Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  Summer that year came in hot and dry. People brought large offerings to the Church and the priest said many masses to bring rain, but no rain fell. Then Wang Ch’eng-yu’s father sought out the Buddhists. He wore a green willow branch on his cap and took part in the Buddhist rites that were supposed to bring rain. When the priest of the Church found out about this he cut off all relief from the family and took the girl back to the orphanage. Her mother wept bitterly and pleaded with the priest, but he said they had broken the agreement and could no longer be trusted with the girl. The mother believed that her daughter was mistreated in the orphanage, grieved a great deal over her loss, and died soon afterwards. Her sons were convinced that she died of grief.

  When Wang Ch’eng-yu grew up, he managed to save a little money. With it he bought some land. This land was mortgaged to the Carry-On Society as security for a $35 loan that enabled him to marry. Crops were bad that year. In order to pay the $15 of interest on the loan, he had to sell his wife’s wedding ornaments, all her clothes, and the winter’s supply of grain. Hardship and grief finally drove his wife insane. The priest said many masses for her, but it did no good. All the neighbors said she was haunted by the spirit of a monkey. When Ch’eng-yu finally managed to save up a little money again, he gave it to the Buddhist group in return for rites which were supposed to drive the monkey spirit out of his wife. The rites were no more effective than the masses. The priest heard about the attempt and sent Society Chairman Wang to punish Ch’eng-yu for his breach of faith. “You have betrayed Christianity,” said Chairman Wang. “By calling on the Buddhists you betray God himself.”

  Wang Ch’eng-yu was dragged into the churchyard and beaten. He thought, “My wife has been driven mad and now I am beaten by the Church. I don’t want to live any longer.” But since he didn’t want to commit suicide either, he lived on to pay many a tithe to the Church.

  Although the kind of fear and persecution which Ch’eng-yu suffered gradually simmered down as the memory of the Boxer Rebellion faded, the Church became so powerful that Buddhist leaders like Sheng Ching-ho, men who in their own right lorded it over the rest of the village, found it expedient to curry favor with it. This landlord and political boss cultivated good relations with the Catholic fathers, dined with them often, invested money in the Carry-On Society, and co-operated in many projects initiated by the Church.

  All the power of the Church and all its efforts to convert Long Bow to Catholicism failed in the end. The Catholics remained a minority group, never numbering more than a quarter of the population. In 1940, after a hundred years of missionary work in the region and approximately 40 years in the village, there were altogether 64 Catholic families out of a total of 257. This was slightly more than a fifth of all the households.

  It should not be concluded that these 64 families were all Catholics against their will, or that they remained in the Church simply out of expediency, because of pressure, favors, the right to rent church land, or to buy a wife from the orphanage. Regardless of how they originally entered the Christian fold, many became sincere believers and passed on to their children as devout a faith as any existing in the world. By its impressive ritual, by its forceful doctrine, by dispensing a certain amount of charity, by raising a loyal younger generation in its own orphanage, and by emphasizing its precarious minority position, the Church built up in its converts a cohesion, a unity of interest and purpose that deeply affected many of its members. It also set them apart from the rest of the community and thereby won them the scorn and often the hatred of the majority of their countrymen. Because Catholic privilege was built and maintained under the protection of foreign gunboats, because Catholic construction was paid for out of funds extracted from all the people by armed aggression, because Catholic converts were exempt from collections to support local religious rites and age-old customs, Catholicism had been known as “the agents’ religion” for a long time. During the course of the next decade the Church in the Shangtang further consolidated this reputation and set the stage for its own demise.

  Important as the Catholic Church became in its heyday, it was never more than one facet in that complex of social relations and natural conditions which fashioned the reality of the times for Long Bow. By the second quarter of the twentieth century these relations and conditions had reduced Southern Shansi to a nadir of rapacious exploitation, structural decay, chronic violence, and recurring famine which has few parallels in history; they had also rendered the region and the country of which it was a part all but incapable of effective defense against aggression from without, a circumstance that was duly noted by the warlords of Japan.

  6

  Invasion

  And now lies burnt

  Our eastern capital.

  No use saying two

  Can defend the pass against one hundred,

  For everywhere there is wavering.

  As for our northern defenses,

  Built in the time of ancient kings,

  Who dares ask if they have been maintained?

  Tu Fu

  SUDDENLY all the dogs in Long Bow began to bark.

  The fierce cacophony startled the young mother Hu Hsueh-chen. She sat in the dilapidated shed where her husband had abandoned her and wondered where she could go that day to beg enough food for herself and her two children.

  “Why do the dogs make such a row?” Hsueh-chen called out to her neighbor, Ch’ou-har’s wife.

  Through the doorless aperture that was the only entrance to her home, the answer came clearly back.

  “The Japanese devils have come!”

  Hsueh-chen ran to the courtyard gate to see if the alley was still free. If so, she would call her children and flee to the open fields until nightfall.

  She was too late.

