Chinese Revolution in Practice (Routledge Studies in Modern History) [1 ed.] 1032576200, 9781032576206

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Routledge Studies in Modern History

CHINESE REVOLUTION IN PRACTICE FROM MOVEMENT TO THE STATE Guo Wu

Chinese Revolution in Practice

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration. The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context. Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions. Guo Wu is an associate professor of history at Allegheny College, USA. His main research interests include modern Chinese nationalism, southern ethnic minority studies, and the Chinese communist revolution. His most influential books include Zheng Guanying: Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and His Influence on Economics, Politics, and Society (2010).

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World Edited by Eveline G. Bouwers The Saga of Edmund Burke From His Day to Ours Mark Hulliung Citizenship, Migration and Social Rights Historical Experiences from the 1870s to the 1970s Edited by Beate Althammer Tourism in Natural and Agricultural Ecosystems in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Martino Lorenzo Fagnani and Luciano Maffi The Making of a World Order Global Historical Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles Edited by Albert Wu and Stephen W. Sawyer Beach Soccer Histories Lee McGowan, Elizabeth Ellison and Michele Lastella The Creation of Kazakh National Identity The Relationship with Russia, 1900–2015 Dmitry Shlapentokh Chinese Revolution in Practice From Movement to the State Guo Wu For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Modern-History/book-series/MODHIST

Chinese Revolution in Practice From Movement to the State

Guo Wu

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Guo Wu The right of Guo Wu to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Wu, Guo (Professor of history), author. Title: Chinese revolution in practice : from movement to the state / Guo Wu. Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. | Series: Routledge Studies in Modern History | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023023530 (print) | LCCN 2023023531 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032576206 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032576213 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003440222 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: China--Politics and government--20th century. | Political culture--China--History--20th century. | Zhongguo gong chan dang. Classification: LCC DS777.75 .W768 2024 (print) | LCC DS777.75 (ebook) | DDC 306.2095109/04--dc23/eng/20230614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023530 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023023531 ISBN: 978-1-032-57620-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-57621-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-44022-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

1

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction

1

Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation, 1917–1921

13

Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP

39

3

Historiography, Memory, and Myth in Maoist China

62

4

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory

92

2

5

6

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution

116

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed during the Cultural Revolution

140

Conclusion

159

Index

168

Acknowledgments

This volume represents the culmination of my intellectual journey spanning 14 years, from 2009 to 2023. I am deeply grateful to Mr. Robert Langham, the senior publisher at Routledge, for inviting me to publish with the company and for supporting my idea to consolidate my published articles into a book. Without Mr. Langham’s encouragement and guidance, this book would not exist. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my PhD advisor, Jennifer Rudolph, who has become a dear friend and prefers to be addressed as Jennifer rather than Dr. Rudolph. As a teaching assistant in her undergraduate class, titled “China in Revolution,” I began to reevaluate what the subject truly entailed. Through her teachings in another class focusing on women and revolution, I gained a newfound appreciation for the unique experiences of Chinese women during the revolution and socialist construction, and this gendered perspective and emphasis on women’s experience has been reflected in the studies included in this volume. Professor Tian Ziyu of Hubei University in Wuhan facilitated my research on Yun Daiying and introduced me to his close friends, Li Liangming of Central China Normal University and Li Ziyuan of South-Central Minzu University, who are both historians. Professor Li Ziyuan arranged my public talk in 2017 at his school on “New Qing History.” My research on “Recalling Bitterness” received generous support from Professor Ralph Thaxton of Brandeis University, with whom I kept exchanging views on the study of Chinese collective memory on the grassroots level. The “bitterness” studies also benefited from the comments of Alex Cook of UC Berkeley, and from discussions with Xin Huang of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Xin Yang at Macalester College, when I presented the theme at the Associations for Asian Studies conference in 2013. Vivian Li Yan shared with me an important propaganda footage during the Cultural Revolution about the Rent Collection Courtyard, which was the topic of her dissertation at the University of Michigan as a PhD candidate of Art History. I met Li Yan again in Anren Town, Sichuan, where we had dinner together with Liu Xiaofei, the grandson of Liu Wencai, one of the evil landlords and our common interviewee. Over the past 14 years, my friend Dr. Chen Xinxiang, a

Acknowledgments

vii

sociologist and chair of the Sociology Department at Central Minzu University, has read all of the articles included in this book and consistently provided me with cross-disciplinary inspirations. I am especially grateful to Professor Denis Ho of Yale, who not only provided invaluable feedback on the draft of my paper, “Recalling Bitterness,” but also helped me refine my English writing. It was Denis who suggested this book’s title, “Chinese Revolution in Practice,” a brilliant idea that I could not have conceived on my own. I added the subtitle “From Movement to the State” to complete the final work. When I was researching the Cultural Revolution and mass incarceration, Professor Terry Martin of Harvard directed my attention to the comparable practice of the Soviet Union when I presented my paper there. I learned a lot from the comments of Professor Antonia Finnane when I presented it at the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2016 to commemorate the 50th year of the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, and I thank Professor Barbara Mittler of Oxford for her insightful questions raised from the floor. Professor Xiaohong Xu, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, not only shared my interest in studying Yun Daiying and early Chinese communism, but also commented on my study of the cowshed. I will never forget the wonderful experience of me and Xiaohong’s private chatting and drinking bottles of IPA over grilled kangaroo meat(!) in a Melbourne bar after the conference. I thank Professor Rebecca Nedostop for providing feedback on the Yun Daiying paper and introducing Xiaohong and I to each other. Professor Kirk Denton of Ohio State University graciously encouraged my research on the evil landlord images and he used my reproduction of the old Chinese children’s comic book’s page with the landlord being beaten by peasants on the cover of that issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. I felt so proud because I could not imagine that I could even contribute to the cover design of MCLC. The political scientist Suisheng Zhao of Denver University showed such tremendous confidence in my research of the Cultural Revolution which mitigated my intimidation when submitting to his predominantly Political Science journal as a historian. Professor Patrick Fuliang Shan of Grand Valley State University has previously read some of the articles here and has consistently instilled in me an unparalleled level of trust. For source materials and important information, I thank Professor Huaiyu Chen of Arizona State University for providing me with significant information and insights. My exchange of views with Huaiyu regarding the fate of modern Chinese intellectuals, from Hu Shi, Ji Xianlin, to Zhou Yiliang, reinforced my aspiration to share my study with more readers who ponder the dynamics between modern Chinese intellectuals and the state. However, it is important for me to clarify that all errors and flaws in this book are solely my responsibility, as is my personal judgment of the character of the PRC state, which I wrote in 2023’s nearly post-pandemic yet more uncertain world. My friends and colleagues who provided assistance with this book are not accountable for my opinions or assessments, which may be

viii

Acknowledgments

perceived as “pessimistic” or unsettling for some. As an individual, I do not consider myself a very “optimistic” person, and I accept full responsibility for my perspective. During the 14 years of my research, my son grew from a baby into a high school student. Family life often distracted me from my work, but the presence of my wife Ranhee Pyo and my son Tianyi Wu also grounded me in the real world, reminding me that life’s everyday moments are just as significant as academic pursuits. Though I hesitate to say they “helped” with my research, they provided me with a valuable perspective on the importance of balancing work and life and living with me in a cold and isolated ghost town on the US Rust Belt requires significant sacrifices from my loved ones. Additionally, my own personal experiences have deepened my appreciation for the seemingly mundane aspects of the lives of revolutionaries like Yun Daiying and the prison inmates who endured the Cultural Revolution. The chapters included in this volume have all been published. Chapter 1 appeared in Journal of Modern Chinese History, vol. 5, no. 2 (December 2011): 129–150 as “From Private Library and Bookstore to Communist Party: Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation, 1917–1921”; Chapter 2 was “Speaking Bitterness: Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP, 1947–1952” in The Chinese Historical Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 3–23; Chapter 3 was adapted from “Recalling Bitterness: Historiography, Memory, and Myth in Maoist China,” in Twentieth Century China, vol. 39, no. 3 (October 2014): 247–271; Chapter 4 appeared earlier as “The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 131–164; Chapter 5 was “Outsourcing the State Power: Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution” in China: An International Journal, vol. 15, no. 3 (August 2017): 58–76; and finally, Chapter 6 was first published as “Ritual, Reading and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed during the Cultural Revolution” in the Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 29, no. 124 (2020): 632–646. I want to express my gratitude to Taylor & Francis, the editors of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Professor Suisheng Zhao on behalf of Journal of Contemporary China, the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the Johns Hopkins University Press for granting permission to reproduce all these articles. Thanks to Professor Xiaobing Li, the editor of The Chinese Historical Review and professor Central Oklahoma University, I was not only granted permission to use the content, but also provided with valuable guidance on how to effectively engage with the publishing company to resolve any copyright issues. However, I have also tweaked these articles by correcting embarrassing typos that escaped the eyes of editors, reviewers, and myself, making the chapters speak to each other through cross-referencing, and getting rid of the Chinese characters appearing in the text to avoid distraction. I also removed

Acknowledgments

ix

all illustrations, but added more years of birth and death to the people that I discuss in the book. With the passing of time, I feel I must, maybe sadly, treat some of them as “historical” personages after their death recently and pay homage to them. I also hope the years alone can illuminate the passage of time and a certain change in the political climate and social milieu. Moreover, they can indicate what people were experiencing and practicing in different times.

Introduction

In 2009, I developed an interest in a research project on the Chinese communist revolution, which diverged from my dissertation and the first book on late Qing reform. During a visit to Wuhan that summer, I met with Professor Tian Ziyu of Hubei University, an expert in the May Fourth movement in the Wuhan region and the life of Yun Daiying, an early Chinese communist leader and martyr. Professor Tian provided me with a wealth of source materials for my research on Yun. At that time, China was still basking in the afterglow of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and Wuhan was uneventful. Little did I know that my interest in the Chinese revolution would persist and yield a series of published articles that continue to captivate me in 2023, despite the profound changes that have occurred in China and the world since then. During my trip to Wuhan, I asked Professor Tian about the movement to recall the bitterness of the 1960s. He paused thoughtfully before revealing that he had contributed to the drafting of the recall materials as a young man, but he did not elaborate. In the years that followed, my fascination with the Chinese revolution and its impact on society led me to Sichuan twice in 2011 and 2014. There, I met with Liu Xiaofei, the grandson of the notorious landlord Liu Wencai. During our visits, we conversed over meals, and I conducted informal, unstructured interviews with him. I accompanied him on a visit to the Liu Wencai Landlord Manor, where I witnessed his deep-seated frustration and his unwavering commitment to rehabilitate his grandfather’s demonized image. Despite being haunted by his bitter memories, Liu Xiaofei remained unyielding, dedicating his time and income as an unmarried, retired worker to conducting independent research on his grandfather’s “true” life and legacy. In 2011, I organized an informal “focus group” in my hometown of Sichuan consisting of retired local party cadres and former Land Reform activists. During the period of 1950–1951, the participants, who were idealistic young students born into better-off families, were attracted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s promise of social justice and the visible improvement of social order brought to rural Sichuan through its rigorous movement of “cleansing bandits and opposing tyrants.” However, in hindsight, they DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-1

2

Introduction

acknowledged that there were excesses and some landlords were not as bad as they had been made out to be. My father helped facilitate the meeting, which was one year before his death in 2012 due to diabetes. He listened, pondered, and honestly thanked the participants for evoking precious memories that most of today’s Chinese elderly have chosen to suppress. Through my father’s memoir, I learned that my grandfather, a small local landholder, committed suicide with scissors during the Land Reform period. Although my father, as a progressive young man, supported the new society and never liked the Nationalist Party, he loathed his father for his disgraceful death. Many years later, as an old man himself, my father shed tears while writing about his father’s death. Nevertheless, as a “landlord’s bastard“ who enrolled in a vocational school on a government stipend in socialist China and even got a play published as a single volume in 1963, he felt genuine gratitude. Similarly, the drafters of the recalling bitterness stories may not have considered how their tales might hurt the descendants of the villains. In the summer of 2017, I returned to Wuhan and had another conversation with Professor Tian, where I updated him on the articles that I had published on Land Reform and Socialist Education. His father had worked under the supervision of Dong Biwu, a highly esteemed early founder of the Chinese Communist Party, and his job included running a business in Hong Kong to raise funds for the party. The study of the Chinese Communist Revolution and Chinese socialism requires a detached analysis of how it worked and how it affected ordinary people’s lives and values. The Scope and Features of the Book Chinese Revolution in Practice is not a narrowly focused monograph; it encompasses multiple dimensions of the changing process of the Chinese communist revolution’s practice, from small groups of elitist young intellectuals to mass mobilization, and from a youth movement to a state that suppressed thoughtful youths. In 2009, I did not anticipate that as a historian mainly focused on archival materials and books, I would be drawn into a world of people who are closely related to history. However, I now embrace the use of their life stories to illustrate the multifarious character of the Chinese Revolution over a span of 50 years. The choice of 50 years holds symbolic significance for me: in 1920, both Yun Daiying and Mao Zedong were idealistic and rebellious young men who ran bookstores, with Mao being influenced by Yun. In 1970, another highly idealistic young thinker, Yu Luoke, who appears in the last chapter of this book, was executed by the state founded by Mao and contributed by Yun. They all shared a love of books. But why was Yu Luoke, a bookish young man, not tolerated by the revolutionary state? The Chinese Revolution was not only a movement of rebellion but also one of creation. This book examines how the movement developed new forms and techniques to engage young participants, empowered previously marginalized groups such as rural women, and denied basic personal freedoms to

