IMAGE 3. Map visualizing the number of Chinese citizens mobilized for land reform work teams in the six provinces of the South Central region. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 99.
ARRIVING
Work Teams
The rumors? Well, Old Gu had heard all of them. Rumors, after all, had become just about the only sure thing left in Nuanshui, the North China village that Old Gu called home. It was true, he knew, that the Communists had already found ways to mobilize villagers, giving many of his Nuanshui neighbors hope for even greater changes. But with the Civil War raging on without end, might not the armies of the Nationalists return? If they did, anyone who had aided the Communists would be in mortal danger. And what to make of the Communists’ promise to liberate the masses from the feudal forces that exploited the poor peasant brothers of Nuanshui? Old Gu had heard through the village grapevine that the party was sending a work team to bring revolution to the village. Who exactly would they target? Old Gu was what the Communists called a middle peasant. He was by no means wealthy, but he at least owned the farmlands that he tilled year after year. The work team was expected to organize an attack on Nuanshui’s landlords, redistributing their fields and belongings to the poor. Would they stop there? Old Gu and his fellow peasants supported the Communists, but the fear of what their revolution meant in practice created a sense of trepidation that permeated the village. Of the many rumors that quietly wormed their way through Nuanshui, the one that troubled Old Gu the most was the possibility that the land reform work team might not be satisfied with expropriating the village’s landlords. Might they not simply communize (nao gongchan) all property and make everyone poor (naocheng qiongren)?1
Old Gu, the stereotypical wavering character penned by party author Ding Ling, exemplified how the Communists viewed Chinese villages: insular and fearful of outsiders. Ding Ling, however, relied on more than her imagination when she wrote The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, the novel that told the fictional account of rural revolution in Nuanshui. Unsurprising given Mao Zedong’s insistence that party intellectuals accumulate revolutionary practice, Ding Ling had spent months supervising land reform before writing the novel. Working in the party’s Jin-Cha-Ji base area over the course of about five months from 1946 to 1947, she found inspiration in actual events: observing a poorly treated middle peasant directly spurred the creation of Old Gu.2 Ding Ling later defended the authenticity of her novel, noting that having lived with her village friends, she felt obligated to “record their actual situation.”3 As a land reform work team veteran, she also made sure to describe the intellectuals such as herself who traveled to village China to upend the rural order. Work teams, just as much as villagers, were essential to the campaigns. Not long after its publication, China Youth, a journal that counted many future team members as readers, advocated reading Ding Ling for “great inspiration.”4 Ding Ling’s novel was said to reveal much about land reform, including the actual process of carrying out these campaigns in the countryside.5
And so in Sanggan River, the team that Old Gu feared, led by Wen Cai, arrived in due course. Blessed and cursed with the airs of China’s old literati elites, the intellectual was an unlikely patron of rural revolution. Hampered by his bookish tendencies and lacking practical revolutionary experience, the insecure Wen Cai exaggerated his education, claimed connections with high-ranking party artists, and made widely inaccurate theories about books he had never read, all to impress others. These transgressions were in his past, which is to say they occurred before he arrived in Yan’an, then the Communists’ capital. Wen Cai, like the many others who had traveled to base areas to join the revolution, had engaged in round after round of self-examination. This soul searching had encouraged him to follow Mao Zedong’s call to learn directly from the wise peasant masses.6
His impressive learning convinced the cadres running the district government to promote him to leader of his work team. Wen Cai, however, was not ready for the task. In Nuanshui, he struggled to cast off his intellectual airs and fully integrate himself into this new world that stressed revolutionary practice over textual learning. He rightly feared that the other work team members did not respect him, and his lack of revolutionary practice led to problem after problem during his time in Nuanshui. Wen Cai found his lack of authority, firmly rooted in his inexperience in the countryside, increasingly frustrating. After one particularly painful clash with his work team, he fumed silently. He knew that he was a newcomer to rural revolution but refused to believe that their opinions were any more valid than his own. Their meager revolutionary experience, what monumental value did it have? Their experience had not been summarized or elevated into theory. It was simply one-sided and not at all reliable. He could accept that his underlings were closer to the masses. They were, after all, out all day among the people. This was not the same as admitting that they were correct!7
