was a reason the CCP implemented land reform on a mass scale because the trust between the local peasants and the party leaders was needed to push the broader communist agenda. By involving the masses in the implementation, the masses got to feel a sense of togetherness, that they were reforming land ownership together and thusly become more aligned with the party and their beliefs. Another quote from Mao says, “Two methods must be adopted in accomplishing any task; the first is to combine the general and the particular, and the second is to unite leadership with the masses” (Cheeks 118).

 

Some of the dangers that this mass campaign of land reform has had on the nation in general are the economic disruptions and the amount of violence that the masses were able to perform in large fashion. The economic disruptions came about in the fact that factory owners now do not want to hire workers in some cases of getting accused of exploitation. This in turn lead to slowed production because the lack of workers. These factory owners are also being villainized by the party, “The campaign also included propaganda against landlords, exploiters, and other bad” (Dietrich 153). My father is struggling with this currently as after he retired from teaching, he started a steel factory and is utterly terrified of being labeled as a bad element after seeing what the masses have done to the landlords. The violence that the masses are capable of is not to be understated. Peasants and local party officials alike would often turn physical when trying to weed out the bad elements. The attacks on these class enemies, as they are often referred to as, ranged from the public struggle sessions and anti-rightist campaigns that take place as murders and exiles masked as thought reform and getting rid of the people that want to hurt the blossoming utopia of the people’s republic. It is evident that this violence was not only allowed but encouraged to an extent with the only caveat being the cadres weren’t to get involved, one women from a rural village I interviewed said Mao himself wanted the cadres, if they saw violence against bad elements, to not interfere with the violence inflicted upon them. A man I interviewed said that the result of land reform and the cadres moving into the villages was widespread, violent attacks on the wealthy farmers and local elite, even though this type of treatment was supposed to be reserved for only “extremely wicked traitors and public enemies.” This in conjuncture with Mao’s want for the cadres to not get involved, shows that Mao knows about the mass violence and is doing nothing to stop it.

Hello readers, it has been a while since I last wrote but so much has happened since then. The Chinese Communist Party has not only survived but it has established itself as the core leadership group leading the newly founded People’s Republic of China. They have risen to this power by defeating the invading Japanese forces, expelled the Nationalists to Taiwan, and now lead the fight against the invading Americans in Korea. However, I will focus on reporting about the major domestic event taking place which is the mass land reform campaign. I have joined a work team and we traveled to a local village in the countryside to carry out the smooth implementation of the land reform campaign. I do believe that the work I am doing is spreading the message of the great chairman and we have redistributed land, but I have also seen sights and heard stories that I fear will not be shared that I feel must be reported.

I signed up to be a part of a work team because I wanted to travel to the countryside and help carry out the land reform campaign. I knew that my background of growing up in the countryside could help in understanding the dynamics of the countryside as I knew that it was much different than the big cities. I believe this reform is being carried out as a mass campaign because the peasants need to know who in their village to take land from for redistribution. I read an article that was specifically for teaching the peasants how to differentiate the classes in the rural areas and I think it was very helpful, although I could think of a few people and families from my own village that may not fit exactly into one of the classes. Also, carrying out the reform in a mass campaign makes it easier for the peasants to understand the objectives of the reform easier as slogans can be used that help simplify the goals of the campaign. These slogans can be used to unite the peasants so that they feel as though they are all striving for the same goals and to ignite the peasants to overthrow the enemy classes that are exploiting them. I have seen the benefits of this class division but I have also seen some negative aspects in dividing the peasants in such a manner.

One of the benefits for dividing the peasants into the different classes is it clearly identifies which people are in the landlord class so that work party members like myself can confiscate their excess land that they were using to exploit the poor and middle peasant classes for redistribution. The village my work party was sent to is an example of this benefit. When we arrived, we held a mass meeting in the makeshift town square asking the peasants to speak bitterness and identify who the landlords in the area were. No one stepped forward to speak but when we traveled to individual family homes, they were eager to speak bitterness and help us identify the landlord who was exploiting all the villagers. We quickly apprehended the landlord, staged a public trial where he was punished for his past crimes and his excess land was redistributed among the peasants. This event makes me proud to recollect and I imagine if I had been sent to my village and I could personally give my father his own land.

One negative aspect of the mass land reform campaign is the fact that in some scenarios, some people do not fit into a particular class or they do not fit the description of that class. In these cases, I have seen people that may not be in the landlord class still tried and struggled against. In the village my work team is in, after we got rid of the exploitative landlord, there was still not enough land for everyone so we needed to find more to distribute. However, even after the personal meeting in family homes, no one could identify a landlord or wealthy peasant. Unfortunately, a middle peasant that quite a few villagers disliked was dragged out and struggled against. Speaking individually with some villagers, they were very concerned to see the middle peasant struggled against as he was always helpful and lenient to the poor peasants and workers. I can remember a middle peasant like this in my own village. He had some extra land that he would rent out but he was a hard working man and was always lenient when rent could not be paid. I wonder what happened to him, I hope he is alright, he has helped and continues to help my family so much.