Introduction

3

others. While the Chinese Revolution has been extensively studied, there have been disputes over its interpretation. The field of China Studies has produced many important works, including monographs, which have explored the origins of Chinese communism, the May 4th anti-traditional movement, the rise of Chinese Marxism and Mao, and the political careers and thoughts of individual leaders.1 However, many of these studies have fallen short in understanding the long-term effects of the revolution on ordinary people and how its ideas were transmitted beyond the circles of theoreticians, ideologues, and revolutionary leaders. The book seeks to address these gaps by examining the mobilizational and propaganda techniques used during different periods of the revolution, and how ordinary people were affected by and responded to them. Due to the political and academic divisions between the pre-1949 revolutionary history and post-1949 contemporary China, it’s rare to find books that explore the continuity between these two periods. However, in this book, I aim to bridge this gap by highlighting the revolutionary practice before and after the communist victory and the establishment of the PRC in 1949. In Chapter 2, “Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP, 1947–1952,” I specifically emphasize the continuity of revolutionary practice. Moreover, Chapter 4 delves into the revolutionary practice in the field of theatrical and film arts, discussing the portrayal of the image of evil landlords and crossing the 1949 boundary. Additionally, in Chapters 5 and 6, I demonstrate that intellectual transformation occurred not only in the Nationalist government’s prison but also during the Yan’an Rectification Movement in the 1940s. This book offers a unique perspective on Chinese revolutionary history by examining how early CCP members opened a bookstore in the early 1920s and how skeptical Chinese young thinkers read their books in PRC prisons in the 1960s–1970s. By providing these depictions, my goal is to enable readers to understand how the “revolution devours its children” over an extended period. The book is not limited to one region or province but instead offers a comprehensive view of the revolution throughout China. I provide detailed portraits of concrete life experiences and in-depth analyses of the mechanisms of institutions and features of revolutionary artworks. Through the book’s six chapters, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the Chinese communist revolution and its impact on various aspects of society, including education, film, prisons, and rural life. I employ a unique method of “multipoint” or “scattered perspective,” which offers readers a multifarious view of the revolution. The book focuses on multiple historical actors who practiced revolution in multiple spaces, with multiple means, and generated various results. Rather than focusing solely on high-level political organization and mobilization, the book’s cultural history approach highlights the historical agency of students, officers and soldiers, socialist art workers, prison guards, and rural women. The author also emphasizes women’s participation in social activism, mobilizational politics, and cultural resistance.

4

Introduction

I aim to transcend traditional approaches by shattering old periodization and regional limitations, extending the duration, and adopting a scattered spatial perspective. Moreover, I place a strong emphasis on critical intellectuals and employ a gendered, bottom-up viewpoint that accounts for women’s experiences during political upheavals and imprisonment. By doing so, this book offers a succinct yet diverse portrayal of the Chinese Revolution. Complicating the story is the fact that not all individuals internalized the indoctrination without skepticism. Resistance constitutes another crucial thread in the book’s narrative. For instance, Yun Daiying harbored suspicions about the motives of Russian agents and initially refused their engagement. During Land Reform, local doubts about the legitimacy of taking over landowners’ legitimate property persisted, leading the CCP to implement violent land reform and rigorous political education in villages and the PLA to radicalize peasants and soldiers and transform their traditional mindsets. Furthermore, grassroots-level pushback against failed economic policies after the Great Famine compelled the CCP to “educate” people to strengthen their dedication to the socialist cause or simply silence their complaints. The Cultural Revolution marked a peak of revolutionary excess, with numerous local mass killings of landlords, rich peasants, and their children, as well as mass incarcerations. Resilience and innovation were once again practiced but not always in benign ways, as new sites of confinement and torture emerged. Nonetheless, despite the state’s monopoly on information, individual Chinese intellectuals persisted in critical reading and thinking, even in formal and informal prisons. Ritual and political theater are two other latent themes that tie up the chapters in this book. For Joseph. W. Esherick, who draws upon multiple anthropologists, “ritual performance” and “political theater” are two distinct ideal types in understanding modern China, but “a ritual performance can be turned into an act of political theater.”2 Using this analytical framework, the book highlights the ritualized lifestyle of Yun Daiying and his comrades, influenced by Neo-Confucian moral introspection, anarcho-communist utopianism, and the YMCA’s group meeting and discussion format. The practice of “speaking bitterness” in public became a new political ritual during the Civil War and Land Reform era, building upon earlier political education about class struggle and nationalism in communist base areas during the AntiJapanese War.3 In the Recalling Bitterness movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the “eating bitterness meal“ was created to evoke the bitterness of the past through coarse food, emphasizing the lucky survival under communist rule. The real-life figure Liu Wencai was also used as a political symbol in ritualized bitterness education held at his old manor. The portrayal of evil landlords in theatrical performances further contributed to the theatricalization of Chinese communist politics. During the Cultural Revolution, incarceration facilities became sites of political rituals, such as reporting to Mao’s portrait, making confessions, and reciting quotations from Chairman Mao, with quasi-religious fetishism of sacralized material objects. In contemporary China, the revival of

Introduction

5

Confucian ceremonial rituals and reinvented traditions, such as performing sacrifices to Confucius and youths’ coming-of-age ceremonies, has become a pertinent cultural phenomenon since the beginning of the 21st century.4 This book provides a comprehensive view of China during the revolutionary and high socialist periods, highlighting the diverse ways in which Chinese individuals thought, reflected, participated, and articulated themselves in the midst of political turmoil. It shows not only how mobilization and control strategies were devised, historical narratives and collective memories were manipulated, but also how they were received, questioned, and challenged in the everyday lives of people. By reading this book, readers can also gain insight into the evolution of tensions between state authorities and dissenting individuals over time, despite massive indoctrination efforts. It is worth noting that the political manipulation of history and memory is not unique to China, as evidenced by ongoing “history wars” in the United States, as I have learned from feedback on my research on non-academic platforms such as Twitter, and through my own experience teaching in a US higher education institution.5 An Ideology-Military-Propaganda State and Its Delegatory Power After examining both individual experiences and the current state of research, I will frame the historical narratives using a conceptual scheme that I refer to as the “ideology-military-propaganda state.” This term captures the essential and ongoing nature of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Scholars of contemporary Chinese politics have carefully studied the micro-level resilience and adaptability of post-Mao PRC institutions.6 In my own empirical studies presented in this book, I also recognize the CCP’s and PRC’s ability to innovate. However, while acknowledging the limited institutional resilience in governance and indoctrination, as well as some positive aspects of the Mao era, we should not overlook the less positive revolutionary legacy, including the manipulation of consciousness, memory, historiography, and art, as well as the abuse of extra-legal reincarnation. The formalist creations and innovations of authoritarian rule are underpinned by an entrenched deep structure of ideology-military-propaganda, which hinders China’s significant liberalization and progress. Although tactical resilience, such as embracing a market economy and adjusting communist discourse to incorporate nationalist appeals, has reinforced the financial viability of this structure, it has not fundamentally changed its inherent three pillars. The ultimate aim of my research is to highlight the nature and distinguishing features of the contemporary Chinese state by means of a series of empirical case studies. As Francis Fukuyama observes, China was the first world civilization to establish a modern state in the Weberian sense, characterized by a considerable capacity for mobilization and governed by an educated bureaucracy. However, it lacks the other crucial components of a modern state, namely, “democracy, legitimacy, and rule of law.”7 To be sure,

6

Introduction

no one doubted ancient China’s outstanding “administrative capability” as a “centralized, bureaucratic state.”8 The use of imperial Confucianism as the ideological backbone of the Chinese state dates back to the Han dynasty and continued until the fall of the Qing dynasty, which created a political vacuum and a void of dominant ideology. According to Dingxin Zhao, imperial elites in China accepted the analogy between patriarchal relations and the relationship between the state and society, and they found Confucianism to be an acceptable ideology because it not only “justified state power,” but also “prescribed how power should be exercised and thus lessened the possibility of despotic rule.”9 In the wake of the void after the fall of the Chinese empire in 1911, Chinese intellectuals looked to new ideologies, informed by prevailing Western trends such as Social Darwinism, nationalism as a means of survival in an era of high imperialism, anarchism, and Marxism. While scholars like Benjamin I. Schwartz argue that it was the late Qing generation of intellectuals, including Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, Zhang Binglin, and Wang Guowei, who were the true agents of change and bearers of new Western ideas, it was the “May Fourth Generation”10 of young students in embracing and shaping the new ideologies that influenced the rise of Chinese communism and the socialist state deserves greater attention. Unlike the previous generation of intellectuals who advocated for change but did not necessarily practice it, this group put their ideas into action. Yun Daiying and his comrades from the “student age group” not only advocated for anarchocommunism but also lived and worked in the same type of space at their bookstore, the “Benefitting Group.” Mao Zedong was inspired by Yun’s innovative thinking on the social function of the bookstore and opened his own Culture Bookstore. The fact that both Yun and Mao became communist movement leaders highlights the break between the “transformer” generation and the “May Fourth Generation” in terms of their aspirations for fundamental social transformation from the bottom up and their immersion in the daily management of a cultural business on the grassroots level. Although by 1921, both Mao and Yun’s ideology had transitioned from anarchocommunism to Leninist communism, their social practice and real-life experiences left a lasting impact on the first generation of Chinese communist leaders, including Deng Xiaoping who worked in a French factory around the same time. This suggests that the most successful and influential Chinese communist leaders were those who combined ideology with practice and populist tendencies. While they may not have been the unprecedented “bearers of new ideas” compared to the late Qing thinkers, they certainly acted out the new ideology in concrete environments. May Fourth ideology contains an important dimension of values and disposition, which was summarized by Lucien Bianco as “faith in progress, democracy, and science, confidence in the limitless potential of human reason …”11 Yet that was not enough for revolutionaries. Once the young students or May Fourth youths passed the age of naïve utopianism, their

Introduction

7

practice became military training and warfighting. Andew Nathan and Andew Scobell find that after building nation-wide “revolutionary committees” after the first three fervent years of the Cultural Revolution, “Mao’s government was virtually a military regime.”12 The military control during the Cultural Revolution overruled the seemingly civilian governance prior to the Cultural Revolution and the military presence was especially visible after the founding of military-dominated revolutionary committees. My studies of the mass incarceration during the Cultural Revolution in this book also show the role played by regional and provincial Military Regions in penalizing and jailing people. Hence, the rise of a “military regime” was more a logical extension of the state in a special circumstance than a surprise. War facilitated ancient China’s state-building and the Chinese communist government was founded after 22 years of solid warfighting. Subsequently, the paramount CCP leader was always concurrently the chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission except for a short period, when the two positions were divided between Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang/Zhao Ziyang. But even so, it was Deng Xiaoping who toppled the latter two leaders but not the opposite. As I argue in Chapter 5, the revolutionary military character of the PRC is accountable for the shortage of the rule of law and due legal procedures. Earlier on, the CCP had rejected the possible approach of peaceful and legalized land reform because it believed that only revolutionary violence could thoroughly displace the old moral and political authority of the landed elites in rural communities, garner emotionalized popular support, and legitimize the new government. During the revolutionary military years from 1927 to 1949, the CCP faced the challenging tasks of spreading its Western/Russian ideology to the Chinese people and building a robust army from a politically enlightened rural population. The integration of civilian and military affairs was evident in the practice of “speaking bitterness,” which was simultaneously implemented in rural villages and the PLA during the Civil War. The aim was to achieve mass mobilization through political enlightenment using modern vocabulary and concepts like the “landlord class” and “exploitation.” In the context of a thirdworld social revolution, China’s mass mobilization and political education practices can be seen as a form of alternative modernity, as I argued in Chapter 2. However, it’s crucial to note that “mobilization people” does not always equate to “granting them actual power,”13 and we need to consider whether people were treated as rational individuals with critical thinking abilities. The word “mobilization” and its Chinese equivalent dongyuan both entertain the essential meaning of preparing troops for service, which can be traced back to the Prussian army building, conscription, and wartime mobilization plan after Prussia’s two major victories in 1866 and 1870.14 I chose to use the concept of “propaganda” to define the Chinese revolution and its state-building precisely because propaganda is about persuasion through the publicizing of information and opinion, including those that may be politically misleading. The institutionalized CCP propaganda work was

