Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution

The entire work team knew the meeting had been a total failure and so they made a decision: team members would fan out and engage peasants in private conversations, encouraging the poorest Nuanshui farmers to “speak bitterness.” Yang Liang, another intellectual on the work team, paid a visit to Liu Man, a lazy and disaffected poor peasant. As Liu spoke of the relentless bitterness in his life, Yang learned the man had once been a village cadre until he was pushed out of the local party branch by hooligans seeking to protect the scheming landlord Qian Wengui.2 The team then brought Liu and their other newly cultivated activists together, calling a meeting for nine tenants of the landlord Jiang Shirong. When the assembled peasants’ will to confront Jiang wavered, team leader Wen Cai imitated the landlord in a mock run-through of a confrontation. The peasants heatedly argued with their “landlord,” but Wen was unmoved until the activists threated him with violence. One screamed: “If you do not hand over the land deeds today, we will beat you to death!”³ The head of the work team then worried that the activists might be intimidated by the landlord’s wife, known locally as a “broken shoe” due to her questionable sexual past. When the poor peasants vowed to curse and beat her as well, the team knew their pupils were ready. Fully enraged, the peasants ran off to confront Jiang and take possession of their land deeds.

Zhang Li had no love for the backward and timid peasantry, and yet as leader of Hanjiatuo’s land reform work team, he was required to rely on the villagers he so casually disdained. But as team leader, Zhang noted that in land reform, relying on the masses was balanced by remolding the masses. As he pontificated to his underlings on the work team, they must “enlighten the masses, help the masses, and carry out ideological mobilization.”⁴ Shortly after arriving in Hanjiatuo, the team quickly called a mass meeting in a large ancestral hall in order to explain the need to carry out land reform. Liu Quan and other team members droned on with round after round of speeches over six long hours. Many peasants, listening to lectures that attempted to explain the historical development of societies, fell asleep.⁵ The team did much better after the comrades started the process of visiting the village poor to discuss their bitter and sad lives. Meeting individually with potential activists, team members used casual conversation to “entice” (youdao) them to spit out their “bitter water.”⁶

William Hinton had not yet arrived in Long Bow when village cadres first attempted to organize their neighbors, but his rich account of these first days of rural revolution remains one of the most gripping accounts of that revolution. According to Hinton, the first ever village-wide meeting, called by local activists to struggle a traitorous village head, started with high hopes. This was a rare opportunity for villagers to congregate in a public setting, and the result was nothing less than a festival-like atmosphere, complete with peddlers hawking snacks. Despite widespread excitement and an impassioned speech courtesy of the new village chair, no one dared to speak up and denounce the traitor, even after the village vice chair began thrashing him without mercy. Instead, the assembled peasants “waited fascinated, as if watching a play. They did not realize that in order for the plot to unfold they themselves had to mount the stage and speak out what was on their minds.”⁸ The Long Bow cadres eventually admitted defeat and called off the struggle, switching their focus to small group meetings where they could properly prepare activists. Peasants who had been unwilling to speak up against a well-known traitor in a mass meeting later met with cadres in small groups. Here they discussed what the hated traitor had done to them in the past and vowed to accuse their tormentor in public.

During the following settling accounts campaign, cadres established Long Bow’s first peasant association to oversee attacks on landlords and rich peasants. Having learned their lesson, cadres once again called activists together in small groups in order to gather opinions, assembling a host of peasant accusations concerning future struggle targets.9 But Hinton’s own work team, which arrived months later, was not impressed with any of the organizing work that the local cadres had done. In fact, when Hinton first arrived in Long Bow, he found his new work team armed and agitated. The previous night, Zhang Qu’er, a peasant cadre serving on the team, had been targeted for assassination. Zhang, an experienced guerrilla fighter in his early twenties, had been walking alone after dark when an unknown assailant attacked him from behind, choked him unconscious, and nearly succeeded in throwing him down a nearby well. The team was never able to ascertain who the mysterious assassin might be. Many Long Bow peasants declared that Yulai, a corrupt cadre, was behind the plot against the work team. Yulai and his son were locked up, but the team suspected that the forces of counterrevolution ran deep in Long Bow.

