Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  In their haste to get started on more fundamental problems, the work team cadres in Long Bow did not wait until they had completed this arduous task of investigation before they made up their minds about the basic situation in the village. Without consultation among themselves, without taking any formal decision, they assumed that land reform in Long Bow had been stillborn. It followed that the village must be Type III and its Party branch Kind III. All mass organizations remained dissolved, all village cadres remained suspended, all Communist Party members continued to meet in secret session. Long Bow was treated as a village where the whole slate had to be wiped clean and the peasant movement had to be reorganized from the ground up.

  The first step in any such reorganization had to be the creation of a new Poor and Hired Peasants’ League. But before such a League could even be started, some determination had to be made concerning who were the poor and who the hired. A detailed classification of the whole community therefore became mandatory and the thoroughgoing investigation which the cadres had earlier bypassed crowded all other matters off the agenda after all.

  29

  Self Report, Public Appraisal

  For those whose duty it is to give guidance and direction, the most essential method of knowing conditions is that they should, proceeding according to plan, devote their attention to a number of cities and villages and make a comprehensive survey of each of them from the basic viewpoint of Marxism, i.e., by means of class analysis,

  Mao Tse-tung, 1941

  “THERE ARE seven in my family. Last year, before the marriage of my son I had six.”

  So spoke Wang Kuei-pao. He was a heavy-set man perhaps 40 years old. Crow’s-feet spread from the corners of his eyes. On his weathered face grew a ragged stubble of hair that had never matured into a beard.

  “Why speak of last year? Speak of the way it is now. Soon you will have a grandson and that will make eight,” said a wit from across the room. He was pressed against the side wall of the hut by the crush of people at the meeting and I could not even see who had spoken, as I myself was pressed against the opposite wall.

  Wang, the expectant grandfather, continued his report unperturbed. “I have three and a half acres. I reap about ten bushels to the acre. My son is a teacher in another village. I have no draft animal.”

  “No doubt you are a poor peasant,” said a third voice.

  “That’s easy. He’s a poor peasant. He hasn’t even fanshened.”

  “Your family has increased but your land remains the same. In the future you’ll have even more mouths to feed.” The speakers supported one another.

  “Well,” said Wang, with a bravado based on the security he felt in being poor. “Go ahead and classify me. Call me a rich peasant if you want to. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

  But everyone agreed. There was not the slightest doubt. Wang Kuei-pao had been a poor peasant all his life and a poor peasant he remained.

  A man named Ting-fu followed Wang. He reported three and a half acres for three people, no livestock, no implements, a broken-down house of three sections, and a shared privy.

  “Ting-fu has toiled his whole life through,” said one of his neighbors.

  “He is the hardest worker in the whole village,” said another.

  Ting-fu was classed as a poor peasant without further ado.

  Thus classification of the classes began in Long Bow.

  ***********

  The handful of peasants who listened to Wang Kuei-pao and Ting-fu were “basic elements” chosen by the work team as the nucleus of the new Poor Peasants’ League—a League which was to remain “provisional” until it assumed its final form. Their primary objective was to find others as poor as themselves who could swell the ranks until the new organization became capable of exerting leverage on the whole community. In the process they would also make a preliminary estimate of the potential allies (middle peasants) among their neighbors and of the “objects of struggle” (rich peasants and landlords) who still lived among them.

  The classification method used was called tzu pao kung yi, or “self report, public appraisal.” The “self report” meant that every family head must appear in person and report his sources of income and his economic position prior to the liberation of the village. “Public appraisal” meant that all members of the Provisional League must discuss each report and decide, by sense-of-the-meeting, on the family’s class status.

  Everyone knew that these classification proceedings could transform the Draft Agrarian Law from a general declaration of purpose into a concrete reality. Decisions concerning class status would eventually determine the future of every family. Those classed as poor peasants could expect to gain prestige as members of the new Poor Peasants’ League and to acquire prosperity by coming into enough worldly goods to make them new middle peasants. Those classed as rich peasants could expect expropriation of all their surplus property, leaving them with only enough to earn a living like any other fanshened peasant. Anyone classified as a landlord faced complete expropriation and then the return of enough property to live on. The classification, in other words, could not be regarded as an academic matter, as a mere nose count, as a census. It laid the basis for economic and social action that affected every family and every individual in the most fundamental way.

  Because this was so the peasants took an extraordinary interest in the classification meetings and gathered without complaint, day after day, to listen, report, discuss, and judge.

  It soon became obvious that every family wanted to be classed as far down the scale as possible. To be called a middle peasant meant to receive nothing. Only those classed as poor peasants could expect to gain. Therefore every family wanted to be classed as poor, and every family head, no matter how poor, tried to minimize what his family had possessed prior to liberation and deprecate what the family had received since.

