Agrarian Revolution in Retrospect
Stories, which transform complex and messy events into tidy narratives with linear plotlines, are essential to the craft of history. Historians in both China and the West have embraced narrative arcs, character development, and dramatic denouements to enthrall generation after generation of readers. This shared narrative approach to making the past sensible and readable has bequeathed a surprising number of similar stories.1 These, however, are simply smaller tales in the much larger story of history, the metanarrative that gives meaning to the vast stretch of time now covered by the historical record.2 In modern China, history has largely been written by reformers and revolutionaries attempting to legitimize their political actions. As a result, the past has been viewed primarily through two grand narratives. Historians affiliated with the Nationalist Party favored a narrative of gradual progress toward Western modernization under the stern political tutelage of Chiang Kai-shek. Those working with the Communists, by contrast, promoted a tale of revolution against the twin forces of feudalism and imperialism.3 Both sides attempted to faithfully recreate history, but the primacy of ideological concerns and a commitment to a straightforward course toward modernity resulted in histories that owe as much to literary fiction as to historical realities.
The natural inclination to narrative, however, has also deeply affected the course of history. This book has explored how the tales of revolution spun by Mao Zedong and his comrades in the Chinese Communist Party defined the course of their greatest enterprise: the transformation of the countryside as the party came to power and cemented its hold over one-quarter of humanity. Party leaders, following the dictates of Marx and Lenin, had initially tied their fates to China’s tiny proletariat, only to see their dreams of a proper urban revolution dashed in the Shanghai Massacre of 1927. Cast out into the countryside and forced to reimagine a path to socialist utopia, Mao Zedong forecast a novel revolutionary storm that would bring his party to power. According to his vision, the Communist Party would lead the peasant masses through a fierce storm of class struggle. Once liberated, China’s peasants would surge forth like a hurricane, sweep aside the forces of feudalism, and recreate the world as Mao envisioned.
This story had its origins in 1927 when Mao Zedong returned home to Hunan to observe firsthand the turmoil then roiling the countryside. His detailed survey of village life, framed as objective and truthful, quickly became the basis for the Communist Party’s narrative of peasant revolution. This story was never intended to be confined to the page. In 1945, after eight years of fighting off Japanese imperialists, the party moved to bring Mao’s narrative to life, dispatching a vast army of work teams to remake rural society through a series of revolutionary campaigns, the most important of which was land reform. Party authors taking part in the early rounds of agrarian revolution penned narrative accounts of their time in the countryside, creating textual models for future work teams. The chapters of this book have followed their narrative structure, starting with the mobilization of urban intellectuals to join seasoned rural activists in the party’s many work teams. Work teams arrived in rural China intent on transforming the countryside by bringing Mao’s tale of peasant liberation to life through fierce class struggle. Team members sought out impoverished villagers and taught them how to speak bitterness, always sure to carry out ideological training so that newly identified activists understood that landlords and other class enemies were behind their suffering. Once mobilized, activists assisted work teams in dividing villages using Mao’s class structure, a contentious affair that simplified complex and fluid social structures into fixed groupings of peasants and landlords. The arrival of these Maoist class categories, previously unheard of in the Chinese countryside, would have momentous consequences for future generations.
Mao’s narrative of agrarian revolution reached its denouement when peasant activists, trained by the party’s work teams, took part in highly ritualized enactments of class struggle. Work teams viewed the public and confrontational struggling of landlords as the means to peasant emancipation, but during early campaigns, poor activists used the ritual to beat and torture their neighbors for economic gain. Later campaigns promised a more nuanced approach to class division and property redistribution, but never shook the violent origins of class struggle, ensuring that agrarian revolution remained true to Mao’s narrative of liberation through violence. Many, of course, benefited from the arrival of Communist power. Recalling his time on a work team, the poet Shao Yanxiang noted with pride how the campaign wrapped up before the New Year, so that villagers could celebrate not just the holiday but their fanshen as well. When the team left, the peasants he left behind seemed genuinely happy, many planning long-hoped-for marriages.4 But the party was unable to deliver on the promise of fanshen and provide universal peasant emancipation. The poorest gained new property from their wealthier neighbors, but party leaders were well aware that land reform alone could never truly transform the rural economy. The violence of the campaigns, meanwhile, left many villagers and work team members traumatized. And while Mao promised liberation through class struggle, land reform bequeathed a legacy of bitterness that endured for decades by fixing the statuses of class enemies. Decades after taking part in agrarian revolution, the poet Shao Yanxiang could only wonder if violence was truly the only way to solve the land problem.5
Mao Zedong’s vision of agrarian revolution, brought to life during these years of campaigns, dramatically altered the Chinese countryside. In late September 1952, future minister of agriculture Liao Luyan praised the monumental accomplishments of land reform during the PRC era. Fielding as many as 300,000 work team members for every year of campaigning, the party had brought the revolution to some 300 million peasants in three years. The result, Liao proclaimed, was an enthusiastic and productive workforce, of which as much as 70 percent had received property distributions. Peasants were happy, politically active, and raising their cultural levels.6 Scholars have agreed that land reform was effective in transferring land; some 43 percent of land was redistributed and over 10 million landlords expropriated.7 But the exact death toll of agrarian reform will never be known. With some 1 million villages in China, one assumption was a death rate of one class enemy per village; recently, scholars have estimated that it is possible that as many as 2 million died as a result of Mao’s land revolution.8 To this accounting, historians must now consider the problem of sexual assault, long ignored by the party. While this issue demands further investigation, at the moment it seems sadly reasonable to assume that sexual assault was just as common as the killing of class enemies in China’s rural revolution.
