Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  These slogans summed up the whole agrarian revolution in one sentence and inspired the young cadres to complete the transformation of their society within a few weeks.

  The campaign that resulted was based on two assumptions: first, that serious feudal exploitation still existed in the county, and second, that large numbers of peasants had not yet fanshened.

  Since almost every family of wealth and position had already lost most of its open holdings (land, houses, draft animals, and farm implements) and at least some, if not all, of its hidden wealth (buried silver and gold), the first assumption might well have been questioned. On the other hand, since there were thousands of poor peasants in the village who lacked much that was necessary to make them independent producers, it seemed obvious that the confiscations had not been complete enough. In practice, the stubborn persistence of poverty was taken as proof of both assumptions and provided the rationale for a new assault. If the poor were ever to fanshen— and who dared say they should not?—more wealth would have to be found.

  But where was the “oil” to come from? Who would provide the fruits? On the one hand, all the remaining hidden wealth of the gentry must be dug out; on the other, all those families who tried to pose as ordinary peasants but who were in fact in one capacity or another exploiters must be expropriated. The attack, in other words, had to be deepened and the target had to be broadened.

  One way to broaden the target was to examine not only the exploitation of the recent past, but to go back through the generations and seek out all the wealth which had originally been acquired from the blood and sweat of tenants and hired laborers by the fathers or even the grandfathers of the small holders of 1946. This was called seeking out the “feudal tails.” Tracing back three generations did indeed unearth many new “objects of struggle” who possessed “feudal tails.” So great had been the inherent tendency of Chinese society toward the dissipation of wealth through the practice of equal inheritance that very few persons could claim with confidence that their families were free from the taint of past exploitation, that they possessed nothing that was not earned by hard labor.* Those who had inherited the divided estates of recognized landlords were especially vulnerable. They were automatically designated as landlords themselves. And this was so even though they worked every day in the fields, for these very fields were considered to be “feudal tails.”

  With such an approach the cadres and poor peasants of Long Bow began a second whirlwind campaign to expropriate for the poor the fruits of exploitation, past and present. The campaign lasted 20 days. Since the heads of most of the well-known gentry families had already either fled the village or been killed, wives, sons, daughters, and relatives were brought before public meetings to answer accusations. Not the leading male representative, but whole families became the object of attack. The militia took advantage of the divisions and hatred within families. By individual cross-questioning, by playing off one against the other, by severe beatings and threats, many more silver dollars, a number of gold boats (an ancient form of money), and large quantities of fine clothes were unearthed.

  After dealing thus for the second time with the gentry, the militia moved on to the “feudal tails.” One such family, with the surname Wang, was all but wiped out.

  Wang Hsiao-nan and Wang Hua-nan were well-to-do peasants who had not divided the six-acre holding which they inherited from their landlord father. They lived in one courtyard with their wives and their aging mother. The elder brother, Hsiao-nan, had a son. Hua-nan was childless.

  When the second wave of confiscation began in Lucheng County, their married sister, who lived in North Market, about a mile to the northeast, came home one day with 2,000 silver dollars which she begged her mother to hide for her. This represented a great part of her landlord husband’s family savings. At a secret consultation which Hua-nan and his wife knew nothing about, Hsiao-nan and his mother agreed to bury the treasure behind their house. In all of Long Bow only the two of them knew that there was such a sum of money and where it was hidden. Neither of them told. But the sister in North Market, when pressed by her husband’s own tenants, confessed to the cache. A greater part of the population of North Market thereupon marched to Long Bow in triumphant procession, dug out the money and carried all of it home with them. So elated were they at finding such a huge sum that they hired a drama corps to stage a Chinese opera and celebrated with food and drink for three whole days and nights.

  The young men of Long Bow, taken completely by surprise, and angered by the removal of so much wealth from under their very noses, attacked the whole Wang family as landlords and landlord protectors. They reasoned that if 2,000 silver dollars had been successfully hidden for so long, perhaps thousands more still lay buried in the ground. When Hsiao-nan could not lead them to a second cache, they beat him cruelly. They would have done the same to Hua-nan but for the fact that he was away from home hauling grain. When Hua-nan could not be found, the enraged peasants seized his wife and beat her in his stead. The beatings served no purpose other than punishment, for no further wealth was ever found; but both Hsiao-nan and Hua-nan’s wife died of the injuries they received. Five of the family’s acres were confiscated as were most of the sections of their house, and all of their personal property from clothes to the round bottomed pot they used for cooking.

  When Hua-nan returned, a few days later, the excitement had died down. The peasants let him live, but with no property left in the family he had to work out as a hired laborer in order to feed himself, his sister-in-law, her son, and his old mother.