Under the direction of team leader Hou the team shut down all mass organizations, leaving Long Bow without a working government or even a party branch. These actions were in line with the dictates of the county government, which had declared that previous attempts at organizing the poor had failed: landlords and rich peasants still ruled the countryside. The work team agreed, and did not even bother to investigate local conditions in Long Bow. Had not Mao declared the countryside a hotbed of feudal reaction? Had not Zhang Qu’er nearly been murdered in cold blood? The process of rural revolution would have to begin anew. Calling a mass meeting for the poorest Long Bow peasants, the team promised that all would now find economic prosperity: the land was to be divided equally among all villagers.¹⁰ These poor farmers were the “basic elements” needed to start a new peasant organization, where a new round of class determination would take place. Only then could the team attempt to redo land reform in Long Bow.

Many years later, long after the publication of his opus Fanshen, William Hinton returned to Long Bow to catch up with old friends and see what had become of the village that he had made famous. The attempted assassination of Zhang Qu’er had never been solved. His work team had repeatedly investigated the assault, but could muster only circumstantial evidence against Yulai and his son as they sat in county lockup. Many who spoke up against the two men had an axe to grind. Long Bow cadres, meanwhile, were positive that the village’s Catholic minority, chafing under party rule, lay behind the assassination attempt.¹¹ County leadership later criticized the team for arresting the two men and had them released, angering the still wounded Zhang Qu’er.¹² Returning to the village during the Cultural Revolution, Hinton discovered that not everything in Long Bow was as it seemed: Zhang Qu’er, fearing the party would transfer him, had staged the entire event to ensure he remained home in Shanxi.13 The work team, predisposed to believe the worst about rural society, had fallen for the charade without a second thought.

The army of work teams dispatched by the Chinese Communist Party during the years of agrarian revolution aimed not just to redistribute land but to utterly transform village societies. Local elites, vilified as representatives of the old feudal realm, were to be forcibly brought down and replaced by a new order led by formerly impoverished peasants. But work teams, following in the footsteps of victorious PLA armies, did not arrive in an untouched feudal countryside. Even before the arrival of the Communists’ armed forces, underground party activists visited their neighbors in the secrecy of night, attempting to win them over to the cause.¹⁴ Villages in the base areas established during the war against Japan had witnessed years of mass campaigns. When the territory under Communist control expanded with the PLA’s military successes, cadres fanned out and helped bring much-needed order to the countryside. During the war with Japan, most rural violence had been committed by Chinese collaborators, leaving the party many targets.¹⁵ In the Northeast, the party spent months targeting tyrants, bullies, and traitors.¹⁶ In the party’s Jin-Cha-Ji base area, the Communists implemented successive campaigns to settle accounts with traitors and reduce rents, beginning the process of remaking the countryside.¹⁷ In Shandong, the party first launched a mass campaign targeting traitors and other local enemies, leading to hundreds of mass meetings and wholesale expropriations. In the aftermath of this campaign, the party lowered rents, distributed grain, and carried out multiple executions in preparation for land reform.¹⁸ In North China’s Wugong village, by the time land reform began, rural life had already been profoundly altered by a decade of Communist programs, a “silent revolution” that had eliminated extremes of inequality. Most Wugong men could afford wives, creating a prosperous community of owner-cultivators.¹⁹

As the lands under party control grew with Civil War victories in early 1948, the party targeted spies, collaborators, Nationalist Party agents, and the largest landlords before allowing work teams to target landlords and rich peasants broadly.²⁰ Work teams, in fact, were advised to not raise the issue of land reform until villages were free from bandits and order was firmly established.21 Despite any previous work done locally, however, the Communists trained work teams to assume that feudal power remained strong. Work teams carrying out a second round of land reform in the old base areas, for example, were instructed that up to 80 percent of land was still controlled by class enemies. Because this meant that previous attempts at land reform had failed, local political organizations were assumed to be suspect and required work teams to begin the process of peasant mobilization anew.²² Party directives spoke of “blank slate villages” (kongbai cun) where the masses had yet to be mobilized; tellingly, even some villages in established base areas were declared blank slates where land reform work had to start from scratch.²³ Because these villages were imagined to be insular feudal communities in need of party penetration, land reform reports spoke glowingly of work teams “breaking through” (tupo) villages to begin their revolutionary work.²⁴

Arriving in what was assumed to be a feudal countryside, the work teams entrusted with bringing agrarian revolution to life sought out “bitterness” (ku). According to the Communists, the feudal forces controlling the countryside ensured that a peasant’s life was one of “eating bitterness” (chiku): the poorer a peasant, the more bitter the life. And because the party declared social advancement impossible under the old regime, peasant bitterness was passed from one generation to the next. As a land reform report penned by two professors from Qinghua University explained, “In the exploitative feudal land holding system, it was impossible to prosper through labor; relying on labor to accumulate wealth and purchase a large quantity of land was even more of a dream.”²⁵ The eternal bitterness of peasants, however, was bottled up and had to be released through the land reform process. This was done through “visiting the poor and asking them about their bitterness” (fangpin wenku) and encouraging them to “speak bitterness” (suku) in private conversations or in more formal “speak bitterness meetings” (suku hui).²⁶

