On the afternoon of the second day of the conference, I found myself the center of one of these meal-time discussion groups. A lively trio of village-born female cadres boldly approached me as I ate. Their spokesman, a young woman with bobbed hair and natural feet, asked me such a stream of questions that the millet in my bowl grew cold before I could get it into my mouth.
“Do you eat with chopsticks in America?” “What crops do you raise?” “Do American women wear pants?” “Why don’t Americans treat all races equally?” Such were the questions she asked.
The women no sooner began their “interview” than a number of men, most of whom had been too shy to approach me, also gathered round and added queries of their own.
“Why does Tu-lu-men (Truman) support old Chiang?” “What does a tractor look like?” “How big is the American Communist Party?” “Does it have an army like ours?”
The temple gong rang long before I had a chance to answer all of these questions. On the next day the discussion continued, and on the next as well, and always it was the women who took the initiative.
45
Unite Real Friends, Attack Real Enemies
Who are our enemies, and who are our friends? This question is one of primary importance to the Revolution. All past revolutionary struggles in China achieved very little, basically because the revolutionaries were unable to unite their real friends to attack their real enemies. A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses, and no revolution ever succeeds when the revolutionary party leads it astray. To make sure that we will not lead our Revolution astray but will achieve positive success, we must pay attention to uniting our real friends to attack our real enemies.
Mao Tse-tung, 1946
AS THE CONFERENCE progressed toward a conclusion, two questions emerged with increasing frequency: What constituted adequate fanshen? And what constituted a correct policy toward middle peasants? The questions were, of course, linked. As long as fanshen was taken to mean the achievement of middle peasant status for all the remaining poor, the more prosperous middle peasants sensed a threat to their position. Since the worldly goods required for more fanshen could only come from those who still possessed a little surplus, no amount of reassurance concerning the middle peasants’ status as allies could allay this group’s gnawing fear that its members would be victimized in the future.
In his long report of April 24, Secretary Ch’en flayed all tendencies to ignore and alienate the middle peasants.
“When Chairman Mao read the Suiteh report and learned that in one village 27 middle peasants’ families had been wrongly expropriated, he said, ‘This is a most terrible thing! This is more dangerous by far than American imperialism. American imperalism is only a paper tiger but if 27 middle peasants can be expropriated in one village, what would happen if this spread to the whole nation? This is forcing our friends to join our enemies.’
“Some of our team members even brushed aside the middle peasants when the latter sought them out,” continued Secretary Ch’en. “The policy of our Party is to depend on the poor peasants, but that doesn’t mean that we neglect the middle peasants or that we fail to unite with them. On the contrary, we must make clear to them that they have their political, organizational, and economic rights. The middle peasants can join the Peasants’ Association, and their land and property cannot be touched. We even distinguish upper middle peasants from others. Why? In order to protect them, to make sure that nothing is taken from them to fill the poor peasants’ needs. If we do get something from them it can only be with their agreement. Middle peasants are entitled to at least a third of the seats in the village congresses which already exist in many villages and will soon be established in all. They are an important factor in the coalition governments of the counties and the regions.”
Secretary Ch’en summed up policy thus: “With the poor peasants as a core, we form the Poor and Hired Peasants’ League. Then with the middle peasants as allies, we form the Peasants’ Association. Then with all the other anti-feudal elements in the community as additional allies, we form the Village Congress. Thus we unite our friends and isolate our enemies.
“This policy is fixed by the character of our Revolution at its present stage. The more the enemy is isolated the quicker can victory be won. If we say that poverty is all and work along a narrow poor-peasant line and neglect all our friends, we will only isolate ourselves. Whoever commits the error of isolating himself is guilty of Leftism. Whoever does not isolate those who should be isolated is guilty of Rightism.”
This was well put. The cadres understood it. But exposition was no longer enough. What was urgently needed was not another review of the theory but a more adequate definition of “middle peasant,” a yardstick for determining when a poor peasant had fanshened, and a practical method for reconciling the legitimate demands of the poor peasants for more property with the legitimate concern of the middle peasants lest they be attacked.
To meet this need Secretary Ch’en on April 28, 1948, distributed a new set of class definitions and proposed the addition of a new category to the class standards.
The new category was that of “new-middle-peasant.” Into this group all those poor peasants who had fanshened were henceforth to be placed. By comparing the size of the new-middle-peasant group with that of the remaining poor-peasant group it would be possible to obtain an accurate picture of what land reform had done for any village. As to the yardstick to be used, this was still vague. The general idea was that a new-middle-peasant family had to have enough land and other means of production to be self-supporting (i.e., enough to bring it up to the level of the established middle peasants). But there was room for considerable argument over the question of just what level of self-support was meant, for everyone knew that there had always been upper, middle and lower middle peasants in the villages. All of these were henceforth often called old-middle-peasants to distinguish them from their newly fanshened brothers, the new-middle-peasants.
