3

DIVIDING

Creating Peasants and Landlords

Crafty Qian Wengui, long accustomed to getting his way by hook or crook, was running out of tricks. The Communists, now firmly entrenched in Nuanshui, enthusiastically watched as their network of peasant activists grew larger by the day. Land reform could not be stopped, and Qian knew that he was the work team’s number one target. It was bad enough that the process of class division had made him a landlord. Once the work team branded him with the dreaded evil tyrant label, he knew that only drastic action might save him. Becoming an army dependent by having his son enlist and fight for the Communists had bought him some time, but that would not be enough to avoid the wrath of local activists. With few options remaining, he decided to use the women of his landlord household to shield himself from the new order. Qian first asked his daughter to marry Zhang Zhengdian, a village activist. The loyal landlord daughter was willing, and once Zhang was married into the family, he had no choice but to start protecting his new father-in-law. When his marriage and sudden lack of activism caused Zhang’s reputation to suffer, Qian pushed his niece Heini to romance another rising village leader. The beautiful Heini, Qian figured, would make the perfect bait for his next trap. But Heini had been born to a peasant family and refused to take part in the nefarious plot.

Without the schemer’s help from his niece, the walls continued to close in on him. Even the other landlords in the village turned on him in order to save themselves from struggle. They were landlords, true, but at least they were not evil tyrants! One landlord wife, at wit’s end herself, went as far as to berate village cadres for not struggling Qian Wengui: “What kind of Communist Party is this bullshit? This is nothing but pretty talk, every day you settle accounts and get revenge, and all the while you protect a traitor and evil tyrant!”1 With even his fellow landlords gunning for him, Qian was running out of time.

After arriving in Hanjiatuo, his work team’s target village, Liu Quan of Peking University had overheard locals doubt the team could find a true landlord. Some even expressed outright disdain for class struggle. As he met with peasants in small groups, the reasons for their skepticism became all too clear. In Hanjiatuo, peasants revealed, very few villagers rented out land, and in any case it was impossible to make ends meet while solely relying on rental income. The Hanjiatuo villagers who rented out farmlands were far from bastions of feudal power: they all received money from relatives employed in the city, and it was this outside income that truly allowed them to survive. And, sure, there were some hooligans in the village, but they did not match the evil tyrants that the work team sought. In fact, one of Hanjiatuo’s most prominent hooligans, villagers pointed out, had recently claimed to have reformed himself and was now serving as the secretary of the local party branch!²

These doubts meant little to the work team and its leader, Zhang Li, who was determined to bring Mao’s revolution to Hanjiatuo. Having already announced the start of land reform in a sleep-inducing meeting, the team followed the well-established precedent of moving in with local households in order to better understand the local society it planned to transform through fierce struggle. Liu Quan ended up staying with the Tangs, a middle peasant family. Always the dutiful revolutionary, Liu recalculated the family’s property holdings and happily concluded that the Tangs were in fact middle peasants, not involved in any meaningful form of economic exploitation. According to the new state’s land reform law, all of the family’s property was explicitly protected. There was absolutely no reason, Liu decided, that his friendly hosts should be concerned about land reform.³ But the naive Liu failed to figure in human greed. With his typical disregard for the peasants, team leader Zhang pushed for more landlords, more struggle, and more property to redistribute. Conspiring with local cadres, Zhang unjustly and illegally labeled the Tangs a landlord household. Villagers of course knew that their neighbors the Tangs were no landlords, just as Liu clearly understood that his work team was seriously deviating from the clear guidelines of the new land law. But no one dared to speak out against team leader Zhang, not even when the militia came to arrest the hapless Tang patriarch. Sobbing, his wife could only cry out: “He has never done a mean thing in his entire life, if you do not believe me then just ask. We are all neighbors, what could not be known?”4

In his writings on land reform, William Hinton waxed poetic about the seemingly eternal landholding system—“the quiet countryside” where “landlords continued to don long gowns, collect exorbitant rents, pay off the soldiery, manicure their fingernails, and eat white flour made from wheat.”⁵ He also made clear, however, that Long Bow landlords could hardly be considered wealthy. They were in fact rather poor. Anyone with real wealth had fled long before the Communists took power, and the small fry left behind were not particularly impressive. They wore silk garments on festive days but otherwise dressed like other villagers as they tilled the fields. The closest thing Long Bow had to a stereotypical landlord was Sheng Jinghe, whose long fingernails attested to the fact that he never worked his fields. Sheng was a frugal businessman, running and investing in distilleries. By the party’s own class scheme, Sheng’s role in rural industry meant that he should never have been labeled a landlord in the first place.⁶ But during the round of land reform that followed the release of the May Fourth Directive, local cadres mislabeled Sheng as a landlord. Hinton was not in the village at the time, but the peasants who attacked Sheng’s family during land reform told him of the landlord’s evil crimes, which had left families broken and destitute.⁷ It was natural for peasants to want more land, and Hinton saw nothing wrong if a family rented out a bit of its extra land to a neighbor. But a handful of families owning so much of Long Bow wealth was “in essence a form of armed plunder.”⁸ As for Sheng, Hinton never expressed doubt about his landlord status.

Hinton’s work team arrived in the village long after the struggling of Sheng Jinghe. Following a narrative that assumed the village to still be controlled by feudal elements, the team shut down village organizations and moved to reassess the class status of every Long Bow resident. Using the method of “self-report, public appraisal,” villagers made a case for their desired class status based on their lives over the past three years. With a potential redistribution of wealth looming, the stakes were high. Those classed poor would be able to take the property of those classed rich, and every villager claimed extreme poverty. But the truly poor “basic elements” in charge of the meeting were hoping to find more rich peasants so that they might finally find economic liberation themselves. The result was a push and pull that was only complicated by confusion over class labels. A landless builder was labeled a “village worker,” which made no sense to Long Bow peasants. A blacksmith was accused of exploitation for providing shoddy goods. And a former opium-dealer-turned-poor-peasant was punished for his past crimes with the middle peasant class label. Much time was spent calculating the amount of income households gained through exploitation.9 While Hinton was impressed by the ability of Long Bow’s peasants to determine class labels, the result was disappointing: only one new rich peasant household was found, while over one hundred families lingered in unacceptable poverty.¹⁰