Liberation found Beijing. When the new government put out the call for students to take part in agrarian revolution, Liu Quan, of famed Peking University, rushed to sign up. He was not alone. Looking around the back of the lumbering pickup truck, he could see that all of his fellow work team cadres were also students from Beijing-area colleges. Together they were traveling down to the feudal countryside to bring revolution and emancipation to the peasant masses of Hanjiatuo village. Even Liu recognized the cliché of young revolutionaries singing songs as they traversed the vast plain, the young women of the team dressed in the Russian-style jackets favored by China’s new leaders. It was a scene, Liu privately mused, seemingly taken straight out of one of the Soviet films now popular back in Beijing.8
This scene would also be at home in Ding Ling’s narrative of rural revolution, but Zhang Ailing, the novelist who created Liu Quan, was no party loyalist. Having fled to Hong Kong shortly after the Communists came to power, Zhang found employment with the US Information Service, which promoted American interests overseas. During her three years working for the agency, Zhang, better known in the West as Eileen Chang, mostly translated English literature into Chinese. One of China’s most talented writers, she also found time to use narratives to bitterly attack the new order she had left behind. Love in Redland, the tragic tale of Liu Quan, was written at the bequest of the US Information Service. Zhang even used a plot outline from American agents to help structure her text.9 As a result, the novel is clearly informed by Cold War anti-Communist paranoia and lacks the poetry and nuance of Zhang’s other works. And while Ding Ling’s narration of rural revolution was immensely influential, Love in Redland had little impact. Today the book has largely been forgotten despite the immense fame of its author. Zhang’s tale of land reform, however, cannot be dismissed as an imperialist fantasy. She forcefully insisted that her account of Liu Quan was based on “real people and real events” and would allow readers to “smell some of the authentic fragrance of life.”10 According to recent scholarship, this was not an empty claim: shortly before fleeing to Hong Kong, Zhang herself seems to have spent three to four months in the countryside on a work team. Love in Redland may have been conceived by cold warriors, but it was penned by a deeply perceptive woman who had joined other Shanghai intellectuals in observing and carrying out land reform in northern Jiangsu from late 1950 to early 1951.11
And so while Love in Redland begins in a stereotypical manner, the narrative quickly subverts the work team’s mission. Surveying his comrades as they rambled through the countryside, Liu Quan allowed his eyes to linger on an attractive young woman before reminding himself that he was on an important mission. He would not be distracted. As a low-level cadre, he dared not make a bad impression on China’s new leadership, which frowned on romantic entanglements among its young revolutionaries. The team’s ride to Hanjiatuo was a long one, and as the trip dragged on, songs and laughter were replaced by restless sleep as the truck sped down ramshackle country roads. Excitement returned late that night when the work team finally arrived in Hanjiatuo amid a heavy rainfall, drums sounding as they approached the old village walls. Red lanterns appeared, lighting the way as peasant women and children emerged to greet the team with the yangge folk dances the Communists now promoted in the countryside. Not to be outdone, the young men of the village militia raised spears adorned with white handkerchiefs. As the rain continued to fall, there was no shortage of waving flags or shouted slogans to welcome the team. The time for agrarian revolution had come. Liu had brought with him a set of expectations about rural life, but mere minutes after he arrived in Hanjiatuo, doubts began to emerge. He listened in on a group of villagers expressing their disdain for class struggle. Why, one asked, could they not simply divide the land without struggle?12 Moments later, Liu overheard the chair of the local peasant association confess that the village did not possess even a single large landlord. A neighboring village had a true large landlord, the peasant association chair continued, but local cadres there had simply kept all of his property for themselves.13
A dutiful revolutionary, Liu Quan quickly reported this information to his team leader, Zhang Li. Zhang, a Communist attached to the new government’s Ministry of Culture, would surely know what to do. In response to Liu’s thoughtful concerns, team leader Zhang first explained that a bit of corruption among local cadres was no big deal, and in any case, the work team had to remain focused on the task at hand. And as for those peasants who seemed to be opposed to class struggle, well they were simply backward. “Just how confused their minds are, you have no idea,” Zhang explained. “They only see the profit that is right in front of their eyes and they usually cannot tell good from bad, thinking that enemies of the people are good people. They often vacillate, are often unreliable, and their minds are filled with the belief that things will eventually return to as they were in the old days. They are so timid, that a falling leaf scares them out of their wits.”14 If agrarian revolution was to succeed, the work team would have to take the lead.
