entire society, but also to manage the economy as a whole and indoctrinate the mass of the population.’13
Land Reform: China’s Earliest Harvest of Sorrows
One of the paradoxes of Maoist politics was that despite its opposition to urban-based capitalism, and its core support coming from rural China (the urban population being then so small), the countryside was to suffer the greatest calamities. The famines in the 1960s are the most extreme example of this, with rural areas largely starved in order to feed cities. Land Reform was one of the most important political movements sponsored by the Mao government from 1949 onwards and it directly impacted on the countryside. Mao had earlier observed abuse against exploitative landlords in his native Hunan in the 1920s, writing a famous report on this.14 This was to frame his world-view in subsequent decades. China’s countryside was the home to most people, but it was a place of pre-modernity, the epitome of the old society and the exploitation it involved.
Since ancient times, land had been a source of power and wealth. Those with land at least had security. But some had accrued large amounts, and others ended up with nothing, being no better than indentured slaves. If China was to reform, then the countryside needed to undergo revolution – and that meant addressing the inequalities of land ownership. State control needed to be introduced. As the 1950 Agrarian Reform Law stated in its preamble, the current arrangement was one of feudal exploitation by the landlord class ‘and should be abolished and the system of peasant land ownership shall be introduced in order to set free the rural productive forces, develop agricultural production, and thus pave the way for China’s new industrialization’.15
Of all the components of the Land Reform movement, before and after it was rolled out nationally, ‘struggle sessions’ were the most infamous. Mao had witnessed these in Hunan in 1926, theatrical events in which those under investigation were marched around the streets humiliatingly wearing tall dunce’s hats emblazoned with their name. Eye-witness American farmer William Hinton observed the ethos of struggle sessions enacted against Party members through the eyes of a cadre called Hou:
In work review meetings during the past week Comrade Hou had stressed the need to keep the movement from developing into a ‘struggle’ against the Party and cadres as individuals. The work time must keep in mind the real virtue of those whose records were under review. It must sustain their morale, preserve their sanity and keep alive in them that spark of courage, energy and ability which had made them leaders in the past.16
A similar need for judiciousness was necessary when landowners were exposed and had to submit to discipline and public correction. Hinton does refer obliquely to violence in his account. But other testimony shows that violence was not an unfortunate, occasional outcome of this movement, but a core part of it. Mao had been the proponent of revolution being a necessarily violent event. It was not, as he famously declared, a dinner party. Violence was inevitable and ubiquitous. The Land Reform movement was to see as many as 2 million perish, with countless other acts of physical violence against those targeted. ‘Under the new guidelines of “not correcting excesses prematurely” the aroused masses frequently engaged in unchecked outbreaks of violence and brutality.’17 It was the first widescale campaign which created a new class in the PRC – disgruntled victims – and a new elite – the middle peasants who had benefited from the redistribution. China’s renewal and regeneration, as shown by this example from the very dawn of the PRC, was to be a process in which there were always clear winners and losers, and in which compromise and consensus were never easy, nor, perhaps, even the objective.
Cleansing of the People
As early as 1957, American psychologist Robert J. Lifton was able to record the ‘sixiang gaizao’ (thought reform) for which increasing evidence was emerging within the PRC. The aim was therefore clearly to remake not just the physical world of the Chinese people, but the inner one too. This showed the radical difference between the Communists and the Nationalists they had defeated. They had a new vision of what a Chinese person should be, and of the techniques that needed to be used in order to achieve this. According to Lifton, this consisted of confessions, in which individuals in writing or in public recounted the deeds they had done in the old world, before the regime came into existence, and the sins they had committed. With this act completed, they were able to move on to a programme of re-education.18
‘Thought reform’ was about accepting a collectivist ethos, ‘serving the people’, and accepting broad social responsibilities in the great project the country was now embarked on to restore and regenerate itself. People were either for or against this. There was no space in-between. Nor was the Party immune from this process of self-reformation and self-inspection. It, too, was targeted by campaigns in order to improve the posture of cadres. They were to be not just administrators, but part of a new model moral army. The selfishness of the past, what Mao complained was the parochialism of ‘mountain stronghold’ ideas (shantou zhuyi), needed to be eradicated.
Practically, that meant an end to prostitution and other vices associated with capitalism and the previous regime. It meant that foot binding, a practice introduced in the imperial era that effectively crippled young women, was outlawed. It meant the provision of mass education, and a set menu of ideological messages delivered not just to Party members, but to the whole of society. It meant destroying the sorts of inequalities that manifested themselves in cities in terms of what kind of housing people lived in. Peasants had their lands redistributed and city workers had apartments and sets of rooms reallocated and reassigned.
Intellectuals figured importantly in this. To understand the particular quality of animosity that Mao evidently felt towards this group, one has to remember that the term in Chinese – ‘zhishi fenzi’ – literally translates as ‘knowledge elements’. This covered a far wider group than the same term in English, running from teachers to those who worked in journalism, and who could be more broadly categorized as service sector workers in Western systems. That accounted for a sizeable number of people. Mao’s own history with this group had also been a difficult one. ‘Mao had long found intellectuals irritating,’ Alexander Pantsov and Stephen Levine wrote in their biography of the Chairman. ‘Skeptical and conscientious, they aroused in him, as well as in other Bolshevik leaders, hatred and revulsion.’19 This may have derived from Mao’s early life, when, as a lowly librarian at Beijing University, he had experienced first-hand the sharp treatment and intimidating behaviour those serving intellectuals sometimes suffered.
Despite this, ‘knowledge elements’ were important to the new China, as engineers, medical practitioners, and planners. In terms of the social background of its leadership, the CPC was from humble stock. But now that it was in government, it needed those conversant in science, maths, and technology to be able to devise and implement its macro-economic and political plans. The issue with intellectuals, which would never be dispelled in the Maoist era, and lingers to this day, is that they were likely to be complicated in their private thoughts and allegiance. Some of them had studied abroad, in the pre-1949 period when young Chinese went to Japan, Europe, and the United States to study. Others were linked to family members who had fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan. Some were simply dissenters, aware of the creed of Marxism but also equipped to critique and doubt it. This group had to be reshaped somehow. ‘Thought reform’ was initially the means to do this.
Writer Yang Jiang (1911–2016) typifies the fate of many of this group. A formidable intellect, she had studied with her husband, scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910–98), in Oxford and then the Sorbonne in the 1930s. In 1947, in Cities Besieged (Wei Cheng), Qian had produced one of the best-loved novels of the life of those exposed to overseas culture and carrying their experiences back to their home country. Yang’s own work largely consisted of producing the first translations into Chinese of works like Don Quixote by Cervantes. She also wrote plays, criticism, and a series of memoirs. Living back in the new China, she and her husband were seen by