The party went to great lengths to explain the depravity of landlords to Long Bow peasants, and Hinton shared this education in rural classes as he observed the revolution in action. Operas featuring a mash-up of local music and Maoist ideology were among the party’s most powerful propaganda weapons, and so it was that Hinton joined Long Bow peasants and took in a staging of Red Leaf River, a land reform opera depicting a depraved landlord who sexually assaulted women and drove families to financial ruin. The evening performance of the show by a Communist-affiliated drama troupe drew a massive audience that Hinton estimated in the thousands. Looking around him, he found the audience totally captivated by the drama:

As the tragedy of this poor peasant’s family unfolded, the women around me wept openly and unashamedly. On every side, as I turned to look, tears were coursing down their faces. No one sobbed, no one cried out, but all wept together in silence. The agony on the stage seemed to have unlocked a thousand painful memories, a bottomless reservoir of suffering that no one could control.¹¹

Soon Hinton and the other male audience members joined the women in tears.

Class struggle requires class enemies, and Mao’s tale of rural revolution was predicated on the belief that every village was marked by class conflict. During land reform, work teams had to identify those villagers who could be classed as landlords, making the concept of class (jieji) and the process of class division (huafen jieji chengfen) essential to the campaigns. This posed a tremendous challenge to land reform work teams. It was true that despite a deeply rooted longing for egalitarianism, societies in rural China were marked by varying degrees of social differentiation. Some households prospered, and others struggled to get by. But before the arrival of agrarian revolution, there were no “landlords” in China. Nor were there any “peasants.” Both of these class labels, and the entire Maoist class system, were completely alien to the countryside. Even the very idea of class was foreign: early reformers had to recast jieji, which had previously meant “rank” or “level” in both Japanese and Chinese, for new purposes.12 The pioneering reformer Liang Qichao had been at the forefront of this linguistic revolution. In 1899 Liang noted that European countries divided their nations into classes, while China did not. Later that year, he remedied this situation by creating China’s first class system: capitalists and workers, men and women. Chinese who found this scheme lacking had to wait until 1919 for early convert Li Dazhao to formulate a more orthodox interpretation of class structure based on translations of seminal Marxist texts.¹³ When land reform launched in 1946, the Communists had a fully developed rural class system based on multiple components: a villager’s living standard and relationship to exploitation, the feudal or capitalist nature of that exploitation, and how past economic production had led to a villager’s current economic situation.¹⁴

This foreign understanding of class status was unheard of in the countryside, where villagers used terms such as stratum (jieceng) to explain social differentiation.¹⁵ It was only through multiple experiments with agrarian reform that Mao’s unique rural class scheme slowly infiltrated the countryside. Landlords did not labor but instead lived off of exploitation. Rich peasant households engaged in farming while also earning income by exploiting the labor of others. Middle peasants represented the happy medium, living off their own labor on their own lands, avoiding significant involvement in economic exploitation. Poor peasants were exploited chiefly through land rents, and hired hands were exploited whenever they sold their labor. These were not the only class statuses given to villagers during the many years of rural campaigning. After the first summer of land to the tiller in 1946, for example, cadres in the Taihang Mountains formed guidelines to fully explain local society, acknowledging the existence of a diverse set of rural classes that included workers, merchants, vagrants, monks, nuns, traditional artists, and teachers.16 But the detailed Taihang regulations were not widely promoted, and work teams rarely ventured outside the standard classes Mao promoted during his early days of agrarian revolution.

Maoist class labels were critically important to the process of agrarian revolution. All of them were also new to the countryside, ironically and tragically appearing just as land reform removed most markers of actual economic social differentiation.¹⁷ The word for peasant, nongmin, was a Japanese creation based on classical Chinese, where it had simply meant “country folk.”¹⁸ The class label of poor peasant (pinnong), which emerged nearly simultaneously in Japan and China after Russia’s October Revolution, was given to farmers who owned no or very little land, and instead rented their fields from wealthy neighbors. Along with hired hands (gunong), who could not afford to rent farmland and made a living from selling their labor, poor peasants were promoted as the proletariat of the village.¹⁹ Or as Mao declared, these impoverished villagers, often ridiculed as “riffraff,” were to be “the main force in the bitter fight” against feudal power in the countryside.²⁰ Narratives of rural revolution emphasized the bitter poverty that marked the lives of poor peasants and hired hands. In Zhou Libo’s land reform novel, the poor peasant character Bare Assed Zhao owned a single pair of pants for his entire family. One popular land reform exhibit, meanwhile, displayed a tattered and worn pair of peasant pants, said to be 120 years old.

Middle peasant (zhongnong) was another late arrival borrowed from Japan. According to Mao in 1927, middle peasants always vacillated, fearful of what the revolution would take away from them. They joined peasant associations in great numbers, but took a wait-and-see approach.²¹ By the start of first land-to-the-tiller land reform, double reduction campaigns had created massive numbers of middle peasants. These farmers often dominated village societies in the base areas yet stood to gain little from the redistribution of land.²² But as Deng Zihui declared in 1946, the middle peasant class was by nature willing to compromise and could be considered an ally during land reform.²³ Sometimes called the “petite bourgeoisie of the countryside,” middle peasants were typically thought to have enough land, labor, and agricultural materials to harvest quality yields and not go hungry. Because some middle peasants rented out some of their extra land, party directives spoke out against activists who wanted to illegally raise middle peasants into higher statuses.24 In recognition of the diversity of rural landholding households, the party further divided middle peasants into upper-middle, middle, and lower-middle categories. Lower-middle peasants did not own enough land, and thus had to rent some of their fields.²⁵ Upper-middle or well-to-do (fuyu) peasants were farmers who rented out a share of their land, and this precise classification seemed promised to police the line between rich and middle peasants.²⁶ But in practice the threat of the “well-to-do” label helped create a widespread fear that all middle peasants might face struggle and expropriation. As a result, the party had to regularly remind cadres that middle peasants were in fact allowed to have up to 25 percent of their income derived through land rents and other forms of exploitation.27

IMAGE 8. A “120 year old” pair of pants used to symbolize the extreme poverty of China’s peasants. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 55.