The young American radical found himself in the midst of China’s rural revolution, an adventure that would define his life. William Hinton was only in his late twenties when he first arrived in China as a tractor technician for an idealistic United Nations program. Working in Communist-held territory when the program shut down in 1947, he had decided to stay in the base area and accepted a position teaching English at a party-run university. Just as he arrived to take up his post, about half of the faculty and staff abruptly left to join land reform work teams. Decades later, when Hinton finally had the chance to transcribe his experiences into Fanshen, his epic account of rural revolution, he described the excitement of joining a work team: “Young men and women in blue ran back and forth tying up belongings, rolling their quilts into tight bundles, fastening shoulder straps to improvised bedrolls,” singing songs and talking of revolution.15 After watching the soft-spoken historian Fan Wenlan send off the young intellectuals with an appropriately scholarly talk, Hinton felt compelled to join them on their journey to remake the countryside.16 How could teaching English compare with changing the world? Accompanied by Qi Yun, a young woman who served as his guide and interpreter, he made his way to a village within walking distance to the university: Zhang Zhuang, these days much better known by the name he gave the place, Long Bow. Long Bow may in fact be the most famous Chinese village, at least outside China. Because the massive scale of land reform eludes easy textualization, Hinton’s “documentary” of revolution in this single Chinese village has become entrenched as the primary source to consult for a global understanding of Maoist rural revolution. A few years after its publication, Fanshen was already declared a classic, listed as one of the essential fifteen books on China in an essay by a noted China expert in Harvard Magazine.17
The American was an outsider, but with his affable nature and belief in the party’s call to bring Mao’s revolution to rural China, Hinton quickly integrated himself with the work team, which was roughly divided between rural cadres and urban intellectuals. Among these students and teachers, he singled out Professor Xu as being the stereotypical academic, making endless mistakes due to his inability to translate Marxist theory into revolutionary practice. But other intellectuals on the team were adept at their work, especially Cai Jin, whose passage through an arduous 1945 rectification campaign gave him “a new class outlook, a new code of loyalty.”18 Team leader Cai oversaw the creation of a village-wide peasant association and brought the village’s land reform campaign to a successful end. In Hinton’s mind, intellectuals such as Cai Jin were better equipped than peasant cadres for overseeing peasant revolution. These enthusiastic young men and women were the perfect agents of rural revolution:
They plunged into the heart of village affairs with eagerness and enthusiasm, made discovery after discovery about the life of their own country-men, developed new and interesting friendships with people whom they never would have met in a lifetime of academic pursuits, and looked on the hardships involved partly as adventure and partly as steeling for future revolutionary activity, a test they hoped to pass without flinching.19
Peasant cadres, in contrast, were prone to depression and even distraction. One simply decided to ignore land reform after finally affording a wife.20 But not every intellectual was up for the task at hand. Hinton had once met a crazed student, a graduate of Beijing’s Qinghua University, who had been arrested for striking a peasant during land reform. After a failed attempt to flee the base areas, he had been confined to his room and gone insane. As Hinton would later remark, “Here was one young cadre whom the land reform movement had failed to remold. Temporarily, at least, it had crushed him.”21
Hinton and his team had arrived in Long Bow intent on remaking rural life in accordance with Mao’s vision of the revolutionary village. In his estimation, the village had not changed for centuries, seemingly frozen in time.22 True, Long Bow peasants had taken part in violent struggle when they took revenge on local traitors in the immediate aftermath of the war against Japan. Later they had settled accounts with their most hated village landlords. And following the release of the May Fourth Directive, Long Bow’s activists had carried out a brutal land reform campaign with the hopes of fundamentally transforming local society. But the work team, assigned to investigate land reform in Long Bow, assumed that nothing of real significance had been accomplished: peasants had yet to find true liberation, and the forces of counterrevolution lurked behind every corner. And so it was that William Hinton, wearing a bulky wool-lined coat, arrived in Long Bow on a shivering cold March day in 1948.
The work team (gongzuodui) was the primary instrument of agrarian revolution. PLA soldiers armed with Maoist ideology and American weapons won the war against Chiang Kai-shek’s armed forces, but civilians in work teams remade the Chinese countryside according to Mao’s grand vision. The party’s first mass campaigns in the aftermath of Japan’s unexpected surrender focused on mobilizing peasants to take revenge on hated traitors. This initial foray into rural revolution was typically led by county and district cadres; one county leader not far from Long Bow traveled from village to village on horseback to jump-start the campaign.23 Most of these lower-level cadres were of peasant origin, but when the scope of the rural revolution expanded with the release of the May Fourth Directive, the party increasingly staffed rural work teams with intellectuals (zhishifenzi).24 According to Mao, these bookish types were “subjective and individualistic, impractical in their thinking, and irresolute in action.”25 But the party had a long history of relying on China’s educated elite, and many came to the Communists’ capital in Yan’an to join the revolution.26
Despite the fact that Mao Zedong and most other leading Communists were well educated, the party largely disdained its growing numbers of intellectuals. The Communists had inherited a critical view of China’s educated elite from the May Fourth era, and traditional forms of learning were increasingly falling out of fashion in Yan’an.27 In his 1937 “On Practice” lecture, Mao argued, “The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice. Only social practice can be the criterion of truth.”28 Theoretical knowledge was subordinate to and dependent on engaging the social world through practice. Mao’s insistence that the attainment of knowledge was impossible without social practice deprived most educated Chinese of any claim to legitimate knowledge.
Even more troubling for future work team members was the question of political allegiance and the demonstration of loyalty to the new regime. In the parlance of the time, Chinese citizens would have to cultivate a proper class stance. As Liu Shaoqi stressed in his 1939 lecture “How to Be a Good Communist,” class stance could be acquired only through revolutionary practice, not study.29 One could memorize the Marxist canon, but one could not truly side with the masses without personally taking part in revolution. Liu Shaoqi heavily criticized those who believed that the theory and method of Marxist-Leninism could be learned solely through book study, warning that “without a firm proletarian stand and pure proletarian ideals it is impossible for anyone thoroughly to understand or master the science of Marxism-Leninism.”30 In early 1942, a mass study campaign forcefully demanded that intellectuals living in the party’s base areas adopt the political standpoint of the proletariat.31 By the start of the party’s campaigns to implement agrarian revolution, Chinese intellectuals understood that there were few better ways to express their loyalty to the party than by actively siding with the peasantry in class struggle, adding practice to theory.
