The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (14 page)

People rebelled throughout the south. In Hunan, villagers took to the streets to demonstrate against the new regime. In a single incident in Nanxian county, a rice-growing region near Dongting Lake, more than 2,000 farmers clashed with soldiers. Shots were fired and thirteen people were killed or injured. The following day a crowd of 10,000 irate farmers made their way to the county seat. Their demands: ‘Stop the Procurements, Oppose the Transportation of Grain’. There were a dozen similar incidents in the province. A secret report described assaults against granaries in Hubei as ‘ceaseless’. In Xiaogan a crowd of 2,000 people dragged away 7.5 tonnes of grain from a state warehouse. In Xishui, a county with a long revolutionary history, a crowd forcibly removed food from freight boats. In Enshi, a mass demonstration against procurements resulted in four dead. In Wuli, just outside Wuchang, the local people rebelled against the physical abuse they had to endure from the local cadres as well as ‘random beatings and random killings’ by members of the peasant association. By March 1950, dozens of ‘relatively large rebellions of a mass character’ – to use the wooden language of the party – had rocked Hubei. In Guizhou some of the incidents involved over 100,000 insurgents, ready to fight the communist party to the death.
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Unrest and rebellion also flared like tiny flash fires in parts of the north where land reform had not yet been carried out. In many parts of Shaanxi, where the dusty, dewless land was cracking from the summer drought, farmers armed with hoes started to hide their wheat for fear of state procurements.
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Further inland along the ancient silk road, in Yongdeng county, Gansu, people banded together to resist state procurements. In one village, 200 farmers surrounded the grain collectors and beat them. In Minle county they were tied up.
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In east China, some forty rebellions rocked the countryside in the first three months of 1950 alone. Most occurred in poor regions, and the target was always the same: famished villagers turned against the party and stormed the granaries. The rebels removed 3,000 tonnes of grain, leaving over 120 soldiers and cadres dead. As a report noted, local officials ‘are completely unconcerned about the hardships of the masses, and even randomly beat, arrest and kill people in the course of their work, producing antagonisms with the masses’.
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The party blamed ‘landlords’ – as well as spies and saboteurs – for standing behind the rebellions. By expropriating large numbers of them and redistributing their assets, the communists hoped to persuade the villagers to rally behind them.
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But as the second round of land reform unfolded, a new problem appeared: the further south the communists went, the less land there was. A world of difference existed between the sparsely populated plains of Manchuria and the crowded villages south of the Yangzi. As there was not enough land to be distributed to the poor, the pledge not to interfere with ‘rich peasants’ was soon broken. In Sichuan it was enough for a farmer actually to make a profit in order to be classified as a ‘landlord’. Families who owned a pot of white sugar or a buffalo to plough the fields were denounced so that their meagre possessions could be confiscated. Even north of the Yangzi, where parts of the countryside had already gone through a gruelling process of land distribution in 1947–8, villagers were subjected to a second round of terror. In Shandong many ordinary farmers were randomly arrested and beaten, regardless of whether or not they met the definition of a ‘landlord’. In Pingyi county, where only a quarter of those locked up were landowners, a local party official proclaimed that ‘from now on we should kill somebody at every one of our meetings’. Indiscriminate beatings at village rallies were ‘common practice’: ‘some of the cadres drop hints that encourage beatings, others do not interfere when beatings take place’. In Teng county, as one party secretary reported, people were topped with dunce’s caps, forced to kneel and then beaten or stripped and exposed to the cold in the winter. Some had their hair pulled out, a few their ears bitten off. In the village of Xigangshan villagers urinated on their victims.
