A man is poor,
Ever thinner, ever blacker,
Goes to borrow fifty coins,
Is asked a hundred in return,
Turns to go,
Knows he’s taken for a thief;
A man is rich,
Ever fatter, ever whiter,
Goes to borrow fifty pieces,
Has a hundred pressed upon him,
Turns to go,
Is urged to stay and drink.
Shantung Chant
DROWNING MEN are prone to violence.
With so many of Long Bow’s peasants on the verge of ruin, how did a handful of landlord and rich peasant families maintain their system of exploitation? How did they enforce the payment of rent and interest through years of famine and war? How did they protect their hoarded wealth from looting and seizure by their tenants and hired laborers who, after all, needed only to join together to bring the whole system down?
To answer this question one would have to examine the whole superstructure of China—political, military, religious, and cultural—and beyond that, the policies of the imperialist powers who propped that superstructure up with loans and arms, even while they attacked with modern industry and commerce the economic foundation upon which it rested.
There is no space here for such an exhaustive study. I can only try to describe in brief how a small group of gentry dominated Long Bow Village itself. The reader must keep in mind that at all times much greater power than could possibly be mustered locally hovered in the background in the shape of county, provincial, and national officials and the armed forces under their control. Helpless as they proved to be in defending the country against external attack, they were usually adequate to the task of crushing internal revolt and could always be called upon to protect the interests of those few families who stood to gain from the preservation of the old agrarian system.
That a few families ran the affairs of Long Bow Village was well known to the whole population. In the 1920’s, the village even achieved a certain notoriety because of the “Eight Squires” who cooperated with a group of foreign priests in an effort to make converts to Catholicism. These eight were Yang, Li, Wang, Kao, Sheng, Liu, and the two Fans. By the early 1940’s Kao and Liu were no longer influential, having been replaced by Shih, Ch’eng, and Kuo, but there were still eight or ten powerful families and they still dominated the village. By consulting together, by acting in unison when that counted most, and by the backing they gave to whomever they chose to openly manage affairs, this group maintained a virtual monopoly of power. This is not to imply that they were all equally active, that they acted without friction and jealousy among themselves, or that they ruled without allies among other strata of the population. Four families took the lead. These were Sheng, Fan, Shih, and Kuo. They had the backing of the other families of means and brought certain middle peasants and even poor peasants into the ruling circle to carry out routine tasks and to share, to some extent, in the spoils. As for the rest of the population, they occupied the position of the mighty stone tortoises who stood in front of the grave mounds of the gentry, bearing forever on their backs the stone obelisks which the wealthy loved to erect for their dead. The policy of the gentry toward them was to deceive, intimidate, divide and rule.
The rule exercised by this group of gentry rested on several pillars, not the least of which was tradition. Several thousand years of Confucian teachings had established a climate of opinion in which no one, or at best only a few persons in the whole village, questioned the system as such. Rich and poor alike looked on land ownership as the most important form of property, the foundation of family life, and the basis for the proper observance of ancestral rites, as well as the security of future generations. The more land the better. Everyone wanted to own land, bought additional land when he could, and if he succeeded in buying more than he could work, saw nothing wrong in renting it out. Success in this scramble for land was regarded as a reward for virtuous living and right thinking.
Viewed in this frame of reference the expropriation of a large part of the wealth of Long Bow by a few families—which was in essence a form of armed plunder—presented itself as a demonstration of moral law. And if this was too hard for the land-poor to swallow (the virtue of the gentry was often most conspicuous by its absence), they could always blame the fates. The rich were rich, so their tenants were taught to reason, because they were born under a lucky star; and the poor were poor because the heavens were out of joint when they emerged from the womb. This could be determined by an examination of the eight characters.* An even more potent variation on this theme was belief in geomancy, or the magical influence of burial grounds. The rich prospered, it was said, because their fathers were buried in auspicious places in relation to flanking hills, flowing water, and the prevailing winds. The poor were poor because their fathers were buried in the wrong places. Since the rich, with the help of professional geomancers could often pick their spot while the poor had to be content with whatever sorry ditch they were thrown into, this fate had an inevitability that was hard to beat.
The squires of Long Bow did not leave the propagation of such attitudes to chance. They actively supported all the various ways and means by which “right thinking” could be impressed upon the people. A village school for that small minority able to attend emphasized the study of The Four Books and The Five Classics of Confucius; operas at New Year’s drove home the theme of the contrasting rewards of virtue and vice; a Confucian Association promoted ancestor worship and provided mediums who could converse with the spirits of the dead; a temple society kept Buddhism, with its passive acceptance of fate, alive. In later years the Catholic Church, with its centuries of experience in the defense of European feudalism and feudal remnants, became a most stalwart bulwark against social change.