With the start of the Civil War in 1946, the Communists reaffirmed that intellectuals had a place within their political coalition, even as the party continued to highlight Mao’s dismissive views of the group. In practice, the party’s policies on the educated elite were largely shaped by their ongoing military conflict with the Nationalists: the Communists applauded agitation against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek throughout China while also welcoming the thousands who fled to the base areas.32 Despite huge challenges, China’s educated elite who joined work teams played a pivotal role in bringing Mao’s vision of agrarian revolution to life. Furthermore, through participation in land reform and other mass rural campaigns, these work team members were to be reborn through the fire of revolutionary practice. Just as land reform promised to transform farmers into class-conscious revolutionary peasants, so too were team members to be reborn as they helped implement rural revolution.
Intellectuals joined rural work teams in droves. Of the thirteen team members in David and Isabel Crook’s account of a 1947 campaign in Ten Mile Inn, a small village in North China, for example, ten were intellectuals. And while team leader Lou Lin was a peasant cadre, his southern accent and shy demeanor limited his ability to run the campaign: the team leader worked behind the scenes while intellectuals ran the show. Although all the team members, mostly journalists, took part in visiting and organizing the poor, the Crooks singled out two intellectuals as being particularly skilled campaigners. The first, Geng Xi, was best at communicating difficult ideas to villagers. Using a “simple question-and-answer technique,” Geng expertly explained new concepts and subtly influenced peasant opinion. As a result, the work team selected him to chair the village peasant association.33 Even more impressive was Leng Bing, by trade a reporter but now expertly implementing rural revolution. This included the delicate task of educating local cadres in thirteen days of closed-door meetings, rehabilitating dozens of villagers who had been falsely accused of various political crimes, and eventually reorganizing the party branch.34 Leng’s grasp on the campaign even exceeded that of the team leader; in a significant disagreement over the nature of local cadres, the party judged Leng’s more conciliatory views correct.35
The Communists mobilized educated party members in force following the release of the May Fourth Directive. In the Taihang Mountain base area, the directive led to the July Handan Conference, where the call went out for the mass mobilization of cadres to carry out land to the tiller.36 The PLA’s rapid push into the Northeast created an even greater demand for work team cadres, with the Northeast Bureau calling for a surge (rechao) of cadres to descend on villages.37 Over twelve thousand responded to the call, and for the vast majority, as much as 80 percent, this was their baptism in the fires of rural revolution.38 The Northeast Bureau initially found these urban revolutionaries harboring “ideological errors” and therefore deficient. Work team members, infatuated (milian) with the pleasures of city life, were instructed to discard their leather shoes, don peasant clothes, and go to the countryside.39 With few experienced cadres in the field, work team members were given crash course training sessions with limited reading material, mainly consisting of Mao Zedong’s two 1933 articles on rural class structures. Despite later reports of these cadres collecting a “great harvest” in land reform, their quick training hampered work team efforts. Some teams, largely composed of office workers and young students, made the mistake of moving in with village landlords, and as a result they were blamed for taking pity on their hosts and giving them both newly opened lands and the fruits of struggle. New cadres were also accused of abusing their positions for private gain through corruption and embezzlement.40 Work team members in the Northeast eventually totaled some twenty thousand, but with 40 million living in the region, teams had to rush from village to village, hurrying through land reform in as quickly as a week.41
At the other end of the spectrum was the work team organized by the Central China Bureau under Li Jianzhen and Wang Wen. The bureau work team, active during the first summer of land to the tiller, carried out a “proper” (zhengque) land reform that was popularized as an example for future work team members. Deng Zihui praised Li and Wang, declaring that their experiences perfectly demonstrated the need for land reform and proving that anyone who failed to support the campaigns blocked China’s march to independence, peace, and democracy. Deng lambasted such doubters as the “sinners of the revolution” (geming de zuiren). While he heaped accolades on the team, he also made sure to note how these “outside cadres” relied on respected village cadres who understood local realities.42 With growing land-to-the-tiller experience, base areas continued to organize training conferences for work team members, with thousands of cadres meeting for weeks, or even months, as they prepared for land equalization campaigns. The Yetao training meeting, held in in the heart of the Taihang region, for example, lasted eighty-six days and involved over seventeen hundred cadres.43 During these meetings, party leaders, stressing the importance of class division, again distributed copies of Mao’s two 1933 articles on rural classes. These articles, edited by party central to eliminate references to “leftist” mistakes of giving no land to landlords and low-quality land to rich peasants, would serve as guides for the division of rural classes.44