In recent years, the party has quietly tried to downplay class struggle, preferring instead to highlight the party’s role in promoting rural economic development. One account of the Communists’ role in agricultural development, published by the party’s history press, argued that bringing about the end of feudalism as an economic system represented the true significance of land reform.9 But Mao’s revolutionary narrative and its promise of peasant liberation has never been forgotten. The foundational study of land reform edited by senior party official Du Runsheng, who personally led massive campaigns to transform rural China, offers a succinct party take on the events discussed in this book: “Land reform was not only a profound economic transformation, but a profound political transformation as well, a prelude to the establishment and construction of a new China.”10 Du defended the legacy of land reform by arguing that the Communists’ agrarian revolution was not simply about creating a more equitable division of land but about transforming peasants and laying the very foundations for the political modernization of rural China. As Du strongly reminded his readers, to one-sidedly judge the revolution “by how much land was distributed” can only result in a “neglect of the tremendous achievements in the political and social realms.”11 Unique among Maoist-era campaigns, land reform is firmly tied to the notion of the liberation and emancipation of the peasantry and represents the cornerstone of party legitimacy in the countryside.12
This is not to say that all Chinese accept the party’s narrative of peasant liberation through land reform. Tan Song, a university professor obsessed with documenting the violence of land reform, has conducted extensive fieldwork to unearth the horrors of rural revolution. His work includes a reevaluation of the case of Liu Wencai, perhaps the most infamous evil tyrant of the early 1950s, notorious for exploiting and torturing peasants, even coercing new mothers to breast-feed him so that he might extend his own life. Liu’s own grandson, Liu Xiaofei, has pushed back against these charges, bringing his family’s tale to global attention in 2016. According to Liu Xiaofei, his grandfather, in fact a kind man, personally financed a Communist guerrilla force.13 Fittingly, novelists have also pushed back against the party’s narrative; Fang Fang’s 2016 award-winning novel Soft Burial (Ruan mai), inspired by one of the stories unearthed by Tan Song, told the shocking tale of an entire family driven to suicide during land reform.14 The party, however, has systematically pushed back these challenges. Tan Song lost his job for his outspokenness, Liu Xiaofei’s grandfather remains a notorious villain, and Fang Fang’s novel was quickly banned.
In the decades following agrarian revolution, the party continued to use land reform methods, most notably a heavy reliance on class struggle, as the driving force behind the politicization and mobilization of Chinese citizens. Struggle meetings appeared in Chinese cities in the early 1950s when urban workers adapted the rituals of land reform to attack urban merchants.15 Struggle also remained an important part of rural political life, with landlords regularly humiliated and abused in accordance with the needs of the party. As seen in this account of a rural struggle meeting during a 1965 campaign against corruption, even village cadres could be struggled as if they were land-reform-era landlords:
To open the session, the “master of ceremonies” whips the crowd into an emotional frenzy by portraying the person’s crimes in as lurid a light as possible. From the crowd, carefully prepared activists scream out cursing cries of rage. Others get caught up in the enthusiasm and start yelling out as well. Then the accused is led out by the local armed militia. . . . He is often made to wear a heavy placard branding him a traitor, class enemy, and so on. . . . People from the crowd “spontaneously” bring forth evidence that amplifies his misdeeds and shows that these are part of a whole despicable pattern of wrongdoing. Shouted curses fill the air. Sometimes strong young militiamen rise from their seats and beat the enemy of the people. This is not officially permitted, but depending on the purposes of the session it is sometimes informally encouraged and tacitly condoned. The guilty person stands facing the people during his whole ordeal (which can last several hours); he is an object of the struggle by the people, not one of the people. When the session is over, he is dragged away in total disgrace. He has been symbolically destroyed.16
While the struggle objects in this case were corrupt cadres, not landlords, all of the key features of land reform struggle are present, including the use of small groups to prepare villagers, the public explication of evil deeds, the shouting of politically charged rhetoric, and the use of humiliation and violence. Mao’s Cultural Revolution furthered the model of struggle perfected in agrarian revolution, now firmly entrenched in urban political culture. According to one recollection, prior to the struggling of two teachers, students explicitly discussed the importance of following Mao’s “Hunan Report,” which had detailed the use of dunce caps and the parading of class enemies.17 Cultural Revolution struggle sessions featured slogans, humiliation, violence, and other familiar features. Many elements of struggle were taken to extreme degrees during the course of the Cultural Revolution; one struggle object wore “a five-meter-high dunce cap decorated with paper cutouts of skeletons, monsters, turtles, and ox heads” during a parade.18
