Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  In the case posed by Huan-ch’ao the peasants confronted a basic problem of economic theory. Their dispute arose from the obvious fact that the work done by different individuals, whether judged by the quantity or by the quality of the output, is not equal. In spite of this, wages and prices tend to standardize, a reflection of the socially necessary labor time required to turn out any given piece of goods. But to arrive at the concept of socially necessary labor time required a breadth of experience and a level of abstract reasoning that could hardly be expected of the peasants of Long Bow at this time. What they saw was a poor craftsman asking for the same return on his labor as a good craftsman, and this smacked to them of exploitation.

  Ch’i Yun could hardly restrain her chuckles as she explained to me the give and take over Huan-ch’ao, the blacksmith. That a skilled worker could exploit the people who hired him was a startling idea to anyone with a Marxist outlook, and she marveled at the ingenuity of those peasants who had thought it up. She grossly underestimated their inventiveness, however, for on the very next day they found exploitation in an even more unlikely place—in the relation between a widow and her lover.

  There lived in the village a lean old peasant named Wang who had long been in love with, or at least was wont to make love to, a rich peasant’s widow named Yu Pu-ho. What little of value he possessed or produced, Wang sooner or later brought to his prosperous and beloved mistress. While his own son and daughter-in-law hired out in order to eat, he skimmed everything edible from his homestead and sacrificed it on the altar of love. If his hen laid an egg, he offered it up. If the eggplant in his dooryard garden produced a firm purple fruit, he brought it around. He even neglected his own land to work long hours on that of the passionate widow.

  When Wang’s paramour came before the Provisional League, the spokesman for one group of women took the floor at once. “We think she is a double landlord. She exploits hired labor and she exploits her lover. She exploits everything he has, even the eggs from his hens.”

  At this everyone laughed except the prim black-clad widow herself and Old Wang. The latter, expecting the worst, looked anxiously around the room for some sign of disagreement.

  Wang need not have been so concerned. The men did not agree with the women.

  “If he’s exploited, that’s his lookout,” shouted a well-groomed youngster from the warmest spot on the k’ang. “He wants it that way. What can we do about it?”

  The “double landlord” classification was withdrawn.

  Some peasants found still a third form of exploitation in the behavior of certain scoundrels or lumpen elements. Just as every Western city has its declassed people, its professional beggars, its small-time racketeers, and skid row derelicts, so every Chinese village once had its yu min or rascals, men and women without legitimate means of support, gamblers, “broken shoes” (prostitutes), narcotics peddlers, and drifters. In political tracts and mobilization speeches they rated only occasional mention, but in real life they were very much a part of every village scene.

  In Long Bow the most notorious of these yu min was Wang T’ao-yuan. Of him people said, “Hsiang yen pu li k’ou, shou tien pu li shou.” (The cigarette never leaves his lips, the flashlight never leaves his hand.) He had survived the lean years of the occupation on profits from heroin peddling, on brokerage fees earned selling other people’s wives, and on the proceeds of the sale of his own wife, a record unsavory enough to have made him an object of universal scorn and hate.

  Wang had reformed somewhat after receiving land in the distribution but he still shrank from hard work. Only a few weeks before he appeared to be classified he sent his nephew on a coal-hauling expedition instead of going himself. The temperature that week hovered around zero. The nephew did not know how to care for an animal in such a frost. As a result, the one donkey owned by the family caught a chill, fell ill, and died.

  In spite of all this, the peasants were curiously lenient with Wang T’ao-yuan. His broad comic face and genial disposition seemed to charm them. If nothing else he had always been a good companion. Because he knew how to laugh at himself and to make others laugh too, people found it difficult to stay angry at him for long.

  But Cadre Liang, who passionately hated dope and purveyors of dope, was not willing to see T’ao-yuan get off so easily. Ignoring the economic criteria for judging the man’s class, he slashed at the criminal nature of his past.

  “Perhaps there are some who want to save face for T’ao-yuan,” suggested Liang. “They had better think it over. Who led the entire family in smoking poison? If Long Bow had not been liberated they would all have died of starvation. And why did he sell the stuff? Why, in this whole village did no one else sell heroin but he? Let’s ask why many an honest laborer among you has not yet fanshened. Then compare your condition with his. In the past, there were those who stood higher than the poor peasants. Now, after liberation they still have the upper hand. Why are such people always able to take advantage of every situation? Why? T’ao-yuan should be forced to explain his past.”

  Responding with alacrity to Liang’s suggestion, T’ao-yuan said, “I began smoking heroin in the famine year and everything I had went to pay for it.” There was a suggestion of languid sensuality in his stance and a puckish grin came and went on his face as he revealed his amoral past. “When I had nothing left I took my wife to Taiyuan. We were half dead from hunger before I finally found a buyer for her. He gave me six bags of millet. That sealed the deal.”

  Even to T’ao-yuan this sounded a little brutal so he added a twist to the tale that put the blame where it obviously belonged—on his wife.

