The Chinese Revolution

Two works by Americans are canonical references for anyone who really wants to understand this monumental, cataclysmic event:

• Red Star over China, by Edgar Snow
• Fanshen, by William Hinton

Edgar Snow worked as a journalist in China as a young man and traveled to Yenan, the remote base of the Chinese Communists, shortly after the Long March brought them there in 1935. This was a period where little to nothing was known of Mao Tse-Tung and his associates or the Communist movement in China, extensive as it was. There had been a number of Soviet areas in south China governing millions of people in the early thirties - it was because of their encirclement by the Chiang Kai-shek forces of the Kuomintang (KMT) in the fifth anti-Communist extermination campaign that the legendary Long March was necessary to escape the old bases and relocate in the northwest at Yenan in Shaanxi. Snow interviewed Mao and other top leaders fresh from this epic campaign; till that point and long after, his account was the only one known in the West. He somehow got Mao to open up about his own background, something almost irregular among these self-effacing revolutionaries.

Snow highlights that Chinese Communism was a youth movement, with children joining army and party organizations and becoming veteran organizers and soldiers while still in their teens. Current top leader Xi Jinping's father Xi Zhongxun, for example, joined the Communist Youth League at 12, and was imprisoned by the KMT and joined the Communist Party at 14.

From time immemorial, China's peasants had suffered under their landlords, warlords, and governments; from time immemorial, they had raised rebellions, typically petering out and resulting in only more oppression and suffering, if not betrayal. The Communists offered a way out of this timeless cycle - a modern movement with the strategy and will to break through to victory. They were fortunate in their enemies, the KMT, who did everything they could to reinforce Communist stereotypes of imperialism, predatory capitalism, and warlordism.

From the start of the Japanese invasion in 1931, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and KMT vied for the mantle of Chinese nationalism. The CCP made the more compelling case, typically wooing KMT soldiers and officers rather than punishing them in order to stimulate defections. And there were many of these starting with the famous Xi'an Incident in December 1936 and culminating in entire KMT armies coming over to the Reds in 1948.

Being Communists, the CCP put great stock in the international movement and solidarity from toilers worldwide. In the end, they made their revolution pretty much alone and at times contravening the Communist International, which bizarrely tended to side with the KMT (at Xi'an, for example, where the Comintern ordered the CCP to release Chiang or face excommunication). As noted scholar of China John King Fairbank said at one point, the CCP earned their status as leader of the Chinese people fair and square. The unorthodox Maoist strategy of passing over cities to organize peasants in the countryside, absolutely necessary after the KMT betrayal and massacres of Communists in the cities in 1927, was frowned upon by the Comintern, who tried to impose Moscow-trained leaders. Snow revised Red Star in 1968 with extensive biographical notes of major CCP figures and discussion on what was then understood of intrigues inside the leadership.

The Soviet Union opportunistically invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria in August 1945 when Japan was on the verge of surrendering. They handed captured Japanese gear and munitions over to (what was to become) the People's Liberation Army. That was the extent of their material help, balanced by extensive uprooting of industrial infrastructure sent back to Russia (Japanese-owned to be sure, but surely the property of the Chinese people).

No, the real ally of the CCP was the United States of America, whose successes against Japan in the Pacific had ramifications for the entire Japanese Empire. American missions to China durring World War II tried to cool the KMT-CCP civil war in the interests of a united front against Japan, with indifferent results. Of course the Americans sided with the KMT and after the war funneled in billions of dollars and thousand of soldiers and sailors, becoming Chiang's chief military sponsor. They trained and equipped KMT armies and ferried them around China to accept Japanese surrender. But all for naught as the civil war 1945-1948 was a surprisingly one-sided affair, especially considering that the KMT controlled considerably more area and people at the start (350 million to 100 million) and had larger and better-equipped armies. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) had no tanks, planes, or artillery in 1945. But by 1948, they had mastered positional warfare, especially with captured artillery, and they finished off the KMT in fixed-piece battles just as Mao said they would all those years before in On Protracted War.