The Communists made no secret that carrying out agrarian revolution was a monumental task. The People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, described the difficulty of finishing land reform by resorting to the old idiom: “ninety li is merely a half of a hundred li journey.” In other words, the closer teams came to finishing land reform, the more difficult it became to bring the campaign to a successful completion.²⁸ But for many work teams, getting land reform started was a frightful challenge. The earliest work teams arrived in village China well versed in Maoist texts, but their training for rural revolution was generally limited to party-scripted outlines that instructed teams to win over poor peasants with broad moral arguments that could be later be directed against class enemies.²⁹ Many work teams discovered peasants unwilling to meet, to say nothing of truly opening up to outsiders. During the first land-to-the-tiller campaigns following the May Fourth Directive, work teams would also have to reach an accommodation with enlightened gentry and other village elites who had become allies during the long war against Japan. Some village cadres were themselves of landlord origin.³⁰

According to the Central China Bureau, party organization was in fact a serious problem in the first round of land reform. Many established party branches were controlled by rich and middle peasants. As the result of impure membership, party branches were hotbeds of corruption and cowardice; many district and village cadres had in fact fled from a Nationalist offensive.³¹ Complicating matters were reports of middle peasants who faked their activism in the hopes of material gain.³² Other work teams were faulted for overlooking local activists. In an example from an early attempt at land reform in the Northwest, villagers had supported Ma Shoucai, a highly respected poor peasant and party member, to head their local poor peasant league. But the work team sent to the village wrongly classified Ma as a middle peasant, making him ineligible even to join the league.³³

Mobilization was further hampered by the threat of retaliation. During the Civil War, villagers carrying out agrarian revolution were risking their lives and had every reason to fear the many rumors of the return of Nationalist forces, especially the “homecoming regiments” (huanxiangtuan) attached to the Nationalist army. These units, led by vengeful dispossessed landlords, specialized in recovering villages under Communist control and had a well-earned reputation for carrying out horrific acts of brutality. Some poor activists declared their indifference. One brave peasant brother proclaimed, “The traitors will not return. If they do return, they won’t kill me, I will kill them first.”³⁸ But as another peasant later admitted, had the Nationalists and the old order returned, “I think they would have sent us to prison or killed us and returned all the land to the landlords.”³⁹ Villagers were not afraid simply of the Communists; they in fact feared all outsiders and their military forces. Under the threat of forced conscription, they found it best to avoid any entanglement with strangers, even if they came with the promise of free land.⁴⁰ Well after the founding of the PRC, when the party’s land reform campaigns concluded in the far Southwest, villagers were still fearful of the return of the Nationalists, in no small part because of the soldiers and bandits holed up in mountain hideouts.⁴¹ For the party, however, peasant resistance to land reform served as proof of the feudal nature of the countryside and served only to validate agrarian revolution.42

After arriving in target villages, work team members during the first land reform campaigns preached a message of unity and order, seeking to tamp down fear and draw distinctions between the Communists and the representatives of the old order, be they Nationalist officials or imperialist collaborators. This message found broad appeal among middle and even rich peasants. These village mainstays had long been part of the Communists’ broad class coalition during the fight against Japan, and many local cadres prized their agricultural production and economic contributions to the Communist cause.⁴³ Many villages in North China lacked a truly dominant elite, and the long war against Japan had served to unify villagers from different lineages and social strata in patriotic resistance. As land reform progressed, however, teams quickly focused on the mobilization of the bottom rungs of rural society. Solidarity would have to give way to class struggle. When land reform came to villages in established base areas, families that had supported the resistance against Japan and enlisted sons in the Communists’ primary military force, the famed Eighth Route Army, might find themselves labeled as class enemies.⁴⁴ But as one directive in the first summer of land to the tiller emphasized, mobilizing the poor was the key to fierce struggle, which would calm middle peasants, neutralize rich peasants, and isolate landlords. To divide the land without fully mobilizing the poor was land reform “only in name, not reality.”⁴⁵ And because these first land reform campaigns coincided with a Nationalist offensive into the base areas, party leaders such as Deng Zihui increasingly turned to the poorest villagers for support. Unlike middle peasant cadres who feared the return of landlord power and dared not engage in struggle, the poor had “nothing to lose” (bu pa sunshi) and were resolute activists. Praising the Central China Bureau work team for understanding that “finding and winning over activists” was the essential first step in starting land reform, Deng noted how the team had bypassed village leaders, mostly middle peasants, and instead relied on a core of poor activists in the party branch and peasant association.⁴⁶