  “While I was out looking for work I had to leave my wife alone at the inn. She took up with another man. The master of the inn tipped me off and suggested that I get rid of her. He also found the buyer.

  “I helped Wang Hsi-nan sell his wife too,” continued T’ao-yuan, but once again he cleverly absolved himself. “Hsi-nan suggested it and even sought me out; he came over and over again. His wife was ‘white, bright, and lovely,’ but she was an idiot. She couldn’t cook or sew. She couldn’t even wipe her own behind. He got stuck with her and he wanted to get rid of her. He wouldn’t stop pestering me so finally I undertook to sell her. I got nothing for my pains. Even after she was delivered I didn’t have enough left over to buy heroin. I was in terrible shape. But Hsi-nan played square. He at least found me some heroin.

  “I know it is a bad thing to sell heroin. I exploited others. I preyed on the addicts. But now I have fanshened. I received land and property but I do not deserve any such thing. I know my fanshen was due to my poor brothers and I must thank them. I wish you would criticize me more.”

  “How do you feel about the death of your donkey?” asked a neighbor.

  “I borrowed BRC 200,000* to buy the little bastard. Now it is dead. You can imagine yourself how I feel,” said Wang, and he began to weep right there in front of the whole group.

  “How do you feel about selling your wife?” asked several women.

  Wang T’ao-yuan made no answer. He only wept more despondently.

  “Well, you sold her, and now you weep about it!”

  “No,” said Wang. “I am not weeping for my bartered wife. I am weeping for my dead donkey.”

  To punish him they classed him as a middle peasant, but even this did not satisfy the women. “He ought to be classed as a landlord’s running dog,” said several. But they said it in a whisper because the men, on the whole, sympathized with Wang.

  *********

  Disagreements over the class status of various Long Bow residents pointed up the need for accurate standards of comparison. In preparatory conferences the work team cadres had studied such standards. Now, as the problems of differentiation grew more and more complicated, they introduced them to the peasants of the Provisional League.

  The standards they introduced were roughly the same as those adopted by the Communist Party of China in 1933 when the first “Land to the Tiller”
policy was carried out in the old revolutionary base at Juichin, Kiangsi.** Most of the poor peasants, after two years of campaigning, understood the standards fairly well, but as they applied them the deficiencies of the relatively simple concepts of 1933 became more and more apparent.

  The Juichin standards, it turned out, were strong in defining the center of gravity of each rural class, that pole which determined the special nature of its typical members and their special relationship to the means of production. The standards were weak, however, in defining exact boundary lines between the classes. They lacked the precision necessary to distinguish between the many borderline, atypical cases that showed up so frequently in real life.

  By far the most important dividing line was that between the middle peasants and the rich peasants. The Draft Agrarian Law of 1947 had made this the great divide between friend and enemy, between the people and their oppressors, between revolution and counter-revolution. It was absolutely essential that this line be clear and unequivocal. Yet here the Juichin documents were most ambiguous. In describing middle peasants the document said, “Some of the middle peasants practice a small amount of exploitation, but such exploitation is not of a constant character and the income therefrom does not constitute their main means of livelihood.”

  Anyone using these standards would have to know exactly what small, constant, and main meant in order to carry out the intent of the law.

  In regard to the difference between poor peasants and middle peasants the same kind of difficulty arose. On this dividing line the Juichin document stated, “In general middle peasants need not sell their labor power but poor peasants have to sell their labor power for limited periods.” Another sentence indicated that even middle peasants sometimes did sell their labor power. In order to make a precise determination, one would have to know what was meant by in general and limited periods.

  As classification progressed, both the cadres and the peasants in Long Bow keenly felt the need for something more precise. This need was met, in part at least, by a set of supplementary regulations issued by the Central Committee in the fall of 1947. On the dividing line between middle and rich peasants these regulations stated that an income received from exploitation that was less than 15 percent of the gross was small and hence permissible for a middle peasant. Anything over that was considered large and enough to put the family over the line into the rich peasant category.

  On the dividing line between middle and poor peasants, the regulations made clear that the labor power sold by middle peasants was mainly surplus labor power or the labor power of the children and old folks. Any family that consistently sold the labor power of its able-bodied adult members must ordinarily be classed as poor.

  Another keenly felt need was for some definite base period. Was one to consider the present status of the family, the status several years back, or the status in the light of several generations? When left to themselves, the peasants of Long Bow tended to go back two and even three generations. This was in accord with habits deeply ingrained in the Chinese people, habits which had much precedent in the culture of the past. Under the old imperial examination system, for example, candidates had to prove not only that they themselves were not representatives of some barred category (boatman, actor, prostitute, or other “wandering” type) but also that their parents and grandparents were free of any such taint. Settlers in Shantung whose parents or grandparents had migrated from Hopei still regarded themselves as Hopei people.

