The class status of most of the population in the rural areas is clear and can be easily differentiated without much divergence of view. Their class status should first be ascertained. In the case of a small proportion of the people whose class status is unclear and difficult to ascertain and where there is a divergence of view, they should be dealt with later and classified after thorough study and after obtaining instruction from the higher authorities. Impatience in determining the class status of these people must be avoided lest errors should be made which lead to their dissatisfaction. If any mistake is made, it must be corrected.
Liu Shao-ch’i
CHANG CH’I-TS’AI, one of the poorest individuals in the whole village, provided the first stumbling block to that nucleus of poor peasants who set out to classify the whole village in March.
The group had little trouble just so long as they dealt with typical cases. Heads of families had only to make the briefest kind of report before they were unanimously declared to be poor peasants or middle peasants. Consequently, during the first two or three days of the proceedings some 40 families were classed without controversy and most of those who were declared to be poor were invited to participate in classifying those who followed them.
When they got to Ch’i-ts’ai, however, the peasants disagreed sharply. The difficulty stemmed from the fact that he had never owned even a fraction of an acre of land. Furthermore, he had never worked on the land for others. All his life he had labored as a builder of houses. On the wages thus earned he had raised two sons and a daughter. A second daughter he had given away as a child bride during the famine year. After the birth of his fourth child his wife had died.
In the distributions of 1945-1946, Ch’i-ts’ai had received almost five acres of land, a donkey, one third of a cart, and many hundredweight of grain. This was enough to make him a middle peasant in 1948. His neighbors all agreed on that. What they found hard to decide was, what had been his class before liberation?
“His class was bare poor,” volunteered several peasants after hearing Chang’s report.
“But there is no such class as ‘bare poor,’ “protested Little Li, the work team cadre sitting in on the meeting. “There are hired laborers who own no land and work for wages on the land of others; there are village workers who also own no land but have skills such as carpentry, masonry, blacksmithing, and weaving; but there is no such thing as a class of ‘bare poor.’”
The peasants, however, could not conceive of a way of life without land. To live without land was to live in a state of perpetual disaster. Anyone who had no land was “bare poor” and the sooner he acquired land the better. To set up a separate class of people who owned nothing and call them workers did not make sense.
The specific skill possessed by Ch’i-ts’ai also confused the issue. The peasants found it difficult to separate the man from his trade and arrive at the common category “worker.” If he was not simply “bare poor,” he was a housebuilder. But housebuilders could hardly constitute a class. Could his wife be called a housebuilder too? Could his children be called housebuilders? It seemed that only the person who practiced the trade could be classed according to that trade and hence be called a worker, if worker he had to be. The rest of his family should be something else.
When Little Li repeated his argument the peasants “gave up the gun” and agreed to call Ch’i-ts’ai a village worker, but it was quite clear that very few understood what this meant.
Another worker, Chang Huan-ch’ao, the blacksmith, posed an even greater puzzle. Some peasants wanted to call this hot-tempered, swarthy-complexioned man an exploiter because he did such poor work and charged so much for it.
“He’s a middle peasant,” said one neatly dressed woman with a reputation as an amorous widow. She spat out the words “middle peasant” as if they bore some sort of stigma. “He’s a middle peasant because he earns good money as a blacksmith, and besides his work is no good. Last year he cheated me. He charged me an awful price but the work was no good and even the iron was poor. He exploited me.”
“He’s not skillful; we all know that,” said a grey-bearded elder. “But if you don’t want to be exploited by him you can always call in others to do the work. It’s different with the landlords. With them you have no choice. You pay rent or you starve. But with Huan-ch’ao, if you don’t like his work you can always take your job elsewhere.”
“Go ahead, say what you think,” said Chang himself, scowling darkly. “Your opinions are very good and I would be the last to get angry.”
“Truth is,” said a second widow, “the tools you make are no good. You really should improve your workmanship.”
“I accept your criticism,” said Huan-ch’ao, desperately trying to hold back his rising temper. He knew that to explode now would land him in the middle-peasant category for sure.