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  By the time the millet ripened in the fall of 1946 the military situation had become more critical than at any time since the Japanese surrender. Not only were the Central Armies taking back strategic positions on the fringes of the Liberated Areas, but a strong detachment of Yen Hsi-shan’s Provincial Army was simultaneously driving across the heart of Southwest Shansi in an effort to seize as much of the autumn harvest as could be carried away before the peasants had a chance to hide it. This detachment had already reached Hsincheng, only 45 miles to the south, and was expected to attack Changchih within a matter of days.

  The People’s Liberation Army, heavily engaged on other fronts, let Yen’s troops come. This was one of the successful tactics for breaking encirclement worked out by Mao Tse-tung in the 1930’s. Armies that could not easily be smashed by frontal attack were allowed to drive deep into a Liberated Area, tempted to overextend themselves, and then, under constant and clever harassment, forced to withdraw or face piecemeal annihilation under the combined attacks of local and regular forces quickly concentrated for the counterattack. Villages in the path of such a drive prepared for temporary occupation by hiding all grain and valuable property, by sending their women and children deeper into the mountains, and by mobilizing their young men for harassing action. Experienced leaders had seen this work out time and time again, but peasants, facing reoccupation for the first time, could hardly help but feel nervous. The gentry, on the other hand, assuming that the advance of their armies signified a turn in their fortunes, openly threatened people with reprisal, arranged to fire “black shots” in the night, and joyously looked forward to a “change of sky.”

  Strange happenings set the whole village on edge.

  A militiaman left a meeting early one night because he was not feeling well. As he stepped out onto the main street he found the village lying quiet under a crescent moon. Only the lone sentries, out of sight at the edge of the fields still moved about. Looking south the sick man saw, or thought he saw, a figure squatting in a dark corner where a side alley ran off from the street. He walked toward the place. Nothing moved. He shouted. There was no answer. Then he took his gun from his shoulder, cocked it with a loud click, pointed it at the man, or the shadow, he wasn’t sure which, and called out, “I’ll shoot.” The shadow suddenly came to life. Before the militiaman could move a muscle the sound of running feet in the alley made clear that a hostile intrud
er had escaped.

  A few days later the majority of the militia went to Li Village Gulch for a training session. Seven men stayed behind. Four of them kept watch in the north, south, east and west, while three who were sick slept in the temple that was their headquarters. These were Kuei-ts’ai, vice-head of the village, who had syphilis, and two rank-and-file corpsmen who suffered from itching sores of the skin. In the middle of the night Kuei-ts’ai heard loud knocking on the street side of the wall. He moved quietly to the compound wall, slid along it, and peered through the crack between the two halves of the wooden gate. There stood a man carrying at his waist a bright object that looked like a pistol. Kuei-ts’ai asked the man why he knocked. The reply came in a dialect that was unintelligible. Kuei-ts’ai repeated the question twice but received no further answer. Then he ordered the man to leave. The stranger made no move to go. Finally Kueits’ai pulled the pin on a grenade and threw it over the wall. The nocturnal visitor left in a hurry and was never seen again.

  Unable to explain these incidents and fearful lest the gentry, with the help of enemy infiltrators, might actually be preparing a conspiracy in the village, T’ien-ming ordered a nightly check-up of the homes of all rich peasants and landlords, all important ex-collaborators and all Catholics implicated in the escape of Father Sun. In the middle of the night militiamen made their rounds in pairs, knocked on the doors of all suspects, ordered the occupants to let them in, and searched the premises for unregistered guests, leaflets, weapons, or other signs of counter-revolutionary activity.

  At the same time the village government, under instructions from the Party and government leaders of Lucheng County, launched a “Hide the Grain Movement” to prevent seizure of the autumn harvest should the enemy troops advance that far. Thousands of families dug pits in the ground or found caves in the hills where they could store their crops and possessions. They also arranged with more isolated villages for temporary shelter for their women and children. Some peasants went even further. They were so frightened that they secretly sent back to landlord families the property and clothing they had received in the distribution, or they began to pay a little rent for the use of expropriated land. The wife of one village chairman even hired herself out as an unpaid servant in an ex-landlord’s household in return for a promise of protection when the gentry again took power. All this was known as ming fen an pu fen or “take the fruits in the light, return them in the dark.”

  In the face of this spreading panic the Communist Party took steps to strengthen morale and prevent the return of “fruits” in the dark. Through the Peasants’ Association they extended the Hide the Grain Movement into a movement to “examine fanshen.” The situation of every family in regard to land and property was again reviewed. Those who had secretly returned property were urged to take it back. The method of breaking an encirclement by temporarily yielding territory while mobilizing all the forces of the people to combat the enemy was clearly explained to all. “Unity will certainly defeat the counter-offensive” became the slogan of the day.

