Read Online The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China by Yuan-Tsung Chen - Free Book Online Page A

to do it. The landpoor peasants, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers were a vast mass of faceless strangers, separated from me by a wide gap of incomprehension. And yet it was precisely for them that I would be going to help carry through the land reform.
    And then there was that other, so much smaller group of faceless strangers—the feudal landlords. The men now termed feudal landlords had been chosen by the former Guomindang government, just as they had been by the emperors for centuries past, to run the show in the rural areas. They were the gentry, the literates, lording it over the vast mass of the illiterate. They rented out land at exorbitant rents, charged high interest rates on loans, and in especially backward areas were real rural despots, using their power to amass wealth by every means. Now they and their families would have to atone for these sins.
    And yet, although there were indeed some very large landowners, the material difference between the good poor and the bad rich was often no more than 180
mu
or about thirty acres a family. Some tyrannous landlords abused their power and position and deserved punishment, but it seemed harsh to me that because of some small difference in wealth, a small landlord family should be assailed and its children stigmatized as members of an “exploiting class.” It seemed unfair too that the really big landlords had been able to flee the country, leaving behind their puppets, these millions of little landlords, to deal with the consequences. Then I thought of Madame Lu. But it was hard to picture my erstwhile proposed mother-in-law as a “feudal landlord,” or, as I now learned to categorize her, “part feudal landlord, part capitalist,” who would be slated to lose her land but not her bourgeois capital.
    Between these clearly “good” and “evil” classes were two more groups, and here it wasn’t always easy to draw distinct lines. The largest group between the two extremes—and our greatest hope for allies—were the “middlepeasants.” Where the poor peasant was always on the verge of sliding down into the abyss because of drought or flood or unpayable debts, the middle peasant could just about make do. Then came the much smaller group of “rich peasants.” These relatively well-to-do farmers had more land than they could till themselves so they hired laborers or rented out a portion to tenants or sharecroppers. They were closer in spirit and interests to landlords, though not as established in wealth and power. We were warned in our preparatory classes to keep a wary eye on them while avoiding action that would force them over to the side of the landlords.
    At the bottom of the social scale were millions of rural dispossessed—beggars and bandits.
    I might have been able to grasp everything more clearly at that time if I’d had more time to study all the documents we were given and listened more attentively to the lectures. But because of the Korean War there was a special urgency about the land reform. Unless the peasants were able to begin tilling their own land by the time the spring sowing started in February or March, there would be a national disaster. That left only about four months in which to accomplish the task for the year. What remained to be done would have to be completed in the next winter lull in farming. The leaders were therefore anxious to have us on the road as soon as possible. But after the lectures we still had to shop and make the warm clothes needed in the remoteness of Gansu Province where the weather was much colder than in temperate Shanghai. All this barely left time for even basic orientation courses.
    When I met Wang Sha to discuss my application he joked with me. “I thought you would choose Gansu, where the Silk Road goes and the Great Wall ends. You have romantic ideas. Well, I’ll approve your application, but don’t blame me if you