Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  On that April day the road to Lucheng was no less populated than the land around it. We met and joined forces with other cadres bound for the County Conference. A peasant hurrying to deliver a government message overtook us on a steep grade. We in turn passed a young woman clad in a striped tunic. She carried a full basket on one arm, cradled a week-old baby in the crook of the other, and all the while balanced herself precariously on the back of a minute donkey whose every step was supervised by her proud young husband. No doubt these two were on their way to show their first-born to his maternal grandmother. On one slope so steep that we had to maintain our balance with our hands, an old man sped upward past us in a cloud of dust, his miraculous ascent facilitated by the fact that he had seized the tail of his heavily-laden mule and forced the animal to pull him along by shouting terrible oaths at him from behind.

  As we approached the county seat, other paths converged on ours until at last they made a road. Peasants driving carts, pushing wheelbarrows, shouldering carrying poles, or simply strolling along as if out for air became too numerous to take special note of. Many of them were engaged in transporting towering stacks of new straw hats. Lucheng County, I learned that day, was famous all over China and even in certain cities of Europe for its straw wares. International conflict and Civil War had cut off markets in the last seven years, but now, with the expansion of the Liberated Areas, business was picking up again. Young and old alike were returning to the traditional craft, a craft based on the tough long straw of Taihang Mountain wheat and on the nimble fingers of Taihang Mountain people.

  Our road gradually broadened into a highway that cut straight through the long, strung-out village of Nan Kuan (South Portal) and then stopped abruptly at the edge of the moat in front of Lucheng’s ancient wall. There, what must once have been a massive and forbidding entrance to a strongly fortified town was now reduced to rubble and ruin. The town dwellers were tearing down not only the gate towers but the walls themselves. Though they had only half accomplished this task it was obvious that a few months would see the bastions levelled. The salvaged bricks, each of which rivalled a western concrete block in size, were already reappearing in the scattered new housing that ringed the outskirts of the town.

  Once inside the dwindling battlements, we found an almost empty plain. One main street lined with a few dozen restaurants and shops, several village-like clusters of adobe walls and courtyards interspersed with lanes and alleys, an extensive Yamen compound—that was all. The rest of the huge quadrangle consisted of land that had never been built upon or land that had long since been abandoned. Ruined dwellings showed more clearly in some sections than in others. These were the areas looted by the Japanese during the last years of the Second World War. Desperately short of fuel, the “sun devils” had torn the timbers from whole blocks of houses. The adobe walls thus exposed had rapidly disintegrated under the erosion of wind and rain.

  The condition of the town did not surprise me. It was typical of hundreds of county towns in North China in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Their emptiness was the result of a process that had begun long before the Japanese invaders arrived. County towns had been fortresses against rural unrest for so long that the very life had been choked out of them. Unable to enter or leave the walled enclosures freely, the people had come to depend on the sprawling communities outside the gates for trade and handicraft services. They had left the decaying inner cities to officialdom, to the grain warehouses of the gentry, and to the barracks of their mercenary rural guards.

  We proceeded past rows of dilapidated dwellings and acres of debris to the Yamen compound at the center of the area. Much of this also lay in ruins. Not content with despoiling the outlying sections of the town, the Japanese troops had finally gutted even their own headquarters. But while the destruction had been great, the portions of the compound that remained untouched were still extensive. A series of courts within courts, which bespoke past splendor of imperial proportions, still contained many a standing wall, many a tight roof, and many an idol-filled temple. There, amidst piles of rubble and brick-strewn yards, we found the offices of the new county government.

  All the southernmost courts of the compound had been turned over to the civil administration. To indicate this a long wooden plank hung beside the front gate. On it were inscribed the characters Lu Ch’eng Hsien Jen Min Cheng Fu (People’s Government of Lucheng County). The northernmost courts had been set aside for the use of the Communist Party. To indicate this a second plank hung beside a side-street entrance. On it were painted the characters Lu Ch’eng Hsien Tang Wei Hui (Lucheng County Party Committee). The courts in between housed the county police, the County Court, and the chambers of the county judges. Of the many public organizations in Lucheng County, only the People’s Liberation Army had its headquarters in another part of town.

