The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (35 page)

New conflicts appeared, even though all grudges were supposed to have been settled with the revolutionary righteousness of land reform. The working animals that had not been killed during land distribution were now borrowed, and many of them were badly neglected. When they were returned to their owners they were often miserable, sick and filthy. Some were worked to death. When, on the subtropical island of Hainan, water buffaloes were passed around the village instead of being returned at the agreed date, the owner had to plant his rice without first ploughing the land, resulting in stems with pale ears that bore no rice. When boats were borrowed for two weeks they were never returned, prompting others in turn to be more cautious with property. Some pretended that their vessels were not seaworthy, others preferred to fill them with river mud rather than to lend them out. Farming tools, to be shared by mutual-aid teams, were often broken, due either to neglect or to sheer spite. Conflicts between those who lent and those who borrowed soon undermined the very notion of private property. The poor proclaimed that ‘it is glorious to be poor’, pushing for the equal distribution of all assets: ‘if there is food all should eat it, if there is money all should use it’. Fear and jealousy meant that poverty became the norm.
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The very term ‘rich’ inspired dread. In some cases the poor pushed for much more radical sharing, anticipating the People’s Communes that would come with the Great Leap Forward in the summer of 1958: everything was pooled together, no matter what each person contributed. In some places in Hainan as many as 6 per cent of all teams practised this form of radical egalitarianism. In one extreme example a team of five families even shared the cost of weddings. But in a fateful anticipation of the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, those who could not contribute as much as others were soon marginalised. Pregnant women were cursed for eating from the common pot without working in the fields. Farmers were reluctant to go to market for fear of being denounced as slackers. With the blurring of private property, theft also became more common. As one report noted, ‘social order is abnormal’, as entire villages sank into a form of open anarchy where every bit of property became fair game.
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Hainan had been the last place to be liberated, Manchuria the first. In Manchuria too the introduction of mutual-aid teams impoverished the countryside – often before the rest of the country. Farmers slaughtered their cattle before they had to share them. Good horses were traded for old nags, carts with rubber tyres bartered for antiquated ones with wooden wheels. The trend started in the spring of 1950. Less than a year later, a third of the countryside was in dire poverty, lacking working animals, food, fodder and tools. Sometimes there was not enough seed to plant the next crop. And even with sufficient seed, the job was badly carried out with sprouts distributed unevenly over the fields. As a report to the People’s Congress noted, ‘the masses lack enthusiasm’.
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Other problems appeared. Land distribution was supposed to have confined the most glaring inequities to the past, freeing the productive potential of the masses from the dead hand of feudalism. But all over the country transactions in land appeared as soon as it had been redistributed. In 1952 poor farmers sold or exchanged parts of their share in Zhejiang province. In one village in Jiande county alone, half the land passed through different hands, sometimes sold to rich farmers and city merchants. In the Jinhua region up to 7 per cent of the redistributed land was rented out at an average rate of 20 per cent of the estimated yearly yield.
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The situation was similar elsewhere. In Langzhong county, Sichuan, up to one in six of all farmers were driven by sheer destitution to sell their parcel, reversing the land reform that had taken place a year or so earlier. Some could not even afford the land tax. Land distribution was also supposed to bring to light all the holdings previously hidden from tax inspectors. But in large parts of Jiangsu and Anhui – among other provinces – many plots remained untaxed. Called ‘black land’, it reached an extraordinary 70 per cent of the overall surface in one district of Qiaocheng, Anhui. Sometimes farmers and cadres colluded in hiding the best plots or turning prime ground into wasteland in the land register. As one village head boldly proclaimed while pacing the fields with a measuring tape in Suxian county, Anhui, ‘measuring the land is all about deceiving those above us and helping those below us’. But more often than not, the beneficiaries of ‘black land’ were the local cadres, who now lorded it over the commoners – as was the case in Jilin province. By one rough estimate, produced by the highest echelon of power in charge of several provinces, roughly half of all local cadres were corrupt. In some regions a new elite had emerged, as one in ten families headed by party officials lived like rich farmers, hiring labour, charging high interest rates and speculating in land.