8

Introduction

responsible for creating images of evil landlords, innocent victims, heroes, villains, and grassroots histories, as well as the script of “recalling bitterness” stories that shaped several generations of Chinese people’s understanding of modern history. As Chang-tai Hung points out, the CCP developed a “propaganda network” early on, and after 1949, the Party established a far more comprehensive propaganda network that exerted a “more imposing and overbearing” control of Chinese society. Hung named this apparatus a “propaganda state.”15 Timothy Cheek uses a plural “China’s propaganda states” to encompass Sun Yat-sen’s dream of “pedagogical state” and Maoist propaganda state, asserting Mao “successfully created China’s propaganda state,” “[p]ropaganda was part of elite training and monitoring of CCP cadres …” and propaganda was “central to a system that underwrites CCP’s legitimacy.”16 Elizabeth Perry argues that “[c]ulture propaganda was a critical weapon in the arsenal of the Red Army and its successor.”17 Edward Friedman et al point out that Mao’s concern with the possible degeneration of the Chinese revolution reflected his concern with the repetition of “Hungary’s Petofi Club” in China and they also stress that Mao as a poet and Mao’s wife Jiang Qing as a former actress rendered them more sensitive about the cultural circle’s “ideological lax.”18 As I argue in this book and elsewhere, museums have long been utilized as a significant site for ideological indoctrination in the People’s Republic of China.19 Additionally, a recent study demonstrates that exhibits are regularly updated to accommodate contemporary political needs.20 Another recent study of contemporary Chinese music reveals that “[a]ttention to the aesthetic experience helps to capture the aural, embodied, and sensory environment that is particular to the Cultural Revolution propaganda arts, a unique environment that also served as the backdrop for an entire generation of children and youth.”21 It can be argued that Chinese leaders’ interest in art, as well as their concern about the decay of Chinese socialism, provided additional impetus to enhance the “propaganda work” in various forms. In recent years, this propaganda effort has expanded overseas, with the Chinese government actively competing with the West in the media and communication sphere, particularly in Africa. This has been achieved through various means, including digital TV access and free access to the databases of state news outlets such as China Daily and Xinhua News Agency.22 In Chinese, this aggressive action is known as da waixuan, or “grand international communication” in official Chinese translation, yet for me, it is more accurate to call it “international propaganda,” which underscores the intention and method of the Chinese government’s efforts to expand its influence through media and communication channels outside of China’s borders. In this book, I address the issue of state-society dynamics by providing concrete examples of how the CCP effectively used literature, public speaking, and performing arts as tools to influence the public, all of which are vital components of the revolutionary-socialist legacy. Philip Kuhn emphasizes that

Introduction

9

the modern Chinese state since the mid-nineteenth century was made to “resist foreign domination by using some of the foreigner’s own technologies, both material and societal” yet the modern state takes on the task of reconciling “broadened political participation” and the “enhanced power and legitimacy of the state.”23 Was this reconciliation successful? Teresa Wright argues that China has achieved a certain equilibrium “because of the confluence of stateled developmental policies, market forces, and socialist legacies has given rankand-file state sector workers little interest in pursuing systematic political change—especially in the late reform period.”24 At times, the Chinese propaganda machine fabricated myths of past atrocities or horrible experiences that never occurred, as the priority was to move the audience. It is evident that the Chinese revolutionary practice differed significantly from the Soviet experience in many respects. For instance, whereas the Bolshevik Party relied heavily on questionnaires to measure the “commitment required of genuine revolutionaries,”25 the Chinese Communists seldom employed such instruments and instead relied on appeals to emotion and esthetic experiences through cultural propaganda and public storytelling. In its revolutionary practice, China also invented other forms such as mass dictatorship and extra-legal cowsheds, delegating or “outsourcing” power to agents such as Red Guards or the masses who could be more arbitrary than the Soviet gulag. Nonetheless, the CCP propaganda and official master narrative faced challenges from counternarratives even during the Cultural Revolution. In such situations, the ideology-military-propaganda state was prone to resort to military or paramilitary means to punish those who were perceived as deviating from the master narrative of the communist party-state. Ironically, female political prisoner Lin Zhao, whom I will discuss in Chapter 6, turned official newspapers and their content, which was used as a “live ideological vaccine in the party propaganda” to “facilitate thought reform” in inmates, into a source of international information, and even negative reports on J.F. Kennedy in 1963 were interpreted positively by her.26 Notes 1 These works included Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution, 1915–1949 tran. Murriel Bell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 2021); Mark Seldon, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1995); Ralph Thaxton, The Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Elizabeth J. Perry, Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2002), Brian DeMare, Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), and Maurice Meisner, Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait (Boston: Polity, 2006).

10

Introduction

2 Joseph W. Esherick, China in Revolution: History Lessons (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2022), 339. 3 For political education and indoctrination of mass workers by the CCP by 1945, see Chen, Making Revolution, 201–208. This was before the technique of “speaking bitterness” was invented and spread. 4 For reinvented Confucian rituals and their modern meaning, see Guo Wu, An Anthropological Inquiry into Confucianism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), 99–110. 5 For American Historical Association’s statement in response to Florida House Bill 999 regarding history teaching in colleges and whether some courses should be deemed as “suppress[ing] or distort[ing] significant historical events”, see AHA Statement Opposing Florida House Bill 999 (March 2023) | AHA (historians.org). 6 Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 7 Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Strass and Girous, 2011), 150, 459, 474–475. I moved the phrase “in Weberian sense” from page 459 to connect with the sentence quoted from page 150 and the main argument of Fukuyama here is that China was modern in terms of state-building and its rational bureaucracy but China falls short of other modern liberal democratic factors in the 20th century. 8 Victor Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 97. 9 Dingxin Zhao, The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 275. 10 For these terminologies and Benjamin Schwartz’s approbation of late Qing scholars, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2–4. 11 Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949, 39–40. 12 Andew Nathan and Andew Scobell, China’s Search for Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 296. 13 John Schrecker, The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1991), 168. 14 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 20, 26. 15 Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 17–19. 16 Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 125–127. 17 Perry, Anyuan, 151. 18 Edward Friedman, et al., Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 49, 55. 19 See Guo Wu, Narrating Southern Chinese Minority Nationalities: Politics, Disciplines, and Public History (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 161–86. 20 Bin Xu, Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 158–69. 21 Lex X. Ouyang, Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022), 17. 22 Maria Repnikova, “Is China Competing with the United States in Africa?” in Maria Adele Carrai, et al., eds., The Chinese Questions 2 (Harvard University Press, 2022), 145. 23 Philip Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–2.

Introduction

11

24 Teresa Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China’s Reform Era (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 113. 25 Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 121–125. 26 Lian Xi, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China (New York: Basic Book, 2018), 133.

Bibliography Bianco, Lucien. Origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution, 1915–1949. Translated by Murriel Bell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971. Carrai, Maria Adele, et al., eds. The Chinese Questions 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022. Cheek, Timothy. The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Chen, Yung-fa. Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Corney, Frederick C. Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. DeMare, Brian. Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Esherick, Joseph W. China in Revolution: History Lessons. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2022. Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Strass and Girous, 2011. Friedman, Edward, et al. Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Hui, Victor Tin-bor. War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hung, Chang-tai. Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Kuhn, Philip. Origins of the Modern Chinese State. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Meisner, Maurice. Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait. Boston: Polity, 2006. Nathan, Andew, and Andew Scobell. China’s Search for Security. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Ouyang, Lex X. Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution. Urbana: University of Illinoi Press, 2022. Perry, Elizabeth, and Sebastian Heilmann eds. Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Perry, Elizabeth J. Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Seldon, Mark. China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1995. Thaxton, Ralph. The Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China. University of California Press, 1997.

12

Introduction

Schrecker, John. The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective. New York: Praeger, 1991. Schwartz, Benjamin I. ed. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972. Unger, Jonathan. The Transformation of Rural China. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2002. Wright, Teresa. Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China’s Reform Era. Standford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Wu, Guo. An Anthropological Inquiry into Confucianism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. Wu, Guo. Narrating Southern Chinese Minority Nationalities: Politics, Disciplines, and Public History. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Xu, Bin. Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Zhao, Dingxin. The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

1

Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation, 1917–1921

The May Fourth era witnessed an explosion in the Chinese publishing industry, the creation of new periodicals, and an increase in book distribution. During this period, book collecting, reading, and the founding of bookstores in many provinces, such as Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Shanxi, and Yunnan, played a significant role in disseminating new culture and political messages and in radicalizing intellectual youths.1 Two closely related bookstores, the Benefiting Group Bookstore [Liqun shushe] in Wuchang and the Culture Bookstore [Wenhua shushe] in Changsha became the “two shining stars” spreading new culture and ideas in the two provinces of central China during the May Fourth period and after.2 The Benefiting Group Bookstore founded by Yun Daiying (1895–1931) was a crucial site for young social activists in Hubei Province to implement their ideals of free and egalitarian association, mutual aid, labor, and rebuilding Chinese society from the bottom up. It eventually became an organizational foundation for the early Hubei communists. This chapter considers the organizational construction and the cultural milieu as well as the ideological transition of Yun Daiying and his cohorts, by shifting the usual focus from cities such as Beijing and Shanghai or coastal provinces such as Zhejiang and by paying attention to the inland city Wuchang, scrutinizing Yun Daiying’s early thought, social activities in founding associations and the bookstore, and emphasizing the role which the Benefiting Group Bookstore played as a community of learning, living, self-governing, and sociopolitical activities.3 More importantly, this chapter complicates the argument of Arif Dirlik about the decisive role of “direct Comintern intervention” in turning young Chinese radicals to “a Bolshevik-style movement” and argues that it was the Bookstore that became an effective social network and organizational tool which in turn enabled the emergence of the local communist organization, without direct intervention by the Comintern.4 Yun’s Book Collection, the Mutual Aid Society, and the Enlightenment Library Born in 1895, the future communist leader and martyr Yun Daiying was a passionate reader and lover of books. His interest in reading was stimulated DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-2

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Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation

by a book catalog he saw at a local postmaster’s home in 1910 when he was 15. After that, Yun became exposed to the Chinese translations of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Darwin. Yun started to learn English when he was 14 and continued to learn Japanese and German through self-education. Yun was mainly influenced by the mutual aid theory of Kropotkin, which had been introduced early in 1907 by Chinese students in Paris through their journal, New Century [Xinshiji]. By 1919, Kropotkin had become the “most revered European radical in Chinese eyes” and influenced Mao Zedong’s thoughts that same year.5 Yun enrolled in the preparatory school of Wuchang’s private China University [Zhonghua daxue] in 1913. The university, founded in 1912, was the only private Chinese institution of higher learning that was neither government-sponsored nor foreign-related.6 He published his first article, “On Obligation” [Yiwu lun], in the famous journal, Eastern Miscellany [Dongfang zazhi] in 1914 along with several other articles. Later, Yun Daiying was entrusted to edit the university’s Guanghua Academic Journal (Guanghua Xuebao), founded in 1915 by Professor Liu Shuren (1887–1952). Under the editorship of Yun Daiying, the Guanghua Academic Journal emphasized “academic progress” and the author’s integrity and creativity and soon became an important organ of the New Culture Movement in central China.7 In 1915, Yun was formally admitted into the Department of Chinese Philosophy of the China University. The considerable book purchases and reading experiences of Yun Daiying during this period suggests that early Republican China had mostly open access to the new publications of foreign countries, and this gave Yun a global outlook. One of Yun’s diary entries in March 1917 said that he planned to purchase mythology from Japan, translate it, and contribute it to a publishing house, and that he also wanted to buy for future reference a book published in America titled Old Age: How to Prevent It. It took only half a month for a Japanese book to arrive in Wuhan from the famous Maruzen Bookstore.8 Yun also subscribed to English magazines, such as Popular Science Monthly, Journey of Education, and Guide to Nature. Foreign magazines also had affordable prices. Among the periodicals read by Yun, the most expensive one was Popular Science Monthly, costing three Chinese silver dollars per year,9 while the Women’s Magazine [Funüzazhi] paid eight dollars for one of Yun’s own articles.10 This leads us to revisit our impression of the early Republican China as an “age of openness” whose cultural diversity, open access to foreign publications, and political pluralism actually provided a favorable condition for the rise of different ideas, cultural enterprises, and social experimentations. We will also recognize the diverse values and policies of the warlords and can hardly generalize them.11 In Hunan and Hubei particularly, the post-revolution provincial regimes after 1911 actually continued their civilian governments already established before the downfall of the Qing government.12 In this atmosphere of relatively open and free dissemination of knowledge, Yun decided to make his personal book collection accessible to all who were

Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation

15

interested in reading. These privately owned books were to be lent out for free. This was different from the exclusive practice of the book collectors of the Ming and Qing eras, who tended not to show their books to anyone other than families or close friends.13 Yun’s aspiration to open his personal library to the public was partially intensified on March 23, 1917, when he visited a friend and inspected the reading room of the Foreign Language School where the friend was studying. On April 5 of the same year, Yun Daiying engraved a seal for his own private library that he called the “Book Collection of the Wisdom Cultivation Society” [Zhiyushe cangshuchu]. He cataloged his books and drafted a policy for the use of book circulation coupons for his collection one day thereafter.14 Yun decided to change the name of his private book collection to the “Library of Wisdom Cultivation” [Zhiyushe tushushi] on June 22, 1917, and he engraved a new seal on July 16, which read “The Library of Wisdom Cultivation” in Chinese and “Yun’s Library” in English. Yun Daiying’s foundation of the lending library overlapped with his attempt to establish a youth organization. On October 8, 1917, Yun Daiying founded a reading club along with Lin Yu’nan (1989–1931), Li Shuqu (1901–1976), and Huang Fusheng (1891–1922), a teacher at the China University, naming it the Mutual Aid Society [Huzhu she] after Mutual Aid written by Kropotkin. The Mutual Aid Society expanded to include 19 members in November of the same year, including one of the earliest Chinese Communist Party founding members, the Trotskyist Liu Renjing (1902–1987). One reason for Yun’s initiation of the society was based on his reflection on the weakness of the Chinese national character: Anything in the world, as long as it is not too small, cannot be accomplished by one man alone, yet the Chinese national character [guominxing] is inclined to do things alone … When Chinese do things individually, they can concentrate on them, but when it involves more than two people, two problems will emerge: (1) dependence, which is a passive reduction of ability; (2) infighting, which is proactive suicide …15 For Yun Daiying, the voluntary association of idealistic and responsible youths was a way to rebuild Chinese society from the bottom up and to remold the national character. According to Yun, the fundamental way to save the nation was to “organize groups” [hequn]16, to train people, and to improve their abilities. The activities of the YMCA were an immediate influence on Yun Daiying in organizing like-minded young fellows around him. In fact, Yun initiated the Mutual Aid Society right after he came back from a summer camp at Mount Lu, organized by the Wuchang Association of the YMCA, which had been founded in the city by 1911.17 Yun was impressed with the religious piety, discipline, and expansion of the Christian fellowship, and even expressed the wish of making his Mutual Aid Society a future “YMCA” in his diary.18 At the same time, Yun consciously followed the example of Mozi,

16

Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation

the ancient Chinese philosopher famous for his religious piety, frugality, and spirit of sacrifice.19 It is believed that Chinese anarchists’ emphasis on morality may have owed a great deal to Neo-Confucianism.20 Though Yun did not make an explicit pledge to Neo-Confucianism, the Mutual Aid Society’s practice of quietly sitting for five minutes at the beginning of each meeting was apparently a result of the mixed ideologies. All members were required to keep promises, to treat others respectfully, and to avoid waste, arrogance, and bad habits; and they were asked to keep a reflective journal and to read a “mutual encouragement essay” [huli wen] aloud at the meeting.21 Yun also created a “daily reflection chart” [meiri zixing biao] for each member to check his own behavior: whether he did good deeds, and rejected prostitution, gambling, smoking, drinking, lying, and cheating in exams.22 On June 6, 1918, the Mutual Aid Society opened its Enlightenment Reading Room [Qizhi tushushi] in the China University’s faculty lounge under the initiative of Yun Daiying. The Enlightenment Reading Room stimulated other students at Shanghai’s Tongji University to build their own reading room, which gradually turned into the Library of Tongji University.23 Yun’s diary entry shows that he was satisfied with the reception that the readers gave the reading room. Students and friends loved to come to this quiet reading area, and the readers were all well-disciplined.24 To reach a broader readership, and at the request of the publishers, Yun Daiying followed up with a book and newspaper retail outlet that sold influential magazines, such as New Youth, La Renaissance [Xinchao], Young China [Shaonian zhongguo], Weekly Review [Meizhou pinglun], and National Salvation Daily [Jiuguo ribao],25 at the main entrance to the China University. He also used the bookstore to meet and talk with his comrades.26 By July 25, 1919, Yun had come up with a mature plan to manage the sales of books and magazines through his own library. He took suggestions from his fellow students for the subscription of the magazines and attempted to keep the price low. For instance, he purchased La Renaissance at 30% off and sold it at 20% off price, which yielded 10% profit to be used for “public welfare” [gongyi], postage, and future purchases by the library.27 In November 1919, a group of Hankou merchants founded their own reading room, which enhanced Yun’s interest in public reading facilities. In the article, “The Profession of Middle School Students and the Cultural Movement,” written right after he learned the news about the merchants’ reading room, Yun pointed out: The reading room [has] the benefit of propagating culture, because it can display all kinds of books and newspapers that provoke knowledge and thought, which will gradually influence and transform the readers. For instance, the Enlightenment Reading Room of my university is of great assistance [in this aspect], and many people acknowledge it. Therefore, that the Hankou merchants have founded a reading room like this, and people utilize it, is [also] of great help for the propagation of culture … There

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17

are many useless native association clubs [huiguan] and guilds [gongsuo] that are roomy and neat, but are only used for god worship and drinking wine. These types of buildings can all be transformed into reading rooms like the merchants.’ If this really happens, are we not going to have many institutions that propagate culture?28 After the May Fourth movement in 1919, Yun Daiying was initially excited by the student protests calling for the return of Qingdao and the punishment of national traitors but later that same year he soon cast doubt on the efficacy of the radical student protest as a fundamental method to solve the China problem. Yun saw that the protest’s value lay only in awakening common society and allowing student circles to practice activism. Yun pointed out that neither the industrial and commercial circles, nor the academic world was truly awakened, in spite of the seeming political success achieved when China’s diplomats, frightened by the mass protests, refused to sign the Versailles Peace Treaty. For Yun, there were more important ways to awaken the majority of the people, which included publishing articles that discussed current affairs, promoting ordinary people’s societies and activities, and pursuing the purity and organization of student unions.29 He insisted that “the most relevant patriotic activity is to propagate new knowledge”30 and “the reading room is a sharp weapon for the propagation of culture.”31 The focus on knowledge corresponded with his inclination to avoid partisan politics at the time. In the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, Yun Daiying drafted a petition for the All China Student Union, in which he advocated non-interference in politics, moral, and intellectual mutual aid among the students, and the provision of service to ordinary people.32 In a diary entry dated September 9, 1919, Yun included a letter to Wang Guangqi (1892–1936), founder of the Young China Association [Shaonian zhongguo xuehui], in which he confessed that he had been a believer in anarchism since 1912, but did not want to talk about anarchism with people who had no knowledge of it, or with people who opposed it.33 It can be argued that the May Fourth Movement of 1919 did not play any particular role in the radicalization process of Yun as a future Communist martyr. This leads us to agree with a reassessment of the proper relationship of the May Fourth Movement and the rise of the CCP, as Hans J. van de Ven has already persuasively done.34 Though the significant part which anarchism played in the ideology of student associations during the 1910s should be highlighted, as Arif Dirlik emphasizes in The Origins of Chinese Communism, the understanding of it was by no means homogeneous among the self-acclaimed anarchists at the time. As a moderate anarcho-communist, Yun Daiying saw the true spirit of anarchism in freedom, equality, fraternity, mutual aid, and labor.35 He focused more on moral self-cultivation than on social revolution and violence, and demonstrated how his own opinion diverged from that of another famous radical anarchist, activist, and sociologist, Huang Lingshuang (1901–1988) as early as

18

Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation

June 1917. In his diary, Yun challenged Huang on two main issues. First, Yun did not sanction violence and assassination; second, Yun saw the organization of public associations as an immediate mission, rather than a future agenda, as Huang suggested.36 Another source of Yun’s utopian dream was the new village practice advocated by the Japanese socialist writer, Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885–1976), introduced into China by Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) in the New Youth issue of March 1919. In an article titled “The New Village in Japan” [Riben de xincun], Zhou summarized the outstanding character of the new village life as featuring “labor, cooperative communal life, responsibility to mankind and to the individual …”37 For Zhou, it was a feasible ideal that combined group with individuality, and public spirit with free spirit. Yun Daiying and his friends applauded the article and the spirit it advocated. Lin Yu’nan published “A Plan of New Life” [Xinshenghuo de jihua] to echo Zhou Zuoren in New Voices [Xinsheng], the first bi-monthly magazine advocating new culture in Wuchang. Yun discussed the ideal of the New Village with Lin on November 1, 1919. Important features in Yun’s imagination of the New Village were the abolition of money and private property, the unification of clothes, and the reliance on agriculture and education.38 At first, Yun Daiying and Lin Yu’nan planned to implement their New Village ideal in the countryside, but they modified the idea and, at Wang Guangqi’s suggestion, made it an urban enterprise.39 On December 22, 1919, Yun Daiying drafted an article titled “The New Life of Ours” [Women de xin shenghuo], later re-titled “The Social Service of Shared Life” [Gongtong shenghuo de shehui fuwu]. In this chapter, Yun saw communal life and book sales as major approaches to realizing communism [gongchan zhuyi] and mutual aid. He chose book sales as a promising enterprise because it was convenient and less costly: “this commitment is worth a try, because I believe that we might get consignments of books from distributors even without putting deposit[s] down.”40 The bookstore would just need to purchase furniture, which would only cost 100 strings of copper coins. For Yun, this business would be initiated to maintain the participants’ livelihood on the one hand and serve as an institution of cultural propagation on the other. Of the dual commitments between the book business and social service, Yun emphasized the latter. He soon let it be known that: “Those who [did] not buy books [could] feel free to read in the store, just as if we [were] running a library,” for “we are not shrewd merchants in the first place. We [would] assume the role of merchants for other purposes. Thus, we should never forget the goal of fraternity and mutual aid.”41 As an institution to enhance the practice of communal life, the bookstore, which would be open from eight in the morning to nine at night, would require each member to offer three to four hours’ service; and evening shifts would be taken care of by all members, except those who had class at school. Public ownership was thus emphasized in the plan for the bookstore. The article, which can be seen as the declaration of the Beneficent Group Bookstore, was co-signed by another 11 collaborators, including Lin Yu’nan, Liao Huanxing (1895–1964), and

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Yu Jiaju (1898–1976), a close friend of Yun Daiying’s and future statenationalist and Nationalist government official.42 When this chapter was submitted for publication on January 22, 1920, to the Duanfeng magazine and later to Learning Light [Xuedeng], the supplement of Shanghai’s The China Times [Shishi xinbao], one paragraph was added to explain “why we need public property.” Here Yun asserted that: The mind for the private is the source of all evils … . Naturally, it is not possible to make everything public under the current circumstance of the family and society … but the public ownership of property is a good way to get rid of the private mind.43 According to the plan, the bookstore would be closed each Monday during the daytime, which would allow the members to engage in excursions and recreation. The scope of the business should include: (1) new books and magazines that are not easy to acquire in Wuhan; (2) well-known daily newspapers; (3) certain Chinese-made goods; (4) Western language books; and (5) other hard-to-get newspapers and books upon demand.44 The “Learning Light Supplement” was currently under the editorship of philosopher and moderate social democrat Zhang Dongsun (1886–1973). Yun Daiying’s diary indicates that he was not only a frequent reader of The China Times but also had corresponded with Zhang Dongsun and Hu Shi (1891–1962), both of whom were regarded by Yun as representative of “good forces” [shan shili].45 The Founding, Management, and Influence of the Benefiting Group Bookstore Yun Daiying’s dream of further expanding communal life through the bookstore’s management was crystallized by the actual foundation of the “Benefiting Group Bookstore” in a rented two-story house on the Hu Linyi Road in Wuchang on February 1, 1920, after he had quit his job in the middle school attached to the China University in January in order to dedicate himself to the new cause.46 It is notable that the bookstore was not only co-founded by the 15 leading members of the Mutual Aid Society including Lin Yu’nan, Li Shuqu, and Yun himself, but also that it incorporated most members of the local youth associations founded under the influence of the Mutual Aid Society, such as the Daily Renewal Society (Rixinshe, founded on December 1, 1918), the Assisting Benevolence Society (Furen she, founded on May 15, 1918), and the Wholesome Learning Society (Jianxuehui, founded on October 20, 1919). For Yun Daiying, the bookstore was built as “a business organ, a site for cultural movement, a crystal of self-cultivation societies; an embryo of communal life aimed at social service.”47 It was designed as a “basic unit of progress and reconstruction” [jinqu gaizao de jiben lianhe].48 As Yun Daiying declared in the article, “The New Life of Ours”:

