The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

by Dikötter, Frank

  Twenty years later, in a homage to the Chairman who now controlled vast tracts of the countryside, Zhou Libo published a novel on land reform, The Hurricane. The author, an editor of the literary supplement of the Liberation Daily in Yan’an, had been transferred in 1946 to Manchuria to join a work team tasked with galvanising the countryside. The team was one of the first to follow a directive Mao had issued in May 1946, as the peace talks between the nationalists and the communists started to unravel. So far the communists had followed a moderate policy of rent reduction, as they were bound in a popular front with the nationalists in a common war against Japan. Now the May directive called for all-out class struggle in the countryside. All the land, Mao ordered, should be confiscated from traitors, tyrants, bandits and landlords and distributed to the poor peasants. The revolutionary potential of the countryside was to be unleashed, sweeping away the old order and repelling the nationalists.

  Zhou Libo’s team was sent to Yuanbao, a town near the banks of the Sungari River some 130 kilometres east of Harbin. The Hurricane purported to describe what happened next. Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the peasants of Yuanbao seized power from the local tyrants and abolished thousands of years of feudal land ownership. In public trials where depraved landlords were made to confess their sins, the irate masses raised sticks and beat the villains to death. Soon their revolutionary zeal took them to other villages, sweeping away all remnants of feudalism like a hurricane. The novel, an instant hit, was used as a textbook for other work teams in charge of land reform, and won the much coveted Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951.4

  But in reality something very different happened in Yuanbao. After the defeat of Japan at the end of the Second World War, most villagers in Manchuria were conservative and regarded the nationalists as their legitimate government. Few knew anything about communism. ‘When we went there, at the time the villagers didn’t know what we communists were like or what the Eighth Army was. They had no idea,’ remembered Han Hui, who was a twenty-two-year-old cadre at the time. In Yuanbao only a few ruffians and vagrants were interested in the communists, and they were the ones who became party activists.

  One of the first tasks of the work team was to divide the villagers into five classes, closely mirroring what had been done in the Soviet Union: ‘landlords’, ‘rich peasants’, ‘middle peasants’, ‘poor peasants’ and ‘labourers’.5 This took place in endless meetings in the evening, as the work teams pored over the life stories of each and every villager with information gathered from newly recruited activists. The challenge was that none of these artificial class distinctions actually corresponded to the social landscape of the village, where most farmers often lived in roughly similar conditions. In Yuanbao there were no landlords. Han Laoliu, who would become the archetypical villain in Zhou Libo’s novel, had been elected head of the local peasant association by the villagers. His wife was a music teacher who sewed clothes in the evening for the schoolchildren. He had no land, but collected rent on behalf of the owner who lived in the county seat or administrative centre. Like the others, he ate coarse grain and had too few clothes to keep him warm in the winter. His greatest claim to wealth was two small windowpanes built into his earth-walled house covered with a layer of straw. ‘In reality Han Laoliu had nothing worthwhile,’ remembered one villager. ‘It’s not quite like what’s written in that book.’

  The next task was to get those identified as ‘poor peasants’ and ‘labourers’ to turn hardship into hatred. This, too, took weeks of persistence and persuasion, as the work team had to convince the ‘poor’ that the ‘rich’ were behind their every misfortune, having exploited their labour since time immemorial. In so-called ‘speak bitterness’ meetings, participants were encouraged to tap into a reservoir of grievances. Some vented genuine frustrations that had long been bottled up; others were coerced into inventing accusations against their richer neighbours. Greed became a powerful tool in whipping up class hatred, as members of the work team calculated the monetary equivalent of past misdeeds, urging the poorer villagers to demand compensation.