  What began in the fall of 1946 as a defensive move was soon transformed by the village cadres and more active poor peasants into a third great offensive against the gentry. Under the slogan pu ta lo shui kou, p’ao ch’i lai yao liao shou (if you don’t beat down the drowning dog, he’ll jump out and bite your hand), all the remaining members of the families already under attack were again brought before public meetings. Their last remaining wealth was demanded. With the enemy troops so close at hand and the threat of counter-revolution growing day by day, the campaign was more than ever charged with emotion and marred by excessive violence. Since, by this time, there was no more land, housing, or ordinary property left that could be confiscated, buried silver and gold became the main objective of the active peasants. This time the ancestral tombs of all the prominent families were dug open and searched for valuables. The tireless treasure seekers left the yellow subsoil piled in scattered heaps around the gaping holes where underground vaults had been found. Carved obelisks of granite and marble lay like scattered dominoes where they fell. So numerous were the rifled tombs that the whole countryside seemed to have been bombarded at random by huge shells. These scars inflicted on the land itself in bold defiance of all superstition demonstrated to all who passed that the poor had indeed turned over. To the gentry, this earthly resurrection of their ancestors was an affront which in their wildest nightmares they had never dreamed possible.

  But it was the living, not the dead, who really felt the bite of the poor peasants’ angry blows. In many cases the living, at least those among the living who still remained in the village, were women. Hence it was they who bore the brunt of this final attack.

  The gentry wives astonished the peasants by their fierce resistance and contempt for pain. “All you had to do to make a man talk was to heat an iron bar in the fire,” a militiaman told me years later, “but the women were tougher. They would rather die than tell us where their gold was hidden. Burning flesh held no terror for them. If they weakened at all, it was in the face of threats to their children.”

  In the long run, however, even the gentry women were no match for the aroused peasants. One after another they were forced to confess where they had hidden the last of their family wealth. Cache after cache of money, silk, embroidered clothes, and jewels was discovered. Each new discovery so angered and excited the people that the campaign mounted in intensity with each passing day. In January the wealthy landlord Sheng Ching-ho had himself turned over to the peasants over $500 in coins. Then he ran away. In July his wife surrendered another $400 and a golden boat. Then she fled with her children. Only the sister-in-law remained in the village. During this third campaign she yielded up another $1,000. Nobody believed that this was the full extent of Ching-ho’s buried wealth, but the sister-in-law, even when tortured, would reveal no more. Two hundred dollars were confiscated from Chou Mei-sheng, the chief of staff of the puppet government before he too ran away. No gold, but quantities of fine silk and woolen clothes were found in the vaults that belonged to Hsu Chen-p’eng, the absentee general. His sister led the peasants to them to save her own life.

  The enemy advance that created the extraordinary tension of this third wave of assault did not get beyond Hsincheng after all. As the military crisis eased, the Peasants’ Association in Long Bow, frustrated by the fact that no major new sources of wealth could be found and unable to single out any more families that could legitimately be called exploiters even under the three generation rule, gradually dropped the campaign altogether. This brought an end to the expropriations inspired by the May 4th Directive.

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  The land equalization campaigns of the summer and fall of 1946 were disappointing to the poor peasant activists who had manned them. When all the “fruits” were divided there were still many families who felt that they had not truly fanshened. Nevertheless the shared wealth did strengthen to a certain extent the ability of the community to produce. The land-poor gained approximately 80 acres of tillable soil and scores of sections of housing. More important than real estate, however, was the treasure unearthed. The silver, the gold, and the jewelry extracted from the once affluent gentry amounted to over $4,000 in value. When distributed among 200 families, each got approximately $20, or a year’s earnings for a hired man.

  Most of this money was immediately converted into means of production by the peasants who received it. An indication of this was the sharp rise in the number of draft animals in the village. Within a few months large livestock increased from 71 to 103 head, a 45 percent jump that was the result of cash-in-hand expeditions to other regions to buy stock. Carts, plows, seeders, and other implements also increased.

  Checking on the accomplishments of the land reform movement at this time, the Communist Party Committee of Lucheng County found that feudal landholding and feudal political power had been effectively destroyed throughout the five districts under its supervision. It also found that the means of product
ion had been broadly redistributed and was consequently satisfied that the goals of the May 4th Directive had been achieved. The County Committee therefore turned its attention to the next big problem on the agenda—how best to put the liberated wealth and resources of the county to work, how best to stimulate production. The general welfare of the people, the ability to provide sufficient support for the armies defending the Revolution at the front, and the ability of the economy to survive the strains of the blockade imposed by Chiang Kai-shek—all this depended on the success of the production movement.

  22

  Organizing Production

  For thousands of years a system of individual production has prevailed among the peasant masses, under which a family or household makes a productive unit; this scattered individual form of production was the economic foundation of feudal rule and has plunged the peasants into perpetual poverty. The only way to change this state of affairs is gradual collectivization, and the only way to bring about collectivization is, according to Lenin, through co-operatives.