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Parts of the countryside descended into a spiral of violence because so many ordinary farmers who were classified as ‘landlords’ or ‘rich peasants’ started to retaliate. In a village in Guizhou, seventy-year-old Zhang Baoshan was mistakenly classified as a landlord. Party activists dragged the man to a rally where he was beaten, tortured and drenched in freezing water. Infuriated, two of his sons went on a rampage, hacking several of their enemies to death. Unable to return home, the sons hid deep in the mountains where they were soon hunted down and lynched by a search party. A frenzied mob cut off their tongues and genitals. Their bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into a river. The entire family of Zhang Baoshan, more than twenty people, were beaten before being sent to prison. An investigation later showed that eight people in the village lost their lives as a consequence of random labelling of the poor as ‘landlords’.
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Sometimes whole villages turned against the communists. In Lanfeng county, Henan, on average one farmer was killed every three days in April 1950. Some of the victims were ordinary people on their way to market. They were set upon by cadres who beat them with the butts of their rifles. After one woman had been shot in the stomach and died amid screaming children and frightened villagers, the crowd turned, overpowering the perpetrators and seizing their weapons.
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More subtle forms of resistance appeared everywhere. Despite all the efforts of the work teams in charge of land reform – the painstaking collection of information on the local power structure, the carefully choreographed meetings to ‘speak bitterness’, the endless propaganda, the village rallies backed up by the power of local militias – ordinary people had qualms about persecuting and stealing from their erstwhile neighbours. Many knew how to keep their emotions in check, locking them away deep inside, to be exhibited only on appropriate occasions. They learned how to perform as a way to survive. Esther Cheo, who joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1949, saw how people could switch their emotions on and off during village meetings: ‘I noticed one woman shout and scream at the landlord. As soon as her part was played out, she returned to the crowd, took her baby who had been peacefully suckling at another woman’s breast, and continued feeding it at her own, while she calmly watched the next participant in the struggle meeting.’ Those who shouted the loudest sometimes supported the victims, for instance by furtively returning the spoils that had accrued to them. In Xushui, a young party activist called Sun handed back a bucket of corn to a former employer who had always treated him like a family member. Sun was stripped of his party membership.
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As work teams in charge of land reform fanned out south of the Yangzi, they encountered powerful clans that were far more diverse and integrated than the rhetoric of class warfare implied. Entire villages shared the same surname. In Hubei, some of the leaders paraded at denunciation meetings managed to turn the assembled throng against the cadres. In Fang county the farmers unanimously agreed not to dispossess any of those targeted as landlords. In Hunan some wealthy farmers slaughtered their cattle, sold the land and bartered their tools before land reform had even started. In Xiangtan one man pulled down his house to sell the bricks. In two counties some 27,000 fir trees on private land were chopped down before they could be redistributed. In Zhejiang, local leaders harangued the villagers against land reform, warning them that ‘year after year the taxes will increase’: a few predicted that ‘it will be hard to avoid famine in future’.
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In Sichuan a few landowners took control of the situation, carefully studying the land-reform law, assembling the villagers and staging fake ‘struggle sessions’ before the work teams had even arrived. They determined their own class status, ascribing the label of ‘landlord’ to a mere handful of people. Some voluntarily distributed parts of their land. Others deposited, bartered or gifted their property to other villagers, making sure that people actually sided with them. In some cases entire villages stood firmly behind those denounced as ‘landlords’. And when all else failed, some would rather torch their houses than hand them over to the mob. This happened all over Sichuan.
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The party interpreted popular resistance as clear evidence that the dark powers of feudalism were still holding sway over the countryside. The less support it found among the villagers, the louder its call for violence. Landlords and counter-revolutionaries, party officials claimed, aided and abetted from abroad, poisoned the minds of the villagers with religion, infiltrated peasant associations with their henchmen and corrupted party cadres with offers of cash and women. Nothing short of terror would overcome the forces of reaction, as ever more murder was mandated. On 21 April 1951, provincial head Li Jingquan ordered that 6,000 landlords, several thousand of them lingering in prison, be paraded and executed in west Sichuan in order to give land reform greater momentum: ‘In land reform we should arrest those who lie low, link up with foreign powers and commit counter-revolutionary crimes: we should kill half of them, or about four thousand, in addition to some one or two thousand currently in gaol who still need to be executed. If we follow this plan we will execute five to six thousand of them, which corresponds roughly to the principle of killing a small batch in land reform.’ His report was endorsed in Chongqing by his superior Deng Xiaoping, the man in charge of the south-west of China.