The above is an unexceptional overview, the over-aching story from a great height. What is exceptional about the two books under review is the behind-the-scenes account of what happened on the ground. Red Star was first published in 1938, fresh off Snow's investigations on the spot. Anyone who read it then would be better informed about China and its prospects than the most diligent reader of Time magazine or the New York Times, the most informed China scholar or congressional staffer, and would be in a position to understand the explosive growth of the CCP in the following period (from 40,000 in 1937 to 1,200,000 in 1945 according to K. S. Karol). There are the early Soviets in the south, the Long March, the exceptional accounts of Mao and others, including the remarkable Zhu De (Chu Teh) and Peng Dehuai (Peng Te-huai). There are accounts of minority peoples and the extensive Islamic influence in western China, groups encountered during the Long March and painstakingly cultivated. Also life in the caves at Yenan and the much-appreciated theatrical performances from travelling troupes of young people, featuring evil landlords and stand-up peasant revolutionaries.

There is discussion of military organization and strategy, but perhaps most tellingly, an account of how the Red Army / PLA insisted that its members top-to-bottom respect the peasants and their property, and all the more the poorer they were. This was unheard-of in a society plagued from beyond memory by warlordism; KMT armies took what and who they wanted, their warlord generals acting no different than predecessors two thousand years before. There is an account of a cranky peasant woman who refused to lend her pot to soldiers who badly needed to use it - they wheedled, they begged, all to no avail. They didn't seize it and they didn't give her a hard time. That was the Red Army; it made an impression and contrasted diametrically with the Japanese, but also with the KMT armies, consisting mostly of peasants like the Red Army, but dragooned ones, unlike the Reds. The Reds made intense efforts throughout the civil war to bring over KMT soldiers and were highly successful doing so, many a Red soldier learning his craft in KMT units. This included Zhu De himself, Mao's companion and leader of the Eighth Route Army in north China, the embryo of the PLA.

Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese Revolution created a whole new vocabulary. A most important word in this vocabulary was fanchen. Literally it means "to turn the body", or "to turn over." To China's hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements, and houses. But it meant much more than this. It meant to throw off superstition and study science, to abolish "word blindness" and learn to read, to cease considering women as chattels and establish equality between the sexes, to do away with appointed village magistrates, and replace them with elected councils. It meant to enter a new world. That is why this book is called Fanchen. It is the story of how the peasants of Long Bow Village built a new world.

-- From the prologue to Fanchen.

Hinton's book is titled Fanshen : A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, and that it is in an excruciating, immersive way. Hinton was part of the work team evaluating Long Bow Village in Shanxi province in north China in 1948 - evaluating in order to execute the latest agrarian law in the liberated areas. The object was thoroughly and as sensibly as possible to expropriate the wealthy and redistribute all their goods to the poorest in the village. Senator Eastland and other anti-Communist hysterics did what they could to prevent publication, seizing Hinton's notes for years, and the book wasn't published until 1966. Too bad, because reading it expels stereotypes of all kinds, documents one of the largest and deepest social revolutions in world history, and convincingly dispels the notion that China was the Americans' to lose, the mirage poisoning Chinese-American relations for over twenty years and causing untold damage. It's almost as if you were there witnessing the best and worst that human beings have to give as they turned their society upside down. Except for the poor food and even death by starvation, the marauding lice, the mortal fear of approaching KMT armies - inconveniences Hinton says were ignored even by intellectual city-bred revolutionaries on the scene like his admired Chinese associate and translator Ch'i Yun, so in the moment participating in this social convulsion destined to change China forever. They literally turned China upside down in the social sense, everyone including the richest vying to prove they were poor, because being designated a landlord or even rich peasant meant confiscation, social and legal penalties, even beatings and death.

The narrative forces conviction, the author sympathetic to be sure, but apparently diligent and balanced in recounting what he saw and heard and clear when hypothesizing - "I later heard ..." or "he must have been thinking ...". Nor is he slow to detail bad behavior among cadres or common people alike. Or just human behavior - there is a fair amount of sex, for example. On one occasion, the village bad boy, layabout, and heroin dealer - a lumpen element! - is called to account (Chapter 30). Being lazy was perhaps worse than being a drug dealer in this hard-working village, but drugs were bad and targeted by Communists well aware of their debilitating social effect and use as a control tool by Westerners in China for over a hundred years. In standard practice, the man is called before a meeting to answer for himself. He jokes and deprecates himself in an all-too-winning way. People accuse him of responsibility for the death of a donkey - think tractor in in a more modern rural economy. He starts to weep. "How do you feel about selling your wife?" asked several women (there was a lot of selling of wives and children in this society). He weeps even more. People start to soften up. "Well, you sold her, and now you weep about it." "I am not weeping for my bartered wife. I am weeping for my dead donkey." The women are not amused. The men insist that he be given the most lenient treatment possible - designation middle peasant (the lower the better).