  It would be difficult to say which part of this rambling headquarters, the civil administration or the Party center, was the busiest. Scores of peasants, merchants, cadres, policemen, soldiers, and townspeople of all descriptions streamed in and out of both gates. If any difference could be noted in these two streams, it was that ordinary citizens in homespun clothes predominated at the front gate while land reform workers and district Party functionaries in cadres’ uniforms of machine-made cloth predominated at the side gate.

  When we arrived at the Party headquarters, the whole area was alive with more than its usual quota of bustle and confusion. The county-wide meeting of land reform workers had brought more than 100 cadres in from the countryside. Most of the male participants had found living quarters on the straw-covered floors of a series of small temples that faced each other across a small courtyard. They hung their dispatch cases, towels, and jackets on the colorful clay idols that lined the walls and made themselves at home amidst the gods. The female participants, far fewer in number and most of them students from Northern University, had taken over a large k’ang in a temple that faced a separate court. I, as a foreign guest, was given a room to myself. It was in a structure that was removed from the center of activity but was still a part of the same building complex.

  Each division of the temple row was supposed to house the cadres from one village, but because the team members came from all over the county and many of them knew each other well from guerrilla warfare days, they by no means remained in their assigned quarters. They wandered freely around seeking old friends, greeting them with hearty shouts, and forming constantly shifting groups for discussion and gossip. The meeting had all the atmosphere, excitement, spirit, and warmth of an alumni day, veterans’ reunion, and political convention all rolled into one.

  The conference, however, was really a school—a school for the study of the strategy and tactics of the New Democratic Revolution, a school of class consciousness and of socialist morality. It was a school in which cadres exchanged experiences, extended their knowledge, unified their outlook, and wrestled with their weaknesses, so that they might return to the villages better prepared to guide and teach the Communists of the village branches and the people.

  Although the destiny of the “basic” villages lay in their hands, although the majority of the peasants looked up to them as seers, the full-time district cadres and the staff members and students from Northern University who made up the work teams were not political geniuses, but only ordinary human beings, products of the old society only partially remolded by their experience with the new. Considering the vast needs of the time, their knowledge was woefully inadequate, their political consciousness limited, and their character development deficient. These educators needed educating certainly as much as did those local Communists who had so recently come before the gate. And so a form of gate had been organized for them—the county land reform conference. It differed from the village gate in that there were no direct representatives of the people to give opinions from below; nevertheless, the cadres heard and judged one another and were guided in an agonizing appraisal of their work by a group of men more advanced an
d more experienced than themselves.

  This higher level of educators was made up of the leaders of the county government and of the county organization of the Communist Party. The key figure at this level was Secretary Ch’en, chairman of the county Party Committee and chief organizer, leader, and teacher of Lucheng’s 2,500 Communists. All the myriad problems engendered by land reform found their way to his door. If the movement went well, he deserved much of the credit. If it went awry he had to assume a large part of the blame.

  Secretary Ch’en kept in touch with current developments and exercised leadership over the land reform movement in various ways—by frequent, unannounced visits to the “basic villages,” by weekly written reports sent in by the work team leaders, and by directives issued from time to time as guide lines for the teams. More important than any of these, however, were the county-wide conferences of full-time cadres such as the one we now had joined. At such a conference time was unimportant. Discussion could last a week, ten days, two weeks. The cadres met for as long as was needed to examine all work, study policy, and solve problems of individual attitude and morale. No group could go through such an experience without being shaken down and strengthened. Few individuals could attend such a session without being changed by it.