Rich peasant (funong) was yet another neologism borrowed from Japanese.²⁸ If the poor peasants and hired hands were the village proletariat and the “main force of revolutionary struggle,” these peasants represented the “rural capitalist class.”²⁹ While rich peasant households engaged in labor, a significant portion of their income was derived through exploitation, either though feudal exploitation in land rents and usury, or capitalist exploitation through wage labor and commercial enterprises. As a result, these farmers enjoyed good lives and accumulated profits thanks to their high level of agricultural production.³⁰ By the time Mao wrote about rich peasants for his “Hunan Report” in 1927, he had decided that this relative wealth made them enemies of the people. According to Mao, rich peasants were no friends of the peasant association and joined only under duress. Even after joining, they remained politically inactive, always uneasy with peasant activists.³¹ By the time of the first land-to-the-tiller campaigns, this negative view of rich peasants was firmly established, with Deng Zihui declaring these farmers “selfish” and “full of tricks,” wanting to “hog” the fruits of struggle.³² As a result, rich peasants, unlike middle peasants, were typically not allowed to join the village party branch.³³

Of all the class labels Mao gave to village residents, the most odious were landlord (dizhu) and evil tyrant (eba). The term dizhu has a long history, but only recently had come to mean a villager whose income came from exploiting the masses.³⁴ By the start of land reform, party theorists had developed a complex typology of landlords, starting with a distinction between large landlords, who effectively controlled one or more villages, and smaller landlords, who lacked true power over their neighbors. Managerial landlords (jingying dizhu), capitalists relying on hired labor to farm their lands, also exercised feudal power through renting lands, providing high-interest loans, holding political office, or cheating their workers. Bankrupt landlords (pochan dizhu) had lost their wealth due to drug addiction or bad business decisions, yet still managed to live the good life thanks to their family connections or outright trickery. Second landlords (er dizhu) were the agents renting out landlord land, making a living by taking a share of the collected rent.³⁵ Party propaganda, however, continually emphasized that the crimes of the landlord class went far beyond mere economic exploitation. They were agents of evil, tied to the Nationalists and other reactionary elements.

IMAGE 9. A poster depicts the connections of Longshan County landlords to the Nationalists, a right-wing youth league, spy organizations, and bandits. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 40-41.

Before the arrival of Communist power the term dizhu was unknown in the countryside. Villagers often simply called their wealthier neighbors “money bags” (caizhu).36 The party even incorporated rural rhetorical preferences into propaganda: characters in land reform operas would use the term money bags, switching to landlord after receiving ideological training in their own fictional land reform.³⁷ Farmers in the Northeast, meanwhile, preferred the term big grain household (da liang hu) or, more colorfully, big belly (da duzi).³⁸ Critically, these terms merely implied wealth and were not by definition derogative. The “evil tyrant” label was reserved for particularly wicked local power holders in need of struggle as soon as villages came under Communist control.³⁹ The distinction between landlords and evil tyrants was left vague, leading Xi Zhongxun to complain about the fluidity of the evil tyrant label, which could be given to a villager who spoke too strongly or cut down the wrong tree, as opposed to someone who had “truly seized an area to bully the masses.”⁴⁰ In practice, nearly any landlord, especially during the heat of confrontational class struggle, might be called an “evil tyrant landlord” (eba dizhu). The determination of landlord class status was an essential moment in Mao’s rural vision, dividing the village between friends and enemies of his revolution. One work team report, noting that class division was “complex and difficult,” thus advised identifying and attacking landlords before ranking remaining villagers.41

IMAGE 10. A landlord’s fur coat, featured in a land reform exhibit, provided a sharp contrast with the aged pair of peasant pants. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 54.

Over the course of agrarian revolution, the party’s treatment of rural classes constantly evolved, with sudden changes that often left local cadres perplexed, to say nothing of villagers trying to navigate life under the Communists. Experimenting with agrarian reform during the earlier land revolution, the party gave rich peasants land of the poorest quality and totally expropriated landlord property. A few years later, the party moved to protect rich peasants and landlords in order to facilitate a new alliance with the Nationalist Party. After the promulgation of the May Fourth Directive and the start of all-out land reform, those determined to be rich peasants stood to once again lose a share of their wealth, despite the directive’s instructions to “generally” not touch rich peasant property. The treatment of China’s rich peasants would become an essential question throughout the following years of rural revolution.

During the first land-to-the-tiller land reform campaigns, the process of class division was haphazard and varied widely. In the North China village of Wugong, the party branch quietly divided their neighbors into Maoist categories behind closed doors. Unable to find a single true landlord after years of Communist rule, the party branch arbitrarily labeled two households as landlords, creating class enemies in a community where nearly every household was in truth a middle peasant household.42 Landlords could be hard to find even in newly liberated villages, especially when even the relatively wealthy took part in agricultural production. The result was a seemingly inevitable expansion of struggle from landlords to rich peasants and eventually middle peasants. During an early attempt at land reform in one Heilongjiang village, activists arbitrarily gave out class labels and persecuted more than 40 percent of the village population, creating landlords out of wealthy farmers who had dared to hire laborers. Any farmer who rented out land was considered a landlord.⁴³

Divisions among the peasantry were already widespread during the land-to-the-tiller round of land reform. In theory, the party leaders hoped that after land had been given to the poorest villagers, middle peasants, the allied troops (tongmeng jun) of the rural revolution, could receive some property.⁴⁴ But some local cadres treated middle peasants roughly, handing out fines for political crimes such as not allowing children to take part in mass organizations.⁴⁵ Others saw middle peasants as not part of the basic masses (jiben qunzhong) but stubborn elements (wangu fenzi) to be kept out of peasant associations and perhaps in need of struggle. The result was widespread attacks on middle peasant interests. As one Communist observer lamented, the definition of the middle peasant class was simple, “but a simple definition cannot solve a problem.”⁴⁶ Even poor peasants were afraid. According to one farmer, just having a “big mouth before land reform” was enough to earn a bad class label and persecution.⁴⁷