During training for land equalization campaigns, work teams members were instructed that because previous land-to-the-tiller campaigns had failed, agrarian revolution would have to begin anew. Just as the new land law was released, Nie Rongzhen, a leading commander in North China, told about one thousand cadres that land reform carried out in the aftermath of the May Fourth Directive had been botched by “rightist” errors, leaving class enemies in power and damaging the war effort.45 By the following year, investigations into the results of land reform had resulted in widespread “leftist” deviations, requiring “reexamination” campaigns.46 On February 22, 1948, party central again announced that the results of early attempts at land reform had largely failed and called for new campaigns to correct past mistakes. In some places, land reform had been successful, but in many villages, landlords and rich peasants still had more than average landholdings. Elsewhere, land reform had failed, leaving the forces of feudalism dominant.47 As a result, another army of work teams fanned out through the countryside to repeat the process of land reform anew. With each new round of land reform, the rural experiences of work team members accumulated, ironically creating new problems. In the Northwest, Xi Zhongxun noted that cadres sent down to the countryside were often dogmatic, forcing methods learned in established base areas in newly won territories, too proud to admit that they did not understand shifting local realities.48
Land reform was temporarily sidelined during the height of the Civil War in summer 1948, but as victory neared the following year, party leaders prepared their largest mobilization of work teams. This started with the training of rural cadres and activists. In Hebei, for example, the provincial party oversaw a series of land reform conferences, training thousands of rural cadres and tens of thousands of village activists in 1949. But the massive scale of land reform demanded the active participation of the educated elite living in newly liberated cities. This was partly due to problems with rural cadres; “not a small number” of the cadres educated at party schools in Hebei, for example, refused to take part in land reform outside their home villages. Some of these reluctant cadres had children or elderly parents at home to take care of, but many simply feared that they would be permanently transferred far from home. One such party school cadre noted, “I have three roads, one leads to the hospital, one leads home, the other leads to land reform, and if I do land reform I will most likely end up dead.”49
As the Communists formally came to power in 1949, the new government called students and teachers to join the revolution by taking part in short-course schools, where they were to be inculcated in party ideology, including the need for land reform. In Beijing, China’s educational capital, roughly twelve thousand participated in these programs.50 According to Chen Tiqiang, who held an Oxford PhD and was teaching in the Qinghua Politics Department, a revolutionary study fever broke out following the arrival of Communist power in Beijing. During that year, Chen was one of many who learned to speak about “Marxism-Leninism’s stance, viewpoint, and method.”51 Because study was not enough to prove loyalty to the masses, he and thousands of others would supplement traditional learning with revolutionary practice in the countryside. And it was not just Beijing-area students and teachers who were to be mobilized. The party’s planned offensive on rural society demanded a massive recruitment of work team members for the final and largest rounds of land reform: during summer 1950, some 180,000 were in training to join work teams.52 The following year, Du Runsheng, the Communist leader perhaps most identified with PRC-era land reform, oversaw the mobilization of another 100,000 work team members. These team members, mostly newcomers to rural revolution, would undertake land reform in the massive six-province South Central region, home to 130 million villagers. Beijing, Tianjin, Hankou, provincial assemblies, and democratic parties also sent work teams to take part in Du’s land reform.53 When land reform was finally complete, the leaders of the South Central China region boasted of having mobilized 545,742 work team members.54
During these PRC-era campaigns, only about 10 percent of work team members had experience in established base areas. Students, teachers, and other educated members of society formed the bulk of the work teams.55 Many, especially students, had strong ties to families now considered class enemies. The pages of China Youth were filled with articles addressing the problem of family ties to newly labeled class enemies. The Youth League instructed members to “take a firm stand” and side with the laboring masses in the countryside by “thoroughly and completely implementing land reform.”56
To be sure, PRC-era land reform work teams enjoyed several advantages when compared to the teams that had roamed the countryside dividing the land during the Civil War. The party’s grip over rural China was growing stronger by the day, and preparatory campaigns had identified powerful landlords, redistributed some wealth, and established peasant associations. Despite these advantages, teams typically assumed that feudal power was strong and suspected that peasant organizations were in need of reorganization. Cheng Houzhi, a recent graduate of Qinghua’s Politics Department, thus argued that before land reform, peasants were bereft of political awareness and “lack organization, lack strength, and do not dare to consider landlords as enemies.” While this belief was in line with the land reform narrative’s depiction of Chinese villages as feudal strongholds, teams discovered real challenges. Some local cadres conspired to protect their landlords from outsiders.57 And work teams might encounter danger while in the field: the team sent to Five Mile Bridge in late 1949 had to help organize a militia to fend off two bandit attacks on the village.58
IMAGE 3. Map visualizing the number of Chinese citizens mobilized for land reform work teams in the six provinces of the South Central region. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 99.