In 1981 Communist leadership, rethinking the party’s long and tumultuous history, explicitly rejected the Cultural Revolution and its rhetoric of class and rituals of struggle. Agrarian reform, which had first popularized the enactment of class struggle, was still considered a major success.19 Because land reform and the liberation of the peasant masses occupy hallowed grounds in the party’s tale of revolution, the campaigns have never been discredited. Alongside the war against Japanese imperialism, agrarian revolution represents the foundation of party legitimacy. During subsequent rural campaigns, work teams attempted to associate themselves with the legitimacy of land reform by consciously practicing the three togethers: eating, working, and living with the peasants. Villagers may have blamed the party for the pains of collectivization, the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. But despite its violence, land reform represented something unique: a treasured moment of cooperation between peasants and the party.20
Today agrarian revolution remains a treasured moment, seemingly immune to the criticisms often directed at other PRC mass movements. A true reckoning of China’s massive agrarian revolution must wait until the day when the campaigns are no longer needed to help legitimize the PRC government. When placed in its proper perspective, agrarian revolution is not something to be lionized as it is in PRC histories, but neither is it worthy of wholesale denunciation. Given widespread rural poverty, the promise of fanshen gave land reform a powerful appeal—not just for poor peasants in desperate need of land but for Chinese elites seeking to create a stronger nation. After land reform, many members of the rural poor, empowered through agrarian revolution, overwhelmingly put their faith in the party.21 It would be unwise to discount the many peasants who fondly remembered the arrival of Communist power, recalling a time when the party worked with farmers to improve rural life. Yet in evaluating these years of difficult campaigning, it is essential to remember that in Mao’s narrative of agrarian revolution, liberation was always predicated on struggle: without class labels, without fierce struggle, there could be no transformation of the peasantry.
If the concepts of class and class struggle were discarded with the leveling of the rural classes, Mao’s agrarian revolution would certainly have a different meaning in retrospect. But the class labels handed out during these years of campaigning became a patrilineal inheritance, entirely divorced from economic realities. Future generations of peasants became the dominant social grouping in Chinese villages, serving as local cadres and enjoying political privileges. Descendants of rich peasants and landlords, scorned as members of the “four bad types,” were kept under surveillance and excluded from village politics unless needed as scapegoats for future campaigns.22 Even the rich peasants who had been allowed to keep their excess property during PRC-era rural campaigns were subjected to decades of systemic social and political discrimination.23 Many landlords feared leaving their homes; when they did venture out into the village, they made sure to make way for village cadres and activists, humbly bowing when greeting their economic and political superiors.24 Not until the 1980s did landlords reenter village society as equals.25 The demise of Maoist classes, however, was hardly an unqualified boon for Chinese villagers. Deng Xiaoping’s move against “egalitarianism” in the late 1970s resulted in the total abandonment of the long-held goal of eliminating differences between urban and rural populations. Largely left behind in Deng’s push to modernize during the “opening and reform” era, China’s rural citizens are now disdained as a problematic population, mostly notable for their supposed low “quality” (suzhi).26 In today’s China, villagers suffer no shortage of indignity, with little hope besides escaping to cities where they labor as underpaid and poorly treated migrant workers. Peasants, as a social category, have become scapegoats for China’s perceived weaknesses.
This bothered Shao Yanxiang, the poet who took part in land reform. Reflecting on his time on a work team a half-century later, Shao gushed over the peasants he worked with, who deeply impressed him with their attention to policy, their ability to organize, and especially their self-awareness during elections. Who, Shao asked, can truly say the peasants are low quality and cannot take part in democratic elections?27 The juxtaposition of the promise of rural liberation embedded in the Communist revolutionary narrative and the realities of contemporary village life leaves Xi Jinping, now China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, in a unique position. Xi’s father, the pragmatic Xi Zhongxun, was one of the few party leaders to question Mao’s framing of rural classes and methods of agrarian revolution. Xi Jinping, furthermore, is no stranger to village life, having spent many of his early years as a “sent-down youth” in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping, however, continues to insist on clinging to Mao’s revolutionary narrative to bolster the party’s legitimacy. Despite his own years in the countryside, his party has shut down attempts to move toward a more accurate representation of agrarian revolution. Economically, Xi and his comrades have pushed for rapid urbanization, while also moving to increase state control over farmlands and rural credit markets. In the countryside, where his father once advocated democracy and fair treatment for rural citizens, Xi seeks, above all else, to maintain power. In retrospect, it is little wonder that many elderly villagers fondly remember Mao’s grand attempt to remake the countryside through agrarian revolution. In reality, these campaigns were complex, uneven, and prone to violence. The stories told about agrarian revolution, however, remain just as compelling as they did in 1927, when Mao returned home in search of a rural path to revolutionary glory.