Others dedicated their lives to the revolution and proceeded as if their lives depended on it (which they did) - the following is from Chapter 18, Founding the Village Communist Party Branch:

One of the first women to become a Communist in Long Bow was a former beggar, Hopei-born Hu Hsueh-chen, a stocky mother of great physical strength and stamina. Her square jaw, prominent nose, and swarthy skin gave her a masculine appearance which was heightened by her bobbed hair and the loose-hanging pantaloons typical of male attire which she wore. She was the first woman in the village to bob her hair and discard the tapered trousers which most women preferred.

For 28 years prior to the Liberation she had lived a life that could only be described as a nightmare. As a young girl her father almost sold her to settle a debt. She talked him out of it, only to be married against her will to a pauper. She was then 16. Harried by famine from Hopei (Hebei) to Shansi (Shanxi), she was forced into beggary when her husband became a gambling addict and sold everything in the house, including their only quilt, for gambling stakes. She watched her first three children die before her eyes. One was trampled to death by a Japanese soldier, the second died of parasites and distended belly in the famine year, while the third wasted away in her arms when her own breasts shrivelled from starvation. When the fourth, a girl, was born to her she finally drove her thieving, good-for-nothing husband out and managed to survive the last years of the Anti-Japanese War by begging, gleaning in the fields after the harvest, spinning cotton for others, and hunting herbs in the hills. Without a quilt for cover she and her daughter slept in a pile of straw through sub-freezing winter weather and somehow survived.

Liberation and the Settling Accounts Movement were to Hu Hsueh-chen what water is to a parched desert. She won clothes and threw away her rags, she won a quilt and burned her pile of flea-infested straw, she won land and gave up begging, and she won a roof over her head and set up a home for her little daughter. Knowing that all these gains were the result of struggle and not gifts from heaven, she attended every meeting and supported those who were active, even though she herself was afraid (at first - ed) to talk in public and afraid to step forward and beat the "bastard landlords" herself.

There is more about how Hu Hsueh-chen is recruited into the CCP by a loving man who became her husband. The vignettes are heart breaking and novelistic, tending to outline rapidly changing social and political dynamics. One teen-age couple in love eloped from their homes in another province to escape planned marriages (Chapters 24 and 32). That was forbidden and deeply proscribed behavior in a society where marriage was a family-wide economic matter - they were sentenced to death and a family representative came to Long Bow to demand their return. Many in Long Bow weren't happy with them either, including some active in the local movement - Li Hsin-ai was prevented from joining the Poor Peasants' Association and was ostracized and ridiculed, including by other women (older ones in particular). At the same time, local officials were being pressed to send recruits to the Red Army, all the more so considering that the last batch they sent were rejected as not being true volunteers. So the officials approached the couple, now with child, encouraging husband Li K'ao-lur to sign up and promising to take special care of Li Hsin-ai and their (newly acquired) land - the general practice for soldiers' families, but encouraging in light of their probation in Long Bow. Such approaches were altogether new in a society marked by coercion and violence throughout - in family, impressed army, and society generally. Multiplied by millions, such stories explain why the KMT didn't have a chance, even as they uprooted Mao and the top leadership from Yenan and chased them across the countryside.

Chapter 44 starts with a quote from Jack Belden:

In the women of China the Communists possessed, almost ready made, one of the greatest masses of disinherited human beings the world has ever seen. And because they found the key to the heart of these women, they also found one of the keys to victory over Chiang Kai-shek.

Hinton describes how young women cadres (one with bobbed hair) were more forward than men in questioning him about the world outside China and the United States in particular - "Does the American Communist Party have an army like ours does?", and so on. Women were reasonably represented in the Communist Party if Long Bow was at all typical, less so among the cadres generally. Changing gender relations in this massively patriarchal society was a task almost beyond comprehension, where rural wives were literally chattel to be beaten at will by mother-in-law if not husband, tender conjugal feelings rare and subject to mockery if discovered by neighbors. Women entered their husbands' families and had nothing, including children, in case of separation. Many an older woman who had clawed her way to power in her household in this oppressive system was a staunch defender of the old ways, and she too had a say in the new China. Communists and cadres, themselves products of this society, handled the problem gingerly. In the end, simple insistence that women had the same economic rights as men subverted the old ways effectively and quickly. One woman was beside herself at the thought of being cast out by her husband, but brightened right up when assured she and her children had a right to land just like everyone else ("We can live a good life without him").

