Fanshen

by Hinton, William ; Magdoff, Fred;

  * The language spoken in Southern Shansi is not pure Mandarin but a dialect. In addition to pronouncing most words in their own local way, Shansi peasants use many words that do not appear in any Chinese dictionary. Even interpreters well versed in Chinese dialects often find themselves at a loss to decipher the details of conversations between peasants. Thus, though I had a working knowledge of Chinese, it would have been impossible for me to follow the meetings without help.

  * Liberated Areas was the name originally given to those extensive tracts of countryside that were liberated from Japanese control by the Eighth Route Army and its supporting militia during the years 1937-1945. Since liberation usually began in mountainous regions straddling the lines between provinces, these areas were also called Border Regions. During the Civil War they expanded greatly.

  * The bombing of these dykes was described to me by Phillip Thomford of Pennsylvania, an agricultural officer of UNRRA, who witnessed it. It was also documented by the Chinese Liberated Areas Relief Administration in the report of their work issued in Shanghai in 1948.

  * The Chinese word for cadre is kanpu, which means “backbone personnel.” It has no satisfactory English equivalent, even though it is commonly translated by the French word “cadre.” Since “cadre,” as ordinarily used in English, means a group- of trained persons, it is not exactly suitable for referring to individual members of such a group. Yet the Chinese word is used both for the group and for the individual.

  In this book the word “cadre” is used to designate any person who plays a full- or part-time leading role in any area of political activity whether it be the government, the Communist Party, or the Peasants’ Association. It is also used to describe technical personnel in industry, agriculture, education, etc., who are employed by the government.

  * Since the county line runs along the southern edge of the hill, Long Bow is not in Changchih County but in the County of Lucheng, the next walled town to the north. The counties of China have traditionally been divided into several districts, or ch’u, for administrative purposes. The southwestern district of Lucheng County was called the Fifth District. If Long Bow had any distinction at all it was as the seat of the Fifth District administration.

  * The acres mentioned here and throughout the text of the book are English acres, each being equivalent to six Chinese mou.

  * Many scholars use the word feudal to describe only the vassal-lord, serf-and-manor system characteristic of medieval Europe. In this book the word is used in a broader sense to describe a society in which a ruling class, basing its power on the private ownership of and control over land, lived off a share of the produce extracted from that land by a class of laboring people. The latter, though neither slaves nor serfs, were still so closely bound to the land which they cultivated as to make them little better than serfs of the landed proprietors. It was a society, furthermore, in which these two classes constituted the main social forces and determined the contours of development.

  * “Those who possess a great deal of land, who do not themselves labor but depend entirely on exploiting the peasants through rent and usury, sustaining themselves without toiling—these are the landlords. Those who own large amounts of land, plow animals and farm implements, who themselves take part in labor although at the same time they exploit the hired labor of peasants—these are the rich peasants. Those who have land, plow animals, and farm implements, who labor themselves and do not exploit others, or do so only slightly—these are the middle peasants. Those who have only a small amount of land, farm implements and plow animals, who labor on their own land but at the same time have to sell a part of their labor power—these are the poor peasants. Those who have no land, plow animals, or farm implements and who must sell their labor power—these are the hired laborers.” (From Jen Pi-shih, Several Problems Regarding Land Reform, 1948. Not published in English.)

  * For a description of this society and its operations, see Chapter 5.

  * A catty is equal to half a kilogram or 1.1 English pounds.

  ** The silver dollars mentioned in this book are worth about 50 cents in U.S. currency.

  * Fei Hsiao-tung and Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947, p. 55.

  * A section of a Chinese house is from six to nine feet wide and may or may not be marked off by a partition. It is determined by the distance between the main rafters which hold up the roof.

  * The word gentry is used here to describe landlords, rich peasants, and persons who made a career of serving them and their interests (such as bailiffs, public officials, village scholars) whose standard of living was comparable to that of the wealthy and came from the same source—the exploitation of the peasants.

  * J. Loessing Buck in his Chinese Farm Economy estimated that the interest on capital invested in land averaged only 8.4 percent annually. Usurious loans yielded 30 percent a month and more. See R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1932, p. 67.

  * A k’ang is a raised platform made of mud bricks that usually takes up one whole side of a room in a Chinese house. It is so constructed that the flue from the cooking fire runs under it and warms it. In the winter the women live and work on the k’ang during the day. The whole family sleeps on it at night. When the k’ang is in a room where no cooking is done, a fire for the purpose of warming the k’ang can be built under it.