The problem with rich peasants was even more acute, with the disjunction between the party’s twin goals of economic development and revolution creating much confusion in class division policies. On one hand, party leaders understood the importance of rich peasants to the rural economy. Li Zipu, writing on the “middle peasant problem,” thus recommended a cautious approach to rich peasants, reasoning that the natural “developmental future” of middle peasants was advancing to rich peasant status.48 But during rural revolution, poor activists saw rich peasant wealth as an attractive target. Moreover, the party’s own land reform narrative demanded that poor peasants and hired hands must receive land if a campaign was to come to a successful conclusion. In one directive announcing the implementation of land to the tiller, the Central China Bureau called for the preservation of the rich peasant economy and the distribution of a share of land to family members of all struggle targets, including traitors and local bullies. But this same directive also gave activists latitude to move on rich peasants, opening the door to the struggle of rich peasants by noting that the lands farmed by rich peasant households should only “usually” not be taken.⁴⁹ A subsequent directive from the bureau confirmed that lands rented out by rich peasants could be confiscated, while “exploitative” well-to-do middle peasants might be encouraged to donate their land.⁵⁰ The bureau, however, still advocated allowing rich peasants to keep the lands farmed by their own households, and party central explicitly endorsed this lenient path, advising work teams to yield (rangbu) to rich peasants, reasoning that a broad class alliance was needed to break the Nationalist offensive then threatening the base areas.⁵¹ This approach, when followed, yielded positive results: During a successful land-to-the-tiller campaign in Beifengzheng, a village south of Shijiazhuang, activists settled accounts with rich peasants for past exploitation but left the fields they farmed themselves untouched.⁵²

While some in the party promoted the limited protection of rich peasant assets, on-the-ground activism made this a tenuous proposal. Two months after the start of land to the tiller, the party was already receiving reports of poor peasants calling for equal division, or leveling, as the only means to economic liberation. This move to equalize holdings meant the confiscation of land from not only rich peasants but many middle peasants as well, a clear violation of party policy.⁵³ Some party leaders sided with land-hungry peasant activists. Investigating the leveling problem (la ping wenti) during the first summer of land to the tiller, Cao Huoqiu declared that the desire for equal holdings among the mobilized poor was “natural” (ziran). Foreshadowing the eventual call to equalize all landholdings, Cao called for leveling landholdings in newly liberated villages where over 60 percent of land was held by landlords; while some land would be taken from rich and middle peasants, Cao reasoned that most land would come from the landlord class.54 With the Nationalist armies on the attack during land to the tiller, party leaders such as Deng Zihui increasingly saw the poorest members of rural society as true loyalists and affirmed their calls to equalize landholdings; although middle peasants were allies of the revolution, they were unreliable (bu neng yikao zhongnong).⁵⁵

Matters were further complicated when party leaders recognized the vast changes that had occurred in base area villagers: not all rich peasants were equal. Leaders in the Jin-Cha-Ji Bureau, for example, noted that many rich peasants in their base area were “new” rich peasants who owed their high incomes to the party’s own policies. These new rich peasants, the bureau insisted, must be considered part of the basic masses.⁵⁶ At the outset of land-to-the-tiller campaigns, some base areas also made concessions to the village elite by promising special treatment and high-quality fields to enlightened gentry and other longtime allies.⁵⁷ In Jin-Cha-Ji, leaders made a distinction between new territories where struggle was intense, and old areas where cadres were encouraged to work with landlords to ensure the quick transfer of land. In these “old liberated areas” as much as 80 percent of the population was composed of middle peasants, and only the most obstinate landlords needed to be subjected to mass struggle.⁵⁸ Jin-Cha-Ji leaders, while recognizing the natural and logical peasant desire for more land, insisted that equal distribution contravened the May Fourth Directive by taking too much from rich peasants and infringing on middle peasant interests.⁵⁹ The East China Bureau took an even more accommodating approach to rural classes in the “blank slate villages” where the party was bringing land reform. Small and middle landlords were allowed to donate land and keep more land than the average middle peasant, as well as their housing and tools.⁶⁰ In the chaotic Northeast, when work teams focused on struggling traitors and despotic landlords, most peasants who had served Japan’s puppet regime in Manchukuo were allowed to apologize for their crimes and keep their lands. Small and medium landlords were allowed to directly donate their lands. The Northeast Bureau even instructed teams to give these landlords some “face” by letting them keep more land than the average village peasant.⁶¹

Given ample leeway by the vague May Fourth Directive, the Central China Bureau leadership moved steadily toward equalization. The “proper” land reform conducted by an elite Central China Bureau work team had equalized holdings, denying landlords and rich peasants an extra share of land in order to ensure that the poor received enough land.62 Shortly after promoting the experiences of this work team, the Central China Bureau released its September First Directive, which promoted a simple model to solve the land issue: “don’t touch the middle, level the two ends” (zhong bu dong, liang tou ping). The lands of middle peasants, who now approached half of all villagers in the aftermath of double reduction, were to be protected, but the holdings of the other village classes were to be largely equalized.⁶³

In the aftermath of the September First Directive, land reform moved to a new stage with the call to “fill the gaps” of poverty, heralding an increasingly strident approach to rural class enemies. Leaders in Central China continued to promise a generous share of land to small and medium landlords, but fill-the-gap directives insisted that only after the masses had been fully mobilized and toppled the landlord class was it appropriate to even raise the issue of “taking care of landlords” (zhaogu dizhu). Directives also presented settling accounts with landlords through struggle as the simple solution to rural poverty. If the poor needed land, they would get land; if the poor needed housing, they would get housing.⁶⁴ By filling the gaps, work teams could reduce inequality among villagers without striking fear among middle peasants by raising the specter of all-out leveling. But rich peasants, still theoretically under the protection of the May Fourth Directive, were increasingly under attack from cadres and activists. Completing land reform in mid-1947, the Taihang base area confiscated property from landlords and rich peasants alike to “fill holes” among the poor.⁶⁵ The Central China Bureau, meanwhile, continued to promote its policy of leaving middle peasant land untouched while leveling the other rural classes. In summer 1947, the bureau thus lambasted the “rich peasant line” as it launched a combative land reform “reexamination” campaign that promised to ensure the poor had in fact gotten enough land. In this campaign, the land of landlords and rich peasants alike would be leveled with the village poor.⁶⁶