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Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation We expect that each participant can contribute his income, whatever the source is, to the common property (but this must be voluntary, not forced even a little bit), and any expenditure with good reason, even pension, funeral, and child’s education will be allocated from the common fund. When we can achieve this, it is purely communist.49

These statements reveal a multi-layered agenda embodied by the bookstore: it was commercial, cultural, moralist, as well as socialist, and it was trying to become larger by combining smaller groups. As a site of communal life, the Benefiting Group Bookstore helped transform its members from traditional-style young Confucian scholars into modern urban youths. Its members led the new, independent, and quasireligious life. Six residential members lived and studied together on the second floor of the store while the first floor was the shop front. They carried books and bookshelves, took turns cleaning, shopping, cooking, doing the laundry, and delivering newspapers to subscribers. Though they often either burned or undercooked the rice, they still enjoyed it and happily studied how to improve their cooking skills.50 At mealtime, Yun always squatted in a corner of the room, eating a little rice and vegetables and drinking plain boiled water.51 Every night after closing at nine o’clock, the members spent half an hour on the second floor holding a business meeting and another 30 minutes having a “self-cultivation session” [xiuyanghui], which often meant self-scrutiny and criticism of the daily behavior of the members. After study, they slept on the floor, feeling it was as comfortable as bed. The members kept daily diaries and frequently held seminars, in which they discussed a prepared issue; and each participant was required to write a paper and present it to the seminar.52 In a short period, the bookstore seemed to have encountered fewer problems than the Work-Study-Mutual Aid Corps [Gongdu huzhu tuan] initiated by a group of prominent intellectuals in Beijng. As Hu Shi observed, one of the problems of the Corps was that “most of the jobs chosen to be done are clumsy, simple and mechanistic, unable to stimulate an intellectual response …”53 Combining interest and labor, selling books, and distributing newspapers was indeed superior to serving food, doing laundry, printing, and binding, which is what the students in Beijing did.54 The combination of the working and living spaces attracted some young students to the bookstore. One student of China University working in the bookstore told the future delegate to the first CCP national congress, Bao Huiseng (1894–1979), who was then a journalist trying to conduct interviews in the bookstore, that he and other students were attracted by the bookstore because they could “use the bookstore as a dormitory and take advantage of the convenience (it provided) for reading books.”55 The convenience of sharing dormitory-style living space and the awkwardness of cooking both suggested an unrealistic aspect of the communal life: there were only young bachelors involved, no women. How should they deal with women? The

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bookstore managers’ answer was ambiguous: “We cannot solve that at this moment,” which was followed by a plan to rent a larger house to accommodate families and to allow female spouses to interact with each other.56 Yet, a local Women’s Reading Society [Funü dushuhui], organized by female radical youths Xia Zhixu (1906–1987) and Qian Ying (1903–1973), found a good meeting place in the shop front of the bookstore, where the women readers exchanged their views and discussed current affairs.57 As a business organization, however, the Benefiting Group Bookstore was not much of a financial success. First of all, the “book maniacs” [shu fengzi], as Yun called his associates and himself, had a hard time securing funding. They could hardly even find a decent but affordable house to rent until one of the founders solved the problem. After quitting his job at China University’s middle school, Yun could no longer donate his own salary to the enterprise. He asked for startup funding of 50 Chinese silver dollars from his uncle but ended up receiving only 20 dollars.58 The money was supplemented by 35 strings of copper one-cent coins (approximately 35 silver dollars or fewer)59 he collected from the book and newspaper retail outlet.60 After Yun had spent 59 strings of copper coins on rent and furniture, he found little left.61 In addition, many of his colleagues in the bookstore were planning to pursue advanced study in larger cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, only one year after the opening of the store. On the first day of opening, the bookstore had a sales income of only 80 copper cents, the second day 40 cents, the fourth day 500 cents, and the fifth day two strings of copper cents. Their business stabilized at around several strings per day after that.62 It took some readers a long time to find the bookstore, which gradually won a reputation of selling weird books; but the business was slow overall, and Yun took a wait-and-see attitude towards his little bookstore.63 In “The Dreams of the Future” [Weilai zhi meng], an article Yun Daiying wrote on October 1920, he confessed that by the end of the month, the bookstore could barely make ends meet and often needed subsidies from its members. According to the reflective account about the history of the bookstore published in the October 1920 issue of Mutual Aid, the journal of the Mutual Aid Society, the average daily income of the bookstore was “several strings of copper cents” [ji chuan wen] and the monthly minimum expenditure were about 40 strings. The bookstore made so little money that it could not provide free meals to its members.64 To support it, Yun Daiying donated 400 silver dollars, the remuneration for his translation of Karl Kautsky’s Class Struggle at the invitation of Chen Duxiu.65 In June 1920, after returning to Wuhan from Beijing’s Young China Association meeting, Yun Daiying initiated another small enterprise called the Benefiting Group Towel Factory [Liqun maojin chang], to which Lin Yuying (also known as Zhang Hao, 1897–1942), who had been a weaver at home before his political radicalization, was appointed manager. Bookstore members were required to work in the towel factory for several hours a day to accumulate capital and work experience, and Yun Daiying, Chen Tanqiu, Xiao Chunü (1893–1927), and others often held meetings in the factory.66 The founding

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and operation of the factory was intended to challenge the capitalists economically on the one hand and to get used to the “communist new life” of work-study on the other.67 However, the towels produced by Yun’s factory could not compete with the products of modern manufacturers.68 Yun’s idealism and inflexibility in management might be held accountable for the financial difficulty of the bookstore. As he confessed, the bookstore gave 10% off to buyers who spent two dollars or more; but there was no better discount for those who spent 10 or even 100 dollars. The bookstore also accepted an unfavorable exchange rate between Chinese silver dollars and copper dollars; some bookstore members were so philanthropic that they only charged the original price plus postage to their friends, who purchased for the public libraries. And the bookstore did not sell more profitable textbooks in spite of the fact that the two major players in China’s publishing industry at the turn of the twentieth century, the Commercial Press [Shangwu yinshuguan] and Zhonghua Books [Zhonghua shuju] relied heavily on the growing market for modern textbooks.69 In fact, in the early 1920s, the branches of the Commercial Press and Zhonghua Books in the Wuhan region used bribery, or a 35% commission rate to lure schools to use their textbooks; and the selling price of a copy of an elementary school textbook could be five times higher than its cost.70 As Yun stated in “The Dreams of the Future”: We used to take the bookstore as the sole bastion, so however difficult it was, we did not want to involve any money that violates our character. We not only declined capital raising, but also rejected loans with any interest, even some that were zero interest. What we welcomed was only donations …71 After learning the lesson of losing money, Yun Daiying modified his attitude and decided to tolerate loans or shares with a one to one and a half percent interest rate. Yet he also emphasized that the creditors must be trustworthy, that the bookstore’s lifestyle should not be changed, and that the bookstore should have no other liabilities except paying interest and principal.72 Eventually, Yun did not prove himself a successful entrepreneur. One of Yun’s letters to a friend later in 1923 suggested that both the bookstore and the factory were financial failures, and Yun owed personal debt as the result.73 Despite its financial difficulty, the bookstore provided an important site for building a community of reading and learning for its young readers, let alone its role as a training ground for associational life among the members. It adopted an open-stack layout with two large bookshelves leaning against the wall. A dinner table-style rectangular desk was placed at the center of the store, on which lay new magazines shipped from Beijing and Shanghai. The signboard placed on the table read “reading desk” and allowed customers to read magazines for free.74 After its opening, the bookstore started to sell procommunist works, such as The Communist Manifesto, Class Struggle, and

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The Development of Socialism from Utopian to Scientific, besides more liberal periodicals such as New Youth and La Renaissance.75 As Yun had anticipated, youths used the bookstore as a free reading room of self-education. The early Communist theoretician Xiao Chunü acquired a solid understanding of Marxism through his self-education in the bookstore.76 It was in the Beneficent Group Bookstore that the human rights lawyer and Communist martyr Shi Yang (1889–1923) engaged in the reading of Marxist books and that transformed him “from close friend to our comrade.”77 The female revolutionary Xia Zhixu emphasized the Beneficent Group Bookstore’s hidden agenda as follows: Selling some usual education books on the surface. [But] there is a room behind the shop front and there books on Marxism may be had. People could go into that room to read books with the referral of the Youth League or their friends.78 As another communist revolutionary Wu Defeng recollected about 60 years later: I still remember that when I was pursuing progress after the May Fourth Movement, I couldn’t find the right way. [I] read some books on anarchism, and this was known by a friend. [He] introduced me to the Benefiting Group Bookstore to read books.79 The bookstore was further transformed into a “database of the Marxism study group, in which there were many books that were for in-house reading only and not allowed to be checked out,” according to the testimony of Wu Defeng, and “progressive elements were linked up through these books.”80 The hindsight of Wu might mislead people to believe that the Benefiting Group Bookstore had a clear political agenda by 1920. However, in an interview conducted in 1956, Wu Defeng admitted that “The ‘Marxist study group’ did not have much content of Marxism, [for] there were very few Marxist books back then … the small group mainly united our dissatisfaction with the old society and patriotic enthusiasm.”81 As Yun Daiying’s letter to Zong Baihua, published on February 23, 1920, indicated, all books and newspapers sold by the bookstore were just related to “New Culture” in a broad sense, and the bookstore was regarded by Yun as “a starting point of our new life; a starting point of a peaceful transformative movement,”82 not an organ for revolutionary agitation. In April 1920, while Yun Daiying stayed in Beijing to attend the meeting of the Young China Association, he presented a reading list to the association members in which he put “Marx and his doctrines” on the top; but it was immediately followed by Kropotkin, Russell, Tagore, Dewey, James, Darwin, and Nietzsche.83 At this time, the Young China Association was facing an ideological split dating back to 1919 between the liberal, academic-oriented members and the

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left-wing radical activists who were pursuing a fixed “ism” [zhuyi].84 In the debate between Yun Daiying and Liu Renjing on the necessity of violent revolution, the latter could not convince Yun of the legitimacy of using violence, because Yun insisted that bloodshed was the very last means for bringing forth mixed results.85 Based on these facts, we can assert that the bookstore carried books with diverse intellectual orientations, rather than solely focusing on Marxism and communism, and it mainly appealed to the dissatisfaction with the old society and patriotic enthusiasm of its young readers. The bookstore also organized its members through a variety of social activities that often crossed the provincial boundaries. For instance, Yun Daiying and Liao Huanxing went to the coal mines of Changsha, Hengyang, and Xincheng in the summer of 1920 to make contact with workers, and in that same summer, Yu Jiaju went to Changsha and managed to persuade the First Normal School of Hunan to enroll students in Hubei. Other members such as Tang Jisheng, Li Qiushi, Liao Huanxing, and Wang Shangde engaged in popular education in Hubei’s Huangpi area, Henan’s Xinyang area, and Shaanxi’s Chishui.86 Yun Daiying’s ideal and organizational purpose in creating the bookstore as an institution of cultural propagation also inspired Mao Zedong. When Yun was preparing for the opening of the bookstore in late 1919, Mao Zedong passed through Wuchang en route to Beijing to protest against the Hunan warlord, Zhang Jingyao. Mao stayed in the building of the soon-to-be bookstore and had discussions with Yun Daiying. When Yun told Mao about his plan of opening a bookstore, Mao was reported to have said: “It is a good method” [zhe shi yige hao banfa].87 When interviewed by Edgar Snow in 1936, Mao admitted that he had founded a “Wen-hua Shu Hui” (Snow’s Translation: Culture Book Society) in Changsha in 1919, after returning to his home province from Shanghai. Mao recalled it as “an association for the study of modern cultural and political tendencies.” It is possible that Mao kept the word “culture” but changed the name of the institution from shuhui to shushe, along with the character of this organization after Yun Daiying inspired him.88 The founding of the Cultural Bookstore was considered the most influential thing Mao did among many other activities related to the propagation of new culture after he came back to Changsha from Shanghai in July 1920.89 From the Bookstore to the Communist Party As an important meeting place for radical Chinese youths in the Wuhan region, the Beneficent Group Bookstore soon attracted the attention of the Comintern. On May 1920, the Russian Communist Party’s deputy Voitinsky arrived in Beijing. He met with Li Dazhao and encouraged Chinese left-wing intellectuals to build a communist party organization.90 One month after his arrival, Voitinsky mentioned the Benefiting Group Bookstore in his correspondence with the Comintern’s Vladivostok Branch and suggested making