Increased mobilization of urban intellectuals for land reform dovetailed perfectly with the party’s effort at thought reform (sixiang gaizao). This ideological campaign, launched in late September 1951, focused on the educated elite and attacked pro-Western views in a renewed attempt to enforce ideological purity. In January of the following year, the Ministry of Education required all Chinese universities and high schools to carry out thought reform among teachers and staff through textual study, confessions, and criticism.59 As a supplement to this study, many educated Chinese, including thousands of teachers and students from China’s top universities, joined land reform work teams. Ma Xulun, minister of education, went as far as to compare land reform to the old imperial exam system that had once served as the pathway to officialdom for the literati elite. He told students and teachers, “The test for the ‘number one scholar’ happened once every three years, but land reform is difficult to meet in one thousand years.”60 Yang Rengeng, a Peking University professor, used his experience on a land reform work team to push his students to follow in his footsteps: “When I give my classes a report on my impression of land reform, I emphasize that peasants are waiting for their help.”61 Preparing urban citizens to carry out land reform, the party published a flood of materials on the campaigns, ensuring that the final and largest rounds of land reform were carried out by teams well versed in the narrative of peasant emancipation through fierce class struggle. Future team members were explicitly instructed to read the land reform novels of Ding Ling and Zhou Libo as part of their training. Potential work team members also flocked to land reform exhibits where they saw visual narratives of the campaigns: images of evil landlords, revolutionary struggle, and liberated peasants. But once drafted into work teams, would they be able to make Mao’s vision of the countryside a reality?
IMAGE 4. Students at Zhonghua University in Wuchang prepare to bring Mao’s revolution to the countryside. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 98.
What work teams found when they arrived in the countryside was widespread suspicion. Rumors swirled, casting doubt on the very nature of land reform. In the Northeast, one rumor went, work teams had massacred landlords and tenants alike so that there would be enough land for the survivors. Another rumor held that the Communists, having racked up a huge debt to the Soviet Union during their many years of fighting the Nationalists, would confiscate the grain that peasants harvested from their newly obtained fields. The most spectacular threat must have been the possibility of a renewed world war, but much more menacing was the idea that class struggle would inevitably engulf the entire village community.62 With rumors still questioning the party’s true intentions, inexperienced urban work team members faced a daunting task, especially when the expanding scope of land reform stretched experienced revolutionaries too thin. In Changshou County on the outskirts of Chongqing, for example, one district had only two experienced cadres overseeing work teams staffed by recently recruited students. With only ten days of study before being sent to the countryside, these students had difficulty establishing peasant associations and educating local leaders. As a result, landlords sent their underlings, colloquially known as running dogs (zou gou) and adopted sons (gan erzi), to turn villagers against the work team. According to one running dog, “Those government folk are all outsiders, relying on them and doing things for them is no good, and after all we are all neighbors.”63
The situation in nearby Hechuan was even worse. There, urban work team members were deemed in need of “education, help, and control” if they had any hope of working with villagers. Team leaders were advised to keep a close eye on their charges and “not allow them to make irresponsible remarks.” The advice was wise, given the shocking things visiting team members had said to Hechuan locals. One told a rich peasant that “not touching the land you farm yourselves is too kind, if you don’t speak truthfully with us you will be struggled right alongside the landlords.” One work team, misunderstanding the party’s policy of relying on poor peasants and hired hands while uniting with middle peasants so that all could obtain liberation, instead created this slogan: “Poor peasants and hired hands find liberation (fanshen), while the middle peasants help.” And as expected, some work team members were said to have an improper class stance, which led to confusion during the campaigns. One team, for example, held a meeting for landlords and announced that in the past, peasants had been “too left” and that the team now believed that “landlords are willing to be enlightened.” Emboldened, village landlords praised the work team and claimed hardships that rightfully belonged to the poor. Or as it was framed in the new rhetoric of land reform, these crafty landlords “spoke the peasants’ bitter water (kushui).”64 The task of mobilizing the poor overwhelmed some work teams. One team in Guangdong had to rely on an enlightened member of the gentry to help them reach the poor. This team was heavily criticized, as was a team that used a gun to force Hunan peasants to speak bitterness.65
Dispatched throughout a vast and diverse countryside, work teams formed the army that implemented Mao’s vision of rural revolution. Yet intellectuals writing about their experiences would typically downplay their own importance in carrying out these campaigns, choosing instead to emphasize how they had been transformed by engaging in revolutionary practice. Working within the limited discursive space available under party rule, intellectuals maintained that this transformation was necessary because “intellectuals” were a problematic social group with suspect class origins and a legacy of book learning. For these educated elites, real change could be accomplished only by securing a proper class stance through revolutionary practice. By becoming one with the peasantry, working with rural cadres, and engaging in class struggle against landlords, intellectuals declared themselves changed. Yet by insisting on the transformative power of observing and participating in agrarian revolution, these reports would ironically help essentialize “intellectuals” along the lines suggested by the party: as suspect members of society who, left to their own devices, would be a reactionary force.