“He’s never been a skillful blacksmith,” the grey-bearded man said again. “But if you say that for this reason he exploits you, then all blacksmiths must become very gloomy indeed.”
Finally Yuan-lung, a young neighbor of Huan-ch’ao’s, proposed a solution. “He’s a poor peasant,” he said with an air of finality. Several pipe-smoking cronies of the speaker hastened to back up this idea, but the women still looked doubtful.
“If you can’t decide now, we’ll discuss it later,” suggested Little Li, but this suggestion won no more support than the other.
The League members finally agreed that since Huan-ch’ao had always owned a little land he should be called a poor peasant. This solution had one added advantage. It avoided the mysterious category of “worker.”
In the case posed by Huan-ch’ao the peasants confronted a basic problem of economic theory. Their dispute arose from the obvious fact that the work done by different individuals, whether judged by the quantity or by the quality of the output, is not equal. In spite of this, wages and prices tend to standardize, a reflection of the socially necessary labor time required to turn out any given piece of goods. But to arrive at the concept of socially necessary labor time required a breadth of experience and a level of abstract reasoning that could hardly be expected of the peasants of Long Bow at this time. What they saw was a poor craftsman asking for the same return on his labor as a good craftsman, and this smacked to them of exploitation.
Ch’i Yun could hardly restrain her chuckles as she explained to me the give and take over Huan-ch’ao, the blacksmith. That a skilled worker could exploit the people who hired him was a startling idea to anyone with a Marxist outlook, and she marveled at the ingenuity of those peasants who had thought it up. She grossly underestimated their inventiveness, however, for on the very next day they found exploitation in an even more unlikely place—in the relation between a widow and her lover.
There lived in the village a lean old peasant named Wang who had long been in love with, or at least was wont to make love to, a rich peasant’s widow named Yu Pu-ho. What little of value he possessed or produced, Wang sooner or later brought to his prosperous and beloved mistress. While his own son and daughter-in-law hired out in order to eat, he skimmed everything edible from his homestead and sacrificed it on the altar of love. If his hen laid an egg, he offered it up. If the eggplant in his dooryard garden produced a firm purple fruit, he brought it around. He even neglected his own land to work long hours on that of the passionate widow.
When Wang’s paramour came before the Provisional League, the spokesman for one group of women took the floor at once. “We think she is a double landlord. She exploits hired labor and she exploits her lover. She exploits everything he has, even the eggs from his hens.”
At this everyone laughed except the prim black-clad widow herself and Old Wang. The latter, expecting the worst, looked anxiously around the room for some sign of disagreement.
Wang need not have been so concerned. The men did not agree with the women.
“If he’s exploited, that’s his lookout,” shouted a well-groomed youngster from the warmest spot on the k’ang. “He wants it that way. What can we do about it?”
The “double landlord” classification was withdrawn.
Some peasants found still a third form of exploitation in the behavior of certain scoundrels or lumpen elements. Just as every Western city has its declassed people, its professional beggars, its small-time racketeers, and skid row derelicts, so every Chinese village once had its yu min or rascals, men and women without legitimate means of support, gamblers, “broken shoes” (prostitutes), narcotics peddlers, and drifters. In political tracts and mobilization speeches they rated only occasional mention, but in real life they were very much a part of every village scene.
In Long Bow the most notorious of these yu min was Wang T’ao-yuan. Of him people said, “Hsiang yen pu li k’ou, shou tien pu li shou.” (The cigarette never leaves his lips, the flashlight never leaves his hand.) He had survived the lean years of the occupation on profits from heroin peddling, on brokerage fees earned selling other people’s wives, and on the proceeds of the sale of his own wife, a record unsavory enough to have made him an object of universal scorn and hate.
Wang had reformed somewhat after receiving land in the distribution but he still shrank from hard work. Only a few weeks before he appeared to be classified he sent his nephew on a coal-hauling expedition instead of going himself. The temperature that week hovered around zero. The nephew did not know how to care for an animal in such a frost. As a result, the one donkey owned by the family caught a chill, fell ill, and died.