Debates over the treatment of rural classes grew in importance over summer 1947 as Liu Shaoqi prepared to host a second land conference with an eye toward eventually compiling a land law to replace the vague May Fourth Directive. Writing on behalf of party central, Deng Zihui reached out to Liu in July, arguing for further attacks on landlords and rich peasants in line with the “don’t touch the middle, move the two ends” approach.⁶⁷ As party central moved against rich peasants, the East China Bureau now pressured work teams to correct the lenient nature of land-to-the-tiller land reform during the ongoing “reexamination” campaigns. According to the bureau, landlords still had excess and high-quality land, while rich peasants still maintained all of the land farmed by their own households. Demanding a transformation of the rural economy, the bureau called on teams to once again settle accounts with rural class enemies who had “stolen the fruits of struggle.” Previous policies had approved of donations and the peaceful transfer of land, and the September First Directive of 1946 had even allowed class enemies to keep extra land, housing, tools, and draft animals. But now “old” rich peasants and landlords would be given no more than the village poor. Far from denouncing the policy of sweeping landlords “out the door,” the East China Bureau now advocated giving hated or “reactionary” landlords nothing.68

Confiscation of rich peasant property was officially approved with the Outline Land Law, released on October 10, 1947. As approved by party central following the Xibaipo land conference, this law claimed that landlords and rich peasants, while under 10 percent of the rural population, held as much as 80 percent of the land, a wild overestimation in North China. This figure was particularly untrue for the “old liberated areas” long under Communist control, which had already hosted double reduction and land reform campaigns. Even before 1937, land tenancy rates in Hebei and Shandong hovered as low as 10 percent.⁶⁹ Poor peasants would have to look elsewhere for wealth. But where? The law’s sixth article called for equal land distribution, ensuring that landlords should receive a fair share of land. But this also meant that many middle peasants, and all rich peasants, stood to lose property.⁷⁰ After personally investigating rural conditions prior to the September land conference, Liu Shaoqi had intended to offer full protection to middle peasants. But just as the conference was coming to a close, Liu’s original plan was disrupted by the publication of a newspaper article calling for the equalization of land, seen as an expression of Mao Zedong’s views.⁷¹ As a result, the sixth article of the land law called for equal distribution, giving landlord families the same share of land as families with sons in the PLA.⁷²

Under the Outline Land Law, base areas launched a new round of land reform to equalize holdings. In order to help work teams correctly classify villagers, party central once again distributed copies of two articles Mao had written on rural classes back in 1933.⁷³ The articles’ original call for poor treatment of rich peasants and landlords had been deleted, but this did little to stem the growth of what party central would soon condemn as “leftist” deviations in class division. These deviations are commonly blamed on the much-maligned Kang Sheng and his work in the Jin-Sui base area, where cadres brought politics into the process of creating economic classes, turning former Nationalist Party members into class enemies. Simply complaining about the new government was enough to be classed as a rich peasant or landlord. Cadres were also basing class statuses on the investigation into three previous generations (cha san dai), creating bankrupt landlords who had in fact labored their entire lives. The total malleability of what Kang Sheng called “shape shifting landlords” (hua xing dizhu) was compounded by secrecy in the class division process, with a small number of land-hungry activists divining class statuses for entire villages.74 In Wugong in North China, a village stocked with middle peasants, the pressure to find class enemies remained strong enough for a work team to wrongly push seventy-one households into rich peasant status.⁷⁵

With increasing violence in the push for equal holdings, some Communist Party leaders questioned the party’s chaotic implementation of class division. In 1948, few spoke with more clarity and force than Xi Zhongxun, then stationed in the long-established Northwest base area, home to villages filled with middle peasants and new rich peasants. According to Xi, many villages lacked a single landlord or “old” rich peasant, and no more than 2 percent of villagers in the Northwest qualified as poor peasants. Relaunching land reform in these old areas for the sake of equal division, Xi argued, would turn the peasant masses against the party.⁷⁶ Xi wrote directly to Mao, warning him that a small number of hooligans, posing as activists, were now supporting a “poor peasant and hired hand line.” These fake activists opposed what they called the “middle peasant line” and used deadly methods of struggle, causing a panic in the countryside. With labor heroes attacked because of their extra grain, peasants avoided production and feared prosperity. Xi even dared to question Mao’s assumptions about rural classes. Noting that middle peasants were already the dominant class in the Northwest, Xi argued that many of those who remained poor were in fact lazy. Putting these peasants in charge of land reform had resulted in chaos. Whereas some party leaders had seen poor peasants as the only reliable rural class, Xi asked Mao to put his trust in China’s middle peasants. They, alongside some but not all poor peasants, were the true basic masses.⁷⁷ As Xi would later say of the “complex” poor peasant class: “Some are poor because they love to eat, drink, go whoring, gamble, or don’t want to work.” As these hooligans accounted for 25 percent of poor peasants in the Northwest, to rely on such men to run land reform and equally divide the land was to “seek death” for the countryside. According to Xi, it was far better to rely on peasant associations under middle peasant control; poor peasant activists were welcome to join once they were approved by their middle peasant neighbors.78

While Xi led the way, others in the party also moved to limit chaos stemming from the party’s treatment of rural classes. In January 1948, party theoretician Ren Bishi delivered a speech on land reform that soon became required reading for work team members. As Ren emphasized, the party desperately needed a greater focus on accurate class division and a more nuanced view of village class structures. During the period of rectification that followed, the Communist Party attempted to correct class labels, protect commerce, and make amends with those who had wrongly lost property, especially those who had been totally expropriated and “swept out the door” (saodi chumen).⁷⁹ Still, after the publication and distribution of Ren Bishi’s speech, reports from the countryside confirmed that the treatment of rural classes remained highly problematic. In the Northeast, middle peasants had played a small role in struggle, allowing poor peasants and hired hands, overeager to class their neighbors as rich peasants and encouraged by slogans to embrace chaos, to beat, torture, and execute struggle targets in a never-ending search for hidden wealth. Many villagers classed as rich peasants were locked up, their property confiscated and “swept clean” (yi sao guang): they were left with nothing. Work teams and village cadres, meanwhile, looked the other way, not daring to contradict the will of the rural proletariat.⁸⁰