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Other regions were just as tough, although precise figures are hard to come by. In Luotian, a Hubei county covered in chestnut forests, as many as one out of every 330 villagers was shot. In a mere twenty days in May 1951, over 170 people were executed as ‘landlords’. First some of the victims were asked to surrender 500 kilos of grain. Then they were asked for a tonne. Then they were shot. Many of the targets were not wealthy at all, but ‘the masses did not dare to speak out’ in denunciation rallies.
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Mao himself set the tone. In the Pearl River delta in Guangdong, one of the wealthiest and most commercialised regions in China, many landowners had extensive contacts with entrepreneurs from Hong Kong. Large plots of land were also bought by overseas Chinese who planned to come home for retirement. And all along the coast there were villages dominated by wealthy emigrants, their modern houses and foreign manners standing in stark contrast to some of the more traditional hamlets inland. Across the province more than 6 million people were family dependants of overseas Chinese: many women, children and elderly people relied on remittances. In total one-fifth of the land belonged to emigrants living abroad. Fang Fang, the party boss in Guangdong, was aware of their economic importance and tried to protect some of their land from expropriation. In 1952 Mao sent Tao Zhu to take over from Fang Fang. Tao Zhu had made his name in ruthlessly suppressing all opposition in Guangxi, killing tens of thousands of people accused of being ‘landlords’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Some compared him to a tank, crushing all enemies in his path.

Fang was soon summoned by Mao for an audience in Beijing, accused of ‘localism’, purged and never heard of again. In May 1952 alone, over 6,000 cadres in Guangdong were demoted or persecuted for having followed an ‘incorrect party line’. Across the province, ferocious beatings and random killings of landowners and wealthy farmers became the norm. ‘Every Village Bleeds, Every Household Fights’ was the slogan. People were trussed up, hung from beams, buried up to the neck and torched. In Huiyang county, just across the border from Hong Kong, close to 200 people were killed. Further north in Chaozhou, over 700 committed suicide. In a matter of three months, more than 4,000 people lost their lives, either beaten to death or hounded to their graves by constant persecution.
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Poverty became the norm. The relative prosperity that some families had achieved through generations of hard work evaporated overnight. People who had managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps thanks to a combination of initiative, diligence and perseverance became outcasts. Expertise and experience in the village were derided; success became a mark of the exploiter. Poor peasants and poor workers were extolled instead. They were born red. ‘To be Poor is Glorious,’ the party proclaimed. But the villagers not only took pride in their poverty, they became fearful of wealth. In Shandong many refused to do more than the strict minimum: ‘the party likes the poor, and the poorer the better’. None other than Kang Sheng, put in charge of the province in 1949, reported that productivity in the areas where land distribution had been carried out was in free fall, as villagers believed that it was ‘glorious to be poor’. Across the north of China, agricultural output plummeted by a third. Civil war caused massive destruction and population displacement, but as some of the cadres themselves put it rather bluntly, ‘land reform has destroyed production’.
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A host of different disincentives reinforced each other, creating a vicious circle of impoverishment. The rights to the land were vague, and villagers never felt quite secure in their ownership of confiscated property. Above all, in ferocious campaigns fuelled by fear, greed and jealousy, nobody wanted to rise above the others. The plots themselves were small and often dispersed across the countryside. Many of the beneficiaries lacked the knowledge, utensils, seeds and fertiliser to cultivate the land. The link between the village and the market was disrupted. Shops and enterprises run by landowners were ransacked or went bankrupt. Subsidiary occupations once pursued by villagers were viewed as ‘capitalist’ activities. In Sichuan, one of the country’s wealthiest provinces, about two-thirds of the land distributed to the poor produced less than before.
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