  This concept of hereditary social status helped to explain the wide support given to the campaign against “feudal tails” which had so sharpened the struggle and broadened the revolutionary target in 1946. Yet such a concept could hardly be said to conform to conditions of modern life. The disintegration of traditional Chinese society under the impact of foreign conquest, commercial dumping, dynastic decline, civil war and famine had introduced such a mobility into social relations (most of it downward) that it was no longer realistic to think of tracing back even five years, not to mention a few generations.

  In view of these facts, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party added to the supplementary regulations a section which strictly defined the base period to be used in making a determination of class status. In areas liberated after 1945 it was to be the three years prior to the liberation of the village. For the Fifth District of Lucheng County this meant the years 1943-1945. Each family was to be judged according to its economic position during those three years alone. The fact that a family had once been very wealthy, rented out land, or hired many laborers, made no difference to its class status if, during the three years of the base period, its able-bodied members earned their own living or a major portion of it by their own labor. Likewise, the fact that a man had once been a poor peasant made no difference at all if, during the base period, he had collected rents, hired laborers, or loaned out money at usurious interest rates.

  By the same token, inherited wealth possessed by families who labored for a living during the base period could not be touched. It mattered not in the least what the source of any family’s wealth might be. If the able-bodied members of that family earned their living by the sweat of their brow during the three years prior to the liberation of their village, they themselves were not rich peasants or landlords and could not legally be attacked or deprived of any property.

  In brief, the reforms called for in the Draft Agrarian Law were to be based on class status, not class origin, on current means of livelihood, not on past privilege or past penury.

  31

  The Revolutionary Heat

  I began as a student and acquired at school the habits of a student; in the presence of a crowd of students who could neither fetch nor carry for themselves, I used to feel it undignified to do any manual labor, such as shouldering my own luggage. At that time it seemed to me that the intellectuals were the only clean persons in the world, and the workers and peasants seemed rather dirty beside them. I could put on the clothes of other intellectuals because I thought they were clean, but I would not put on clothes belonging to a worker or peasant because I felt they were dirty. Having become a revolutionary I found myself in the same ranks as the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the revolutionary army, and gradually I became familiar with them and they with me too. It was then and only then that a fundamental change occurred in the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feelings implanted in me by the bourgeois schools. I came to feel that it was those unremolded intellectuals who were unclean as compared to the workers and peasants, while the workers and peasants are after all the cleanest persons—even though their hands are soiled and their feet are smeared with cow dung. This is what is meant by having one’s feelings transformed, changed from those of one class to those of another.

  Mao Tse-tung

  THE CLASSIFICATION meetings continued for days. Hour after hour we sat in the ice-cold adobe dwellings of the poor and listened as discussion followed report and report followed discussion. We were glad when the press of people was such that padded limbs and torsos leaned against us from all sides. In such close quarters the heat generated by each participant helped to keep his neighbor warm. When the crush was great enough, body heat even took the chill off the air in the room. Unknown to me this close contact made inevitable a form of heat that continued to warm all participants long after the meeting was over.

  One cold night as Ch’i Yun and I walked homeward across the flat toward Kao Settlement, I began to notice an uncomfortable burning sensation on the skin of my shoulders and up both sides of my neck. This soon spread to the small of my back and to those areas of my stomach where a worn leather belt held my padded trousers tight against my flesh.

  As soon as I got home I took off my jacket, turned it inside out, held it close to the burning wick of the single, bean-oil lamp allotted to me, and took a close look. The lining was alive with flat, crawling mites, some of them transparently white, others already dark with engorged blood. Lice!

  So that was i
t. The ubiquitous vermin had found me already!

  Having examined my jacket, I took off my pants. They were as alive with lice as the jacket.

  My padded outfit could not be washed, nor could I in good conscience ask for another. There was only one thing to do—pick off the lice, crush them, and start over. I knew well enough how lice were hunted. How many times had I watched peasants sitting in the warm sun with their jackets over their knees pursuing the slow-crawling vermin, catching them between their thumb-nails and squeezing them until they burst? But that night, holding my jacket close to the flame, I could not bring myself to begin. I pictured to myself how the lice would snap and crumble, how the blood would spurt. I had no stomach for it. Finally I laid the jacket on the floor, found a pair of chopsticks, and picked the lice out of the lining as if I were picking delicacies off a banquet table. One by one I dropped them on a smooth brick and crushed them with a stone. By this aseptic but laborious method I gradually cut down the voracious army in my garments.

  While I was in the midst of the hunt one of my English students came to the door. Shamefaced, I dropped the chopsticks and threw the jacket over a chair. It was too late. The student had seen what I was up to and began to laugh. Through him word soon spread to the whole University and into the village beyond that Old Han, the American, was catching lice with chopsticks and crushing them with bricks and stones.

  Such was my baptism of fire, such my introduction to the notorious “revolutionary heat” that several generations of Chinese students and intellectuals had learned to bear without complaint because they felt that their country needed them among the people.

  When the time came to search my clothes the second time I found that I was far less squeamish than at first. Soon I was hunting lice like a veteran and exhibiting the bloodstains on my thumbnails to anyone rash enough to tease me about chopsticks and bricks.