One of the first steps for any newly arrived land reform team was to hold a village meeting to announce the start of land reform. Ideally this would be done using simple language so that villagers might comprehend the need for land reform, how the campaign would be carried out, as well as what might be expected from them during this tumultuous time. But the party found such large gatherings of limited use. The Crooks, observing land reform in Ten Mile Inn, attended a mass meeting to announce the Outline Land Law of 1947. The main purpose of this meeting, which was open to all but those already deemed struggle targets, was to introduce the work team and underground local cadres to the village. The work team also discussed policy, but admitted afterward that many of the villagers had probably not understood their manifesto.⁴⁹ Members of the team were not too concerned because they already understood the importance of mobilizing peasants in small group meetings. The party trained work teams to first “visit the poor and ask about their bitterness” before carrying out class struggle. Understanding local conditions, these outsiders could then take root (zhagen) among the peasant masses, ideally by carrying out the three togethers: living, eating, and working together. Taking root in the countryside, work team members decoded the complex web of village relationships that they were to reframe in terms of Maoist classes.⁵⁰ Just as important, team members forged personal relationships, linking new class statuses with personal emotional bonds with the poor peasants they would need to lead through the crucible of ritualistic struggle.51 This was not a simple process. Work teams, staffed with intellectuals believed to be hampered by obstructions (zu’ai) that made working with poor peasants and hired hands difficult, were easy to take advantage of. Corrupt village leaders could even direct work teams to “their people” to ensure that their secrets would remain confined to the village.⁵²

IMAGE 5. Establishing ties (chuanlian) with potential activists. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 109.

The production and mass publication of land reform novels enshrined the importance of establishing connections with the rural downtrodden in the party’s narrative for agrarian revolution, providing organizational models for work team members. In Zhou Libo’s The Hurricane, a fictionalized account of his time in land reform in the Northeast, one of the work team’s first allies was Zhao Yulin, known locally as “Bare-Assed Zhao” due to the fact that he was so poor that his family of three owned only a single pair of pants.⁵³ This pitiful condition deeply embarrassed Zhao, but his extreme poverty made him the ideal peasant activist. The party thus heaped praise on poor activists such as Li Aiji, whose politicization was due to a land reform work team that had ignored rich peasants and the machinations of landlord running dogs, and insisted on taking root among villagers such as Li: “peasants who were missing teeth, had dirty homes, and talked as if they were totally ignorant.”54 Small group meetings were also important for educating village cadres, typically new to land reform themselves. The hope was that reading articles concerning land reform, including instructions on determining class statuses, would help avoid the common problems of forcing land reform and not trusting the masses.⁵⁵

IMAGE 6. A work team member takes root (zhagen) among the peasant masses. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 108.

After identifying and taking root among potential activists, work teams brought these future activists together in speak bitterness meetings, small group settings where poor farmers were encouraged to discuss their frustrations and anger. Because many peasants were loath to publicly denounce village elites, these meetings were essential to land reform. Such was the case with Bao Yilin, a peasant militiaman. Far from militant, Bao later admitted that he felt guilty after struggling a village landlord who in the past had treated him with kindness. According to Bao, despite the assurances of local party leaders, forcing the kind landlord onto a village stage and cursing him did not seem “fair.”56 For wavering activists such as Bao, speaking bitterness became an essential moment in rural revolution, useful for directing general peasant frustration and anger against newly identified class enemies. Once peasants were able to articulate their bitterness in small group settings, work teams focused their collective anger onto village landlords by suggesting how peasant bitterness was the direct result of landlord exploitation. As one report on the first year of land reform in North China colorfully explained, speaking bitterness allowed peasants to realize that the root of their poverty lay in the “blood-sucking devils” who lived alongside them. They would further realize that there were only two last names in the world: Rich (Fu) and Poor (Qiong). This knowledge, produced through speaking bitterness, led directly to action.⁵⁷ But speaking bitterness was not simply about generating anger and violence. Though the process of speaking bitterness, villagers narrated their lives within the context of the land reform campaign, making rural revolution meaningful on a personal level.⁵⁸ Decades of suffering and hardship were not simply a matter of fate but had an identifiable cause in class oppression and exploitation. As this suggests, work teams used speaking bitterness to reframe rural wealth. Because peasants had witnessed their neighbors’ fortunes rise and fall over the years, many tenants accepted landownership as legitimate: hard work led to prosperity, while lazy famers sank into poverty. Through small group meetings, work teams endeavored to convince peasants that wealth and owning an excess of land was possible only through exploitation and thus was in fact an act of injustice.⁵⁹

IMAGE 7. A peasant woman speaks bitterness (suku). Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 109.