  41

  In the Dragon Hall

  Now the mallet is lifted to smite the lips of the metal monster. …Hear the great bell responding! How mighty her voice, though tongueless! KO NGAI! All the little dragons on the high-tilted eaves of the green roofs shiver to the tips of their gilded tails under that deep wave of sound; all the porcelain gargoyles tremble on their carven perches; all the hundred little bells of the pagodas quiver with desire to speak. KO NGAI! All the green-and-gold tiles of the temple are vibrating! The wooden goldfish above them are writhing against the sky;... KO NGAI! What a thunder was that!

  Lafcadio Hearn

  IN THE HEART of the Yamen area a large temple, unharmed by vandalism, stood solid and imposing amidst the ruins. It had been converted into a hall by emptying it of all trappings and idols. Thus stripped down the building displayed an awe-inspiring symmetry. Two great beams 25 feet in length and three feet thick supported the center of a heavy tiled roof. This roof swept up and out at the four corners as if poised for flight, while across its ridge pole four enormous dragons in colored tile battled each other for supremacy in the sky.

  The deep tones of the temple bell summoned the cadres from far and near. Under the fiery dragons, under the spreading roof, under the ancient beams where countless worshippers had once bowed their heads in a grey swirl of incense, the County Conference met in plenary session. Two tables and a brick rostrum constituted the only furnishings in the vast hall. The tables were used by note-taking secretaries, the rostrum by various speakers as they made their reports. On the wall behind the rostrum hung a large portrait of Mao Tse-tung. Above this, painted in gold on a large red board were four characters in Mao’s distinctive calligraphy. They said, “Serve the people.”

  Small group discussions followed the mass meetings. They were held wherever the participants found it convenient. Some teams met in their sleeping quarters. The hubbub created by the first two or three teams to begin a session inevitably drove the others away. Each of the others had to find a quiet spot in the shadow of the big temple or in one of the abandoned ruins behind it, and carry on as best it could, using 1,000-year-old bricks for seats. After dark the Long Bow team often met in my room, but during the daylight hours we chose as our special preserve a pile of rubble at the base of an old bell tower.

  On this tower, a ruined brick structure that overlooked the whole temple area, four ghostly characters, each one taller than a man, proclaimed a slogan out of the past. It was a slogan so encumbered with irony that it engraved itself on my memory. From top to bottom the characters read Jih Chun Yung Tsai—The Japanese Army Forever Remains.

  ***********

  It took three full days for the leaders of the various work teams to report to the whole conference on the six weeks they had spent in the villages. Their reports lasted one hour, two hours, even three hours. They were rambling, confused, repetitive; yet the assembled cadres listened in absolute silence, intent on catching every word. Those who could write—perhaps 50 percent of the total—held their copy books on their knees and took notes without pause. All found themselves listening to experiences that, while differing in detail from their own, reflected as if in a mirror the essence of what had happened to them. As one team leader followed another, each person present experienced a sense of having his own past reviewed.

  Ch’i Yun and I arrived at the first session a few minutes late. An old man was already speaking from the rostrum. He was the leader of the East Portal team. For 40 years he had worked as a hired laborer before receiving land and a donkey as a result of the “Settling of Accounts.” Those years of toil had put a stamp on him that no subsequent experience could erase. He had only to don a new government-issue suit to transform it into a peasant-style outfit. A wide sash wound round his waist and trouser cuffs bound tight to his ankles with strips of cloth gave his modern garb an unmistakably rustic flavor. On his head he wore, not a visor cap, but a towel.

  “When we first set out to find the poor peasants, we made mistakes because our standards were too rigid,” the old man said. “We thought that the people who lived near the county town would be canny and dishonest, so we trusted very few and opened the door only a crack. That’s why the ranks of our League remained lean. When we visited them the peasants didn’t want to talk to us. They still remembered the Wash-the-Face Movement of last year. We had to change our methods. Each of us began to talk about his own past. Soon one of our cadres who had worked in the mines found an old miner among the poor peasants. When we started to talk about the hardships of underground work the old peasant began to speak of his own sorrows. Soon his friends also opened up.”