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the bookstore a core focus to unite revolutionary groups in the Wuhan region.91 However, Yun Daiying kept a distance from the Comintern and other Marxists in Hubei Province. According to Bao Huiseng, the “provisional Party center” [linshi Zhongyang] advised him to “absorb” Yun Daiying and his people into the party cell in 1920.92 Following the instruction, Bao Huiseng personally talked to Yun Daiying and other bookstore members; but the meeting bore no fruit. “They were so enthusiastic about their New Village, about running the bookstore and self-cultivation at that time. Each of them looked just like a Puritan and was too aloof to approach,” Bao recalled later in 1949.93 One early founder of the CCP, Li Hanjun (1890–1927), and the Comintern’s Russian agent Mamayev, secretary of Voitinsky, each also approached the Benefiting Group Bookstore in the winter of 1920, but both attempts failed as well.94 In fact, the diary entry of Yun Daiying dated December 21, 1919, already addressed the issue of the Russian Revolution, about which Yun remarked I am sorry that the great experiment of the Russian radicals was not founded on communism [gongchan zhuyi], but instead on economic collectivism [jichan zhuyi]. The result was that they did a lot but accomplished a little, and it is likely that they will end up with failure.95 Here Yun very clearly differentiated the state socialism of Soviet Russia from the anarcho-communism he envisioned. Yun Daiying’s passivity in engaging the Comintern could also be explained by his elitist bent that rendered him suspicious of the validity of a mass movement. As he made clear in a personal letter in October 1920, “the weakness of the masses can only be used to destroy, not to construct.” That was the reason why Yun emphasized the indispensable nature of a “progressive and pure small group” [jinqu chunjie de xiaozuzhi].96 Yun Daiying’s skepticism concerning the nature of the Russian Revolution and its relevance to China’s reality was manifest in his letter to Liu Renjing dated December 21, 1920, in which Yun asserted that: Our mission is to find a principle that suits both our national condition and Communism … as far as I am concerned, the Russian Revolution obviously did not originate from the self-awareness of the working class. It was undoubtedly stirred up by Lenin and others’ advocacy of their Bolshevism, using revolution as a means of implementation.97 Yun’s suspicion regarding the implementation of the Bolshevik revolution in China and his reluctance in collaborating with the Comintern agents indicated that the interest of radical Chinese youths in the Bolshevik revolution around 1920 was not absolute and slavish, but rational and critical.98 Yun’s critical thinking about the Bolshevik revolution was supported by a contemporary China observer, Harold R. Isaacs, who stated that “these first contacts between Bolshevik Russia and China illustrate how, even at this early date,

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contradictions arose between Russian national purposes and Communist international revolutionary purposes …” Harold Isaacs continued, Even more striking is the fact that the first Soviet agents to reach China … came looking not for new revolutionary currents to swim in but for a deal with any likely looking band of militarists and politicians who might serve Russian diplomatic interests.99 While Yun showed reservation toward the prospect of the intertwining of China’s social revolution and Leninist revolutionary agitation, the Communist cell of his city had been established in November 1920 by another group of Hubei radicals, including Liu Bochui (1887–1936), who was directly dispatched from Shanghai to Wuchang by Chen Duxiu, Dong Biwu (1886–1975), Chen Tanqiu (1896–1943), and Bao Huiseng, who were more closely connected with the Comintern.100 Dong Biwu had co-founded a private Wuhan Middle school in March 1920 as a base for his Marxist propagation, and he actually ordered books, such as the Communist Manifesto and The New Economy of Russia from the Benefiting Group Bookstore.101 In fact, Yun Daiying despised Bao Huiseng partially because Bao was believed to be capable of writing anything simply to make a living while working as a journalist. Yun also disliked Dong Biwu, because Dong used to work in the Nationalist government.102 By putting the two sides of the story together, we can discern Yun Daiying and his bookstore colleagues’ idealistic vision, their desire to preserve their innocence and elitist character, and a resistance to the infiltration of the Comintern. Ideologically, as late as the April of 1921, Yun Daiying still emphasized the consolidation of “foundation” through education over the immediate implementation of any “ism,” in his letter to Lin Yuying concerning the operation of the Junxin Elementary School in Huanggang County, which was re-established by Yun Daiying, Lin Yuying, and Lin Yu’nan earlier in 1921 to cultivate young students.103 Unfortunately, the Benefiting Group Bookstore did not last long, and its demise occurred at a crucial juncture when Yun’s thought was at an intellectual crossroads. On the night of June 7, 1921, an army under the direct command of the Hubei warlord, Wang Zhanyuan, staged a mutiny. This led to a large fire that “covered the sky” in Wuchang city and the bookstore, which had been in operation for 16 months so far, did not survive the fire and was burnt to the ground. The unfortunate end of the bookstore in Hubei’s “Year of Mutiny”104 seemingly dealt a blow to Yun that decisively terminated his anarchist dream, especially when compounded by the aforementioned frustration he had already felt because of the poor management of the bookstore. One month thereafter, Yun attended the first annual meeting of Young China Association in Nanjing and advocated “ism,” eventually turning to Bolshevism soon after the meeting.105 Though Yun Daiying lacked interest in Comintern agents and their local protégés such as Bao Huiseng, prominent figures like Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu influenced him greatly. Yun’s meeting and conversation with

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Li Dazhao in Beijing in the spring of 1920 allegedly played a decisive role in his conversion.106 Before that, Yun Daiying’s correspondence and acquaintance with Chen Duxiu around February 1920 while Chen was making a lecture tour in Wuhan had already pushed him towards Marxism.107 Chen Duxiu’s reputation among youths, his friendship with them and his enthusiasm in recruiting new party members should be considered a salient element in the early organization of the CCP. In addition, for a radical youth at the time, joining the Party in those days could be as informal as receiving a letter of invitation from Chen Duxiu and accepting his offer.108 Though the Benefiting Group Bookstore no longer existed, it had successfully accomplished its role as a nexus of social networks for radical youths in the Wuchang area. Upon his return to Wuchang in July 1921, Yun called some youths previously influenced by the Benefiting Group Bookstore to a meeting in the Junxin elementary school that lasted from 16 to 21 July. Twenty-four people attended the meeting, including Lin Yu’nan, Lin Yuying, and Yun Daiying himself, with Yi Lirong from Changsha’s Culture Bookstore as an observer. The Junxin meeting proclaimed the foundation of a new Co-Existence Society (Gongcun she), which was organized as tightly as a de facto state with an explicit revolutionary agenda. The resolution of the meeting decided that the goal of the society was “to seek the realization of class struggle and workerpeasant politics with positive and solid preparation, in order to accomplish the goal of the perfect co-existence of human beings.”109 Thus far, Yun Daiying and some of his comrades had completed the evolution from organizing reading groups to creating a revolutionary group. The members of the Co-existence Society, however, continued their moralist commitment by taking the pledge “to abstain from prostitution, gambling, smoking, drinking, taking concubines, and extravagance, to do no harm to society, to do no harm to social groups, and to try to avoid doing evil even though it is taken for granted by society.”110 The Society also required full donation to it of the disposable income of the members and emphasized its character as a group based on mutual trust and moral integrity.111 To excavate the reasons for Yun Daiying’s political transformation from 1920 to 1921, it is important to notice his and other radicals’ shared deep hatred of private property, which would find an echo in the platform of the CCP. Fundamentally, Yun Daiying embraced the Communist Party as a means to “seek the independence and liberation of the Chinese nation,”112 as he admitted in 1925. In late 1921, Yun officially became a member of the Chinese Communist Party and continued as such until his execution by the Nationalist government in 1931. It is noteworthy that Yun Daiying remained a moderate leader within the Party and became “the first to oppose the (ultra-left) line of Li Lisan in the party” in 1930.113 Conclusion During the early Republican period, bookstores played a significant role in spreading new knowledge and politicizing young and radical intellectuals. As

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Chen Yung-fa has pointed out, the majority of revolutionary intellectuals were “marginalized petty intellectuals” [bianyuan de xiao zhishifenzi] who took the lead in the Communist revolution of China, and few of them “enjoyed nation-wide reputation before they joined the CCP.”114 From this point of view, provincial radical youths Yun Daiying and Lin Yu’nan, believing in the power of reading and the spreading of knowledge and political messages, used study societies and bookstores to protest the old social order, to assert their cultural independence, and to establish their national network.115 They acquired a new group identity through shared reading experiences and a body of shared knowledge. As we will see in Chapter 6, the practice of intensive, in-depth book reading once again became a source of inspiration and willpower for educated and critical-thinking youth in Maoist China. By establishing bookstores, young radicals first attempted to combine their own enthusiasm for reading and learning with the search for a means to engage more people and to rebuild Chinese society. The idea of creating groups flourished in China after 1895, influenced by Yan Fu’s translation of Herbert Spencer’s theory of social organism.116 “Liqun” [to benefit group] was the core idea of Liang Qichao’s treatise “On the New People” [Xinmin shuo]. For Liang, qun was the embryo of the modern nation-state and an autonomous civil society that transcends the private being.117 In this sense, Yun and his friends were not only selling books or even spreading certain ideologies, but also were trying to reconstruct Chinese society from the bottom up by creating small and dynamic youth groups and inventing associational lifestyles. By July 1919, Mao Zedong also had come to the realization that “qun” was equivalent to “shehui” [society] and comprised what he extolled as a “great union of the people” [minzhong de da lianhe].118 Yun Daiying had a clear self-consciousness about his goal too: “I believe that [if we] want no-government [wuzhi], we must start with individual self-government and the self-government of each and every group.”119 The purpose of self-government was to cultivate “good forces” among young students so as to confront the “evil forces” [e shili] in society.120 As a site of social practice, the bookstore differed from study societies in its economic character. No matter how reluctantly the founders recognized it, they had to run the bookstore as a business and think Daiying was frustrated by the loss of money in his bookstore. Yun repeatedly stressed the moralistic, social, and non-profit character of the bookstore; and saw public ownership of the property among the members as the absolute ideological and practical foundation of the bookstore within the process of implementing their socialist ideals. To be sure, the self-assertion of moralism did not begin with revolutionaries, such as Yun and Mao: the book trade itself had long been considered by book merchants in Ming and Qing China as a superior kind of business because of its involvement with the spread of learning. But the assertion of public ownership undoubtedly buttressed the founders’ moral confidence.121 The bookstore’s associational life was imbued with quasi-religious rituals

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which preceded and resembled the group discussion and self-criticism familiar later in the People’s Republic of China’s social life. This differs from some scholars’ assertion that “the direct precedents for hsiao-tsu [xiaozu; small group] stem from Bolshevik Party rituals” because “the [Chinese] population did not find hsiao-tsu either very familiar or easy to adapt to.”122 The collective life and daily self-reflections inside the bookstore indicated a far more complicated interplay of Neo-Confucianism and practices patterned after the YMCA. The preference for running bookstores rather than establishing schools demonstrated another feature of the bookstore as an effective institution of spreading new knowledge and influencing revolutionary youths. Its foundation and management were easier than schools for young radicals, and the way they spread knowledge and political messages was faster and more straightforward. Compared with new-style schools, which also played a significant role in disseminating new culture, bookstores appealed to both students and non-student elements, such as literate workers, by engaging them and encouraging self-education outside of a classroom.123 Organizationally, the Benefiting Group Bookstore played the role of an overarching or “umbrella” society that incorporated the previously existing smaller groups and societies. The Benefiting Group Bookstore became a significant transitional stage between two youth associations, the moderate Mutual Aid Society and the radical Co-Existence Society, and paved the way for the final radicalization of local youths. The trajectory of evolution from the Mutual Aid Society and the Benefiting Group Bookstore to the Co-Existence Society, coupled with Yun Daiying, Lin Yuying, and Lin Yu’nan’s eventual conversion to Communism demonstrate that young Chinese radicals did find their own method of self-organization, self-discipline, and self-transformation not directly related to the Russian Revolution and the Comintern and, at least for a while, they consciously resisted the engagement of the Comintern agents in China. Notes 1 See Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 176–182; Xie Zhuohua, ed., Zhongguo tushu he tushuguan shi [A History of Books and Libraries in China] (Wuchang: Wuhan daxue chubanshe, 1987), 235–236. For the rise and spread of print capitalism in modern China, see Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); and Kai-wing Chow, Printing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, revised paperback edition 2007). For book trade, see Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007). 2 Tian Ziyu, Wuhan wusi yundongshi [A History of the May Fourth Movement in Wuhan] (Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2009), 174.

