Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  To support this conclusion Secretary Ch’en pointed out that in the Party branches of the basic villages not one landlord or rich peasant had been found. The Long Bow team thought they had found one rich peasant, the woman Comrade Chao Ch’uan-e, but according to the new class standards she was only a middle peasant. On the basis of class origin the Party branches had proven to be sound and solid. Consolidation, not the wholesale reorganization that had been envisioned in February, was what the Party needed, said Ch’en. The teams should cure the disease and save the patient with a policy of criticism and education. Love, protect, educate, remold and unite.—these should be the five basic principles used in dealing with Communists and cadres.

  Judging by the pattern of land distribution and by the class composition of the village Party branches, it was obvious that previous estimates of the situation in Lucheng County had been wrong, and these estimates had led to much trouble and confusion. Why had such erroneous estimates been made? What made such big mistakes possible?

  Secretary Ch’en suggested that the judgment of the cadres had been colored by a faulty outlook that expressed itself in two main ways—as an “ultra-poor-peasant line” and as “absolute equalitarianism.”

  The ultra-poor-peasant line said, in effect, that the poor peasants and hired laborers should conquer the country and rule the country. “Base everything on the interests of the poor peasants; carry out the demands of the poor peasants.” Such notions had penetrated every field of work. “Yet,” said Secretary Ch’en, “even to speak of such a ‘line’ is wrong, unreal. A Communist can have none but a proletarian line, the class line of the working class, and that class line is: depend on the poor peasants; unite with the middle peasants; and join up with all anti-feudal elements to eradicate the feudal system. That is the whole of it. No one part can be omitted. This statement determines the line, the policy, and the tactics of the land reform movement. Wherever the land reform movement has been completed and the majority of the peasants have already become middle peasants, then the main task becomes production, and it is absurd to rely in the main on the poor peasants, for by that time the majority of the peasants are no longer poor peasants but have become new-middle-peasants. Land reform policy cannot be applied mechanically to post-land reform conditions.”

  Ch’i Yun nudged me. “That’s just what we have been doing,” she said.

  Now that Ch’en spelled it out, it seemed obvious to me too.

  “Absolute equalitarianism is also basically wrong,” said the Secretary. “It is because the cadres judge their work from an equalitarian point of view that they end up thinking the land reform has not been completed. As soon as this point of view is disregarded it is easy to see that the work of land division has not only been completed, but that it has been carried too far. With the same objective conditions, with the same set of facts, two different conclusions can be arrived at because we start with two different points of view. The hills that loom so high in the evening appear to be low mounds at noon. Because many of us had the wrong point of view in the past, many middle peasants and many new-middle-peasants became uneasy, and unhealthy tendencies appeared. In Long Bow poor peasants knelt in the dust to find medicine and prayed to mud gods for cures.

  “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao Tse-tung all oppose absolute equalitarianism,” said Secretary Ch’en emphatically. “At Yehtao in December Secretary Po said, ‘Under present conditions we can never have such a thing.’ Even if we were to push it through today, in the future a thousand happenings in the village would reverse the situation. What if today we gave every peasant an exactly equal share? This peasant gets sick and spends his money, that man neglects his crops, this peasant’s wife gives birth to a baby, that man is lazy, this man works hard. Can equality continue? Only under Communism, when the land belongs to the country as a whole, and abundance is the order of the day, can equality be realized. The best we can do now is to use what patching material we have for holes. We cannot go out looking for material to fill all the holes that exist, for to do that would mean to injure the middle peasants and destroy their prosperity.

  “In the light of these facts,” said Secretary Ch’en, “our point of view toward fanshen and the abolition of feudalism has not been correct. Our goal is to abolish the system, to do away with the landlords as a class. We oppose the feudal system primarily because it hinders production. But, under the influence of wrong ideas, we have taken as our standard for successful struggle the wrong thing, namely ‘sweep-the-floor-out-the-door’ and we have applied it to individuals, not to the class. Our standard for judging fanshen was also wrong. We took absolute equality as our banner. We did not look to the further interests of the people and of the Revolution. We tried only to be charitable. We wanted to give everyone what they needed. We tried to be God.”

  The last phrase initiated a second great commotion in the room. Sitting in the midst of the audience Ch’i Yun and I could hear remarks coming from all sides. “We tried to do the impossible.” “No wonder it was hard to get the peasants to meet!” “The people saw through it right away.”

  Some of the comments indicated relief. “So that’s what’s the matter!” “I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t figure it out.”

  Others showed a measure of disgust, even annoyance. “Well, who led the way, I’d like to know?” “Our policy changes every few days. Who knows where we are going? We are. like a mouse in a box.”