In spite of all this, the peasants were curiously lenient with Wang T’ao-yuan. His broad comic face and genial disposition seemed to charm them. If nothing else he had always been a good companion. Because he knew how to laugh at himself and to make others laugh too, people found it difficult to stay angry at him for long.
But Cadre Liang, who passionately hated dope and purveyors of dope, was not willing to see T’ao-yuan get off so easily. Ignoring the economic criteria for judging the man’s class, he slashed at the criminal nature of his past.
“Perhaps there are some who want to save face for T’ao-yuan,” suggested Liang. “They had better think it over. Who led the entire family in smoking poison? If Long Bow had not been liberated they would all have died of starvation. And why did he sell the stuff? Why, in this whole village did no one else sell heroin but he? Let’s ask why many an honest laborer among you has not yet fanshened. Then compare your condition with his. In the past, there were those who stood higher than the poor peasants. Now, after liberation they still have the upper hand. Why are such people always able to take advantage of every situation? Why? T’ao-yuan should be forced to explain his past.”
Responding with alacrity to Liang’s suggestion, T’ao-yuan said, “I began smoking heroin in the famine year and everything I had went to pay for it.” There was a suggestion of languid sensuality in his stance and a puckish grin came and went on his face as he revealed his amoral past. “When I had nothing left I took my wife to Taiyuan. We were half dead from hunger before I finally found a buyer for her. He gave me six bags of millet. That sealed the deal.”
Even to T’ao-yuan this sounded a little brutal so he added a twist to the tale that put the blame where it obviously belonged—on his wife.
“While I was out looking for work I had to leave my wife alone at the inn. She took up with another man. The master of the inn tipped me off and suggested that I get rid of her. He also found the buyer.
“I helped Wang Hsi-nan sell his wife too,” continued T’ao-yuan, but once again he cleverly absolved himself. “Hsi-nan suggested it and even sought me out; he came over and over again. His wife was ‘white, bright, and lovely,’ but she was an idiot. She couldn’t cook or sew. She couldn’t even wipe her own behind. He got stuck with her and he wanted to get rid of her. He wouldn’t stop pestering me so finally I undertook to sell her. I got nothing for my pains. Even after she was delivered I didn’t have enough left over to buy heroin. I was in terrible shape. But Hsi-nan played square. He at least found me some heroin.
“I know it is a bad thing to sell heroin. I exploited others. I preyed on the addicts. But now I have fanshened. I received land and property but I do not deserve any such thing. I know my fanshen was due to my poor brothers and I must thank them. I wish you would criticize me more.”
“How do you feel about the death of your donkey?” asked a neighbor.
“I borrowed BRC 200,000* to buy the little bastard. Now it is dead. You can imagine yourself how I feel,” said Wang, and he began to weep right there in front of the whole group.
“How do you feel about selling your wife?” asked several women.
Wang T’ao-yuan made no answer. He only wept more despondently.
“Well, you sold her, and now you weep about it!”
“No,” said Wang. “I am not weeping for my bartered wife. I am weeping for my dead donkey.”
To punish him they classed him as a middle peasant, but even this did not satisfy the women. “He ought to be classed as a landlord’s running dog,” said several. But they said it in a whisper because the men, on the whole, sympathized with Wang.
*********
Disagreements over the class status of various Long Bow residents pointed up the need for accurate standards of comparison. In preparatory conferences the work team cadres had studied such standards. Now, as the problems of differentiation grew more and more complicated, they introduced them to the peasants of the Provisional League.
The standards they introduced were roughly the same as those adopted by the Communist Party of China in 1933 when the first “Land to the Tiller” policy was carried out in the old revolutionary base at Juichin, Kiangsi.** Most of the poor peasants, after two years of campaigning, understood the standards fairly well, but as they applied them the deficiencies of the relatively simple concepts of 1933 became more and more apparent.