In response, the party revised the call for equal landholdings in the Outline Land Law in deference to middle peasants, allowing them to maintain their property if they did not agree to equal distribution. In practice, however, the desire for equal distribution meant widespread infringement on middle peasant property until the party suspended land reform in summer 1948. Only a year later, with the end of the long war against the Nationalists finally in sight, land reform and class division returned to the center of the party’s rural policies. Two years to the day after the release of the Outline Land Law, the North China Bureau announced a new campaign to bring land reform to some 15 million newly liberated rural citizens. But there were hints that this would be a new land reform, with a new approach to class. This campaign featured a return to the “move the two ends, don’t touch the middle” approach that had been discarded during the push for full equalization. Village intellectuals, including those from landlord and rich peasant families, were to be taught to “serve the people.”81 Leaders of the East China Bureau, noting that cadres dispatched from North China were facing challenges in their region, similarly suggested that young village intellectuals, leftist landlords, and enlightened gentry could make valuable contributions to rural work as village cadres.⁸²

After the founding of the PRC, the process of class determination continued to follow the precedents established during Civil War campaigns, with an even greater emphasis on correct classification. No less of an authority than Mao Zedong had declared mistakes in class statuses as one of the primary problems with Civil War–era campaigns.⁸³ Work teams continued to use peasant associations as forums for villagers to collectively determine class status. Villagers would individually report (zibao) their class status, which would become official only with public agreement (gongyi).⁸⁴ As one village land reform report helpfully explained, this was a carefully plotted out process of “explaining the concept of class, learning the concept of class, advocating the concept of class, identifying classes, reviewing class status, finalizing class status, and finally approving the determination of class status with the higher level of leadership.”⁸⁵

Even in the relatively simple rural economy of North China, not every villager had fit neatly into Mao’s rural class scheme. As the campaigns moved into the prosperous and diversified economies of southern and coastal China, Mao’s classification system was tested to its limits. Shortly after promulgating the China Land Law in summer 1950, the party approved a host of new statuses for village residents: religious professional, practitioner of superstition, craftsman, peddler, independent professional, and merchant. In practice, however, significant problems with the division of classes remained. First, the land law strayed from a purely economic approach to class division. The law held that some rich peasants could be classed as “rich middle peasants” if villagers did not object, allowing public opinion considerable sway in the process of land reform.⁸⁶ The line between rich peasants and middle peasants, meanwhile, caused much anxiety, especially when attacks on rich peasants continued throughout the latter half of land reform. In land reform near Chongqing, for example, the phenomenon of equal distribution remained common, creating no shortage of chaos as cadres and activists illegally moved against rich peasants. Even middle peasants found themselves losing good land. Upper-level cadres wondered if this might be a landlord plot to dampen the desire for struggle among the masses, but also admitted that local cadres were to blame. Most did not see the “essence and evil consequences” of equal division, and some in fact fully supported taking property from rich and middle peasants in order to satisfy the needs of the poor.87

The process of class division, furthermore, remained a highly volatile affair. Outsiders on work teams had to rely on villagers to properly assess local economic relationships. The party called for the determination of classes to proceed through the investigation of the three years prior to liberation, but the messy process of class determination unearthed complex social relationships through recollections and accusations, reviving stories of parents and grandparents.⁸⁸ For those who understood the grounds for class determination, this could be an empowering moment—an opportunity to secure property and status under the new Communist order. One Sichuan nun, initially labeled a religious practitioner, was able to win reassignment as a poor peasant by insisting that she never begged and had instead relied on her own labor.⁸⁹ Open discussion of landholdings and past transgressions could also prove ruinous, even for the staunchest supporters of land reform. One peasant association vice chair found himself facing doubts over his past life as a bandit and charges that he had been too lenient to village landlords during a previous rent reduction. Might this former bandit be a class enemy in disguise? Fearing struggle, he committed suicide.⁹⁰

There was good reason to fear struggle as class determination expanded during the first years of the PRC. Party leaders crafting the lenient class policies found in the new Land Reform Law had not anticipated how the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula would create fears that landlords, already connected to the Nationalists in Mao’s vision of rural China, might use the conflict to oppose the new order. Just months after fighting began, party reports made the ties between American imperialism and landlord deviousness explicit. Landlords, who had been praised for quietly accepting land reform in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, were once again chastised as devious tricksters. In South Central China, Du Runsheng declared that with war in Korea, violent struggle was needed to tame class enemies.⁹¹ Landlords were now accused of taking control of peasant associations, destroying production materials, and using their mastery of policy to attempt to influence the land reform process. One nefarious man, for example, argued against his rightful landlord status by proclaiming, “Chairman Mao has said that every extra landlord is an extra enemy.”92 Just a few months after party leaders had promoted working with the village elite, a Guangdong team was criticized for allying with the enlightened gentry to mobilize the rural poor.

With treatment of various classes still in flux, work teams could easily exacerbate rural anxiety. In Liangshan County, the team working in Jianshe village decided to bypass the peasant association, which was headed by a middle peasant, and held meetings with poor peasants and hired hands. Shut out, the peasant association chair grew nervous: “The poor peasants and hired hands hold meetings all day, and I have no idea what they are meeting about. Could it be that they are collecting materials for struggle?” As a result of the work team’s secrecy, rumors began to fly that struggle would inevitably spread to rich and, finally, middle peasants.⁹³ Those classed as upper-middle peasants, in the nebulous zone between friend and enemy of Mao’s revolution, generally feared land reform. One such upper-middle peasant, Lu Guosi, was so terrified by the prospect of struggle that he ran about his village, searching for any news of his fate. He also made sure to constantly complain about his own bitterness. Lu even tracked down anyone who owed him money to declare, “You don’t have to repay me, that loan was my mistake.”⁹⁴

With so much at stake, villagers made the most of class division, often in ways that brought official rebuke. Investigations into class determination complained that villagers were ruled by self-interest, not revolutionary fervor or Maoist orthodoxy. Households, not surprisingly, tended to underre-port their land in order to get better class labels. One study of three villages discovered that households had concealed over 20 percent of landholdings, leading investigators to declare, “Each household withholds information, each piece is untrue.” While some blame was assigned to rich peasants and landlords who had previously hidden their land, the report admitted that peasants, hearing that distributions were based on current holdings, claimed to have pathetic landholdings, hoping to get more. Because this phenomenon was most associated with middle peasants, land-hungry poor peasants and hired hands suffered.⁹⁵ Reports on class determination also revealed that while some landlords were pleading for mercy, others schemed to avoid their class status, drumming up instances of labor. One Sichuan landlord attempted to pass off selling opium as labor.⁹⁶ A Guizhou landlord claimed he was too old to labor before villagers reminded him that he had never labored when he was younger. But middle peasants were also trying to pose as poor peasants in the hopes of getting more property.97

IMAGE 11. A peasant, chained by his landlord, works the land. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 36-37.