  “As a result of these movements,” Ch’en said, “the landlords and rich peasants were treated much too harshly. Many prosperous families were wiped out altogether or driven away. Worst of all, the middle peasants were badly frightened. Some offered to give up land because they were afraid. Others made contact with counter-revolutionaries. The Left tendency has been with us so long that many peasants and cadres sincerely believe that Left is better than Right. They resent doing things according to policy and believe that this limits them, clips their wings, so to speak. And even though we have suffered this serious tendency for a long time we have not examined it thoroughly, not to mention wiping it out. Instead we have created a theory to justify it and have built a whole system of thought—the poor peasant line—around it. It is time to correct this and do away with it altogether.”

  The Secretary then attacked the idea that Left was better than Right. “In reality, both Left and Right are wrong. To carry on work based on the real situation is neither Left nor Right and is the only correct way. History has proved to us that whenever victory draws near it is easy to commit leftist, adventurist mistakes. And now victory is drawing near. We no longer treat Chiang Kai-shek by washing his face to expose him. Our slogan is to kick him down. Now everyone knows that victory will be ours within three to five years. Now is exactly the time to be made dizzy by success and to commit the mistake of Left adventurism.

  “Once we get over the idea that Left is better than Right, what practical steps should be taken to correct past errors?” asked Ch’en. “That is relatively easy. Our work during the next period must be to repay all middle peasants wrongly expropriated, to return all commercial and industrial property to its original owners, to resettle landlord and rich peasant families wrongly driven from their homes. Only in this way can the people of every village be set at ease and the foundation laid for high morale in production. The revival and development of production—that is our main work from now on.”

  Having covered the main question before the conference, Secretary Ch’en wound up his morning-long talk with a survey of some minor problems. He discussed the recruiting drive, the problem of aid to soldiers’ families, the question of rear service, and finally what was closest to the hearts of the district cadres themselves, the problem of community aid to full-time political workers. Whereas only a few weeks earlier word had come down that the cadres would have to solve their own home production problems, now Secretary Ch’en announced a new policy that completely reversed this. “From now on, aid to cadres’ families is to be th
e same as aid to soldiers’ families,” he said. “The directive has already been sent to the villages. All administrative units have been asked to put it into effect immediately.”

  This last announcement was greeted with excited cheers. Secretary Ch’en could not have said anything better calculated to set the cadres at ease and raise their morale. By itself, however, this promise of aid was not enough to overcome the shock of the political analysis which had been presented that day.

  56

  Who Is to Blame?

  Within the revolutionary ranks, it is necessary to make a clear distinction between right and wrong, between achievements and shortcomings, and to make clear which of the two is primary and which is secondary. For instance, do the achievements amount to 30 percent or 70 percent of the whole? It will not do either to understate or to overstate …. It would be entirely wrong to describe work in which the achievements are primary as work in which the mistakes are primary.

  Mao Tse-tung

  SECRETARY CH’EN’S speech jarred all the cadres loose from their familiar ideological moorings and set them to examining and questioning on a scale hitherto unknown. Never had these rubble-strewn yards and temples-turned-dormitory seen such dedicated, concerted debate and argument. The work teams first met where they would; then they met together with the other teams and production cadres from their respective districts in assigned courtyards. Finally they met en masse in the great central hall where the dragons fighting each other across the ridgepole aptly symbolized the mental struggle going on below. Such meetings, alternating in the order described, continued for several days.

  None questioned the basic conclusions stated by Secretary Ch’en. As soon as he reported that the feudal land system had basically been abolished and that the fanshen of the poor-and-hired peasants had virtually been completed, everyone recognized the fact. The cadres’ months of investigation, study and mass mobilization in the 11 “basic villages” left no room for doubt on that score. There simply were no great accumulations of wealth left, whether in the hands of landlords, rich peasants, corrupt cadres, or public institutions; nor was there any significant treasure stashed away in secret k’angs, grave mounds, or any other place. All of these prospective sources had been pursued to the end and each had proved a mirage. Team after team reported that most local gentry had been expropriated and that landholdings had already been distributed among the former landless and land poor.

  Secretary Ch’en’s second conclusion that expropriation had gone too far was not questioned either. The painstaking classification proceedings had demonstrated that many families of landlord and rich peasant status had been cleaned out completely. In too many cases family heads had been killed. Dependents had either run away or else stayed on to face extreme poverty and discrimination. Worse still, the classification revealed that many middle peasants had been similarly treated. No one who had taken part in the investigation of the preceding months could doubt that serious excesses marred the land reform movement in Lucheng County and that they must be rectified.

  As for the Party branches, not only did they not contain a single member of landlord or rich peasant origin, but they also turned out to be composed primarily of the least selfish and the most forward-looking people in the villages. This had been demonstrated by the day-to-day work. A report on this question by the team leader from Chin Village was typical: “When I first got there, I treated the five big cadres as oppressors. But they turned out to be the most honest and active people. Though they had made serious mistakes, they were willing to examine their pasts and have now corrected their outlook and behavior. The more I work with them, the more respect I have for them.”