  For the minority at the upper end of the scale, downgrading was even more vital. All the prosperous peasants were fearful lest they be shoved over the line into the rich-peasant category and lose out. Even the middle-peasant category included an upper group, the well-to-do, who could legitimately be asked to give up something. Those who feared that they owned enough to be called well-to-do wanted no part of any such condition and fought hard to convince their neighbors that they really had no surplus, that they were simply average middle peasants.

  Since everyone wanted to be downgraded, since “poverty was best,” I expected the final result of the classification to be a general shift downward. But this was not the case, and the reason for it was quite simple. The preliminary classification was undertaken by a group of families already designated by the work team as poor. It was in their interest to place others in higher brackets for two obvious reasons—in the first place, unless some families were classed as landlords, rich peasants, or well-to-do middle peasants there would be no property to distribute; in the second place, if there were large numbers of families classed as poor, whatever “struggle fruits” materialized would have to be spread thin. Clearly, the fewer families there were on the sharing end, the more each family would be likely to get.

  The two contradictory trends, the desire on the part of all those being classed to be downgraded, and the desire on the part of those doing the classing to upgrade everyone else, tended to cancel each other out. In the course of the reports and appraisals the true situation of each family tended to be revealed.

  For this happy result, credit must also be given to the method of discussion employed, a method that enabled every individual to talk over each case. This method was known as ke ts’ao, a word that literally means “ferment” and finds its American equivalent in the “buzz session.” After each family presented its report, the chairman called out, “Ke ts’ao, ke ts’ao.” Then all those who were sitting together in those natural clusters formed as people came to the meeting fell to discussing the case. They continued to discuss it until they more or less agreed. As agreement was reached in various parts
of the room, the hum of voices gradually died down. Then the chairman called out, “Pao kao, pao kao!” (report, report).

  A spokesman for each group, designated on the spur of the moment by those who sat around him, then expressed the consensus arrived at by his companions in the course of their “ferment.” If the opinions of the scattered groups did not coincide, the chairman tried to clarify the differences, review the facts in the case, and ask the family under consideration to report in greater detail. Then he called for another ke ts’ao and repeated this process until a real sense-of-the-meeting was reached. No votes were taken. To decide such matters by a vote meant to impose the will of the majority on the will of the minority, with all the hard feeling that such an imposition was sure to cause. Objectively, the work team felt, any family must stand somewhere in the scale. A real understanding of the family’s condition should enable the peasant judges to place the family in its proper niche. To vote meant to admit defeat, to make a subjective rather than an objective decision. When no sense-of-the-meeting could be reached, the cadres advised putting off the classification until further study of the standards and further investigation of the facts clarified the whole picture.

  The complete lack of facilities for any form of large gathering established ideal conditions for the informal ke ts’ao discussions that characterized Long Bow meetings. Instead of coming together in a room equipped with rows of chairs, such as would be found in any Western meeting hall, the peasants had to gather in some empty loft, some abandoned room, some quiet portion of the street, or in the largest of their private homes. Each had of necessity to bring his or her own private seat—usually a brick, a block, or a little stool made of wood and string—and sit down wherever the company proved most congenial. The groups that crystallized in this way formed natural discussion circles that made it possible for any meeting to switch to a “buzz session” without the least rearrangement or disturbance. Thus everyone had a chance to participate and express opinions whether or not he or she actually spoke to the gathering as a whole. This system enabled shy people to speak first in small groups and gradually build up confidence to the point where they were willing to stand up and talk before the multitude. Truth was well served by such an arrangement because what one person forgot another was sure to remember. The collective proved wiser than any individual, and in the end a consensus of the participants emerged.

  For Ch’i Yun and myself these meetings served as a window opening on the inner life of the village. The peasants, who had seemed on first acquaintance to constitute a fairly homogeneous mass—poverty-stricken yet energetic, ignorant yet shrewd, quarrelsome yet good humored, suspicious yet hospitable—turned out to be a most varied collection of individuals. Each possessed marked originality, and each faced problems peculiar to his or her situation that often obscured the general problem of livelihood, the overriding necessity to fanshen.

  With a “well bottom” view of the world still limiting their vision, most peasants found it hard to separate their personal problems from the basic economic situation that was the root of their misery. They tended to concentrate on traits of character, unresolved feuds, past insults, and other peripheral issues to the neglect of the true criterion for determining class status—their own relation to the means of production.

  The audience, also made up of peasants, was equally subjective. Time and again, Little Li, Ch’i Yun, and the other work team cadres who sat in on the meetings had to bring the discussion around to objective economic facts and warn against classifying some family in the upper brackets because the family head had collaborated with the Japanese, habitually beat his wife, or sided with his wife against his mother.

  Yet so strong ran the feeling against exploitation, collaboration, and criminal behavior that sometimes the team cadres themselves were carried away. When this happened, their prestige and eloquence were such that they easily swayed the whole meeting.