As skillfully deployed by land reform work teams, speaking bitterness was essential in organizing farmers and spreading Communist power in the countryside. Work team members were instructed to “speak matters of the heart” in order to “use bitterness to draw out bitterness, connect bitterness with bitterness” (yi ku yin ku, ku lian ku). They also publicly displayed landlord property in “fruit exhibitions” (zhanlan guoshi) so that peasants could “point at objects and speak bitterness” (zhiwu suku), comparing their own pathetic existences to the easy lives of the landlord class.⁶² Work team members shaped vague memories and a lifetime of rural hardship into concrete memories of detailed acts of exploitation and cruelty. They accomplished this during small group meetings by encouraging villagers to carefully rethink past events, turning impressions of repetitive acts into specific instances of bitterness, fundamentally altering how villagers thought of their neighbors and the past itself.63

Speaking bitterness with work teams, villagers were explicitly taught to reformulate their relationships with their neighbors. Social distinctions could be found in every village community. Some farmers had more property than their neighbors. Others were disliked for personal or moral reasons. Kinship and friendship networks overlapped in complex ways. All of these differences, under the guidance of visiting work teams, were reworked into a Maoist class system of moral peasants and exploitative landlords.⁶⁴ Furthermore, attending small group meetings marked activists as emerging village leaders; those denied entrance, conversely, were potential class enemies.⁶⁵ Speaking bitterness against class enemies, finally, helped generate anger while limiting potential feelings of sympathy and therefore helping legitimize the violence to come.⁶⁶

Were work teams merely providing a forum for the poor and downtrodden to vent long-bottled-up frustrations, or were they coercing villagers to falsify complaints about potential struggle targets? Accounts of land reform present a peasantry that suffered no shortage of bitterness. And at times work team members also actively solicited complaints regarding local cadres. Such was the case with the Crooks, who observed a round of land reform that coincided with a campaign to reform local cadres. The team visited the village’s poorest households and encouraged these peasants to speak bitterness, hearing complaints of cadre favoritism and unfair divisions of struggle fruits, which had left some farmers stuck with poor-quality land. As criticisms mounted, the team gathered peasants together in speak bitterness meetings, including one meeting of poor peasants chaired by team leader Lou Lin. According to the Crooks, small group meetings provided peasants with a safe environment to openly discuss their problems. At the meeting chaired by Lou Lin, for example, the work team discovered peasants had many complaints about cadres, including charges of sexism and immoral behavior.⁶⁷

As the Crooks discovered, gender and power were intimately linked in village life. Party leaders, well aware of this, often sought to bring women into the process of mobilization for agrarian revolution. Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai’s wife, strongly argued this point during a 1947 meeting on land reform policy when she declared that “women function as great mobilizers when they speak bitterness.”68 Examples of women speaking bitterness and telling life stories full of sorrow indicate that she was correct. Li Xiuying, a peasant woman who had ample bitterness to speak, emphasized how her youthful poverty compared to wealthy neighbors. After marrying into a poor family, she had been forced to bury one daughter alive and sell off one of her sons, eventually becoming a beggar herself. Despite her suffering, a local “moneybags” (caizhu) continually harassed her.⁶⁹ Even more extreme was the bitter tale of Lei Yuzhi, whose family had taken a leading role in their village’s first attempt at land reform. When Nationalist forces took back the village in 1947, the land her family had taken from the landlord, Hu Zhensheng, was confiscated, and her mother was tortured and killed. Lei graphically described all of these sufferings as she spoke bitterness.⁷⁰ Believing these bitter tales to be excellent devices to organize farmers, the Communists often used women’s associations, founded and run through the local party branch, as shock troops to attack the village elite. These women, having already broken with tradition by joining a village-wide organization, were thought to be natural participants in class struggle meetings.⁷¹

