Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  But the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army understood the truth embodied in Mao Tse-tung’s famous phrase, “Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers.” They laughed about the American supplies that poured in day after day to shore up Chiang’s rotting front. They knew that sooner or later all that hardware would fall into their own hands. To sum up the situation they even coined a cocky new slogan: “America is our arsenal and Chiang Kai-shek is our quartermaster.” In every major engagement they captured thousands of rounds of ammunition, mountain guns, machine guns, trucks, bazookas, and even tanks. Every bullet, every rifle, every gun captured was tabulated as before on village walls in the rear areas. And, as the running record of weapons taken and armies annihilated mounted swiftly, so too did confidence mount.

  The Chinese Communist Party estimated three possible forms of aid to Chiang and discounted them all. American leaders could dispatch their own armies directly against the Liberated Areas in a desperate effort to save the situation. But to do this they would need at least 2,000,000 men. Even then they could not hope to wrest permanent control of the area from the Chinese people, for there was no reason to suppose that Americans could succeed where the Japanese had failed. In addition, American leaders had to consider the protest that open intervention was sure to engender from their own people and from other countries and the many domestic and international problems it would inevitably create.

  In the absence of direct intervention, America could send more advisory personnel. But there were already thousands of military advisors with Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. Their efforts had availed them nothing in the past. Sending more people could hardly change the situation.

  The third way to help Chiang was to redouble his supplies. But if the supplies already sent had not enabled him to win, how could more supplies change the situation? The weapons and materials available to him already outstripped the manpower he could tap and train.

  So, as the leaders of the Liberated Areas and the People’s Liberation Army saw it, militarily Chiang was already finished. It was only a matter of time.

  Chiang was bankrupt militarily, they said, because he had isolated himself politically. His dictatorial rule, his reliance on military means to subdue the country, and his surrender of basic Chinese rights to American business in return for massive military assistance made it impossible for the moderates to support him. Unable to win to his side the only important “third force” group in the country, the Democratic League, he ordered it dissolved on October 27, 1947. But no sooner did he slay this liberal dragon than it sprang up hydra-headed. On January 1, 1948, many democratic elements within the Kuomintang met in Hong Kong to establish the Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee. On January 5, several Democratic League leaders re-established the leading body of their outlawed League. At about the same time the China Democratic National Construction Association, an organization of liberal business and commercial people, announcing a more radical program than it had ever previously supported, stepped up its activities.

  In 1948 Chiang Kai-shek’s policies also brought him into increasingly fierce conflict with the students and professors of China’s colleges and universities. As the students expanded their agitation for peace and against American intervention, Chiang opposed them with increasingly oppressive measures. Hundreds of agents invaded classrooms and dormitories across the nation. They posed as students but actually devoted their energies to spying and informing.

  “During the night,” wrote one student of North China College, “gestapo students inspect dormitories with pistols in their pockets. Anyone can be arrested for being impolite or hated by these students. If we hold a debating meeting to discuss technical problems, we are closely watched by the gestapo students. If we speak one word of criticism, we are reported and our names put on the blacklist.”

  Several thousand students and 230 professors and lecturers were dismissed from various colleges in 1947. In numerous instances armed squads raided campuses, beat up male and female students alike, wounded hundreds and arrested thousands. In May, 1947, a co-ed was killed in an attack on the Shanghai Law College. In October, the murder of Yu Tse-san, a student at Chekiang University, became a cause celebre that led to nationwide demonstrations. By May 1948, when it became clear that Chiang had acquiesced in the American plan to rearm Japan, student protests reached an all-time high. Across the nation several hundred thousand college and middle-school students demonstrated in the streets, and everywhere they met hoses, clubs, and rifles in the hands of Chiang’s troops and police.

  Chiang crushed the mounting protests of industrial workers with the same brand of extreme violence. One of the worst incidents occurred in Shanghai on February 2, 1948. On that day, three workers were killed and 60 wounded in an open clash between the strikers of the Shen Hsin Textile Mill No. 9 and Kuomintang troops and police. This came to be known far and wide as the Shen Hsin massacre.

  Chiang’s legal response to the nationwide unrest caused by his own betrayal of national interests was to set up “special criminal courts” in which democrats, liberals, and persons merely suspected of harboring “unpatriotic thoughts” were prosecuted wholesale. But the assemby-line convictions handed down by these courts, like the shooting down of strikers, the police raids on campuses, and the banning of all “middle-of-the-road” political parties only aroused more determined resistance and isolated Chiang and the Kuomintang more than ever.

  There was only one possible development that could save Chiang from complete rout. That was the dissolution of the Revolution from within. Historically the status quo in China had been saved from revolutionary overthrow time and time again by excesses, sectarian blunders, naiveté, and disunity in the ranks of her rebels. Popular forces on the verge of victory had isolated themselves in 1864, in 1900, in 1911, and again in 1927. Chiang hoped and prayed that history would repeat itself. While he talked publicly of more dollars and bullets from Washington, privately he based his plans on the internal disruption of the Liberation Areas. His secret service, financed and trained by the American Navy under the SACO (Sino-American Cooperative Organization) agreement, worked hard to organize a revolt of 100,000 people in the Communist-led rear.* The political basis for this revolt was to be the dissatisfaction among the middle groups in the countryside, resulting from adventurist and “leftist” mistakes made by the Communists and the poor peasant activists whom they inspired and led.