  * Poor peasant children, especially girls, were bought and raised as slaves. At 13 to 15 years of age, they were sold as brides. Young girls were also hired as servants.

  * A string of cash was made up of copper coins, each with a hole in the center so that it could be strung on a string. There were 100 coins to a string. Nine strings could buy one silver dollar.

  * “There is even reason to believe that, with the increased pressure on the land caused by the growth of the population, the condition of the rural population, in some parts of China, may actually be worse than it was two centuries ago.” (R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, p. 71.)

  * Ibid., p. 77. See also Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, New York: Modern Library, 1944, p. 83.

  * According to this method of fortune-telling, one’s fate could be determined by a study of the two written ideographs standing for zodiacal signs which ruled respectively the year, month, day, and hour of one’s birth.

  * Labor service consisted of work on government transport, public projects such as roads and dykes, and gathering and transporting materials for these purposes. Finding food and lodging for dignitaries traveling on public business was also handled under “public affairs.”

  * Unlike the peasants of Mexico, Spain, Italy, and Russia, the Chinese, at least in my experience, were very tender with their animals.

  * Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, New York: International Publishers, 1954, Vol. I, pp. 105-115.

  * Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China, New York: Macmillan Co., 1929, p. 279.

  ** Ibid., pp. 309-310.

  * Chanoine Leclerq, La Vie du Père Lebbe, as quoted by Simone de Beauvoir, The Long March, Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1958, pp. 400-401.

  ** Reid, Sources of Anti-Foreign Disturbances in China, as quoted by Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China, p. 55.

  † For a Chinese interpretation of the role played by the Empress Dowager, see Hu Sheng, Imperialism and Chinese Politics, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1955, p. 141.

  * When in 1937 the Japanese invaders advanced southward to attack Shantung, Han Fu-ch’u, the Kuomintang warlord who ruled Shantung, retreated all the way to Honan without fighting a battle. He was executed by Chiang Kai-shek for treason as was another general, Li Fu-ying. Liu Chih, a warlord commanding Chiang Kai-shek’s personal troops in Honan, was responsible for the defense of the Paoting area in Central Hopei. He also fled. For other instances, see Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962.

  * In the fla
t country the “underground” was not simply a figure of speech. There actually were large areas where the peasants connected villages to each other with tunnels dug through the deep silt soil. When the enemy occupied one village, people escaped through these tunnels to the next. Dry wells, horses’ troughs, sleeping platforms—every ruse and camouflage that a people fighting for its life could devise—were used to hide the exits. In 1948, when I walked on foot through this region, the remains of these tunnels were still very much in evidence. Many people I talked to had fought in them.

  * In the first flush of victory in North China, the Japanese looted everything in sight and slaughtered peasant and landlord alike, thereby driving many landlords into the ranks of the resisters. But later on the Japanese found common ground with many gentry and worked with and through them to maintain traditional “law and order.”

  * Israel Epstein, The Unfinished Revolution in China, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1947, p. 317.

  * For a description of how the Communist Party arose in China and how it came to be in a position to fill vacuums in North China, see Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China.

  * See Michael Lindsay, American Magazine, March 31 and April 14, 1944.

  * The New Fourth Army, created out of units left behind when the main forces of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army pulled out on the Long March to Yenan, filtered behind the Japanese lines on both sides of the Yangtze River and created Liberated Areas there along much the same lines as the Areas in the North. The South China Anti-Japanese Brigade, organized by Communists in Kwangtung, established bases on Hainan Island and in the mountains near Canton.

  ** Before the Japanese surrender in 1945, another four men followed these two so that Long Bow Village could boast altogether six Eighth Routers, a fair record for a village not only occupied but also fortified.

  * Most Taihang young men were married before they were 18.

  * United States Relations with China, Washington, D. C.: Department of State, August, 1949, p. 312.

  * For various estimates of the proportion of Japanese and puppet troops tied down by the Eighth Route Army see: Israel Epstein, The Unfinished Revolution in China, p. 317; Liao Kai-lung, From Yenan to Peking (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1954) p. 9; Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 29; Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, p. 500.

  ** By the time this campaign was concluded, over a third of China’s population and a quarter of her territory were in Communist-led areas.

  * Ho Ying-ch’in’s order read as follows:

  A. As illegally armed units are without warrant disarming Japanese troops, your command must take effective defensive measures pending the arrival of the Nationalist Army designated by Generalissimo Chiang and Commander-in-Chief Ho to accept your surrender.