The Juichin standards, it turned out, were strong in defining the center of gravity of each rural class, that pole which determined the special nature of its typical members and their special relationship to the means of production. The standards were weak, however, in defining exact boundary lines between the classes. They lacked the precision necessary to distinguish between the many borderline, atypical cases that showed up so frequently in real life.
By far the most important dividing line was that between the middle peasants and the rich peasants. The Draft Agrarian Law of 1947 had made this the great divide between friend and enemy, between the people and their oppressors, between revolution and counter-revolution. It was absolutely essential that this line be clear and unequivocal. Yet here the Juichin documents were most ambiguous. In describing middle peasants the document said, “Some of the middle peasants practice a small amount of exploitation, but such exploitation is not of a constant character and the income therefrom does not constitute their main means of livelihood.”
Anyone using these standards would have to know exactly what small, constant, and main meant in order to carry out the intent of the law.
In regard to the difference between poor peasants and middle peasants the same kind of difficulty arose. On this dividing line the Juichin document stated, “In general middle peasants need not sell their labor power but poor peasants have to sell their labor power for limited periods.” Another sentence indicated that even middle peasants sometimes did sell their labor power. In order to make a precise determination, one would have to know what was meant by in general and limited periods.
As classification progressed, both the cadres and the peasants in Long Bow keenly felt the need for something more precise. This need was met, in part at least, by a set of supplementary regulations issued by the Central Committee in the fall of 1947. On the dividing line between middle and rich peasants these regulations stated that an income received from exploitation that was less than 15 percent of the gross was small and hence permissible for a middle peasant. Anything over that was considered large and enough to put the family over the line into the rich peasant category.
On the dividing line between middle and poor peasants, the regulations made clear that the labor power sold by middle peasants was mainly surplus labor power or the labor power of the children and old folks. Any family that consistently sold the labor power of its able-bodied adult members must ordinarily be classed as poor.
Another keenly felt need was for some definite base period. Was one to consider the present status of the family, the status several years back, or the status in the light of several generations? When left to themselves, the peasants of Long Bow tended to go back two and even three generations. This was in accord with habits deeply ingrained in the Chinese people, habits which had much precedent in the culture of the past. Under the old imperial examination system, for example, candidates had to prove not only that they themselves were not representatives of some barred category (boatman, actor, prostitute, or other “wandering” type) but also that their parents and grandparents were free of any such taint. Settlers in Shantung whose parents or grandparents had migrated from Hopei still regarded themselves as Hopei people.
This concept of hereditary social status helped to explain the wide support given to the campaign against “feudal tails” which had so sharpened the struggle and broadened the revolutionary target in 1946. Yet such a concept could hardly be said to conform to conditions of modern life. The disintegration of traditional Chinese society under the impact of foreign conquest, commercial dumping, dynastic decline, civil war and famine had introduced such a mobility into social relations (most of it downward) that it was no longer realistic to think of tracing back even five years, not to mention a few generations.
In view of these facts, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party added to the supplementary regulations a section which strictly defined the base period to be used in making a determination of class status. In areas liberated after 1945 it was to be the three years prior to the liberation of the village. For the Fifth District of Lucheng County this meant the years 1943-1945. Each family was to be judged according to its economic position during those three years alone. The fact that a family had once been very wealthy, rented out land, or hired many laborers, made no difference to its class status if, during the three years of the base period, its able-bodied members earned their own living or a major portion of it by their own labor. Likewise, the fact that a man had once been a poor peasant made no difference at all if, during the base period, he had collected rents, hired laborers, or loaned out money at usurious interest rates.
By the same token, inherited wealth possessed by families who labored for a living during the base period could not be touched. It mattered not in the least what the source of any family’s wealth might be. If the able-bodied members of that family earned their living by the sweat of their brow during the three years prior to the liberation of their village, they themselves were not rich peasants or landlords and could not legally be attacked or deprived of any property.
In brief, the reforms called for in the Draft Agrarian Law were to be based on class status, not class origin, on current means of livelihood, not on past privilege or past penury.