At the same time Sheng Ching-ho and his peers in Long Bow were not so naive as to believe that the cultivation of “right thinking” alone was sufficient guarantee of their position and property. Sanctions more concrete than the teachings of the sages were needed to maintain the collection of rents and the settlement of debts in Long Bow. A more practical pillar on which the rule of the gentry rested was thus the village government with its power to tax, arrest, flog, fine, and ultimately to execute.
The structure of this government was not complicated. At its apex stood the village head or ts’un chang. He was assisted by several staff members: a village secretary who kept accounts, handled correspondence, and issued licenses and documents; a public affairs officer who allocated labor service;* and a village constable who made arrests, administered punishments, and kept the local lockup. None of these positions carried any regular salary, but they placed a man in a position to make a silver dollar by one means or another.
In Long Bow, with its population of close to 1,000, intermediate levels of organization were also deemed necessary. There were three or four lu chang or neighborhood leaders and twenty odd chia chang or heads of ten family groups.
As a guarantee that the orders of these officials would be carried out, the village maintained a Peace Preservation Corps boasting several dozen rifles shouldered on a part-time basis by chronically underemployed young men who, for a little millet, a few personal favors, perhaps a fix of heroin, and a chance to bully, loot, and rape could be depended on to do the will of the gentry.
From the village head to the ten family leaders all of the officials were locally chosen, but they were by no means chosen by universal suffrage. As a matter of fact, insofar as I could determine, no general election had ever been held at any time for any position in the whole history of the village. The office of village head was simply assumed by one or another of the gentry after consultation with the rest, or was parcelled out, after similar consultation, to some person of lesser means who had earned their esteem. The same method was used in filling the rest of the posts. Once the personnel had been selected they were usually confirmed in office by the district head or the county magistrate who cared not one kaoliang stalk as to their fitness for the work, so long as the local gentry were satisfied with them.
To qualify as a village official one had to be fluent, unscrupulous, ingratiating when dealing with those of superior station and threatening when dealing with poorer and weaker persons. Above all one had to be willing to submit to the whims of the gentry and not feel humiliated when ordered to carry out some business for them.
The peasants had their own less than flattering title for such people. They called them kou t’ui-tzu, which means “leg of the dog.”
It can be readily understood that such an administration did not serve people impartially. As far as the higher authorities were concerned, the main purpose of the village government was the collection of taxes, the supply of manpower for public works, and the conscription of soldiers. As long as the extremely heavy quotas in these three spheres were met, no one cared how they were distributed. The gentry saw to it that their own obligations were as light as possible. They avoided taxes whenever they could and made up the difference with extra levies on the rest of the population; they sent middle and poor peasants to move earth, build roads, and repair the fortress-like walls of important villages and towns, while they themselves stayed at home; they conscripted their tenants and laborers for the army, while their own sons went to school.
These evasions of public duty were all dividends that came with control over the village administration. More important in the long run was the leverage over the peasants which the power to distribute the quotas at lower levels gave to those in control. There were many ways in which an obstinate peasant could be taught to bow his head. He could be ordered to haul grain for some warlord in the middle of the planting season. His only son could be tied up and dragged off to the army. His deeds could be doctored to cheat him of land. Taxes could be piled on taxes until he went under. The Peace Preservation Corps could “accidentally” march through his crops. He could be entered in the special register reserved for criminals and thieves. He could be discriminated against in the arbitration of disputes.
There were always bitter quarrels among the peasants over the use of privies, the ownership of trees, the exact boundaries of fields, the possession of women, and many other matters. A peasant who was out of favor with the authorities could easily get the worst of any settlement. A minor case, picked at random from the life of Long Bow Village, will serve to show how this worked.
One day a fairly prosperous middle peasant and cloth peddler, Li Pao-yu, found out that his neighbor Hsiao-tseng often slept with his wife while he himself was away buying cloth. Since he was older and much less solidly put together than Hsiao-tseng, Pao-yu complained to the village office. An investigation proved the truth of the complaint. The village head thereupon ordered both the wife and her lover flogged. After the flogging the two were hung by the arms from the gable of the village office for eight hours. Then the village head fined them both several silver dollars. Since his wife had no money of her own, Pao-yu had to pay the fine. Even though Hsiao-tseng continued to consort with the woman, poor Pao-yu never complained again. He didn’t want to part with more silver dollars.