  At this crucial moment, when the pace of the war was accelerating hour by hour, when a victory great or small was reported from one front or another almost daily, when the confidence of the People’s Liberation Army commanders, of the rank-and-file troops, and of the cadres in the rear was approaching its zenith—at just such a moment mistakes were easy to make, very easy to ignore, and therefore capable of being aggravated to lethal proportions. The danger was great that revolutionary cadres, flushed with victory, would waive fine points of policy, ride roughshod, because they had the power to do so, over the interests of this or that small sector of the people, and thus erode the very cement of the new social order before it had a chance to set. This road to disaster was paved with temptation.

  But if Chiang had learned something from history, so too had China’s revolutionaries. Mao and his colleagues at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party had diligently studied the failures of the past. They had gone as far back as Li Tzu-ch’eng (1630) and even beyond. They recognized full well the pitfalls that followed on the heels of victory, and therefore in the spring of 1948 made a careful check on all revolutionary policies and the manner in which they were being carried out in every Border Region. Particular importance was attached to the land reform; and Mao himself, while en route with his Central Committee headquarters to a new base in Hopei, stopped long enough in Northeast Shansi to make a personal investigation of the peasant situation there.

  Mao summed up his findings on April 1, 1948. He did so in a speech that was delivered to a conference of rural cadres gathered from various pa
rt of Northwest Shansi and Suiyuan where land reform work had advanced further than in the Taihang. Mao characterized the land reform efforts in the Shansi-Suiyuan Border Region as successful, but pointed out that success became possible only after the correction of serious errors. These errors were: (1) Erroneously placing in the landlord or rich peasant category many laboring people who did not engage, or engaged only slightly, in exploitation; (2) the indiscriminate use of violence against landlord and rich peasant families, “sweep-the-floor-out-the-door” confiscations, and a one-sided emphasis on unearthing landlords’ hidden wealth; (3) serious encroachments on commerce and industry, particularly the commerce and industry owned by landlords and rich peasants.

  All of these errors together constituted a “Left deviation” of dangerous proportions. Behind this Left deviation, Mao said, lay notions of “absolute equalitarianism”—the demand on the part of the landless and land-poor peasants for absolutely equal division of all land and property.

  “We support the peasant’s demand for equal distribution of land,” said Mao, “in order to help arouse the broad masses of peasants speedily to abolish the system of land ownership by the feudal landlord class, but we do not advocate absolute equalitarianism. Whoever advocates absolute equalitarianism is wrong …. Such thinking is reactionary, backward, and retrogressive in nature. We must criticize it.”

  Explaining why absolute equalitarianism was a mistaken concept, Mao restated the basic content of the Chinese Revolution at that stage of its history as being a “revolution against imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism waged by the broad masses of the people under the leadership of the proletariat.” He also restated the general line of the Communist Party in regard to the work of agrarian reform: “To rely on the poor peasants, unite with the middle peasants, abolish the system of feudal exploitation step by step and in a discriminating way, and develop agricultural production.”

  “The target of the land reform,” Mao stressed, “is only and must be the system of feudal exploitation by the landlord class and by the old-type rich peasants, and there should be no encroachment either upon the national bourgeoisie or upon the industrial and commercial enterprises run by landlords and rich peasants. In particular, care must be taken not to encroach upon the interests of the middle peasants, independent craftsmen, professionals, and new rich peasants, all of whom engage in little or no exploitation.”

  And then he came to the crux of the question:

  The development of agricultural production is the immediate aim of the land reform. Only by wiping out the feudal system can the conditions for such development be created. In every area, as soon as feudalism is wiped out and the land reform is completed, the Party and the democratic government must put forward the task of restoring and developing agricultural production, transfer all available forces in the countryside to this task, organize cooperation and mutual aid, improve agricultural technique, promote seed selection, and build irrigation works—all to ensure increased production. … The abolition of the feudal system and the development of agricultural production will lay the foundation for the development of industrial production and the transformation of an agricultural country into an industrial one. This is the ultimate goal of the new democratic revolution.*

  Not abstract justice, not absolute equality, but the development of production, the industrial transformation of the country—this was the goal of the Revolution, for only thus could real problems of livelihood be solved.

  55

  We Tried to Be God!

  Policy is the starting-point of all the practical actions of a revolutionary party and manifests itself in the process and the end-result of that party’s actions. A revolutionary party is carrying out a policy whenever it takes any action. If it is not carrying out a correct policy, it is carrying out a wrong policy; if it is not carrying out a given policy consciously, it is doing so blindly.