  B. As bandit units are attacking Kaifeng, Tientsin, Chengchow, and other cities—special attention must be paid to the above-mentioned facts and Japanese troops already designated must, in accordance with our memorandum No. 4, be swiftly concentrated in these cities, as well as other places, for effective defense. If these places fall into the hands of bandit units, your troops will be held responsible for their recovery. (See Liao Kai-lung, From Yenan to Peking, p. 10.)

  ** On July 29, 1946, U.S. troops in Tientsin, in coordination with Chiang Kai-shek units, assaulted the town of Anping, Hsiangho County, Hopei Province. On June 16, 1946, U.S. troops at Tangshan, Hopei Province, raided Sungchiaying and other places; in July they raided Sanho Village, Luanhsien County, and Hsihonan Village, Changli County, both near Tangshan. On March 1, 1947, U.S. troops made a military reconnaissance of positions at Hohsipao, in Northeast China. Of numerous attacks in Eastern Shantung the most widely known were one by U.S. warships on Langnuankou and Hsiali Island, Mouping County, on August 28, 1947, and one by U.S. forces in conjunction with Kuomintang troops on Wanglintao Village, north of Chino County on December 25, 1947. (See Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 439.)

  * Lao shih literally translated means “honest,” but in Chinese it means more than that; it means genuine, without guile, steady, hardworking, easily imposed upon perhaps, but formidable when aroused.

  * Inherited property was no less suspect than property bought with incomes acquired through rent and interest since there would have been no property to inherit had not the previous generations “peeled and pared” the landless and the land poor of their day.

  * This quote is from a 1927 report written by Mao Tse-tung. The phenomenon which he predicted was delayed for two decades. Nevertheless it took place much as he had foreseen and, historically speaking, within a short time.

  * Grass characters are ideographs written free-style by hand as contrasted to ideographs blocked out in square form and printed.

  * The use of the word “comrade” as a general form of address was universal in all the Liberated Areas during the Civil War period. Copied after the custom of the Communist Party, which later spread to the Red Army, it eventually came into common usage throughout revolutionary society.

  * The phrase “capital holders,” used by T’ien-ming to designate capitalists, came from some of the basic Marxist documents which he had studied. Among them was most probably the Communist Manifesto, in which the fundamental contradiction between workers and capitalists was explained. T’ien-ming was here thinking in general terms, not merely of Long Bow or Lucheng County.

  * Liu Shao-ch’i, How to Be a Good Communist, New York, New Century Publishers, 1952, pp. 31-33.

  ** Ibid., p. 37.

  * In judging Man-hsi’s motives it should be kept in mind that at the time he joined the Communist Party there was absolutely no guarantee that the Revolution would be victorious. He did not hesitate to take a position in the front ranks at a time when the real opportunists were waiting quietly at home to see which way the tides of war would flow in the country as a whole. In other words, opportunism, like everything else, is relative, and a man who saw glory in being a Communist in China in 1946 chose a very hard road.

  * Liu Shao-ch’i, How to Be a Good Communist, pp. 37-38.

  **Liu Shao-ch’i, On The Party, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1954. p. 18.

  † Ibid., pp. 159-160.

  * In all the Liberated Areas a pass system had been in effect from the beginning. During the Anti-Japanese War it served to prevent communication between collaborators within the area and especially any liaison between them and the Japanese or puppet forces on the outside. When the Civil War became imminent it served the same purpose in regard to the Nationalist sympathizers. To be caught without a pass was a serious offense.

  * United States Relations with China, Washington, D. C: Department of State, 1949, p. 940.

  ** Ibid., p. 313.

  * David and Isabel Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959, p. 180. It should be stressed again and again that the target of the land reform movement in all its phases was the “feudal” property of the “feudal” classes—i.e., the land, livestock, implements and personal property of the landlords in the countryside. Capitalist forms of property were specifically exempted. Investments in industry and commerce, and even capitalist-type farms, were considered progressive under the conditions then existing in China; hence, stringent bans on the confiscation of industrial and commercial holdings of landlords were written into all land reform laws and regulations.

  * A poor peasant in Ten Mile Inn, a village on the eastern slope of the Taihang range, pointedly asked: “How could any man in our village claim that his family had been [bare] poor for three generations? If a man is poor, then his son can’t afford to marry; and if his son can’t marry, there can’t be a third generation.” (See David and Isabel Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village, p. 133.

  * A sheng is 028 bushels, or a little less than a quart.

  * The system, which gradually emerged out of post-war chaos, was completed in September 1948. In 1946 and 1947, the features outlined here were applied one by one.

  * The
se were wartime rates. After 1950, rates were cut to between 12 and 15 percent.

  * Li Hsun-ta was a famous labor hero of the Yenan region.