  The Japanese column had already turned the corner. No sooner did she step into the street than a soldier looked up, broke ranks and started after her. Hsueh-chen fled inside her own hovel and ducked to the left. The soldier ran past her into the room. He knocked down her six-year-old son, stepped squarely on the little boy’s hunger-swollen stomach, then plunged on into the back room hoping to catch his mother. Hu Hsueh-chen did not wait for him to come out. She ran to the next house and hid.

  When the soldier, cursing his luck, left the courtyard, neighbors found Hsueh-chen’s boy lying unconscious on the floor. He regained his senses, but on the next day fell ill with fever. Four days later he died. On his deathbed he cried out over and over again: “Mother, the devils are coming, the devils are coming!”

  ***********

  The all-out drive that brought the Japanese Army into the hamlet of Long Bow in the summer of 1938 began in July 1937 at Lukuo-chiao, just outside Peking. There a detachment of Chinese soldiers had the temerity to resist some Japanese on “maneuver” who demanded the right to search a village for a missing compatriot. This violation of the peace of “Greater East Asia” provided the pretext which Hirohito’s legions had been waiting for. When Chiang Kai-shek refused to accept Japan’s conditions for settlement of the dispute, the Japanese army confidently resumed the conquest of all China which it had begun in the Northeast in 1932.

  Discounting the possibility of massive popular resistance, the Japanese generals determined on classic blitzkrieg tactics. With the overwhelming forces already gathered in East Hopei, where they had earlier wrung from Chiang the right to station troops, they quickly smashed the poorly-armed and too often traitorously-led armies that stood in their way and drove south and west down the main trunk railroads into the heart of the country.* For a year all went well. They occupied most of the Chinese cities well known in the West—Peking, Tientsin, Tsingtao, Shanghai, Nanking, Hankow, and Canton—and, with the exception of the Hankow-Canton line, most of the railroads and highways that connected these cities.

  Japanese strategists took it for granted that control of the cities, the railways, the whole modern communications network, would bring them control of the countryside thus enmeshed and surrounded
. This was a serious error. While their mechanized armies pushed on triumphantly into Central China, a resistance movement grew up behind them. This resistance soon confined the conqueror’s effective control to the cities and the narrow railroad corridors between them. Before any further conquests could be made, before any real plums could be plucked from the conquest of the North, Japan had to wipe out the guerrilla fighters in her rear. Large numbers of combat troops had therefore to be recalled from far-flung battlefronts to “pacify” rural areas already “conquered.” Thus began a fierce and prolonged military struggle—the famous stalemate stage of China’s “Protracted War” (1939-1944).

  In this fierce contest, the Taihang Mountains inevitably became a most savagely contested region, for the Taihang Mountains dominate the North China plain, which in turn provides the main base, marshalling ground, and granary for any drive southward. As long as the Japanese were unable to clear the mountains, their hold was never secure in the lowlands, and all their efforts in other parts of the country, even in other parts of the world, were greatly hampered. Chinese armed groups from bases in the mountains went down into the flat country, crossed the Peking-Hankow railway and set up new bases in the swamps and lakes of Hochien and the roadless cotton lands of South Hopei. When hard pressed, the regular forces withdrew behind the Taihang’s formidable ranges while the plains people carried on their resistance underground.*

  It became a matter of life and death, therefore, for the Japanese to clear the mountains. The first major effort to do this consisted of a drive to cut the Taihang range in half. After taking Taiyuan, Warlord Governor Yen Hsi-shan’s provincial capital in 1938, a part of the Japanese Army pushed through the mountains to Changchih and then drove eastward through Lucheng and Licheng toward Hantan on the plain. But even though a second column simultaneously marched westward into the mountains from Hantan by way of Wuan, the two forces were never able to link up. A guerrilla offensive destroyed one motorized column in a deep mountain gorge. Ambushes and man-made landslides slowed down the other column. Snipers took a continuous toll both of the marching troops and of the garrisons they left behind. In the end the drive bogged down. The remnants of both columns withdrew—in the East to Wuan, in the West to Lucheng. The latter small walled city thus became the last garrison point on the western flank of the Taihang Mountains to be held by the invaders.

  Even though the Japanese Army garrisoned Lucheng and with the help of a series of blockhouses, controlled the highway leading out to the county town of Changchih, they did not control more than a fraction of Lucheng county’s rural villages. A guerrilla government operated throughout the highlands. Guerrilla troops and their supporting militia moved at will through occupied territory, and even into occupied villages at night. In order to protect the Changchih-Lucheng highway, flanking villages such as Long Bow had to be occupied and fortified. Long Bow itself thus became the last permanently garrisoned outpost on the road to Yellow Mill, a mining town at the base of the mountains. Outside the village one stepped into no-man’s land, and only a few miles away Chinese-controlled guerrilla territory began. Long Bow was thus established as a fortified point on one side of a narrow finger of occupied territory thrust across the flat from Changchih toward the higher ranges of the Taihang.