The brutality of the old regime is described through its effects on a number of villagers. Usury practiced by local landlords took a terrible toll, where a small amount would be borrowed to stave off starvation in a famine year, the principal soon quadrupled and worse until finally paying it back was out of the question. At that point the landlord would seize the borrower's land and/or home. Resistance of any kind was typically met with violence by the landlord's retainers, virtually an extension of the local police. If more force was required, the local or regional police or even the army would be called in. It wasn't some remote banker beggaring you (and literally that in many cases), it was a neighbor you knew well. Hinton too has a chapter on a roving theatrical troupe; a highly popular character in Long Bow was an evil landlord whose affected mannerisms everyone recognized immediately from one of their own. In his influential and prescient Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (March 1927), Mao cited "local tyrants and evil gentry" who "slaughtered peasants without batting an eyelid", one "personally responsible for killing almost a thousand poverty-stricken peasants, which he euphemistically described as 'executing bandits'"; others in his native county in Hunan who buried people alive and killed innocent beggars for sport. It looked over-the-top at first, less so after reading Hinton.

I remember one day in 1964 when a Maryknoll priest spoke at a convocation at my Catholic high school. The man ranted about being expelled as a missionary from China in 1948; even brother in home room thought he was unhinged. Long Bow had an uncharacteristically strong Catholic community, the result of European missionaries who had worked there diligently and built a large Gothic-style church in 1916. The Church throughout the country enjoyed special legal and political protections as part of the foreign concession arrangement where foreign powers literally occupied parts of the country militarily and exercised outsize political influence accordingly. The Church in Long Bow was a large landlord as exacting as any, ran an ostensibly charitable organization, the "Carry-On Society", favoring Catholics but serving as a shake-down operation for all others. It ran an orphanage for girls, much needed to be sure, but as part of an plan to insinuate Catholicism into the community, since the Catholicized young women were sold as wives to poor peasants marginally cheaper than the going market rate. It need hardly be said that the girls were worked to the bone in the mean time. The entire collaboration apparatus in Long Bow and its county, run in concert with the KMT, consisted of Catholics during the Japanese occupation. In short, the Catholic Church in Long Bow embodied foreign imperialism working hand-in-hand with landlords and militarists to oppress the local population. When Long Bow was liberated in 1945, the Communists and local people wasted no time crushing "the infamous thing" (as Voltaire put it), redistributed all their property, and broke their political power decisively. No wonder that Maryknoll was affected - accustomed to being the lord of earth as well as heaven, he was brought low and quickly if Long Bow was any indication.

There is an entire section, Who Will Educate the Educators?, concerning how the CCP inculcated its values among members and insisted on proper methods. The anti-Catholic campaign in Long Bow got completely out of hand, for example, resulting in at least two beating deaths at mass meetings, Catholic ring-leaders to be sure and much-feared as powerful figures for many years, but not right by any accounting and not necessary. Peasants were driven by millennia of fear and tended not to take half measures, which they thought were dangerous and courted retaliation; they discounted the efficacy of talking and social pressure. Cadres in 1945, peasants themselves and badly trained, either joined in or failed sufficiently to suppress extreme behavior in a chaotic situation.

In the preface, Hinton says that Long Bow was uncharacteristic in the rapidity of its transformation, leaping "from reactionary bastion to revolutionary storm center in the course of a few days" without the opportunity for a longer preparation period that smoothed the way in other communities. But excuses are not accepted, reformation is necessary, and that is the point of criticism-self criticism. There were sessions in the village in 1948 where peasants were encouraged to criticize Communists in mass meetings, especially considering how a number of cadres (not then in power but back in the village after a stint in jail) had become corrupted and power-drunk earlier in the fanchen period. That didn't go too well at first, probably because neither party was versed in how to conduct itself, the accusers devolving into random personal attacks, the accused accepting all criticism or none as personality dictated, neither the desired outcome.

Such sessions at a county-wide Communist conference a bit later went better. The criticism was gentler, but the demand for reformation no less insistent. There is a quasi-religious element, starting with dedication to the death and no material reward, the peasant cadres answering to superiors but also to those they served and often treated worse than rank-and-file peasants. Even the language is suggestive: self-sacrifice, purification, self-examination (examine your conscience!), service to others and to a grand cause, faith, the constant necessity for personal and organizational reformation. Even the extreme, unhealthy regard for Mao as a secular god (or emperor) is in evidence, people with a grievance ready to exclaim that "Chairman Mao would not approve of this".