To the extent that Pao-yu’s wife was actually to blame, a certain rough justice was meted out in this case, but Pao-yu certainly felt that he had been cheated and so, almost invariably, did other peasants who went with complaints to the village office. Without influence one might as well appeal to a mud wall. And so, when disputes arose among the poor, they were usually settled by force. The strong won the day and the weak “ate bitterness.” Just so long as the quarrel did not affect the revenue of the gentry, no one in authority cared how unjust the settlement was.
If one peasant could be discriminated against, another could be favored. As a reward for loyal service and good behavior a man could be given light labor service at convenient times. Lucrative contracts for the supply of materials (such as kaoliang stalks for flood control) could be thrown his way. His sons could be passed over as conscripts and left to help with the field work at home or recommended for good positions at the county seat. He could be assured of a sympathetic hearing in case he had a dispute with anyone else.
But even such a system of favors and penalties did not guarantee permanent control of village life. There was always the danger that the patient tortoise might upset the obelisk altogether. Physical force, naked and unadorned, was therefore the third important pedestal on which the power of the gentry in Long Bow rested. Violence was chronic at all levels of human relationship. Husbands beat their wives, mothers-in-law beat their daughters-in-law, peasants beat their children, landlords beat their tenants, and the Peace Preservation Corps beat anyone who got in the way. The only living creatures that could hope to avoid beatings, it seemed, were adult male gentry and draft animals—the donkeys, mules, horses, oxen, and cows that were the basis of Long Bow’s agriculture.*
Violence reached its zenith in relations between landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor. The gentry literally held the power of life and death over the peasants and personally carried out whatever punitive measures they deemed necessary when their interests were damaged or threatened. If they caught a thief, he was dealt with on the spot. One famine year a Long Bow peasant child, only six years old, stole some leaves from a tree belonging to his father’s employer. The landlord caught the boy, beat him black and blue with a stout stick, and docked his father $12. This amounted to the father’s earnings for the entire year. He had to borrow money from a relative to get through the winter and was still paying off the debt a decade later.
In the village of Sand Bank, not far to the west of Long Bow, a poor peasant named Hou took a few ears of ripe corn from the field of a rich relative named Hou Yu-fu. Hou Yu-fu caught the culprit, dragged him into an open yard in the village, had him strung to a tree, and personally flogged him until he lost consciousness. Not long afterwards this man died of internal injuries.
Similar direct action was taken when rent fell in arrears or interest went unpaid. Then the landlord went in person to the home of his tenant and demanded the grain due him. If it was not forthcoming, he drove the peasant off the land or out of the house. If the peasant resisted, the landlord or one of his retainers beat him.
Should a peasant attempt to defend himself, affairs could easily take a very ugly turn. One Taihang peasant struck back at a landlord who raped his wife. He was hung by the hair of his head and beaten until his scalp separated from his skull. He fell to the ground and bled to death.
Only if the landlord found it impossible to cope with a peasant did he go to the village government for help. Then the constable, who carried a revolver, and a few stalwarts from the Peace Preservation Corps armed with rifles, soon straightened out the matter. Should the local forces prove inadequate the rifles of the whole district could easily be concentrated on one village and if this was not enough, the county magistrate had at his disposal a standing force of several score armed men in permanent garrison.
Little wonder that the peasants seldom resisted the demands of the gentry. They knew only too well what would happen to them if they struck back. In their own experience and in the history of the region there was no lack of precedents.
In most cases involving disputes with peasants, direct action by the gentry, backed up when necessary by the armed forces of the village government, was enough to preserve law and order. But this was not so when the gentry themselves fell out. Since the village head was only their servant, or at best their peer, the most he could do was mediate. He could not impose a solution. When mediation failed there was no recourse but to enter a lawsuit at the county court or Yamen. There cases were fought out with a full regalia of lawyers, briefs, counter-briefs, witnesses, and liberal handouts to all and sundry. Public morality being what it was, the family with the most resources, the best connections, and the least scruples usually won. The loser was often punished with a public flogging and, in addition, was required to throw a banquet for the entertainment of all involved, at which time the public apologies were offered that wound up the case.
So ruinous were court cases that most families avoided them like the plague. If they were unable to settle matters out of court, their quarrels could harden into feuds in the course of which each family in the dispute tried to damage the persons and property of the other. To repay an insult or avenge an injury, gangs were organized, beatings administered, crops fired, wells plugged, carts and implements broken, trees cut down, women and children kidnapped, and men murdered.