As for the revised class standards distributed by Secretary Ch’en, they had been issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party only a few weeks before. They replaced all previous declarations on the subject. The main innovation which they introduced was a shift in the line drawn between middle peasants and rich peasants, a shift toward the rich peasant side to the advantage of the middle peasants. Instead of allowing middle peasants only 15 percent of gross income from exploitation, the new line allowed them up to 25 percent.
The effect of this shift was to enlarge the united front of the people and to isolate as popular enemies only those diehard elements who could not possibly be mobilized to support a “land-to-the-tiller” policy.
In proposing any basic social change, Secretary Ch’en explained, revolutionaries had to decide who should be brought together and who isolated, who should be called a friend and who an enemy.
The theoretical basis for such a determination rested on a proposition propounded by Marx long ago: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” This could be restated, although not without danger of oversimplification, as “It is not what you think that determines how you make your living, but how you make your living that determines how you think” When applied to any Chinese village, this meant in practice that poor peasants who owned very little and were consequently heavily exploited could be expected to think one way about land reform, while landlords who owned a lot and consequently were able to live by exploiting others could be expected to think another way about the same question. The poor wanted to transform the system. The landlords wanted to maintain it inviolate. Here were two clear-cut extremes. One could predict with relative ease how representatives of these two classes would react to a revolutionary program of land equalization. In practice, however, as the movement developed, not only the extremes but all the groups in the middle were drawn into the struggle on one side or the other. Since the landlords
, few as they were, controlled the economy, dominated the state, and had the support of powerful imperialist forces, they could easily buy off certain sections of the population and many individuals in every stratum. Hence, the poor peasants, numerous as they were, must find allies if they were to challenge the system. On whom could they count for support? Basically on all those who worked for a living, suffered from the system, and also wanted a change. Such allies included most of the self-supporting middle peasants who owned their own land, the peddlers who owned their own stocks, the shopkeepers who owned their own shops, the free professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, who provided services for fees), even the plain poor people and vagabonds who, unable to find gainful employment, were forced to beg, gamble, or steal for a living.
So far the question remained relatively simple. All the above-mentioned people depended on their own labor to live or welcomed the opportunity to do so. They were natural allies in the fight against the landlords. What complicated matters was the existence of large numbers of people with mixed incomes, families that lived partly by labor expended and partly by exploitation, families who planted, hoed, and harvested themselves, but also hired labor, rented out land, or loaned out money. Where did these people fit in?
If any and all income from exploitation was to be opposed and all families receiving any income at all from exploitation were to be regarded as enemies of change, then millions of families who earned most of their livelihood by means of hard labor and wanted to transform society must artificially be forced into the enemy camp.
If, on the other hand, all people who labored for any portion, however small, of their income were to be regarded as friends, then many heavy exploiters who hated the Revolution and feared change must be called allies.
No such simple method of differentiation was therefore practical.
Obviously neither exploitation alone nor labor alone could determine this question. The line could not be drawn at either end of these overlapping phenomena. It had to be drawn somewhere in between. The question was where? Not exploitation but the proportion of exploitation income in the total income of a family, not labor as such but the proportion of labor income in the total income of a family became the crux of the matter.
The principle, “How you make your living determines how you think,” was held by Ch’en to be as applicable to mixed incomes as it was to incomes from one source. One could expect the major source of income to play a more important role than the minor source in determining the attitude and behavior of an individual.
Countless experiences from everyday life showed that such expectations were indeed borne out by the actual behavior of the people. Those who derived more than half of their income from their own labor tended to identify themselves with working people and consequently to support the revolution. Those who derived more than half of their income from the exploitation of other people’s labor tended to identify their interests with those of the exploiters and consequently to ally themselves with the counter-revolution.
It therefore made sense to divide that large group of families who had mixed incomes, who both labored and exploited, by drawing a line right down the middle. Those who earned more than half of their income by exploitation were classed as rich peasants and treated as enemies.* On the other hand, those who earned half or more of their income by their own labor were classed as middle peasants and treated as friends.