Feng Youlan, China’s preeminent expert on philosophy, had a typical approach to the problem of class loyalty, clearly identifying himself as not of the landlord class but still admitting that “the emotion that I felt for the landlord class in my youth still lurked in my heart.”66 Education was no cure for these emotions. Qinghua’s Chen Zhenzhou, a specialist in composition and rhetoric, had imbibed the revolutionary education that swept through Chinese universities during the early days of the PRC, but wrote of still harboring uncertain class loyalties. Chen understood the lessons of his revolutionary courses, which taught the critical importance of standing on the side of the masses, but emotions were impervious to theory. He admitted “always considering things from the perspective of my family” and not from the perspective of the masses.67 Feng Kexi, an academic involved in the Democratic League, a political party that had once seemed to offer an alternative to the Communists and the Nationalists, noted just how contaminating the culture of the class enemy had been for those hoping to transform themselves through rural revolution: “Regardless of being a landlord or not, by living in a feudal traditional culture, our ideology, emotions, and consciousness were all jumbled up. Because of this, we thought: most landlords are bad, but some are good.”68 Or as professor of sociology Yuan Fang wrote, during their initial visit to the countryside to help carry out land reform, he and other intellectuals still had “their original class characteristics, such as pitying landlords and viewing problems abstractly.”69
As Yuan Fang’s assessment suggests, suspect class loyalties were only half of the problem. First, just as Mao had postulated, intellectuals admitted to thinking of issues and approaching problems in an abstract and not sufficiently practical manner. Sun Zhizhong, then finishing his graduate work at Qinghua, noted how he and other “bookish intellectuals” at first had difficulty in implementing land reform, while Dang Qiaoxin, who took part in land reform in the Chongqing area, only hated landlords in an abstract manner.70 Chen Tiqiang, who held an Oxford PhD and was then teaching in the Qinghua Politics Department, argued that the study of Confucian philosophy encouraged intellectuals to feel sympathy for the landlord class, which intellectuals mistakenly saw as worthy of pity.71
Besides their humanistic, idealistic, and reformist tendencies, intellectuals also held themselves accountable for hubris and denying the authority of those who now seemed destined to lead society. Wang Xuan, who held a Cornell PhD and was teaching international law at Peking University, noted that he had to “cast off the stinky airs of an intellectual” before he could engage in land reform work.72 Dang Qiaoxin started his land reform report with much stronger language, admitting that he had trouble accepting a new social position below rural area cadres, whom he playfully derided as country bumpkins (tubaozi): “Why does the Communist Party always say that urban petty bourgeois intellectuals are like this or like that, always discussing our shortcomings? Perhaps it is because they fear that ‘country bumpkins’ cannot lead us, so they first want to beat out our bluster?”73
Suffering from suspect class loyalties and the problematic ways of thinking, intellectuals such as Dang Qiaoxin were in need of change, a process that started with study. But intellectuals on party work teams would follow Mao’s understanding of knowledge and insist that while theoretical study was important, traditional learning was no substitute for revolutionary practice. Critically, in his report on land reform, Feng Youlan argued that by uniting with the peasant masses in land reform, his theoretical understanding of Marxist theory became a true understanding of class exploitation. Feng thus stressed the transformative effects of engaging in revolutionary practice during land reform. While studying Marxist theory had not been enough to change him, Feng argued that participating in land reform led him to identify with the peasantry rather than his landlord family.74 According to Feng, class stance could only be obtained through revolutionary practice and thus could not be “faked.” Or as Chen Tiqiang argued, only through revolutionary practice could an “intellectual” be complete. Noting that “Chairman Mao has said that those intellectuals who do not have the knowledge of struggle can only be called ‘half intellectuals,’” he argued that only through the fierce struggle of land reform would intellectuals complete their mastery of stance, viewpoint, and method.75
The idea that petit bourgeois intellectuals were suspect due to ties with the landlord class was widely accepted. As college student Meng Gang argued, intellectuals such as himself were in the process of climbing out of the “mud” of old China, and “having some contamination from landlord class mud is expected and not at all out of the ordinary.” Meng also stressed that students were not landlords because they relied on their mental labor, and because they were not members of the landlord class, land reform could change them. Again, revolutionary practice was essential for true transformation, for while he took part in revolutionary activities at school, little had changed. Only by spending six months in the countryside was Meng able to overcome his “petite bourgeoisie and intellectual airs.”76
The difficulties that students from landlord families faced during land reform are perhaps best encapsulated in a letter written in 1951 by Zheng Huiren, a university student and Youth League member.77 Zheng wrote to the editors of China Youth asking for advice concerning his relationship with his landlord father, who had fled his village as land reform approached. According to his letter, Zheng initially supported land reform but had believed that the campaign could be carried out without harming his father, an elderly and caring man. After being exposed to land reform propaganda, however, he had second thoughts: “I realized I had to use a class perspective when looking at these questions. Looking at problems from the perspective of the peasant class is very different than looking at problems from the perspective of the landlord class.”78
Zheng Huiren recalled instances when his father had done “evil things” and wrote a letter to the peasant association reporting his father’s whereabouts and alias, but his choice of political correctness over family loyalties left him conflicted. He confided to the editors:
I was thinking, my father is quite elderly, and he has always been so good to me and my brothers, working day and night just to earn a bit more money to make our lives better, providing for us so we could go to school. And now to make my father return so that he can be struggled and suffer, while I am here, so fortunate to be in school, is this right? What if I am with my father and he asks me: “I raised you, spilled blood and tears for you, always thinking of you, and now you do this, now you treat me like this?” How can I respond to this?