Dear readers,

We are in the midst of a changing country with a new government. However, there are still ongoing issues as we continue the revolution here in China. Over the past few years, land reform has been a major emphasis among the masses as Mao and the CPP have been working towards equality in all aspects. By using mass campaigns, it has made the issue spread into the country-side where poor peasants live. The government has made sure to resolve all kinds of issues using the Central Organization Department to develop mass organization. The government was organized in a way that people are able to contribute to the bigger scheme since these leaders not only pass down directions to the peasants, but they also report back up on how the campaigns are going. This kind of political equality for everyone in the country was attractive to most people in the country.

 

By making land reform a mass campaign, peasants came together to fight the inequality they were facing from ‘evil tyrant landlords.’ Using terms like this, as well as finding struggle stories among the peasants, led them to rally behind the struggle. Speaking bitterness created anger within the peasant community and was spread through meetings that these villages would have. These kinds of meetings would be meaningful in what kinds of campaigns the CPP would take action in since the revolution came from the masses and goes to the masses. The leadership role that Mao took was very important since his goal was to combine the general and particular issues that people talked about and would unite leadership within the masses. With the Marriage law and other laws making women equal to men, women started to have a bigger role in the revolution. They made significant impacts economically, politically, and socially which contributed to the revolution. However, this change in culture wasn’t embraced by everyone. Mother-in-laws and husbands began to worry about how much power they were given and that they didn’t have control over what they did. 

 

Something that did not go so well in this campaign was the amount of violence it created within the country. Villages had driven the landlords out of the area by extensively threatening, abusing and even killing them. Mao had wanted a fight against the landlord land, and not the landlords themselves. This movement also created some issues within the community in identifying who the rich peasants and the landlords were as many of them tried to come off as a poor peasant, making them unreliable. Even though my father was a good person with good intentions, this kind of revolt worried me. Coming from a wealthier background in the silk industry, my father was considered one of the enemies of struggle. However, he did give up his land and was also a community man, even promoting equality within his village. I feared that an extremist in the CPP would come to my fathers house and hurt him. As for my mother, she was against the revolution and what it stood for. She got sent to my father as she sent away her four daughters for marriage. Even though the party strived for an ‘abundant and flourishing family,’ it was going against the tradition that she was accustomed to. I believe that the violence will settle down and there will be more equality than there was ever before in China, but I do think the extremists will not change their way of thought. The campaign did in fact mobilize around the whole country so it’s not to say that it isn’t possible for everyone to be on the same page.

Dear trusted readers,

 

I long for my years as a mere student in Beijing when my reporting was frequent. Now, I go decades without writing. Since you last heard from me in Yenan, Japanese imperialism was devastating, the horrid Nationalists were in Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China under Mao came out victorious. Back then, I did not understand the full plight of the proletariat and the benefit of the Party, but thanks to the 1942 mass study campaign in Yenan, I understand now is the time that the CCP has been waiting for. The work has now begun, and the light is shining on the working class. It is time to see if Mao Zedong will successfully utilize the masses to enact his vision of a great new China. With the Agrarian Reform Act of 1950, our new leader has set out to utilize the peasantry and transform the inequitable structure of our agrarian nation just as promised. Although I am now a loyal member of the CCP party, I am still willing to risk my life to bring my dear readers the reality on the ground. 

This campaign is in full effect. Intellectuals and students from urban areas, such as myself, have been tasked by Mao and the PRC leadership to carry out land reform and bring “fanshen” to the exploited peasants residing in every village. Fanshen destroys the inequitable and exploitative system by establishing a class consciousness within China’s peasant farmers. Given my background as a student in Beijing and the daughter of a well-off peasant farmer in Anyang, I was placed within a work team in a small village. I wish I could remember the name; however, I have been to so many villages in the past year, some only for a week, that most blur together. To say I was naive about what I would find is an understatement. I have not participated in village life for many decades, and even when I was, my station was significantly better than poor peasants. It is sad to say I was disillusioned when I arrived in my first assigned village. Despite my efforts to practice unbiased and raw journalism, I found myself entering my first work team with the image of Ding Ling’s Old Gu and a monstrous landlord looming over the masses. In reality, village relationships and inner workings are much more nuanced than all the literature and songs make it out to be.   