It should be stressed here that these standards applied only to rural conditions and only to families engaged in or living off agricultural production. The only kind of unearned or exploitative income that could cause a family to be classed as a landlord or rich peasant was income of a feudal or semi-feudal nature—that is, land rents, interest from usurious loans, or the surplus value extracted from direct labor on the land. All forms of strictly capitalist profit were excluded from this category as were the capitalists themselves. The object of the land reform was not to destroy what few capitalist sprouts had managed to grow up in the shambles of the feudal economy but rather to encourage them. Therefore, income derived from the employment of labor in commercial shops, agricultural processing plants, manufacturing enterprises, or even modern factories owned and controlled by Chinese was not included when judging whether or not a person was to be classed as a feudal exploiter or as one of the people. If a rich peasant or a landlord derived part of his income from a cotton gin, a bean-pressing plant or a commercial shop, this part was excluded when classifying him. And if it was decided that he was in fact a landlord or rich peasant because of other income, only his agricultural holdings were confiscated, not his commercial or industrial holdings. As a feudal exploiter he was considered to be a backward force, but as a capitalist exploiter he was considered to be a progressive one. His feudal holdings were divided up among the people but his capitalist holdings were held intact as his private property.
Could the political attitude and role of every individual in fact be determined by an analysis of the main source of his or her income?
Of course not. There were too many well-known cases of poor peasants who were counter-revolutionary and of landlords who were revolutionary for anyone to expect such a thing. No line, however accurate, could hope to separate people according to their subjective position with 100 percent accuracy. All that was claimed for the dividing line was that it was the most rational and practical basis for dividing the people from their enemies and it would prove valid for the vast majority. As for the exceptions, those above the line who were sincere revolutionaries would remain revolutionaries even though they lost their holdings, while those below the line who opposed basic change might well be won for the Revolution once they received property and land and saw how life had been improved for all.
Having determined precisely where to draw the line, Secretary Ch’en proceeded to explain how to draw it in the actual process of differentiating the classes. Concrete methods to determine gross income, net income, percentages of exploitation, etc., were demonstrated.
To divide middle peasants from rich peasants on the basis of a one-half-of-net-income rule was simple enough in certain cases. It was clear, for instance, that if two men worked together to produce a crop and they shared the labor equally, half the crop would be due to the efforts of one and the other half would be due to the efforts of the other. Therefore, a man who employed labor equal to his own derived no more than half his net income from that labor and was clearly a middle peasant.
A man who employed more labor than he himself put in must obviously derive more than half his net income from other men’s labor and must therefore clearly be a rich peasant.
The quickest way, then, to judge the class status of a peasant family was to look at how many men were hired and compare this with the amount of labor put in by the family. If the two forces were equal, the family was, by definition, a middle peasant family. But if the hired labor exceeded the family labor, the family was, by definition, a rich peasant family.
This simple rule of thumb was recommended for use whenever possible in judging the class status of the rural population.
If the hiring of labor had been the only form of exploitation that existed, nothing more would have been needed than this first rule of thumb. All families could have been judged on the basis of labor hired versus labor expended. But the more affluent families in any Chinese village also derived income from other sources, such as rent and interest. Some method for equating these sums with the profits derived from hiring labor had to be found in order to make comparisons, figure totals, and determine whether more or less than half of any family’s net income derived from exploitation.
Of course, in those many cases where the labor hired equalled the labor expended by the family, any additional income from rents or loans must be enough to place the family in the rich peasant group. But in the numerous cases where the family contributed more labor to production than it hired from outside, it was necessary to know the actual amount of the net income received from all sources
in order to compare the net income derived from exploitation with the net income derived from family labor.
The same problem arose in analyzing the income of families who hired no labor at all but received substantial amounts of rent or interest in addition to the crops harvested by their own efforts.
Before classifying such families it was necessary to arrive at actual net income figures. This was very difficult to do. Net income was defined as the amount of money or goods which remained each year after all expenses for seed, fertilizer, land, and labor had been deducted. For the middle peasant working on his own land, this was the gross amount of goods or money which he received for his year’s labor minus all costs, including his own living expenses. But few peasant families kept accounts accurate enough to figure net income. The one figure they usually had but were exceedingly reluctant to reveal to anyone, was a figure for gross income—i.e., the total crop harvested. To arrive at a figure for net income it was necessary to develop another rule of thumb based on average experience.
The results of many studies made over the years had shown that under village conditions in China, net income was usually equal to about one third of gross income. That is to say, out of three parts of gross income one part represented surplus value, or profit, and two parts represented capital outlay for wages and fixed expenses such as seed.
Using this second rule of thumb, one could easily figure net income once the figure for gross income was known. Take, for example, a family with a gross income from the land of 30 hundredweight of grain. The net income amounted to ten hundredweight. If in addition to this crop, the family also received up to ten hundredweight of grain as income from loans, they were still middle peasants. Their net income from exploitation did not exceed their earned net income and therefore amounted to only half of their total net income.
Fanshen Page 53