Despite the formal approval of new class statuses, fitting villagers into Maoist classes remained difficult. In the countryside surrounding Shanghai where villagers aspired to factory jobs, for example, most relied on nonagricultural income to make ends meet.⁹⁸ In Fujian’s Yang village, peasants overseeing class division created an entirely new class status, that of the “usurious practitioner” (zhaili shenghuozhe), for two men who had no land or business but lived in the style of landlords by granting loans.⁹⁹ One work team, reporting a “struggle target problem” (douzheng duixiang wenti), admitted finding few true landlords.¹⁰⁰ Finding targets would have been even more difficult without the practice of considering economic relations during the three years prior to the arrival of Communist power. This practice unearthed some truly pathetic landlords, including the clearly impoverished Zhang Yuanxin. During his classification, Zhang argued that he should be labeled a poor peasant, reasoning, “Right now I live in the temple, with no land or house, what am I if not a poor peasant?” Activists rebuked Zhang, strongly reminding him that his previous wealth meant that in no way could he qualify as a poor peasant. Zhang, in the end, could only lower his head and accept his landlord status.101

Throughout the many campaigns of rural revolution, the theoretical basis of class division was economic: the definition of a landlord was based on the percentage of income derived through exploitation versus labor. Descriptions of landlord evils included tales of extreme peasant poverty caused by the economic crimes of the landlord class. As the Communists knew well, there was significant social disparity in many rural areas and no shortage of economic suffering. A report on Five Mile Bridge, a village in Guizhou, declared the economic situation there a “complete mess” (lingluan) where nearly everyone lived in a straw huts. One particularly pathetic case was that of Yang Minghua. Yang rented his farming land from Zhang Hanchang, but his rent was only part of what he owed his landlord. On various holidays and harvest days Zhang had to gift his landlord with fish, chicken, or home- cooked meals. He also had to perform a seemingly endless variety of free labor for his landlord, from chopping wood to running menial errands. As the report emphasized, all of this was unpaid, leaving Yang starving on the street after his landlord refused to feed him.¹⁰²

But according to the party’s revolutionary narrative as explained by its ever expanding propaganda army, being a landlord meant far more than prospering from the economic exploitation of the peasant masses. These men were cast as evil and corrupt. As a result, attempts to avoid the landlord class status by selling off land and other properties took on sinister overtones.¹⁰³ Landlords were portrayed as a reactionary class attempting to derail the revolution, and records of landlords committing illegal acts to limit their losses abound in party records. One evil tyrant landlord in Wenjia, an administrative village, was charged with illegally selling off much of his land before it could be taken away. Landlords also might spread rumors in the hopes of curbing peasant activism and class struggle. According to one landlord rumor, “The American soldiers have occupied Korea, the Third World War has started, soon the Communists will be gone, and when the Nationalist Party returns they will crack your skulls.” Most brazenly, in the suburbs of Chongqing, an evil tyrant connected to the Nationalists teamed up with twenty like-minded elites to start their own peasant association to hamper the implementation of land reform. The evil tyrant claimed to have been a Communist for over ten years and promised that only those who joined his peasant association would receive land. Over two thousand signed up. Amazingly, this was not the only “fake” peasant association to spring up during the late rounds of land reform in Sichuan.104

IMAGE 12. An evil landlord, upset over land reform, uses metal spikes to hurt a peasant. Source: ord. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 113

While party propaganda generalized the evil nature of the landlord class, it was also certainly true that many landlords resorted to violence when faced with land reform. Even after the Civil War ended, there were cases of landlords poisoning wells or lashing out by destroying agricultural tools or cutting down forests.¹⁰⁵ These crimes against the new regime could be read as acts of self-preservation or desperation, yet the party universally portrayed these actions as the direct manifestation of the evil nature of the landlord class. The party further tainted local landlords by widely promoting stories of landlord crimes to demonstrate the depravity of the class as a whole. The landlord Liu Yuancong, struggled in 1951, was accused of over five hundred crimes. His underlings beat peasants to death over perceived slights and murdered others to cover their crimes. During a five-day marathon of charges in his local peasant association Liu was further accused of thievery, seizing property, making high-interest loans, and selling opium. In light of his crimes, one report concluded, “Killing him was really letting him off easy.”¹⁰⁶

IMAGE 13. A landlord poisons a well to take revenge on peasant activists. Source: Zhongnan tudi gaige de weida shengli, 105.

As discursively constructed by the Communist Party, landlords were ruthless exploiters. Living off the labor of the good peasant masses, they murdered to protect their lands and class interests. But that was just the start of landlord crimes. According to the party’s countless tales of lecherous landlord men, they were by nature perverse sexual deviants. The sexual abuse by landlord men could take many forms, from raping peasant women to controlling the young women already within their households. Landlord women, meanwhile, were accused of using their sexuality to corrupt peasants and subvert the revolution. Through a skillful representation of rural gender relations, the Communists demonized the old order by portraying village power holders as lecherous sexual deviants preying on peasant women. Simultaneously, Communist propaganda presented the party as the sole savior of peasant women and, by extension, the peasant family.

