The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (13 page)

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.
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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.
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Many people were accused of being traitors. Jack Belden, a journalist sympathetic to the communists, 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.
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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.
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Sent to Shanxi to oversee land reform in 1947, he fomented all-out class warfare in the countryside by forcing every villager to take a stand. In a hamlet called Haojiapo, he watched approvingly as the farmers forced landlords to kneel on broken bricks. The victims were then beaten, spat upon and had excrement poured over them. Kang Sheng allowed ‘the masses’ to decide who they did not like, unleashing pent-up frustrations that could target almost anyone. In parts of the region, the search for enemies went so far as to include even farmers classified as ‘middle peasants’, who were arrested, beaten, tortured and then stripped of their property. In some places one out of five people was branded as a ‘landlord’. In Shuo county, nobody dared utter a word when someone was denounced as ‘rich’, because speaking out might lead to a potentially fatal accusation of ‘shielding landlords’. It was enough for one of the poor to point at a farmer and call him a ‘landlord’ for his fate to be sealed. In Xing county alone, over 2,000 people were killed, including 250 elderly and twenty-five children – the latter were called ‘little landlords’.

One of the victims was a man called Niu Youlan. His surname meant ‘ox’, and he had helped the guerrilla fighters with large gifts of grain, cloth and silver. His collaboration did not save him. In September 1947 the sixty-one-year-old man was dragged on to a stage to face 5,000 villagers. An iron wire was driven through his nostrils. Then his son was forced to pull him like an ox, blood streaming down his face. He was branded with a hot iron and died eight days later, locked up in a cave. As Xi Zhongxun reported to Mao Zedong on 19 January 1948, ‘people are drowned in vats of salt water. Some have boiling oil poured over their heads and burn to death.’
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Kang Sheng also directed land reform in other parts of the country. Soon his methods were copied everywhere. In Hebei, Liu Shaoqi reported that ‘when the masses fight, they beat, torture and kill people, and right now it is out of control’. People were buried alive, dismembered, shot, throttled to death. Sometimes the bodies of the victims were hung from trees and chopped up.
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Zhang Mingyuan, in charge of land reform in eastern Hebei, witnessed how in one village forty-eight people were beaten to death in less than thirty minutes. But in many cases the violence was carefully orchestrated, as the poor tallied their votes to decide who should die in village assemblies. When names were called out people voted by raising their hands or by casting a soybean.
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One reason why the violence spread was that villagers literally got away with murder. After each struggle session the crowd divided up the material possessions of the victims. Greed and lust for power pushed party activists to define the individuals to be targeted in increasingly vague ways. But fear of retribution also fuelled violence. Deng Xiaoping described his experience of land reform in Anhui:

In one place in western Anhui the masses hated several landlords and demanded that they be killed, so we followed their wishes and killed them. After they had been killed, the masses feared reprisals from the relatives of the victims, so they drew up an even longer list of names, saying that if they could also be killed everything would be fine. So again we followed their wishes and killed those people. After they had been killed, the masses thought that even more people would seek revenge, so again they came up with a list of names. And again we killed according to their wishes. We kept on killing, and the masses kept on feeling more and more insecure, taking fright and fleeing. In the end we killed two hundred people, and all the work we did in twelve villages was ruined.
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By the beginning of 1948, when the pressure abated, some 160 million people were under communist control. On paper the party determined that at least 10 per cent of the population were ‘landlords’ or ‘rich peasants’, but on the ground as many as 20 and sometimes even 30 per cent of the villagers were persecuted. The statistical evidence is woefully inadequate, but by a rough approximation between 500,000 and a million people were killed or driven to suicide.

In March 1951 a letter was published in the
People’s Daily
. Several farmers from Hunan had written to ask about land reform. ‘Why doesn’t Chairman Mao just print some banknotes, buy the land from the landlords and then give us our share?’
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It was a good question. That was, after all, what was happening in the island fortress of arch-villain Chiang Kai-shek. Between 1949 and 1953, large landowners in Taiwan were compensated with commodity certificates and stocks in state-owned industries for the land that was redistributed among small farmers. This approach impoverished some wealthy villagers, but others used their compensation to start commercial and industrial enterprises. Not a drop of blood was shed. The experience was based on Korea and Japan, where land reform was successfully carried out under General Douglas MacArthur between 1945 and 1950. Not a drop of blood was shed there either.
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Land reform in the north of mainland China had been carried out in the midst of the civil war. But in the south, where the campaign unfolded from June 1950 to October 1952, it could have been peaceful, as the nationalists had fled to Taiwan. Even Stalin advised Mao to pursue a less destructive approach towards the countryside. Having presided over a ruthless war against the kulaks in the Soviet Union at the height of collectivisation in the 1930s, he was in a good position to offer a word of counsel. He had launched a pitiless campaign of dekulakisation in 1928, resulting in thousands of people being executed and close to 2 million being deported to labour colonies in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. But now Stalin stressed the need to limit the struggle to landlords only and leave the economy of the rich peasants intact in order to speed up China’s recovery after years of warfare. His views were wired to Beijing in February 1950. A few months later the Land Reform Law was published, promising a less divisive policy.
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It was not to be. Promises on paper were a world apart from the violence on the ground. Mao wanted the traditional village leaders overthrown so that nothing would stand between the people and the party. As a Chinese saying has it, ‘The poor depend on the rich, the rich depend on Heaven.’ Now all were to become dependent on the party. And unlike the Soviet Union, where the security organs had liquidated the kulaks, Mao wanted the farmers to do the job themselves. The moral values and social bonds of reciprocity that had long regulated village life were to be destroyed by pitting a majority against a minority. Only by implicating the people in murder could they become permanently linked to the party. Nobody was to stand on the sidelines. Everybody was to have blood on their hands through participation in mass rallies and denunciation meetings. Even before the law was published, Mao warned the assembled leaders on 6 June 1950 to prepare for a battle to the death: ‘Land reform in a population of over 300 million people is a vicious war. It is more arduous, more complex, more troublesome than crossing the Yangzi, because our troops are 260 million peasant soldiers. This is a war for land reform, this is the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords. It is a battle to the death.’
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The need to break traditional village bonds was particularly acute in the south, where a series of popular rebellions directly challenged the communist party. There were many reasons why villagers objected to their new rulers, but the main one had to do with grain requisitions. These were carried out by the military, and often brutally. In parts of Guangdong 22 to 30 per cent of all the grain was requisitioned, sometimes as much as 60 per cent, forcing people to sell everything they had, from their cattle down to the seed necessary to plant the next crop. Throughout the south-west, the region under Deng Xiaoping’s purview, ruthless house searches left their owners with just enough food to last for three days. In Sichuan, farmers were beaten, hung up and had smoke blown into their eyes or alcohol forced down their noses when they refused to hand over their crop. A bulletin reserved for the eyes of the top leadership noted that pregnant women were ‘frequently’ beaten so badly that they miscarried. Whole families swallowed poison in an attempt to find in death an escape from the tax inspectors. In a bizarre incident in Rongxian county, four women and a man were stripped naked and forced to run with kerosene lamps attached between their legs as an incentive to hand over more food. As a result, 2.9 million tonnes of grain were collected in tax from south-west China in 1950, although the state spent 4.3 million tonnes, most of it on an army of 1.7 million troops. Traditionally, the region had produced a grain surplus. Now it was bankrupt.
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