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3 For this provincialized approach to the May Fourth movement and early Chinese Communism, see Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For the research on Yun Daiying, see Li Liangming and Zhong Detao, eds., Yun Daiying nianpu [A Chronology of Yun Daiying] (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008); He Xianglin and Li Liangming, eds., Jinian Yun Daiying danchen 110 zhounian xueshu taolunhui lunwenji [A Collection of Essays for the Commemoration of the One Hundred and Tenth Birthday of Yun Daiying] (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2006); Li Liangming, et al., eds., Yun Daiying danchen yibai zhounian ji xueshu taolun hui lunwenji [A Collection of Essays for the Commemoration of the Hundredth Birthday of Yun Daiying] (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996); Tian Ziyu, et al., Yun Daiying zhuanji [A Biography of Yun Daiying] (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1984), 55. 4 For Arif Dirlik’s influential view on this issue, see his The Origin of Chinese Communism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9–11. 5 Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 36. One student of Yun Daiying’s recalled that the Mutual Aid Society was an “kewai dushuhui”, extra-curricular reading society. See Liu Yeqing, “Huiyi Yun Daiying laoshi” [In Remembrance of Professor Yun Daiying], in Huiyi Yun Daiying [In Memory of Yun Daiying], ed. Renmin chubanshe bianjibu (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982), 293. For the influence of Kropotkin in China, also see Arif Dirlik, Anarchism and Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 155. For Kropotkin’s influence on Mao Zedong, see Hung-Yok Ip, “The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpretation,” Modern China 20, no. 1 (1994): 38. 6 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 9. 7 Tian, Wuhan wusi yundongshi, 72–74. 8 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 26, 34. 9 Yun Daiying, Yun Daiying riji [The Diary of Yun Daiying] (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981), 40. 10 Ibid., 79. 11 For the social and democratic support for human rights and democratic institutions in Republican China, see Frank Dikötter, The Age of Openness (University of California Press, 2008), 20–21. For the diversity of warlords, see James E. Sheridan, “The Warlord Era: Politics and Militarism under the Peking Government” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 12 Republican China 1912–1949, Part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 285–287. 12 Edward McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 82, 93. For instance, the Draft Hunan Provincial Constitution [Hunansheng xianfa caoan] promulgated by the Zhao Hengti regime in January 1922 did include some “bourgeois style democratic and liberal rights” [zichanjieji xingzhi de minzhu ziyou quanli], according to Li Weihan, a veteran Communist revolutionary, and thus provided Mao an opportunity to pursue a “legitimate struggle” [hefa douzheng]. Li Weihan, “Huiyi Xinmin xuehui” [In Memory of the New Citizen Society], in Wusi shiqi de shetuan [Societies and Groups during the May Fourth Period], eds. Zhang Yunhou, et al. (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1979), 617. 13 A very interesting discussion of the book collectors of the Ming and Qing eras can be found in Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book:

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35

31

Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 83–118. Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 63. Ibid., 545. Ibid., 584. For the founding of the YMCA in China, see Shirley Garret, Social Reformers in Urban China: The Chinese Y.M.C.A. 1895–1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 112. Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 389. Wei Yixin, “Xinzhong kaimo diyiren” [The Number One Role Model in My Mind], in Huiyi Yun Daiying, ed. Renmin chubanshe bianjibu, 116; Zheng Nanxuan, “Yongyuan de jingyang” [Everlasting Admiration], in Huiyi Yun Daiying, 124, 129. For the Anarchists’ emphasis on morality, see Martin Bernal, “The Triumph of Anarchism over Marxism, 1906–1907,” in China in Revolution: The First Phase 1900–1913, ed. Mary C. Wright (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 138. For its implicit relationship with Neo-Confucianism, see Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 243. Zhang et al., eds., Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 118–119; Liu Renjing, “Yongmeng wei geming er fendou de zhanshi” [A Brave Soldier Fighting for Revolution], in Huiyi Yun Daiying, 178. Liao Huanxing, “Wuchang Liqun shushe shimo” [The Beginning and End of the Beneficent Group Bookstore in Wuchang], in Huiyi Yun Daiying, 254. Wei Yixin, “Xinzhong kaimo diyiren”, 118. Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 395–400. That Yun was asked to sell La Renaissance and New Youth by their publishers was mentioned in “Liqun shushe” [Benefitting Group Bookstore], Huzhu [Mutual Aid], no. 1 (October 1920), cited in Zhang, et al., eds., Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 125. Li Liangming and Sun Zexue, Hubei xinminzhu geming shi: zhonggong chuangjian yu da geming shiqi juan [A History of the New Democratic Revolution in Hubei: Volume on the Foundation of the Chinese Communist Party and the Great Revolution] (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008), 27; Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 9, 94. Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 590. Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 156–157. Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 537, 575. Ibid., 555. Ibid., 660. Ibid., 561. Yun Daiying, “Zhi Wang Guangqi xin” [Letter to Wang Guangqi], in Yun Daiying wenji [Collected Works of Yun Daiying] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), 109. The Letter can also be found in Yun Daiying riji, 621–625. Hans J. van de Ven, “The Emergence of the Text-Centered Party” in New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, ed. Tony Saich and Hans J. van de Ven (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 5–27. Hans J. van de Ven argues that despite the cliché that the May Fourth Movement led to the founding of the CCP, the movement actually played no role in early CCP debates and the correlation between the movement and the Party was established as late as the 1930s. Yun Daiying, “Zhi Wang Guangqi xin” [Letter to Wang Guangqi], in Laihong quyan lu [Collection of Yun Daiying’s Letters], eds. Zhang Yu, et al. (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1981), 109.

32

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36 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 9. For Huang Lingshuang’s advocacy of assassination and violence, see Huang’s articles included in Ge Maochun, et al., eds. Wuzhengfu zhuyi sixiang ziliao xuan [Selection of Materials on Anarchist Thought] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984). 37 Zhou Zuoren, “Riben de xincun” [The New Village in Japan], Xinqingnian [New Youth] 6, no. 3 (1919): 266. 38 Tian Ziyu, Wuhan wusi yundongshi, 169. 39 “Liqun shushe” [Benefiting Group Bookstore], in Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 126. 40 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 162. 41 Ibid., 161. 42 Yu Jiaju has been the object of much research interest in mainland China, see Zhang Kaiyuan and Yu Zixia, eds., Yu Jiaju yu jindai zhongguo [Yu Jiaju and Modern China] (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007). 43 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 162. 44 Yun Daiying, “Gongtong shenghuo de shehui fuwu” [The Social Service of Shared Life], in Yun Daiying wenji, 120. 45 Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 610. 46 Tian Ziyu, Wuhan wusi yundongshi, 172. 47 “Liqun shushe” in Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 124. 48 Yun Daiying, “Yun Daiying’s Letter to Hu Yeyu,” Huzhu, no. 1 (October 1920), cited in Yun, Laihong quyan lu, 87. 49 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 161. 50 Yun Daiying’s letter to Zong Baihua, dated 22 February 1920, in Yun Daiying, Laihong quyan lu [Collection of Yun Daiying’s Letters] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe,1981), 69. 51 Wu Huazi, “Women de shibiao” [Our Teacher and Role Model], in Huiyi Yun Daiying, 134. 52 Hu Zhixi “Mianhuai Yun shi” [In Memory of Professor Yun], in Huiyi Yun Daiying, 173. 53 Hu Shi, “Gongdu huzhu tuan de wenti” [The Problems of the Work-StudyMutual Aid Corps], Xinqingnian 7, no. 5 (1920): 1–4. 54 For the detailed plan of the Corps, see Li Dazhao et al., “Gongdu huzhu tuan mukuan qishi” [Fund Raising Advertisement of the Work-Study-Mutual Aid Corps], Xinqingnian 7, no. 2 (1920): 185–88. 55 Bao Huiseng, Bao Huiseng huiyilu [The Memoir of Bao Huiseng] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1983), 47. 56 “Liqun shushe” in Huzhu, no.1 (October 1920), cited in Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 136. 57 Fang Zhenyi, “Yun Daiying he ta chuangban de Liqun shushe” [Yun Daiying and His Benefiting Group Bookstore], Bianji zhiyou [Editorial Friend], no. 4 (1989): 92. 58 One “Yuan Shikai” Chinese silver dollar in 1920s Beijing had a purchasing power equal to 43.85 RMB yuan today. And in 1924, a Beijing rickshaw puller on average needed 5.73 silver dollars per month to support himself, and 11.62 dollars to support a family. See Chen Mingyuan, “Ershi shiji shangbanye zhongguo gedi yinyuan goumai li” [The Purchasing Power of the Silver Dollar in China in the First Half of the 20th Century], http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/book/chapter_42442_ 27294.html? k=e1eaf3de3726b904c923a0661d8b13f3 (Accessed 20 August 2009). 59 The value of copper cents and copper dollars varied from time to time and place to place. Based on the data I collected from the Internet, one silver dollar was equal to 130 copper dollars, which could be equal to 10 or 20 copper cents in Changde County of Hunan Province by 1915, and 360 copper dollars in 1932. See the Website ‘Historical Records of Change’: http://zyk.cdcity.gov.cn/wzgg/cddsb/ cddsb-2007-nj2006-3805.htm. Bao Huiseng’s memoir suggested an exchange rate

Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

33

of one silver dollar against 330 copper dollars in 1921 Hankou. See Bao, Bao Huiseng huiyilu, 76. It is noticeable that in Hubei Province, silver dollars and strings of copper cents were all issued in the form of paper banknotes by the Hubei Official Money Bureau, founded in 1897, and the circulation of Qing bank notes was terminated in 1923. See Zhuo Kun, “Qingmo minguo shiqi Xiangyang liutong de huobi” [The Currencies Circulated in Xiangyang at the end of the Qing Dynasty and Republican China], Xiangfan Evening Paper, http://www.hj.cn/html/Culture/ Found/KGZS/2007-2/6/072616372728505.html. (Accessed 20 August 2009). Tian Ziyu, Wuhan wusi yundongshi, 172. “Liqun shushe,” cited in Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 127. Ibid., 128. Yun Daiying, “Zhi Zong Baihua xin” [Letter to Zong Baihua], in Xuedeng [Learning Light] supplement of Shishi xinbao, February 23, 1920. “Liqun shushe,” cited in Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 128–29. Gao Xincheng, Zhongguo tushu faxingshi [A History of Book Distribution in China] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2005), 266. Wang Xingfu, Linshi san xiongdi: Lin Yuying, Lin Yu’nan, Lin Biao [Three Brothers of the Lin Family: Lin Yuying, Lin Yu’nan, and Lin Biao] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1995), 21. Yu Chuantao, “Ziqiang aiguo de qianbei xueren” [Patriotic Scholars of the Old Generation], in Yu Jiaju yu jindai zhongguo, 263. Tian Ziyu et al., Yun Daiying zhuanji, 55. “Liqun shushe”, cited in Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 130. For a detailed discussion of the foundation and management of the Commercial Press and Zhonghua Books, see Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 203–56. Yu Yuting and Shu Xingwen, “Wuhan tushu he wenhua yongpin ye de huigu” [Reflection on Wuhan’s Book and Cultural Products Industry], in Wuhan wenshi ziliao [Cultural and Historical Materials of Wuhan], ed. Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Wuhanshi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, no. 6 (1982), 183. Yun Daiying, “Weilai zhi meng” [The Dreams of the Future], in Yun Daiying wenji, 230. Ibid., 231. Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 216. Bao, Bao Huiseng huiyilu, 46. Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 165. Fang, “Yun Daiying he ta chuangban de Liqun shushe”, 92. Zhang et al., ed., Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 205. Xia Zhixu, “Wuhan dangzuzhi dui qingnian xuesheng de yingxiang” in Zhonggong chuangshiren fangtan lu, ed. Wang Laidi (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 2008), 239. Wu Defeng, “Dang chengli qianhou Wuhan diqu de yixie qingkuang” [The Situation of the Wuhan Region around the Time of the Foundation of the CCP], in Yida qianhou, ed. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan xiandai shi yanjiushi, vol. 1, 357. Ibid. Wu Defeng, “Wuhan jiandang qianhou de qingkuang” [The Situation of Wuhan around the Founding of the CCP], in Zhonggong chuangshiren fangtan lu, 232. Yun Daiying, “Zhi Zong Baihua xin” [Letter to Zong Baihua’], in Xuedeng [The Learning Light] supplement of Shishi xinbao, February 23, 1920. Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 171. For the debates and a thorough study of the history of the Young China Association, see Wu, Shaonian zhongguo xuehui yanjiu.