  Since the speaker had never been to school, he found reading difficult. He had to pause frequently in order to decipher the notes which had been prepared for him by the efforts of his whole team. Finally he pulled an old pair of spectacles from his pocket and fixed them on his nose by means of a string which he tied around the back of his head. That these antique spectacles with their square lenses of ordinary window glass could help him to see more clearly was doubtful, but they did seem to give him confidence and that was reason enough to wear them.

  “In front of the poor peasant delegates the Party members were very afraid,” he continued. “They dared not reject any opinion or speak their minds at all. They just accepted every criticism no matter what, but in their minds they couldn’t think it through. We had to explain to them that they had the right to speak their own opinions, that this was an education for them. Later we discovered that some of the delegates were not quite honest themselves. One was there only to take revenge on a Party member whom he hated.”

  As he progressed through his report, this old peasant-turned-cadre launched into stories that required no notes and soon found that he could hold the audience spellbound. Then he took his glasses off. One of the stories which he told concerned an illiterate like himself, an East Portal Party member who had taken more than 60 objects from the public stores. Faced with the necessity of admitting his misappropriations before a gate manned by poor peasants, the man became panicky. What if he couldn’t remember everything? He stayed up five nights in a row, took out one article after another and drew a picture of it. To these primary reminders he added sketches that would help him recall the motive for the theft. On one piece of paper he first drew a pair of leather shoes. Next to the shoes he drew the outline of a woman. The woman represented his wife. She had always despised him, threatened to leave him, and never made shoes or clothes for him. This, he decided, was because he was “bare poor.” As soon as he received land and house he tried to relieve domestic tension by bringing home to his wife things which might impress her. All this he easily recalled when he looked at his sketch of her. T
he confession which he finally made with the aid of such pictures was so detailed and comprehensive that the delegates allowed him to pass the gate without further delay. There was one stipulation, of course. He must return all 60 of the misappropriated items.

  The captain of the East Portal team told this story to illustrate the sincerity with which many Party members approached their self-examination, but the story simultaneously illustrated another facet of the campaign, a facet that emerged more and more clearly as the team reports followed one another. This was the tremendous pressure which had been brought to bear on the Party members to make them acknowledge the failure of the fanshen movement and concede their part in it. The pressure was so great and carried with it such overtones of revenge that many honest Communists felt they had no way out. Attempts at suicide had occurred in village after village.

  Reports like these demonstrated to the members of the Long Bow team that they were not the only ones who had made mistakes, lost their way, travelled a curved road, or failed to find the conditions which they had gone to the village to seek. But this was scant solace in the face of the very sharp criticism which Party Secretary Ch’en directed at all the land reform cadres and the Long Bow team in particular.

  County Secretary Ch’en was not the sort of warm-hearted friendly man we expected to meet after our experience with Regional Secretary Wang. He was a lean fellow with a stern jaw and penetrating eyes that looked out from behind dark-rimmed spectacles. An intellectual through and through, he did not easily unbend. Surrounded by that crowd of boisterous, talkative rural cadres, he seemed ill at ease. When anyone wandered in his presentation or talked of trifles, Ch’en had a way of looking very bored. In the midst of one report he snapped, “Let’s stick to the point.” He later stopped a speaker in the middle of a sentence with, “Let’s hear your own faults, not someone else’s.” The respect which the cadres nevertheless felt for him stemmed from the intellectual brilliance which he demonstrated every time he rose to speak. His speeches were well-ordered, disciplined, and clear, although they could not be called concise. He presented every idea in several complementary ways so that all might understand it and patiently went over ground he had covered twice before so that there would be no doubt as to his meaning. His speeches even demonstrated a flash of humor now and then, but it was a humor that was incidental to what he had to say. He was not one to be funny just to amuse his listeners. For all this the cadres respected him, even admired him, but they found it difficult to get to know him. He was too much the typical commissar of the novel—reserved, iron-willed, hard-working, and self-sacrificing. And what he demanded of himself he also demanded of others.