Although land reform has been successful in redistributing the land to the peasants, the campaign is not perfect. In fact, oftentimes, I question if the benefits of land reform outweigh the multitudes of disadvantages. As a work team member, my colleagues and I have seen and heard stories of the worst of the worst. Reports of the mass killing and sexual violence against women in Shandong have unfortunately become the norm during the “struggles” our work teams have been instructed to manipulate and carry out. Furthermore, some villages I have been assigned to simply do not have tyrannical landlords or even enough land to go around. It keeps me up at night thinking about myself, as an outsider, entering these villages, tasked with educating these peasants, and placing these people I know nothing about into classes and categories. I have voiced my concerns to the leaders I report to in Yenan, but I am afraid nothing will be done. I am anxious to see what the long-term effects of this campaign will be, and I am worried about the next one. 

 

Until Next Time,

Cui Shuli

My friends,

 

It has been a few years since I have last been called upon to comment on the State of the Revolution. On this I can only say that much has happened. The end of the War against Japan gave way to the War against the Nationalists, culminating in the ultimate victory of the Communist Party. Among the first and foremost actions of the Party has been the Land Reform campaign. My friends, I must confess I have had limited experience with the campaign of my own, but I have had the opportunity to speak with a great many people that have, either as a member of a work team or were present in the countryside when the reform teams came through. My own experience has been almost entirely limited to only what could be gathered from those I’ve spoken to; however, I have had an experience that I feel it necessary to share with you. Many of you know that I come from a family that operates a small freight company in Beijing, that my father started a great many years ago, before the fall of the Qing. My Brother now operates this company following the death of my father during the war against Japan. It was here that I had my only direct run in with the Land Reform campaign, being myself now too old and infirm to continue the arduous labor in the countryside. I was working in my brother’s shop alone one day when a large party of peasants from one of the villages nearby came in search of him and his wife. When I asked how I might assist them they said that their local landlord, my sister-in-law’s father had fled from the struggle session that had been planned for him. He had no sons and the only surviving family of his that they could find was my brother and his wife. They had with them a bill which they presented to me saying that my brother owed them in his father-in-law’s stead. They seemed to not realize that I was his brother, and demanded to know where he was. I told them that the owners of the shop were not home at the moment, but I would deliver it to them when they returned. They seemed to accept this answer and left; however, they told me that they would return to collect. When my brother returned, he told me that there had been similar parties moving through the city and that several of his colleagues had been presented with similar bills by peasants from villages where they or members of their families were landlords. It seems to me that these villagers came seeking further restitution than what was available from their landlords, either because they demanded more than the landlord had, or else the landlord had successfully secreted away some hidden store of wealth and so to meet the demands of the villagers they came to the cities to collect from other members of the families. I have heard of the violence being performed against some of the shop owners, though I have not seen it myself. I heard second hand of a family who were interrogated by one of these roving bands in search of more money. I have heard that the government has taken steps to curtail this practice of presenting bills which has sprung up following the expulsion and elimination of the Landlord class, however it still persists and in some cases has caused immense suffering among the people of the cities.

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

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.

Dear Readers,

 

The recent social movements in our country are significant. After establishing the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party first implemented land reform. The landowners’ land, livestock, farming tools, surplus food, and surplus houses in rural areas were all confiscated and distributed fairly to all, regardless of age or gender. Mao paid his attention to the masses, and so far, it feels like he is gaining control. Our country’s population is significant, and if he can unite them, the reforms he desires will proceed.

 Land reform would be a message to the masses as directed to them as a law promoting fairness and equality. Giving land to landless peasants or equal resources to citizens of all statuses sounds morally idealistic. However, from a woman’s point of view, there are better policies than this. Here, let me introduce the recent movement that happened about gender equality. Now, soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the law of engagement was improved. Primarily, it changes the traditional male-dominated trend. Features include: marriage is performed by free will; the rights of women, children, and the elderly are protected; and a system of fair procedures after divorce is clearly stated. The patriarchal trend remains, and although it is not as effective as it could be, the law is a step toward a revolutionary social change. Inadequacies can also be noted in land reform. This reform has indeed allowed women to own their land. However, they need to learn how to cultivate the land. They would be troubled if they were suddenly given tasks they had never been entrusted with. They are already busy with household chores, and a new responsibility and duty have just been added. As a result, the pressure on women is still intense, and it can be criticized as a policy that increases the workload of women in weaker positions. Frankly, one farmer told me that it is dangerous to look only at the positive aspects of the reforms, as there are rumors of 2 million or so casualties, sexual assaults, etc., but I don’t know if they are true.

However, I would like to point out that land reform has many good points. There are reasons for the choices made by Mao Zedong, and he should have analyzed the difficulties we are feeling and devised policies. For example, land reform provided an opportunity for the peasants themselves to determine their destiny. I believe this has inspired the peasants to take positive action to improve their lives. It is one of the outstanding achievements of the project to develop such awareness among those who would otherwise be considered of low status. As Mao Zedong said, our revolutionary activities still need to be completed. We must maintain the prevailing tendency throughout society to think that the revolution is somehow complete. This land reform is also a political transformation, and its outstanding achievement is that it has laid the foundation for the modernization of rural China to build a new society.

 

Thank you for reading.