Documents issued by the Women’s Federation explicitly called on activists to ensure that women understood their “special bitterness” in terms of class. Women met in groups, where female activists helped them prepare to speak in public, even role-playing as landlords to practice the art of struggle. Some argued that women, less involved in local power relations, were quick to speak out against class enemies. This was especially true of child daughters-in-law (tongyangxi), whose hardships moved the crowd. As one woman recalled, “They cried and the audience cried too.”⁷² The power of female tears was well respected: party reports praised female speakers of bitterness for easily breaking into tears and inducing tears among their audiences. Crying, in fact, was a true sign of a success. One county boasted that among 5,184 speakers of bitterness, 4,551 cried profusely. Among the bawlers, 12 fainted and 195 fell ill from their tears.⁷³ The party’s emphasis on women during rural mobilization, however, was not always due to the belief that women were natural revolutionaries or excellent mobilizers. At least one party report warned that the organization of village women was essential because as “backward” elements, if not “hidden tails” of the landlord class, women were bound to hamper land reform by spreading rumors.⁷⁴

After the founding of the PRC, the mobilization of women continued to be a priority for newly established local governments. Mobilization work, however, was highly dependent on local cadres. Some locals made sure to organize women during land reform, creating propaganda and activities to draw them into the campaign. In these villages, women joined peasant associations, with some promoted to leadership positions. In other places, however, village cadres ignored the mobilization of women, inviting harsh rebuke from party superiors.⁷⁶ The experiences of women in agrarian revolution defy any simple generalization. In Xiajia village in the Northeast, for example, women played an important part in its land reform campaign. But women generally met separately from the men.⁷⁷ In Guizhou’s Five Mile Bridge, Wu Zhanxian’s attempts to organize village women failed: when he came in the front door, the women of the household fled out the back door.⁷⁸

At the dawn of the PRC era, with the Civil War finally over and with peace at hand, the prospects for mobilizing villagers seemed greatly improved. Peace proved short-lived, however. In summer 1950, American troops began arriving on the Korean peninsula to push back the forces of Kim Il-sung, who had once fought alongside the Chinese Communists in the Northeast. This news, accompanied by a constant stream of rumors of a renewed global military conflict, rattled the countryside. Investigation into rural society found widespread fears of American atomic bombs, and the party made an explicit connection between the threat of imperialist invasion and landlord resistance. According to party leaders in Hebei, landlords and rich peasants, encouraged by rumors that Chang Kai-shek had flown to the Northeast to “assess the situation,” were said to be launching a counterattack against the party.79 And in South Central China, landlords were said to be publicly speaking out against land reform, boldly registering the names of local cadres and instigating riots. With the countryside once again in turmoil, the fact that many work teams were staffed by cadres sent from North China became particularly troubling for locals. In one South Central village, local elites blamed a drought on the outsiders on the work team. Locals, angry that the work team members did not “believe in spirits” (bu xin shen), forcibly expelled the team from their village.

Despite these continued difficulties, the scope of mobilization expanded as the party returned to rural revolution in the early 1950s. The party hosted huge land reform exhibits in cities and towns, while also drafting urban residents into work teams to transform the countryside. Even in small rural towns, dockworkers and merchants were expected to learn about land reform, while elementary and middle school students created propaganda with their teachers.⁸⁰ Peasant associations, founded in the buildup to land reform, trained local leaders who could collaborate with work teams. In July 1951, for example, a work team hosted a two-day training session for peasant representatives in eastern Sichuan, feeding the future activists rice, porridge, and even a meat dish while discussing the urgent tasks at hand. Over a hundred peasant representatives, fifteen of them female, attended the meeting. Team leader Li, in charge of the work team, oversaw reports from each village and stressed the importance of investigating production, which would determine who gained and who lost during the campaign. Representatives vowed to carry out propaganda work after returning home, including mobilizing support for the Korean conflict and starting the difficult work of organizing women.⁸¹

The mobilization of the rural poor, however, remained the key to starting land reform. The end of the war with the Nationalists eliminated one major concern for work team members, but awareness of the topsy-turvy course of land reform from land to the tiller to the push for total equalization of landholdings created widespread confusion in villages awaiting rural revolution. One middle peasant wondered in fall 1949, “Party policy says middle peasant land will not be touched, but also says that there are some lands that will be touched, so what exactly is the policy?”⁸² Work teams, meanwhile, did not always benefit from the party’s many years of rural campaigning. When the suburbs of Beijing implemented land reform from 1949 to 1950, a mere 135 cadres with land reform experience were dispersed on work teams charged with bringing the revolution to 264 villages.83 And despite the call for a slow and orderly land reform, mobilizing the masses remained a difficult process. In the months preceding the release of the party’s final land law, Mao declared the upcoming campaigns for 300 million villagers a “hideous class war” between peasants and landlords, “a battle to the death.”⁸⁴ Far less prosaically, a report from South Central China in late 1950 noted that implementing land reform would still take a “tremendous effort” (feichang chili).⁸⁵