  These conclusions might well have lifted a heavy burden from the minds and hearts of all those who attended the conference. They demonstrated, after all, that the main problem of the agrarian revolution had been solved. But at first this tremendous news was overshadowed in the cadres’ consciousness by the fact that they had all gone so far astray in attacking nonexistent problems and imaginary enemies. The argument and soul-searching that went on in the county seat after Secretary Ch’en’s speech flowed from a sense of shock at having lost the way, astonishment at the harm that had been done, and confusion as to where the blame lay.

  How could it have happened?

  In the face of mountains of evidence, how could the Party have so misjudged the true situation? How could it have set off on the wrong road to begin with and then continued to march down it for so long? That such a serious mistake was possible, that it had been made by county leaders, and even Border Region leaders, that the newspaper of the Central Committee had backed it up, had itself promoted the “poor-peasant line”—this shook the confidence of the district cadres. Up to that point, from all that they had seen and learned in the course of years of hard fighting and organizing, the Communist Party under Mao’s leadership seemed infallible, or nearly so. Out of the disaster of the Anti-Japanese War and throughout the early postwar years, the Party had led them from victory to victory. They had come to depend upon it like children on their mother. The sudden realization that their approach had been misdirected left them temporarily helpless. If the Party itself could get lost, as it seemed to have done, what was there to cling to?

  Ch’en’s report unleashed a veritable river of pent-up grievances and complaints. At first the cadres tended to blame everyone but themselves. Many participants attacked the peasants. They were backward, they were selfish, they asked only how much millet was in it for them. Even those who had already fanshened hid their quilts and pretended to be poor. After the suspension of the old cadres they put on their “democracy caps.” They did exactly as they pleased. They refused to come to meetings; they even refused rear service, and neither the work team cadres nor anybody else had the power to discipline them. It was this, they argued, that had led the cadres into Left policies.

  “If you aren’t Left there is no way out,” said Little Ch’uer with an air of gloomy certainty. “In order to complete our work we have to violate policy.”

  Others blamed all the trouble on the county leaders and on the Lu Family Settlement meeting where these leaders had prepared the district men ideologically for the campaign. At Lu Family Settlement the county secretaries had made a wrong estimate and then developed it into a system of thought.

  “It is true,” said a team worker from Yellow Mill, “that we learned many valuable lessons at Lu Family Settlement. One of them was that graft and corruption cannot be tolerated. None of us will ever misappropriate anything again. That lesson we learned very well; but the spirit of oppression against Party members we also learned there. Whenever anyone said anything in self-defense, the rest stood up and said, ‘What is your thought, what is your thought?’ Was this our fault? I say we cannot bear the whole burden on our backs.”

  “The higher cadres must take responsibility for such mistakes,” said the team leader from Ke Shu. “They must be brave enough to listen to criticism from below.”

  ***********

  Little Li, now the acting leader of the Long Bow team, exchanged sharp words with the genial Assistant County Secretary Chang when the latter came to discuss Long Bow in detail with Li’s group.

  Chang tried to demonstrate the sectarian trend of the cadres’ work by bringing up the way in which they had handled the gate. The extremism that had driven certain comrades to the verge of suicide before the first gate had only been compounded at the second, he said.

  Little Li disagreed emphatically.

  “Why couldn’t Wen-te pass the gate then?” asked Chang.

  “He wouldn’t talk,” said Little Li with feeling.

  “Why wouldn’t he talk?”

  “Because he was arrested and held in the county jail and felt he had been wronged.”

  “That was our mistake, not his,” said Secretary Chang. “We should not treat him harshly on that account.”

  “How can you say that?” interrupted Ch’i Yun, chiming in on Li’s
side. “He did many bad things. He himself had a wrong attitude.

  “Just as Secretary Ch’en said, the Communist Party is not pure, particularly in working style, and this must be corrected. If we deny the need to correct and educate Wen-te, then we deny that the Party makes mistakes.”

  “We were very patient with him,” exclaimed Little Li. “The masses met all day to help him, but he didn’t want to speak frankly. After the meeting we talked to him for hours and asked the people to be patient and meet with him again. But it was all no good, no good at all.”

  “You must remember that Wen-te did not get all the education that the others received,” said Chang. “They had a whole month of preparation while he was in jail. Also, we here in the county were not clear when we set him free. At that time we still thought that the attack on Little Ch’uer was inspired by the Communist Party in Long Bow, and so Wen-te was afraid. He thought responsibility might still be placed on his shoulders.”

  “But you don’t understand the way in which Wen-te and Yu-lai threatened people,” replied Little Li, so agitated he could sit still no longer. He stood up and strode back and forth across the temple yard. As he walked he described in detail the situation as it had been in the village in the weeks before the second gate. He pointed out that unless Wen-te had been harshly ostracized the people would never have dared to speak. But Secretary Chang still did not seem to understand. Again he criticized the way in which the whole matter had been handled.