The sessions in the village improved as they continued and were refined. Man-hsi, a powerfully-built and brave cadre (if a little dense), had beaten many people in the earlier period and failed his gate as it was called, the mass criticism-self criticism session (Chapter 50). He didn't know what to do, all that he said looked false and forced. He was inconsolable and wept like a child for days. Fellow Communists prepped him for the next session before the peasants. He thought it through, how he was going to speak to the masses, taking some of his comrades' advice, not taking some. At the meeting he said, "I know I have hurt many people, but if you decide to pass me, I will be grateful. And if you want me to work for you in the future, I will do my best. The only thing I cannot stop is eating." They approved him.

Fanshen reads like a legal brief in places - 20% of your income comes from X and 30% from Y, well then you're a middle peasant, unless condition Z obtains, then poor peasant. Elsewhere it's more like a novel, including Chapter 51, A Young Bride Leads the Way. Beautiful seventeen-year old Hsien-e, forced into marriage at fourteen, was determined to take her own life rather than submit to further abuse from her husband and his father, feared former cadres and scourge of the entire village. It's as if Lisbeth Salander had been injected into a Pearl Buck story, but armed with the alliance of Hu Hseh-chen, profiled above, now leader of the Women's Association. The village had never sanctioned a woman divorcing her husband, but these two call a meeting of the the village's women to demand one, not at all certain of support from any but the progressive young women. The abuser and his even more lordly father are stopped cold in a series of dramatic showdowns, including a fixed piece in the church, the only building large enough to contain the throng, mesmerized by the spectacle of it's own self-education.

The perpetrators come very close to being beaten to death, the staunchness and sense of the Communist Party members just able to save them. A higher CCP official encourages them to try redeeming the younger man, remarking that truly reformed cadres are some of the best. "Love, protect, educate, remold, and unite - these should be the five basic principles used in dealing with Communists and cadres" (Chapter 55), a motto disaffected Communists were perfectly willing to recite sarcastically when they thought some people are getting away with murder and they too need to be considered when pointing it out, policy be damned.

Village mass psychology could turn on a dime, especially when turmoil in the Communist branch overlapped material downturns affecting all. One such period is recounted in Chapter 57 (Disaster), when a great hail storm and flash flood ripped through the village and immediate environs in the summer of 1948, wreaking a terrible toll. The entire CCP was engaged in a top-to-bottom re-evaluation at that very moment and most village cadres were away at a conference when the flood hit. The cadres were themselves low, feeling they were being blamed for the excesses of the recent ultra-left period, which emphasized a poor-peasant approach and deepening of fanshen. They had just been executing the line at that time, now the line changes, and it's all our fault? The confusion and anger abated when regional leaders painstakingly explained the need for the change - the necessity to form the broadest possible alliance as country-wide victory approached - and took most of the blame on their own shoulders, but it took some time to digest. And all right at the moment when the hardest-working villagers could hardly get up in the morning from despondency at their wrecked crops. It worked out in the end, as people began to believe that the authorities would deliver on promises of aid (an unheard of innovation in China) and the cadres, essentially unpaid volunteers, pulled themselves together. But it gives a sense of the almost insuperable management problem day-to-day, navigating such shoals.

The personal portraits put a human face on this immense, world-historic event. Take Old Lady Wang, industriously weaving away at every meeting, marching off before dawn to her small acreage on bound feet, volunteer work team in tow, land and team courtesy of the revolution. She had an opinion on everything and not slow to tell you what it was. Classed a middle peasant, she objected furiously, including to the top leader in the street. Chairman Mao himself would smile and throw up his hands if having to deal with her. Or Old Tui-Chin, a hard-working poor peasant even after the redistribution, who became a village leader as it progressed. Obscure, voiceless, and unnoticed for fifty years, he showed an unexpected talent for leadership during the fanshen period, gaining increasing respect during this chaotic time through common sense, good will, and an uncanny anticipation of policy changes dictated by his inner compass.

Revolution is never something to be wished for, indicative as it is of a hopeless society, broken beyond repair and requiring top-to-bottom renovation. The violence, chaos, and heartbreak incident on the turnover verges on nightmare. But the alternative may be even worse, a conclusion several million people in China seem to have come to all those years ago when they turned their society upside down. This is the story of how they did it.

Mike Bertrand

August 13, 2013