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Everybody had received a plot of land, so everyone had to pay tax – in the form of grain. But before liberation not every villager was a farmer, and even those who tilled the fields often had sideline occupations, making handicrafts in their spare time to supplement the family’s income. In some regions entire villages specialised in producing paper umbrellas, cloth shoes, silk hats, rattan chairs, wicker creels or twig baskets for the market. Much of this handicraft wealth was squeezed out by the new regime or forced into mutual-aid teams. Before the revolution, blacksmiths would camp near the hot-water shops or public mills of a village, their furnaces resounding with the blows of the hammer on the anvil as they worked with recycled iron to provide cultivators with agricultural tools. Now many of them worked in teams under the watchful eye of the state. In Huili, Sichuan, the weight of hoes and rakes doubled under collectivisation. The quality was so poor that in some cases the tools had to be discarded after a day or two of use in the fields.
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Entire industries in the countryside were wiped out. A good example is what happened in Xiaoshan, an affluent county in Zhejiang where over half the local people relied on the craft of paper-making for an income. The profession demanded special skills, passed on from generation to generation, as hemp, ramie, mulberry and bamboo had to be soaked, pounded and washed to retrieve the long fibres, which were then cleaned in a lime solution and pressed into sheets. Within a year of liberation the industry was taxed out of existence, as fewer than a quarter of 200 small factories managed to remain in business. A once thriving population was reduced to digging up bamboo shoots, cutting grass and stealing wood to eke out a living. Xiaoshan was by no means exceptional, as private enterprise was denounced as a bourgeois pursuit throughout the country. In all of Hubei province, by 1951, the income that most people in the countryside obtained from secondary occupations was cut in half compared to earlier years. More than ever before, the villagers relied on agriculture. In many provinces the output of sideline occupations in the countryside would not match pre-war levels until the 1980s.
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But as an ever greater proportion of villagers were funnelled into agriculture, the actual amount produced per person declined after the redistribution of land. Work teams dispatched by the Committee on Land Reform reported that entire counties in Hubei plunged into starvation. There were numerous reasons for widespread hunger, but most were man-made. Cadres who hailed from the north issued orders while ignoring the conditions of the local economy. Villagers were locked up in meetings all night long. Animals starved to death. Tools were lacking. In some villages four out of five residents had no food to eat. Lending had come to a complete halt, as everybody feared being stigmatised as an ‘exploiter’. The poor had nowhere to go, as charitable institutions from the old regime had been disbanded.
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Famine stalked large swathes of the countryside in 1953. In the spring, 3 million people in Shandong went hungry. Five million people were destitute in Henan, close to 7 million in Hubei and another 7 million in Anhui. In Guangdong over a quarter of a million people went without food. In Shaanxi and Gansu over 1.5 million people went hungry. In Guizhou and Sichuan desperate farmers sold the seeds on which their next crop depended: this was the case with a quarter of the people in some villages in Nanchong county. The practice was also common in Hunan, Hubei and Jiangsu. In Shaoyang county, Hunan, starvation compelled even farmers who used to be well off in the past to sell everything they had. In many of these provinces desperate parents even bartered their children. Villagers were reduced to eating bark, leaves, roots and mud. Famine was a familiar challenge in traditional China, and natural disasters were responsible for a good deal of this hunger. The year of Stalin’s death saw floods, typhoons, frosts and blights on an unprecedented scale.