  Weeks of indoctrination also produced true believers who no longer needed prodding along from the work team. Some people were transformed into revolutionary zealots, ready to break the bonds of family and friendship for the cause. Drawn to an ideology that promised liberation, they relished becoming the champions of the exploited, forging a better world full of hope and light. They no longer felt themselves mere farmers plodding along in a forlorn village, at the mercy of the seasons, but instead believed they were part of something new that endowed their lives with meaning. As one missionary caught up in land reform noted, ‘They knew their parts well and spoke sharply the proper party phrase at the proper time with the proper emphasis.’6

  After months of patient work, the communists managed to turn the poor against the village leaders. A once closely knit community was polarised into two extremes. The communists armed the poor, sometimes with guns, more often with pikes, sticks and hoes. The victims were denounced as ‘landlords’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘traitors’, rounded up and held in cowsheds. Armed militia sealed off the village; nobody was allowed to leave. Everybody had to wear a strip of cloth identifying their class background. The landlords had a white strip, rich peasants a pink one while middle peasants wore yellow. The poor proudly displayed red.

  One by one the class enemies were dragged out on to a stage where they were denounced by the crowd, assembled in their hundreds, screaming for blood, demanding that accounts be settled in an atmosphere charged with hatred. Victims were mercilessly denounced, mocked, humiliated, beaten and killed in these ‘struggle sessions’. Soon an orgy of violence engulfed the village, as people lived in fear of reprisals from private militias led by former village leaders who had managed to escape.

  Many of the victims were beaten to death and some shot, but in many cases they were first tortured in order to make them reveal the location of their assets – real or imagined. There was no shortage of volunteers. Liu Fude remembered: ‘There were people who only needed to be told to hit somebody and they would do so. For instance Madame Ding, she was that kind of person.’ Madame Ding, who worked for Zhou Libo, claimed: ‘I did exactly as he told me to do. This is what Zhou Libo would say: “That Sun Liangba can be taken to task,” that’s what he would say. So I would beat him.’ One woman who had been beaten unconscious was about to be buried in a coffin outside the village, when somebody discovered that she was still breathing. A leader ordered that she be dragged out of her coffin and executed. Some of those labelled ‘rich peasants’ tried to hide in the fields, but they froze to death. In one village alone, out of a population of roughly 700, seventy-three people were killed.

  The pact between the party and the poor was sealed in blood as all the land and assets of the victims were distributed to the crowd. The land was paced, measured and distributed to the poor, the name of the beneficiary carved on to a wooden signboard marking the boundary of each plot. Grain was loaded into baskets, furniture lugged off, pigs herded away. Even pots and jars were placed in rattan hampers, making it look like moving day. ‘So what did I get?’ Liu Yongqing pondered more than fifty years after the looting, his skin leathery and tanned, his hair sparse and grey. ‘I got a jar. A water jar.’ Lü Kesheng, a man with an open face topped by a dense crop of white hair, got less: ‘I got a horse. A horse leg, not a whole horse. We [slaughtered and] divided a horse between four families.’ Zhang Xiangling, a young cadre at the time, also got a horse leg. ‘My grandfather, grandmother, my great-grandfather, several generations never had a horse’s leg. Now we had one! That was just incredible!’ Even rags were shared out between the villagers – always according to class divisions, the first choice going to the ‘poor peasants’ and the ‘labourers’.

  Once everything in the village had been mopped up, down to the last handful of grain, the poor got into their carts in the middle of the night and visited other villages, hoping that they might find n
ew struggle targets. ‘You get what you find’ was the motto. Soon hundreds of carts converged on the county seat, each one crammed with farmers armed with banners, pitchforks and red-tasselled spears. ‘The rats in the city are even fatter than the pigs in the village.’ City people had money. In the county as a whole, 21,000 out of a population of 118,000 were targeted. To ensure that the supporters of the old regime would never come back, many young men joined the army. Their families received extra land and special protection. Soon the soldiers started to besiege Changchun.7