The impassive mud walls of Long Bow thus harbored a never-ending “war of all against all” which absorbed a great part of the energy of the people and tended to conceal that basic conflict, the struggle between the gentry and the peasants over the fruits of the land, which would eventually overwhelm everything else.
It was this background of corruption, favoritism, influence peddling, and violence that drove many a young peasant into the gangster-type secret societies such as the “Red Rifles” that were endemic in the region. It was this same background that made it possible for certain powerful gentry to organize their own private armed forces, oppress and rob people at will, loot and rape and murder without fear of reprisal, and, when successful, build themselves up into local warlords with power over whole districts, whole counties, and even provinces. Between raids and debaucheries their rifles were always available for the suppression of revolt and many an adventurer built a career and fortune looting and killing under the guise of hunting rebels and, in later years, Communists. Yang Hu-sheng, for many years the warlord of neighboring Shensi Province, and one of the men who kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in Sian in 1936, started out as a soldier-bandit in command of a small armed detachment.
The gentry who operated gangs on a village or district level were known as opa or “local despots.” In the 1940’s Long Bow had its own local despot, Fan Tung-hsi (son of Fan Pu-tzu), but since his exploits more properly belong to the period of the Japanese War they will be dealt with in a later chapter.
When agrarian revolt flared in isolated parts of China after the suppression of the Great Revolution in 1927, neither the legitimate gangs of the village politicians nor the illegitimate gangs of the local despots were enough to suppress them. Then Chiang Kai-shek introduced additional forms of control into every village reached by his power—the pao-chia system of mutual responsibility, and the Kuomintang Party organization.
The pao-chia system was a variant of the traditional lu (neighborhood) and chia (10-family group) system already described. The ten families of the chia and the hundred families of the pao (the lu was an intermediate level) were held collectively responsible for the activities of each and every one of their members. Key individuals were expected to report their neighbors’ every move, and everyone was punished when any member of the group was suspected of involvement in revolutionary activity. Mass executions were carried out under the slogan: “Better to kill one hundred innocent people than to allow one Communist to escape.”
Shansi was one of the provinces where a reign of terror was instituted along these lines in the 1930’s. Many peasants were seized and killed in Lucheng County and young men dared not leave home to look for work for fear of being picked up as agitators. Taking a defiant attitude or wearing a red scarf was enough to cause suspicion.
Since family and class loyalties tended to be far stronger than any loyalty to national or local government it is doubtful if the pao-chia system was very effective in rooting out subversion. A much better instrument for this purpose was the Kuomintang Party, which recruited as members young gentry such as Fan Tung-hsi and built with their aid a counter-revolutionary political force able to gather intelligence, expose suspects, and co-ordinate activities over a wide area. Around this hard core of diehard gentry were gathered teachers, students, officials, and persons of normal ambition in public life. For such people as these a Kuomintang membership card was obligatory.
In Long Bow most of the leading gentry and their “dog’s legs” were Kuomintang members. They agitated in favor of that peculiar blend of nationalism, fascism and Confucianism immortalized by Chiang Kai-shek in his book, China’s Destiny, maintained strict thought control over all village life, and mobilized the landlord class for a showdown with the rising peasant revolution.
The ruthless way in which the slightest defiance on the part of tenants and laborers was suppressed over the years created in the peasants a deep, almost instinctive, reluctance to mount an attack against the power of the gentry. Revolt after revolt had been crushed during 20 centuries of gentry rule. Those who raised their heads to lead them had either been bought off or had had their heads severed. Their followers had been cut to pieces, burned, flayed, or buried alive. Gentry in the Taihang proudly showed foreign visitors leather articles made from human skin. Such events and such mementos were a part of the cultural heritage of every peasant in China. Traditions of ruthless suppression were handed down in song and legend, and memorialized in the operas which were so popular everywhere.
It is no wonder, then, that only the most severe provocation could overcome the peasants’ great reluctance to act, and set them in motion. But once in motion they tended to extremes of cruelty and violence. If they struck, they struck to kill, for common sense and millenniums of painful experience told them that if they did not, their enemies would inevitably return another day to kill them.
The extreme and often misdirected violence of peasant uprisings in China was an indication of certain basic weaknesses in the peasants as a political force, weaknesses which were cultivated anew in each generation by the very nature of the fragmented, small-holding, peddlers’ economy in which they were all reared.