  30

  Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggarman, Thief

  The class status of most of the population in the rural areas is clear and can be easily differentiated without much divergence of view. Their class status should first be ascertained. In the case of a small proportion of the people whose class status is unclear and difficult to ascertain and where there is a divergence of view, they should be dealt with later and classified after thorough study and after obtaining instruction from the higher authorities. Impatience in determining the class status of these people must be avoided lest errors should be made which lead to their dissatisfaction. If any mistake is made, it must be corrected.

  Liu Shao-ch’i

  CHANG CH’I-TS’AI, one of the poorest individuals in the whole village, provided the first stumbling block to that nucleus of poor peasants who set out to classify the whole village in March.

  The group had little trouble just so long as they dealt with typical cases. Heads of families had only to make the briefest kind of report before they were unanimously declared to be poor peasants or middle peasants. Consequently, during the first two or three days of the proceedings some 40 families were classed without controversy and most of those who were declared to be poor were invited to participate in classifying those who followed them.

  When they got to Ch’i-ts’ai, however, the peasants disagreed sharply. The difficulty stemmed from the fact that he had never owned even a fraction of an acre of land. Furthermore, he had never worked on the land for others. All his life he had labored as a builder of houses. On the wages thus earned he had raised two sons and a daughter. A second daughter he had given away as a child bride during the famine year. After the birth of his fourth child his wife had died.

  In the distributions of 1945-1946, Ch’i-ts’ai had received almost five acres of land, a donkey, one third of a cart, and many hundredweight of grain. This was enough to make him a middle peasant in 1948. His neighbors all agreed on that. What they found hard to decide was, what had been his class before liberation?

  “His class was bare poor,” volunteered several peasants after hearing Chang’s report.

  “But there is no such class as ‘bare poor,’ “protested Little Li, the work team cadre sitting in on the meeting. “There are hired laborers who own no land and work for wages on the land of others; there are village workers who also own no land but have skills such as carpentry, masonry, blacksmithing, and weaving; but there is no such thing as a class of ‘bare poor.’”

  The peasants, however, could not conceive of a way of life without land. To live without land was to live in a state of perpetual disaster. Anyone who had no land was “bare poor” and the sooner he acquired land the better. To set up a separate class of people who owned nothing and call them workers did not make sense.

  The specific skill possessed by Ch’i-ts’ai also confused the issue. The peasants found it difficult to separate the man from his trade and arrive at the common category “worker.” If he was not simply “bare poor,” he was a housebuilder. But housebuilders could hardly constitute a class. Could his wife be called a housebuilder too? Could his children be called housebuilders? It seemed that only the person who practiced the trade could be classed according to that trade and hence be called a worker, if worker he had to be. The rest of his family should be something else.

  When Little Li repeated his argument the peasants “gave up the gun” and agreed to call Ch’i-ts’ai a village worker, but it was quite clear that very few understood what this meant.

  Another worker, Chang Huan-ch’ao, the blacksmith, posed an even greater puzzle. Some peasants wanted to call this hot-tempered, swarthy-complexioned man an exploiter because he did such poor work and charged so much for it.

  “He’s a middle peasant,” said one neatly dressed woman with a reputation as an amorous widow. She spat out the words “middle peasant” as if they bore some sort of stigma. “He’s a middle peasant because he earns good money as a blacksmith, and besides his work is no good. Last year he cheated me. He charged me an awful price but the work was
no good and even the iron was poor. He exploited me.”

  “He’s not skillful; we all know that,” said a grey-bearded elder. “But if you don’t want to be exploited by him you can always call in others to do the work. It’s different with the landlords. With them you have no choice. You pay rent or you starve. But with Huan-ch’ao, if you don’t like his work you can always take your job elsewhere.”

  “Go ahead, say what you think,” said Chang himself, scowling darkly. “Your opinions are very good and I would be the last to get angry.”

  “Truth is,” said a second widow, “the tools you make are no good. You really should improve your workmanship.”

  “I accept your criticism,” said Huan-ch’ao, desperately trying to hold back his rising temper. He knew that to explode now would land him in the middle-peasant category for sure.

  “He’s never been a skillful blacksmith,” the grey-bearded man said again. “But if you say that for this reason he exploits you, then all blacksmiths must become very gloomy indeed.”

  Finally Yuan-lung, a young neighbor of Huan-ch’ao’s, proposed a solution. “He’s a poor peasant,” he said with an air of finality. Several pipe-smoking cronies of the speaker hastened to back up this idea, but the women still looked doubtful.

  “If you can’t decide now, we’ll discuss it later,” suggested Little Li, but this suggestion won no more support than the other.

  The League members finally agreed that since Huan-ch’ao had always owned a little land he should be called a poor peasant. This solution had one added advantage. It avoided the mysterious category of “worker.”