  Having failed in their efforts to cut the mountain bases in half, the Japanese used their occupied salient as a jumping-off point for punitive raids against the regions they were unable to conquer. Three times they launched major “Kill All, Burn All, Loot All’ campaigns. Throughout whole counties dwellings were razed or burned, livestock slaughtered, implements smashed, wells plugged, and people driven back and forth across the hills and plains like hunted herds. Tens of thousands were killed outright; hundreds of thousands starved. Only those who had buried their grain in advance and who hid in secluded mountain gorges or caves until the enemy left survived. When on top of this man-made carnage, drought and flood unleashed the silent killer famine, the suffering became indescribable. Even the Japanese found it hard to live. They increased their pressure on the occupied villages, wrung the last peck of grain from already starving peasants, slaughtered the draft cattle for meat, and dismantled houses for the fuel in the timbers of the roofs and doorways. In desperate need of garrison forces and fortifications, they press-ganged the able-bodied into puppet units and labor gangs. If the guerrilla areas suffered the flames of hell, the occupied areas suffered the tortures of purgatory.

  In these times of terrible trial, every person and every human institution was put on the rack, and the quality of the metal from which they were made was ruthlessly tested. Under this stress two main political trends developed: resistance and collaboration.

  7

  Collaborators

  Even the dung beetles are arrayed

  With beautiful wings of gauze.

  So think I in sadness when 1 see

  Our officials decked out in such splendor.

  With our country in imminent danger

  Where shall we find refuge?

  The Book of Odes

  WHEN THE Japanese army drove into the rural districts of the hinterland, the most conspicuous men in every community were, of course, the leading gentry who headed the village administrations and ran the economic, social, and religious institutions. The Japanese took it for granted that these people would not resist, and for the most part they were not disappointed. After all, the leading gentry had the most property to lose in any annihilation campaign. They dared not mobilize and arm the peasantry for fear that these armies would someday turn against them. When the chips were down, when they were forced to choose between collaboration and, resistance, they often found that they had more in common with the invaders than they had with their own tenants. At least the Japanese officers shared their own respect for private property, the sanctity of land rents, and the importance of orthodox religious worship.*

  The resulting collaboration, to be sure, was not always straightforward and direct. The people of the Taihang region had a saying about the occupation politics of landlords—Hang t’ou hsiao, chung chien ch’u or “thin at the ends and wide in the middle.”

  As the Japanese moved in, the gentry retired from public life, not knowing how long the enemy would stay and therefore not wanting to identify too closely with them. During the middle period they collaborated actively and openly, believing that the Japanese would be around for a long time, if not forever. At the end, with Russia’s armies driving Hitler back to Berlin, with America winning victories in the Pacific, and the popular forces in the mountains growing stronger day by day, they retired behind the scenes again, aware that a change was in the making. As soon as the Japanese surrendered, they came out of “retirement,” reorganized village affairs, and applied the name “Anti-Japanese Village Government” to their administrations in an effort to cash in on the fruits of victory.

  The gentry of Long Bow were no exception to this rule. When the Japanese troops were still beyond the hill, Sheng Ching-ho relinquished public control of the village office. The Catholic landlords, Fan Pu-tzu, Shih La-ming, and Wang Lai-hsun, then set up a new administration using as a front man one Chou Mei-sheng, a capable and clever middle peasant who was willing to play their game and turn a tidy penny in the process. Chou Mei-sheng was appointed secretary to the village government and became notorious as the chief of staff of the whole puppet regime, a position which he held for seven long years. Mei-sheng, in turn, picked a poor peasant, Shang Shih-t’ou, as village head and staffed his office with two more poor peasants—Kuo Fu-kuei as head of the police, and his brother Kuo Te-yu as head of public affairs. All these positions continued to pay off handsomely with graft and loot. The gentry were openly represented in this set-up only by Wang Lai-hsun, who served as a street captain for four years, and Kuo Ch’ung-wang, the rich peasant who worked closely with Chou Mei-sheng in the village office. No serious decisions were taken, however, without consultation between the members of the ruling clique as before.

&
nbsp; In Long Bow Village the duties of this government were the same as those of any previous administration—to collect taxes, organize labor service, conscript soldiers, and maintain “law and order.” The chief difference was that this time the demands were heavier and the enforcement more brutal. Now when the village officials went to collect grain, Japanese or puppet soldiers went with them. Entering each courtyard in turn they threw bags on the ground and demanded that the peasants fill them up. If they brought along two bags, the family had to fill two; if they brought three bags, the family had to fill three. The collections were not based on how much land or how big a crop the family had harvested, but on how much grain the enemy wanted to collect. Anyone who had no grain had to run away before the collection began or face serious punishment.

  Labor service, made many times heavier by the demands of war, became a burden no less onerous than taxes. Whenever there was work to be done—a road to be built, a fortification to be constructed, supplies to be transported—the word went out to the village office and the peasants were ordered to report for service no matter what urgent task they themselves were engaged in. The only ones who never went were the gentry and the village officialdom.

  In 1943 a fort was built by conscript labor at the north end of Long Bow on the edge of no-man’s land. Every able-bodied male in the village had to go and dig. One poor peasant, Wu-k’uei, was just at that time putting a new roof on his own hut. He did not want to stop while he had no roof overhead, so he hired a young boy to go in his place. For this he was arrested, beaten until an arm and a leg were broken, and left lying in the newly dug moat that surrounded the fort. A group of his neighbors had to beg for permission to carry him home.