The first of these weaknesses was an all-pervading individualism engendered by the endless, personal struggle to acquire a little land and to beat out the other fellow in the market place. Peasants individually driven to bankruptcy viewed economic disaster not as a social but as a personal matter, to be solved in isolation by whatever means came to hand. This essentially divisive and selfish approach made co-operation between peasants on any level other than the family extremely difficult, greatly increased the leverage of the gentry’s divide-and-rule tactics, and made inevitable the corruption of a certain percentage of peasant leaders who, when they found a way out themselves, abandoned their brothers.
A second crucial weakness was the lack of vision that arose directly out of small-scale production with its rudimentary division of labor and indirectly out of the cultural isolation which this type of economy, with its limited market, imposed on the community. Of the great waves of political, cultural, and scientific thought that broke on China’s shores in the early twentieth century scarcely a ripple reached such inland villages as Long Bow. The peasants heard little provincial, less national, and almost no world news. Less than one person in ten could read. Completely absorbed in crop production, family life, and the desperate battle for daily survival, they were true victims of the “idiocy of village life.”
As victims of village idiocy the peasants had little opportunity to learn of large-scale production and the potential abundance that it offered mankind. Their idea of the good society was one in which everyone had a plot of land, a roof overhead, clothes to wear, and wheat dumplings to eat. The equalitarianism they dreamed of was noble, but it was also Utopian—there being no conceivable way in which every family could enjoy a prosperous life on a long-term basis as long as production was atomized by small private holdings and cursed with primitive technique. Even if all the means of production could be equally divided, what was to prevent the old process of differentiation which had originally produced landlord and tenant from producing them all over again?
Only a new set of social and productive relations could break through the vicious circle, release China’s productive power, and open the road to a prosperous future. But of new sets of social relations, of other modes of production, the peasants knew nothing, could imagine nothing, and hence had no beacons to guide them in any search for liberation. They were in the position of a man trying to survey the sky while imprisoned at the bottom of a well.
The despair of men standing up to their necks in water coupled with the ignorance engendered by a “well-bottom” view of social relations led inevitably to impetuosity in action—a third great weakness of the peasants. Because they so desperately wanted a way out they deluded themselves about the difficulties involved. They thought in terms of short, drastic action to divide existing wealth rather than the “hundred-year great task” of releasing and creating new productive forces through a fundamental transformation of society. Therefore, when they did act, they were not prepared for two or three years, not to mention decades, of bitter struggle and were easily discouraged when revolt did not quickly bring any improvement in their situation. Armed uprisings almost always ended in a self-defeating, Robin-Hood-type banditry because the peasants did not see the need for, or were unwilling to undertake, the long hard mobilization of the whole laboring population that alone could transform society and bring about their liberation. A temporary, partial victory could elate these roving insurgents, but a minor defeat could plunge them into black despair, and even cause them to abandon the campaign altogether.
Mao Tse-tung, long before he became chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, catalogued the weaknesses exhibited by peasants as revolutionary soldiers. Among them were:
(1) The purely military viewpoint—a tendency to regard fighting as the only task of the army; avoidance of such political tasks as educating and organizing the mass of the people, arming them, and helping them to establish their own political power. Without this political work the whole fight lost its meaning and the revolutionary his reason for existence.
(2) Extreme democracy—aversion to discipline, each commander and each soldier going his own way in a carefree manner.
(3) Absolute equalitarianism—a demand that everyone be treated alike regardless of circumstances; opposition to extra rations for wounded soldiers, horses for officers who had to travel, lighter loads for older persons and the sick, etc.
(4) Subjectivism—holding opinions and voicing criticisms without a realistic examination of the facts and without regard for political principle; basing opinions on random talk and wishful thinking; focusing criticism on minor issues, petty defects, and personal quirks. All of these could only lead to mutual suspicion and unprincipled quarrelling between people.
(5) Individualism—vindictiveness, cliquism, the mercenary viewpoint; holding oneself responsible to individual leaders rather than to the revolution as a whole; hedonism—an urgent desire for personal comfort and pleasure, a longing to leave the hard life of struggle and find some softer spot.
(6) The idea of roving insurgents—military opportunism, avoidance of hard political organizing in favor of “hiring men and buying horses”; living off the land like any ordinary bandit.
(7) Adventurism—acting blindly regardless of conditions and the state of mind of one’s forces; slack discipline on the one hand but corporal punishment and the execution of deserters on the other; attempting to enforce rather than to inspire loyalty to the cause.*
The gentry of Long Bow were well aware of these weaknesses of the peasants. They played on them to prevent any challenge to their rule before the Revolution began and counted on them to disrupt the Revolution once it got under way.