  China had a hidden asset, one it jealously protected from the prying eyes of strangers in small, family-based villages all across the country. It was the land. Nobody knew exactly how much of it there was, and every government had failed fully to measure, assess and tax it. More often than not the land tax was based on a rough approximation carried out decades if not centuries earlier. Outsiders were often eyed with suspicion, and all the villagers had an incentive to keep some land hidden from the view of the state. No tax, for instance, was generally paid on uncultivated land, such as grave plots, sandy soil, wooded areas or land high up in the hills. As the population expanded and new crops appeared that were suited to soils previously left unploughed (for example the potato and the peanut after the eighteenth century), more and more untaxed land was cultivated without the knowledge of the tax assessors. On top of this, large plots were left unregistered: nobody quite knew the extent of what was called ‘black land’, and a nationwide survey with vast inputs of manpower would have been needed to uncover it.8

  Land reform pitted villagers against each other, and as they denounced one another in ferocious meetings, the actual holdings in the countryside finally came to light. Properties of the rich were expropriated and their land parcelled out to the poor. Ground rent was abolished. But now the party knew exactly how much land existed. It determined how much each strip could produce and demanded that each household hand over a designated amount of grain. As one observer noted about Manchuria: ‘Heavy grain requisitions to support the Communists’ armies of 3 to 4 million men have in many areas not only stripped the countryside of food surpluses but have eaten into subsistence stocks.’ On top of tax, foodstuffs including soybeans, corn, rice and vegetable oils were traded with the Soviet Union for industrial equipment, motor vehicles, oil and manufactured supplies, increasing the overall food deficit. Hundreds of thousands of people starved to death in Manchuria as a result.9

  Village life, on the eve of the communist conquest, was extraordinarily diverse. In the north, where tightly packed villages with houses made from sun-dried mud bricks were strewn across the dry and dusty plains, wheat was the staple. Most farmers owned the land. Further inland along the ancient silk road, set among bare hills and steep ravines on a loess plateau, tens of millions of people lived in caves hewn out of brittle earth. These people of the dust carved out tiny terraces on steep slopes of eroding loess, planting the soil with potatoes, maize and millet. Further south, along the fertile Yangzi valley, rich deposits of silt allowed farmers to produce abundant crops of rice. White plastered houses with black-tiled roofs in closely knit clusters stood among the rice paddies with their raised banks, dykes and embankments.

  Even more varied were the communities in the south, from coastal fishing hamlets to aboriginal villages deep in the mountains. Scattered along the coast were whole villages with ostentatious mansions built by returned emigrants. They were directly inspired by foreign architecture, except for the windows, which tended to be narrow and placed high up near the roof as a concession to local geomancy – and as a precaution against theft. The individual character of these houses and their owners stood in contrast to the fortified cities erected by the Hakka, who spoke their own language and built enormous, tower-like, circular edifices which harboured hundreds of halls, storehouses and bedrooms accommodating dozens of families. The villagers often shared the same surname and lived together for support and protection. All over the subtropical south, powerful lineages controlled the land and built extensive villages with ancestral halls, schools, granaries and community temples. The most basic social distinction – as in any other village in the world – was between locals and outsiders.

  Nowhere in this profusion of social diversity could anybody called a ‘landlord’ (dizhu) be found. The term was imported from Japan in the late nineteenth century and given its modern formulation by Mao Zedong. It had no meaning for most people in the countryside, who referred to some of their more fortunate neighbours as caizhu, an appellation that implied prosperity yet carried no derogatory undertones. There were also plenty of less respectful labels such as ‘big belly’ (daduzi). As S. T. Tung, publisher of the Chinese Farmer with a doctoral degree in agriculture from Cornell University, put it at the time, ‘China has no “landlord class”.’ There is little question that absent landowners abused their power, while malpractices were rife in the countryside, but the country did not have a dominant class of junkers or squires, and nothing equivalent to serfdom.10

  Nor was there anything even vaguely approximating what the communists referred to as ‘feudalism’ (fengjian) in the countryside. For centuries the land had been bought and sold through sophisticated contracts that were upheld in magistrates’ courts. In some cases contracts even drew a distinction between the topsoil and the subsoil. The land was freely alienable everywhere. Tenancy rights were also defined contractually, although the vast bulk of the land was in the hands of small owners. Trusts were set up by corporate entities to hold land, for instance temples, schools and, especially in the south, clans sharing a surname and organised around a common ancestor.