Actual cases of landlord-as-sexual predator certainly existed, especially during the chaotic years preceding Communist victory. Jack Belden interviewed a woman who “was constantly forced to receive the attentions of a local landlord,” who also headed the local Nationalist militia.107 Communist propaganda ensured that the crimes of some landlords became indicative of the depravity of the landlord class as a whole. Such was the case with the vile Xuan Jingxiu, an accused evil tyrant and bandit. During his trial in late 1950, he was charged with the rape of Li Suqing in 1931, keeping her captive for two years before having her buried alive. This was only one of multiple charges of rape against Xuan, whose depravity seemed to know no bounds. According to the report, he raped and sodomized over two hundred women and children. And in the “counterrevolutionary territory” under his control, he claimed “first night rights” (chu ye quan), brazenly raping newlywed brides.¹⁰⁸

For the party, the idea of landlords as sexual predators was an accepted truth. One report on the “feudal regime” in control of rural Sichuan declared that dishonoring peasant women was a standard landlord crime. The report offered an example of a sexually deviant landlord in Wenjiang county, Lei Fuhua, a wealthy landowner who served in a number of official posts, including school principal. Taking advantage of his wealth and position, Lei “constantly” raped peasant women: over thirty teachers, peasant wives, and students. As a result young women “didn’t dare to go” anywhere near the landlord. Lei even took his running dogs to the household of the poor peasant Li Xinghua with the intension of raping Li’s attractive nineteen-year-old daughter. Finding her not home, he sexually assaulted Li’s thirteen-year-old daughter, ordering his running dogs to knife the girl to death when she resisted and cursed him. Threats of further violence kept her father quiet.109

Through skillful repetition in party propaganda, the horrific crimes of individual men such as Lei Fuhua became tied to the entire landlord class. The party, for example, offered powerful representations of new class identities in the operas that were staged throughout the countryside during the many years of agrarian revolution. Because the staging of evil landlords preying on helpless women proved highly effective in generating audience passion and anger, dramatists relied heavily on stock characters designed to promote class struggle. The landlord character Lu Chengshu of Red Leaf River, the opera William Hinton watched in Long Bow, is notable for both his love of cheating the peasantry and his predilection for sexual assault. Hardly limiting himself to collecting rent and interest, Lu was a sexual predator, cruelly raping Yan Yan, a young peasant girl, an act that led directly to her suicide. The connections between class and sexual assault became so pervasive that in some cases, all landlord and evil tyrant extramarital sex was simply deemed rape.¹¹⁰

Cadres and peasant activists, despite casual references to dividing the wives and daughters of class enemies, were almost never accused of sexual assault. The recent work of Tan Song, an academic and activist dedicated to recording the abuses of the land reform era, suggests that sexual misconduct among cadres and activists certainly existed and may have been widespread. Investigating the gang rape and killing of a landlord daughter over a half century after her death in 1950, Tan uncovered the details of the crime. A land reform work team, failing to get much from a local bank manager, called for the struggle of his daughter, a young teacher named Liang Wenhua. Some ten militiamen, sent to fetch Liang, gang-raped and killed her. In 2006, Tan’s investigation revealed that one of the accused rapists, Li Chaozhao, was still alive. Interviewed by Tan, Li detailed the background of the crime, noting that the bank had been already taken over by the Communists, so naturally the manager had little cash to turn over. Li, insisting that he did not take part in the crime, admitted that the other militiamen were in fact guilty, although none were ever charged. As Li bluntly explained in graphic terms, activists overseeing female class enemies had nearly unlimited power.¹¹¹

Agrarian revolution embedded the language of Maoist social classes deep within rural society. The famous philosopher Feng Youlan discovered this when he joined other intellectuals and traveled to a village just outside Beijing to join a land reform work team in early 1950. Later, Feng admitted that before participating in land reform, he had thought that the movement was “merely some sort of economic policy.” After joining the work team, however, Feng witnessed strange events, including an old peasant woman who cursed her husband in the new language of class, yelling out, “You are a rich peasant, you are a landlord, and you are an evil tyrant!” Now, Feng wrote, he understood that land reform had to be understood as “a form of mass education.”112

The introduction of the concepts of class, class labels, and class struggle into Chinese villages dramatically altered rural life for decades. The concepts of landlords and peasants, arriving in rural China during these seven years of agrarian revolution, became accepted as natural social categories. This was a moment of discursive explosion, a time when the campaign and its distinctive rhetoric spread to many narrative forms, from simple songs and slogans to full-length novels and operas. Under party direction, villagers were taught to see landlords as qualitatively different from peasants. Landlords were villains, determined to stop land reform at any cost. Landlords were also sexual deviants, capable of raping of young women and other reprehensible acts. Landlord women, meanwhile, used their sexuality to serve the impure interests of their class by seducing or even marrying local cadres. And the crimes of landlord elders were passed on to future generations without hesitation or question. In Wugong in North China, a visiting work team could find only one suitable class enemy to struggle: Li Yingzhou, a true bully whose actions had led to the deaths of multiple peasants. But because the man lay dying, the work team organized a brutal struggle of his only son, Li Dalin. This man, beaten and crippled by his neighbors during land reform, was guilty only of being his father’s son. Not far from Wugong, meanwhile, a poor orphan girl was labeled a landlord so that she might serve as the village scapegoat for class struggle.¹¹³

Behind the narrative of liberation through class struggle, however, is evidence that some peasants actively sought to protect their landlords from struggle. During the height of the Civil War, many landlords found shelter and safety among family members in nearby villages.¹¹⁴ The party generally blamed this phenomenon on landlord chicanery or ideological confusion. But the conspiracies local communities concocted during class division to convince work teams that village landlords were in fact laborers were impressive. In Guizhou, for example, a peasant association chair named Yang Taoxuan attempted to save his relative Yang Zexuan from being cast as a class enemy. The relative, Yang Taoxuan argued, had given him medicine to cure an illness and thus should be considered a doctor.115 Many peasants, horrified at the prospect of struggling their neighbors, actively spoke out in favor of peaceful land reform. In Lu county in southeast Sichuan, peasants told work team cadres that their local landlords were actually rather poor, so there was not much to gain in violent class struggle. Some peasants also made it clear that they liked their landlords. As work team members reported, there was “not much hatred” (chouhen bu hen) to be found. One poor peasant wife insisted that their landlord was respectful (gongjin): when he came to the village, he wore grass sandals and never rode a sedan chair. A hired hand admitted that he had been exploited, but also declared it was no big deal. Work team members, through education, were able to correct these ideological problems.¹¹⁶ The party could scarcely have it any other way. Without resentment toward landlords, fierce class struggle, the penultimate chapter of the party’s narrative of rural revolution, was impossible.