Many, however, woefully underestimated the scope of land reform in Mao’s New China. In Sichuan’s Nanchuan County, cadres touted their earlier successes and compared their upcoming land reform to the PLA’s smooth crossing of the Yangtze River in the aftermath of the epic military battles of the Huaihai Campaign. With rent reduction and other mass campaigns already carried out in the newly conquered territories, these cadres boasted that carrying out land reform by finally distributing landlord property would be “no problem” (mei wenti).⁸⁶ Two Nanchuan cadres, Liu Tianzheng and Huang Kaiyu, brought their poor attitudes with them when they were transferred to nearby Fuling County to oversee land reform. In Fuling’s Zengfu, Liu refused to accept local opinions and nearly destroyed the local peasant association. Peasants who dared question his methods were accused of standing with landlords. Huang, meanwhile, delighted in attacking village cadres, a practice known colloquially as “shaving beards.” Tensions between the visiting cadres and locals exploded during a particularly contentious meeting; as a result, twenty-seven peasants were locked up until an investigation determined that the Nanchuan cadres were at fault.⁸⁷

Despite the shifting context following the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the process of finding potential activists among the poorest peasants in a given village remained standard procedure throughout the party’s campaigns to remake rural China. Speaking bitterness was firmly ensconced as the primary method of mobilization in the party’s narrative of rural revolution. Du Runsheng, overseeing rural campaigns in the South Central region, praised speaking bitterness as nothing less than an “enlightenment movement of class consciousness.”⁸⁸ Peasant activists vowed to aid land reform by “implementing speaking bitterness education” by following a set path: comparing, recalling, digging out the roots of poverty, and pouring out bitter water.89

In some cases, however, organizing potential activists became even more difficult during the final stages of land reform, which often took place in regions with a notable lack of local landlords. In the prosperous Jiangnan region surrounding Shanghai, for example, the rural rental system was highly commercialized and thoroughly impersonal. As a result, work teams found it difficult to stir up class anger among poor peasants, whose enmity was largely reserved for small-fry rent collectors.⁹⁰ The party’s promise of class struggle and property redistribution, meanwhile, created a widespread sense of uncertainty among villagers. Yan Hongyan, speaking to cadres preparing to carry out land reform in Sichuan, connected this fear to the clashing interests of villagers. The poorest called for total equality, striking fear in the hearts of those who were even moderately wealthy. Landlords, meanwhile, could only fear for the worst.⁹¹ And because agrarian revolution was by design a confrontational process, campaigns could and often did bring great violence to the countryside. Often it was not counterrevolution but the very actions of local activists that led to antiparty rumors.⁹²

And just had been the case in the North, some work teams found it difficult to organize villagers who seemingly harbored no hatred for class enemies. Tan Qixiang, a historian helping carrying out land reform in 1951, confided in his journal that his team had faced great difficulty in generating peasant hatred toward landlords. Most peasants, in fact, were angry not with landlords but with local bullies and slackers.⁹³ Resistance to agrarian revolution was not limited to peasants. In Guangdong, confronted with local cadres largely opposed to harsh land reform policies, the party replaced village officials with North China cadres.⁹⁴ And while concern about outsiders had been a consistent theme throughout the party’s agrarian revolution, mobilization was now particularly confounded by the well-developed lineages that often dominated villages in South China. In such cases, adopted sons and other fellow outsiders proved valuable allies for work teams looking to organize poor peasants. Poor lineage members, resentful over poor treatment from wealthy relatives, became heralded as exemplars for valuing loyalty to class over kin.⁹⁵ One land reform report went further, noting the importance of reaching out to “backward elements,” treating such figures with respect and offering praise and encouragement, if not a good meal during meetings.