  Mao Tse-tung

  February, 1948

  MAO’S SHANSI-SUIYUAN speech, as it came to be called, was published in the People’s Daily early in June 1948. It had a decisive effect on the whole land reform movement in North China. During the previous fall and winter the extensive ideological preparations made for carrying out the Draft Agrarian Law had all emphasized the harm done by “Right opportunist” tendencies, by half-hearted measures, by compromise with the gentry, by fear of head-on conflict and all-out war. They were based on estimates that the land reform had been less than thoroughgoing. They called on all cadres to take a clear stand on the side of the poor-and-hired peasants and urged a complete rooting out of the feudal system on the assumption that this had not yet been accomplished. All through the spring season, partial corrections had been made in these early estimates. On the basis of careful reclassification whole villages once thought to be Class III had been upgraded, Party branches suspected of infiltration by class enemies had been declared sound, and expropriated middle peasants had been promised repayment; but still the emphasis had remained on the fanshen of the poor-and-hired. Here at last was a major speech warning of the opposite extreme, warning against leftism as a dominant trend, a general line, a whole system of thought.

  As soon as these ideas appeared in print, high-level conferences were called in every Border Region to consider their implications. The Party leaders of Lucheng County, Secretaries Ch’en and Chang, went eastward to attend a gathering of cadres at the subregional level where evaluation and discussion lasted for several days. As soon as the local men returned home they made a spot survey of actual conditions in Lucheng County, called in the team leaders from all the “basic villages” for individual talks, listened to the parallel problems that these men faced in village after village, and decided that there was indeed something radically wrong with the way in which they were leading the county. They immediately sent out a call for a second County Conference.

  On June 17th, Ch’i Yun and I joined the rest of the Long Bow work team as they trekked for the second time to Lucheng County town. Only Team Leader Hou was missing from the group. He had taken home leave to tend his crops. The second conference was almost twice the size of its predecessor. Not only had all cadres from the “basic villages” been called, but also all full-time cadres from the ordinary, or “production villages.”

  Once the cadres were seated before him in the great temple at Party headquarters, Secretary Ch’en wasted no time in preliminary remarks. He adjusted his spectacles, picked up his notes, waited a few seconds for his audience to quiet down, and then plunged right to the heart of the matter. “We have called this meeting as a turning point in our work. I want you to pay close attention because many wrong ideas have been shared by all of us and many wrong actions have been taken.”

  All those who were literate sat with pens poised, ready to record what was to come, while the illiterate majority looked straight at Secretary Ch’en, intent on catching his every word and noting his every gesture.

  “Actual conditions in this county are quite different from the estimate that we made at the Lu Family Settlement meeting last February,” announced Ch’en. “Then we thought the land reform in our county was far from complete. After intensive surveys in 11 basic villages, we now know that this estimate was wrong. The feudal system in our county has already been fundamentally abolished. The poor peasants have, in the main, fanshened.”

  These words created a stir in the room. People spoke to each other in excited whispers. “I told you that three weeks ago.” “The peasants all say there is no ‘oil.’” “Well, why didn’t we see it before?”

  The commotion was so great that Secretary Ch’en had to interrupt his speech. When the cadres finally noticed his disapproving glance, they held their tongues and he continued, quoting facts and figures.

  “In the whole of Lucheng County there are 120,000 people farming 100,000 acres of land. The average holding is approximately four fifths of an acre per person. The fanshened poor peasants already hold just under an acre per person, the middle p
easants slightly less, while the landlords and rich peasants, having been expropriated, hold only one sixth of an acre apiece.*

  “In Tungwu Village, after the third classification, it was found that only four families lacked land. In Chia Village the whole population was short only three acres. Three families of landlords and rich peasants have not been completely expropriated, but these three families between them hold but two acres of surplus land. Such figures prove that the land reform work in Lucheng County has already been all but completely fulfilled.

  “That is not to say that there is no problem of land,” Secretary Ch’en continued. “On the contrary, there are still many problems in regard to land holding, but most of them are just the opposite in nature from what we estimated in the past.”

  Many heads bent forward as ears strained to catch exactly what he meant by this.

  “The attack has been overdone! Many middle peasants have been injured economically and many commercial and business establishments have been harmed. When it comes to rich peasants and landlords, ‘sweep-the-floor-out-the-door’ tactics have been used. But families cannot be driven from house and home forever. Neither can commerce and industry thrive when private business is attacked. Yet in Lucheng and in South Portal, outside the gate, there remain only three or four private businesses. A shop owner in Yellow Mill has been forced to surrender his house. This case is not exceptional.

  “We have neglected Article 16 of the Draft Agrarian Law. And what does Article 16 say? It says: ‘In places where the land has already been distributed before the promulgation of the law, and provided that the peasants do not demand redistribution, the land need not be redistributed.’

  “Is not our county exactly such a place?” asked the Secretary, looking from cadre to cadre in the audience. Everywhere he looked, heads nodded in agreement.

  Having summarized the situation in regard to the land, Secretary Ch’en turned his attention to the condition within the village Party branches. In the past the County Committee had estimated that the class composition of the Party branches was not pure. At the Lu Family Settlement meeting, Ch’en himself had reported that 40 percent of the Communists in the county were landlords or rich peasants. Now, with the results of the Party purification movement in 11 “basic villages” available, it was obvious that although the branches had many shortcomings, poor class composition was not one of them.