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But many reports also pointed the finger at brutal grain levies as well as incompetence, if not callous indifference, on the part of local cadres. In Shandong, each villager had to subsist on roughly 20 kilos of grain a month in 1952. In terms of calories, 23 to 26 kilos of unhusked grain are required each month to provide 1,700 to 1,900 calories per day, an amount international aid organisations consider to be the bare minimum for subsistence. Fodder, seed and other necessities had to be taken out of this amount, meaning that farmers had to live on a mere 163 kilos per year, or less than 14 kilos a month. The state reduced this amount to 122 kilos in 1953, the equivalent of a starvation diet at just over 10 kilos a month. And Shandong was hardly an isolated example. In Jilin, as Chapter 7 showed, brutal grain levies during the Korean War caused widespread famine in 1952. That year, the farmers were left with an average of 194 kilos a year. But the rate of procurement went up from 42.5 per cent to 43.8 per cent in 1953, further reducing the share for each village to a mere 175 kilos, equivalent to less than 15 kilos a month: that, too, was a starvation diet, barely supplemented by a few occasional greens. These are telling figures, even if they do not always capture the human dimensions of hunger. In Nanhe, a dust-swept county on the barren plain of Hebei, the number of children sold out of sheer destitution increased inexorably after 1950: eight children in 1951, fifteen the following year and twenty-nine by 1953. The party archives are silent about the heart-wrenching decisions that impoverished families must have reached in trading their offspring for a handful of grain, but they do mention the local cadres: they stood by as lenders exacted extortionate rates of up to 13 per cent per month. And sometimes they joined the fray, throwing their weight around to impose even higher rates.
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The party had an answer to all these problems, and it was to travel further down the road to collectivisation. Speculators, hoarders, kulaks and capitalists were blamed for all the trouble – despite years of organised terror against counter-revolutionaries and other enemies of the socialist order. More rather than less state power was seen as the solution. Starting in 1953, the mutual-aid teams were turned into co-operatives. Tools, working animals and labour were now shared on a permanent basis. Villagers retained nominal ownership of their plot but secured a share in the co-operative by staking it along with those of other members in a common land pool. The co-operatives soon overshadowed the entire lives of the villagers, selling seed, salt and fertiliser, lending money, fixing the prices, determining the time of the harvest and buying up the crops.

This second stage of collectivisation was also supposed to be voluntary, although by now the grip of cadres and the militia on the countryside was such that no realistic alternatives existed. This time around many villagers went even further in trying to withhold their possessions from the communes. As one report noted, it was ‘very common’ for villagers to abandon years of frugality and slaughter their animals. One couple managed to devour a 50-kilo hog all on their own, not saving any of the meat. Up in Jilin – to take a different example – Sun Fengshan killed his pig in the hope of keeping it from the state’s reach, but lacked any facilities to freeze and store the meat. Much of it was eaten at night by dogs, leaving his family crying at the loss. Instead of borrowing from each other, people now turned to the state – with no intention of repayment. The poor were often at the vanguard of collectivisation. In Yangjiang, they accepted state grain while openly declaring that none of it would ever be returned. One man who carted away 1,500 kilos of rice was asked how he would ever be able to reimburse his loan. ‘In a year or two we will have socialism and I won’t pay back shit’ was his answer.
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Traditional village rights and customs were neglected or destroyed. There was a scramble over common resources that had not been confiscated and redistributed with land reform, for instance pastures, moorlands or salt marshes where animals were allowed to graze, or riverbanks and woodlands where children collected firewood. People tried to grab what they could before the state collectivised everything. In Huaxian county, Guangdong, a crowd of 200 fought over the forest, resulting in many injuries. In Maoming a village organised a team of 300 to cut down the trees belonging to a neighbouring hamlet. Disputes also flared up over rivers and ponds, creating ‘a tense and insecure situation in the countryside’.
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The amount of land under cultivation decreased with the introduction of co-operatives. People pooled their plots, but large tracts were abandoned because their owners were compensated with so few shares that it was not worth the trouble. In Jilin province 40,000–50,000 hectares of farmland were cast aside during the first phase of co-operativisation. Even carefully cultivated fields fell into neglect. Explained Wang Zixiang, a farmer in Sichuan, who allowed his terraced field to collapse to the ground: ‘Why repair it when it will soon revert to the collective?’
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