In Zengbu, as was typical of land reform, struggle against landlords was preceded by small group meetings where cadres further educated peasants on how class enemies were in fact responsible for all of their sufferings before the Communists brought liberation.⁹⁷ Or as another Guangdong villager recalled of his time living with land reform work team members:

They asked us to describe the circumstances of each of the households in the village. They taught us the nature of class relationships—who worked for whom, how the harvests were shared, who was enjoying the fruits of our labor. They seemed moved when we described the bitterness [ku] in our lives. Then they suggested that we must act to “grasp power in our own hands” against feudal exploitation.⁹⁸

As this recollection suggests, work teams labored to connect personal bitterness with the very nature of the agrarian economy. Some went further. In the South Central region, teams were instructed to link personal sufferings to the actions not only of class enemies but of American imperialists as well.⁹⁹

Because meetings with poor peasants served as the crux of the organizational process, land reform problems were often traced back to a failure to mobilize the rural poor to properly speak bitterness. One team, sent to Jijing village in Sichuan, carried out propaganda, held speak bitterness meetings, and even held a special leadership group (zhuxi tuan) meeting on the eve of confronting local landlords. Their careful preparation was not enough, however, and the confrontation ended in failure. Searching for answers, cadres blamed the collapse of the struggle meeting on the fact that the “the bitterness of the bitter ones did not become the bitterness of the masses.”¹⁰¹ A similar problem occurred in Wuxi County’s Fenghuang, which had served as a testing ground for many of the party’s campaigns in rural Sichuan. In Fenghuang a team of thirty cadres and activists, said to be of proper work style and clear class stance, conducted a full month of land reform without ever mobilizing the masses, to say nothing of holding a struggle meeting. According to the party, this team, while giving lip-service to the idea of fully exterminating the landlord class, simply did not know how to rely on the poor. By failing to “visit and link up with the bitter” (fang ku chuan lian), team members isolated themselves from locals. According to a party report, released to warn other teams against repeating their mistakes, they adopted a rather pathetic approach to rural organization. Upon meeting the masses, team members ignored middle peasants and simply asked poor peasants if they had bitterness (ni you ku mei you) and if they might be willing to struggle landlords (gan douzheng dizhu bu gan). Some poor peasants replied affirmatively, but when the team held meetings, these poor peasants begged off, claiming they were busy in the fields (wo shengchan hen mang). The work team lost faith in the masses, viewing them as backward and beyond hope. The masses, meanwhile, increasingly found ways to avoid meetings entirely.¹⁰²

Cultural differences between teams and peasants took on new dimensions during the tail end of land reform, when the party moved to consolidate power in South and Southwest China, home to many ethnic minorities. The party, aware that that minorities had historically been oppressed by Han Chinese, first focused on developing local cadres before starting land reform. Linguistic issues, however, severely hampered the mobilization of minorities. Some work teams, anxious to jump-start class struggle, erroneously translated the term for “village headman” (tusi) as “village bully.”¹⁰⁴ Other terms such as “backward” (luohou), having no local equivalent, had been translated as “thief” or “criminal,” a practice that created much fear among locals. But the party’s essentializing description of minority personalities (xingge) reveals a cultural chasm that made organization particularly difficult: “straightforward and simple, emphasizing practical action, attaches importance to emotions, assertive and tenacious, strong sense of self-respect, fond of praise and reward, and fearful of criticism.”¹⁰⁵ One report on land reform in an ethnic Miao village directly insulted the Miao as culturally backward while simultaneously assuring its readers that the Miao hatred for the Han, who made up most of the village landlords, was “primarily a class hatred.”¹⁰⁶ In other villages in the Southwest, minorities such as the Yi controlled the land and gave out high interest loans to Han tenants; yet because Han Chinese controlled the local governments and the Yi were considered an “oppressed” minority, it was impossible to easily locate an “exploiter” or “exploited” group to rely on in land reform. Work team members, well trained in previous rounds of land reform but still outsiders, continued to insist on following the class struggle method, even this meant forcing struggle on unwilling peasants.107

Even facing new challenges in China’s socially complex minority regions, the key to mobilizing peasants remained consistent: speaking bitterness. Minority activists in the Northwest were told to emphasize how Hui landlords oppressed Han and Hui alike; one Hui activist, for example, was praised for her heartbreaking story of a Hui landlord burying a Han woman alive for breaking a porcelain bowl.¹⁰⁸ In retrospect, it is clear that these tales of suffering were essential to the success of Mao’s rural revolution. As newcomers to villages, work teams generally discovered a significant reservoir of unhappiness among peasants, but this bitterness was useless unless work teams could transform memories of the past into hatred for class enemies. It was only through participation in these meetings that villagers learned to speak bitterness and dared to publicly struggle their neighbors. One county-level report on land reform argued that “without mobilizing to smash feelings and sentiments” (dongyuan dapo qingmian), villagers were likely to keep silent during struggle meetings.¹⁰⁹ But before class struggle could begin, the work team had to first oversee the next chapter of agrarian revolution: the division of villagers into their new Maoist classes.