  The most systematic, reliable and extensive sample survey of farmers was carried out from 1929 to 1933 by a University of Nanking team led by John L. Buck. They surveyed in detail the entire population of 168 villages distributed over twenty-two provinces, collecting immense amounts of detailed information on the lives of over 16,000 farms. Land Utilization in China scrupulously noted the many regional differences and varied forms of employment in the countryside, but the overall image which emerged from the study denied the existence of vast inequalities. Over half of all farmers were owners, many were part-owners, and fewer than 6 per cent were tenants. Most farms were relatively small, and very few were more than twice the average size. Tenants were not generally much poorer than owners, since only fertile land could be rented out. In the south, for instance, tenants on irrigated rice land were better off than owners in the north, even more so since two grain crops could often be grown a year. A majority of farmers supplemented their incomes with handicrafts and other forms of non-agricultural employment which produced roughly a sixth of their incomes. One-third of all farmers surveyed were unaware of any adverse factors in agriculture. None blamed expensive credit, exploitative merchants or land tenure.11

  But this was before the war. A decade of fighting between nationalists, communists and the Japanese did not substantially change the ownership of the land, but certainly increased violence in the countryside. In Xushui, some hundred kilometres south of Beijing in the dry and dusty countryside of north China, where the fields were covered in sorghum, growing two metres high with purple tassels of grain, the Japanese and the communists were as fierce as each other. Sun Nainai, healthy and talkative when she was interviewed at the age of eighty-nine, explained how the villagers were caught between both camps. The Japanese captured her father-in-law as a guerrilla fighter and gave him a choice: work for the police in his village or be buried alive. He took the second option because he knew that if he agreed to work for the Japanese, the communists would bury his entire family alive in retribution. In the end his family secured his release by paying an enormous ransom. In normal times village life would have been rife with family feuds and personal wrongs, but farmers in war-torn areas were obliged to make even harder choices between resistance, collaboration and survival.12

  Many people were accused of being traitors. Jack Belden, a journalist sympathetic to the comm
unists, described how a local leader called Mu had collaborated with the Japanese and killed dozens of guerrilla fighters. Just after the war Mu was paraded through the villages where people stood waiting with kitchen knives to cut out his flesh. He was dragged on to a stage to face his accusers, and found everyone in the crowd trying to rush forward at once.

  The cadres did not like the look of things and took Mu out in a field and shot him. They handed his body to his family who covered it with straw sheets. The crowd found out where he was and grabbed the body away from his family, they ripped off the straw sheets and continued to beat him with wooden clubs. One boy with a spear stabbed his corpse eighteen times in succession. ‘You stabbed my father eighteen times,’ he cried, ‘and I will do the same.’ In the end, they tore his head from his body.13

  Land reform cut a bloody swathe through the villages under communist control. Everywhere work teams dug up old grudges, fanned resentment and turned local grievances into class hatred, and everywhere mobs were worked into a frenzy of envy as they appropriated the possessions of traditional village leaders. Yuanbao was one of the first towns where land was traded for blood, but in 1947–8 every village went through a similar ritual: people were divided into classes, the poor worked up into a fever pitch of hatred, victims humiliated, beaten and sometimes killed, and the victors shared the spoils.

  One of the most violent regions was Shanxi, where Kang Sheng presided over a reign of terror. A sinister-looking man with a murky past, Kang had worked closely with the Soviet secret police in eliminating hundreds of Chinese in Moscow during the great purges started by Stalin in 1934. Students disappeared at night, never to be seen again. In 1936 he set up the Office for the Elimination of Counter-Revolutionaries, and a year later Stalin sent him by special plane to Yan’an. He quickly sided with Mao, and used the police methods he had learned in the Soviet Union to oversee security and intelligence. So brutal were his methods that in 1945 he was replaced.14