Zheng turned to the editors for advice, for, as he admitted, “I know that many of my ideas are incorrect, but I just cannot understand where the errors lie, and there are so many questions I cannot figure out.”79
The editors of China Youth, in publishing this letter, called for readers to send in their responses to Zheng Huiren’s probing questions. The editors prefaced the letter with four sets of discussion questions, which served to suggest appropriate responses. The first set of questions implied that all landlord wealth was derived from exploitation; the second set stressed the importance of struggle in the division of the land; the third set, which ran the longest, focused on the proper relationship between landlord parents and their children. The final set, in comparison, was composed of one question, asking for the basis of Zheng’s erroneous thinking. Over the next few issues, the journal published 46 letters from a total of 1,315 they received from their readers, all of which duly criticized Zheng Huiren for empathizing with a class enemy.80
Many of these letters also served as a forum for students to emphasize how they had learned to stand with the peasantry and see their parents as class enemies. A Qinghua student from a landlord family claimed that all landlords were evil, and as a result he “resolutely supports land reform and forsakes my landlord family.”81 A classmate noted that the Zheng Huiren case was a popular topic discussion on campus; he argued that his parents may have helped his education, but only because they wanted him to become a rich official. Therefore, his father’s emotions could not be considered “real” and Zheng should forsake his own parents.82 A People’s University student referenced his time on a land reform work team, when he helped organize peasants in speak bitterness meetings, an experience that caused him to “mentally and emotionally feel the righteousness of land reform” as he stood firmly with the peasant masses.83 The China Youth editors concluded in their final remarks on the case that young intellectuals from landlord backgrounds could be considered part of the people, but only if they “willingly turned their backs on their landlord families.”84
In late 1949, Dong Shijin, China’s leading agronomist, penned a letter to Mao Zedong, urging him to halt land reform. Boldly challenging Mao’s sacrosanct views of rural society, he used his expertise in agriculture to argue that land reform would hurt production and demoralize landowners. Recognizing that poor peasants strived to become landlords, Dong denied the moral superiority of poor peasants and called on Mao to protect landlords and other village elites. Ignored, Dong eventually fled to the United States.85 His was a rare voice. Most educated Chinese, well aware of the problem of rural poverty, welcomed land reform. Shao Yanxiang was one such figure. A poet and longtime supporter of the Communists and Sun Yat-sen’s call to give land to the tiller, Shao eagerly joined a work team in 1951, eventually journeying to the far Northwest. He was assigned to Gansu, a poor province where nearly 8 million villagers awaited land reform work teams. Before departing, Shao and his fellow revolutionaries gathered in Beijing’s Zhongshan Park on October 10, the second anniversary of the founding of the PRC. There, not far from Tiananmen, they heard An Ziwen, party central’s organization chief, reminded his audience that while work teams had to rely on the poorest villagers to lead land reform, as outsiders they would have the utmost difficulty in organizing them. Any poor peasants who approached the team, An claimed, were most likely self-interested ruffians or operating at the behest of class enemies. The honest working poor would never seek out work teams. Two weeks later, Shao boarded a train for the countryside, nervous and feeling as if he was “overlooking an abyss or walking on thin ice.”86 Shao’s trepidation was unsurprising. Party leaders had admonished Shao and other work team cadres that they had to guard against “the erroneous tendency of going too far” while at the same time “never pouring water on the masses.”87
Shao, dismissing tales of rural violence as Nationalist rumors, had good reason to join his work team. Familiar with the party’s various land laws and an avid fan of land reform novels, he fully supported the campaign to liberate the rural masses. Taking part in agrarian revolution offered an opportunity for Chinese citizens like him to quickly find accommodation with the Communist Party, which desperately needed the active participation of intellectuals and other urbanites if the campaigns were to be successfully completed. As work team members, they played a crucial role in organizing and mobilizing peasants for the complex task of agrarian revolution. And by joining a work team, intellectuals were able to engage in revolutionary practice and distance themselves from their past and their families while drawing closer to the party. Siding with peasants in rural revolution, team members believed, proved their political loyalty. After arriving in village China, however, work team members would discover that the next step in agrarian revolution, organizing poor peasants, was no easy task.