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85 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 172–173. Yu, “Ziqiang aiguo de qianbei xueren” in Yu Jiaju yu jindai zhongguo, 263. 86 Tian Ziyu, Wuhan wusi yundongshi, 173–174. Also see Tian Ziyu, et al., Yun Daiying zhuanji, 42–44. 87 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 164. 88 Snow, Red Star over China, 137. It is also possible that Mao was actually referring to the Culture Bookstore he founded in 1920 but downplayed its commercial character in the interview. 89 Yi Lirong, “Huiyi Changsha wenhua shushe” [In Reminiscence of Changsha’s Cultural Bookstore], in Yida qianhou, vol. 1, 248. 90 Luo Zhanglong, “Huiyi dang de chuangli shiqi de jige wenti” [Recalling Several Issues during the Foundation of the CCP], in Yida qianhou, vol. 1, 199. 91 Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi yanjiushi trans., Liangong (Bu), gongchan guoji yu zhongguo guomin geming yundong [SUCP, the Comintern and Chinese National Revolutionary Movement] (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 1997), 28. 92 Bao Huiseng insists that the Chinese Communist Party was established in Shanghai in 1920, and that the Shanghai cell worked as a de facto central party organ. Bao likes to call it “provisional party central” in his memoirs. See Bao Huiseng, “Bao Huiseng de yi feng xin” [A Letter of Bao Huiseng], in Yida qianhou, vol. 2, 435. 93 Bao, Bao Huiseng huiyilu, 20. 94 Ibid., Bao Huiseng “Gongchandang diyici quanguo daibiao huiyi qianhou de huiyi” [Reminiscence of the Time around the Founding of the CCP], in Wusiyundong zai Wuhan shiliao xuanji [Selected Materials about the May Fourth Movement in Wuhan], eds. Zhang Yinghui and Kong Xiangzheng (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1981), 336. 95 Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 646–647. 96 Yun Daiying, “Zhi Hu Yeyu” [Letter to Hu Yeyu], in Yun Daiying wenji, 246. 97 Yun Daiying, “Letter to Liu Renjing” in Laihong quyan lu, 39–40. 98 The Russian historian Alexander Pantsov might have exaggerated the attraction of Russian Marxism and Bolshevik revolution to the Chinese revolutionaries in the post May Fourth period. See Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 23–38. 99 Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 61. 100 Wu Ziqiang, “Chen Tanqiu lieshi zai Wuhan”, Wuhan wenshi ziliao, no. 3 (1981): 59. 101 Tu Wenxue, ed., Wuhan tongshi: zhonghua minguo juan [A General History of Wuhan: 1912–1949] (Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2006), 107. 102 This is based on my conversation in Wuhan in the summer of 2009 with Professors Li Liangming and Tian Ziyu. 103 “Junxin xiaoxue de chengli” [Founding of the Junxin Elementary School], in Wusiyundong zai Wuhan shiliao xuanji, 256–257. 104 Professor Chen Zhirang (Jerome Chen) describes the years 1920 and 1921 as Hubei’s years of mutiny because of the unstable political situation. See Chen Zhirang (Jerome Chen), Junshen zhengquan—jindai zhonguo de junfa shiqi [Militarist-Gentry Regimes: The Warlord Era of Modern China] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008), 72. 105 Wu, Shaonian zhongguo xuehui yanjiu, 117–118. 106 Zhang and Kong, eds., Wusiyundong zai Wuhan shiliao xuanji, 291.

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107 Tian Ziyu, “Wuhan diqu dui Makesi zhuyi zai zhongguo chuqi chuanbo de gongxian” [The Role the Wuhan Region Played in the Early Dissemination of Marxism in China], in Tian, Zoujin shilin [Walking into the Forest of History] (Wuhan: Changjiang chubanshe, 2009), 253. 108 An early co-founder of the CCP, Zhang Shenfu told his interviewer how the CCP expanded among radical youths through personal friendships and Chen’s recruiting efforts. See Vera Schwarcz, Time for Telling Truth is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 94–101. Chen Duxiu’s influence on Chen Gongbo’s having joined the CCP can be found in C. Martin Wilbur, “Introduction” in Chen Gongbo, The Communist Movement in China, ed. C. Martin Wilbur (New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 8. 109 “Junxin dahui jilue” [Minutes of the Conference in Junxin Elementary School], Wo’mende [Ours], no.7 (October 1921), cited in Zhang and Kong, Wusiyundong zai Wuhan shiliao xuanji, 302. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Zhang et al. ed., Wusi shiqi de shetuan, 511. 113 Li and Zhong, Yun Daiying nianpu, 194–195, 359. 114 Chen Yung-fa, Zhongguo gongchan geming qishinian [The Seventy Years of the Chinese Communist Revolution] (Taipei: Linking Books, 2001), 29. 115 For the role of books in political dissent and cultural independence, see David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 51. 116 Wang Fansen, “Evolving Prescriptions for Social Life in the Late Qing and Early Republic: From Qunxue to Society,” in Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920, ed. Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe: 1997), 260. 117 See Gao Ruiquan, ed., Zhongguo jindai shehui sichao [The Waves of Thoughts in Modern China] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2007), 335. 118 Mao Zedong “Minzhong de da lianhe” [Great Union of the People], in Mao Zedong zaoqi wengao [Early Writings of Mao Zedong], ed. Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi [Party Literature Research Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China] (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1990), 373. 119 Yun Daiying, “Zenyang chuangzao shaonian zhongguo” [How to Create Young China], Shaonian zhongguo [Young China] 2, no. 1 (July 15, 1920). 120 Yun, Yun Daiying riji, 622. The May Fourth focus on society and social issues has recently been delineated in Yang Nianqun, Wusi jiushi zhounian ji: yige wenti shi de huisu he fansi [In Commemoration of the May Fourth Movement at its 90th Anniversary: A Review and Reflection on “A History of Problems”] (Beijing: Shijie tushu chuban gongsi, 2009). 121 Brokaw, Commerce in Culture, 271. “Shehui suo gongyou” was emphasized in the flyer of the Culture Bookstore, dated 10 November 1920 and titled “Wenhua shushe tonggao haoxue zhujun” [The Culture Bookstore Informs Gentlemen Who Love Learning], in Xinmin xuehui ziliao [Source Materials of the New People Society], ed. Zhongguo geming bowuguan (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980), 261. 122 Martin King Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 35. 123 Studies on politics and education in late Qing/early Republican China can be found in Stephen C. Averill, “The Cultural Politics of Local Education in Early Twentieth China”, Elizabeth Vander Ven, “It’s Time for School: The Introduction of the New Calendar in Haicheng County Primary Schools, Northeast China,

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Yun Daiying’s Social Engagement and Political Transformation 1905–1919”, and Liyan Liu, “Cai Hesen: A Provincial Scholar Becomes a Young Radical,” Twentieth Century China 32, no. 2 (April 2007). For the radicalization of students in teachers’ schools in the 1930s, also see Xiaoping Cong, Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation–State, 1879–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 160–182.

Bibliography Bao, Huiseng. Bao Huiseng huiyilu [The Memoir of Bao Huiseng]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1983. Brokaw, Cynthia J. Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Period. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. Chen, Gongbo. The Communist Movement in China. Edited by C. Martin Wilbur. New York: Octagon Books, 1979. Chen, Mingyuan. “Ershi shiji shangbanye zhongguo gedi yinyuan goumai li” [The Purchasing Power of the Silver Dollar in China in the First Half of the 20th Century] Last accessed 20 August 2009 http://vip.book.sina.com.cn/book/chapter_ 42442_27294.html?k=e1eaf3de3726b904c923a0661d8b13f3 Chen, Yung-fa. Zhongguo gongchan geming qishinian [The Seventy Years of the Chinese Communist Revolution]. Taipei: Linking Books, 2001. Chen, Zhirang (Jerome Chen). Junshen zhengquan—jindai zhonguo de junfa shiqi. [Militarist-Gentry Regimes: The Warlord Era of Modern China]. Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008. Chow, Kai-wing. Printing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, revised paperback edition, 2007. Chow, Tse-tsung. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960. Cong, Xiaoping. Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation–State, 1879–1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. Dikötter, Frank. The Age of Openness. University of California Press, 2008. Dirlik, Arif. The Origin of Chinese Communism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Fogel, Joshua A. and Peter G. Zarrow, eds. Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. Gao, Ruiquan, ed. Zhongguo jindai shehui sichao [The Waves of Thoughts in Modern China]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2007. Gao, Xincheng. Zhongguo tushu faxingshi [A History of Book Distribution in China]. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2005. Ge, Maochun, et al., eds. Wuzhengfu zhuyi sixiang ziliao xuan [Selection of Materials on Anarchist Thought]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984. Hall, David D. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. He, Xianglin, and Li Liangming, eds. Jinian Yun Daiying danchen 110 zhounian xueshu taolunhui lunwenji [A Collection of Essays for the Commemoration of the One Hundred and Tenth Birthday of Yun Daiying]. Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2006. Ip, Hung-Yok. “The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpretation.” Modern China 20, no. 1 (1994): 34–63.

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Isaacs, Harold R. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. 2nd rev. ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961. Li, Liangming, and Zhong Detao, eds. Yun Daiying nianpu [A Chronology of Yun Daiying]. Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008. Li, Liangming, and Sun Zexue. Hubei xinminzhu geming shi: zhonggong chuangjian yu da geming shiqi juan [A History of the New Democratic Revolution in Hubei: Volume on the Foundation of the Chinese Communist Party and the Great Revolution]. Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008. Li, Liangming, et al., eds. Yun Daiying danchen yibai zhounian ji xueshu taolun hui lunwenji [A Collection of Essays for the Commemoration of the Hundredth Birthday of Yun Daiying]. Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996. Liu, Liyan. “Cai Hesen: A Provincial Scholar Becomes a Young Radical” Twentieth Century China 32, no. 2 (April 2007): 84–110. McCord, Edward. The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Mao, Zedong. Mao Zedong zaoqi wengao [Early Writings of Mao Zedong] Edited by Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi [Party Literature Research Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China]. Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1990. McDermott, Joseph P. A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Pantsov, Alexander. The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000 Reed, Christopher A. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005. Renmin chubanshe bianjibu, ed. Huiyi Yun Daiying [In Memory of Yun Daiying]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1982. Saich, Tony, and Hans J. van de Ven, ed. New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995. Schwarcz, Vera. Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Sheridan, James E. “The Warlord Era: Politics and Militarism under the Peking Government” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 12 Republican China 1912–1949, Part 1. Edited by John K. Fairbank. Cambridge University Press, 1982. Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China. New York: Random House, 1938. Tian, Ziyu. Zoujin shilin [Walking into the Forest of History]. Wuhan: Changjiang chubanshe, 2009. Tian, Ziyu. Wuhan wusi yundongshi [A History of the May Fourth Movement in Wuhan]. Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2009. Tian Ziyu, et al., Yun Daiying zhuanji [A Biography of Yun Daiying]. Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1984. Tu, Wenxue, ed. Wuhan tongshi: zhonghua minguo juan [A General History of Wuhan:1912–1949]. Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2006. Van de Ven, Hans J. From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Wang, Xingfu. Linshi san xiongdi: Lin Yuying, Lin Yu’nan, Lin Biao [Three Brothers of the Lin Family: Lin Yuying, Lin Yu’nan, and Lin Biao]. Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1995.

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Whyte, Martin King. Small Groups and Political Rituals in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Wright, Mary C., ed. China in Revolution: The First Phase 1900–1913. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968. Wu, Xiaolong. Shaonian zhongguo xuehui yanjiu [A Study of the Young China Association]. Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 2006. Xie, Zhuohua, ed. Zhongguo tushu he tushuguan shi [A History of Books and Libraries in China]. Wuchang: Wuhan daxue chubanshe, 1987. Yeh, Wen-hsin. Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Yun, Daiying. Yun Daiying wenji [Collected Works of Yun Daiying]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984. Yun, Daiying. Yun Daiying riji [The Diary of Yun Daiying]. Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981. Yun, Daiying. Laihong quyan lu [Collection of Yun Daiying’s Letters]. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1981. Yun, Daiying. “Zhi Zong Baihua xin” [Letter to Zong Baihua], in Xuedeng [Learning Light] supplement of Shishi xinbao, February 23, 1920. Zarrow, Peter. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Zhang, Kaiyuan, and Yu Zixia, eds. Yu Jiaju yu jindai zhongguo [Yu Jiaju and Modern China]. Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007. Zhang Yunhou, et al. Wusi shiqi de shetuan [Societies and Groups during the May Fourth Period]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1979. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan xiandai shi yanjiushi ed. Yida qianhou [Before and after the 1st Party Congress of the CCP]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980. Zhuo, Kun, “Qingmo minguo shiqi Xiangyang liutong de huobi” [The Currencies Circulated in Xiangyang at the end of the Qing Dynasty and Republican China] Xiangfan Evening Paper. Last accessed 20 August 2009. http://www.hj.cn/html/ Culture/Found/KGZS/2007-2/6/072616372728505.html Zhang, Yinghui, and Kong Xiangzheng, eds. Wusiyundong zai Wuhan shiliao xuanji [Selected Materials about the May Fourth Movement in Wuhan]. Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1981. Zhonggong zhongyang dangshi yanjiushi, translated by Liangong (Bu), gongchan guoji yu zhongguo guomin geming yundong [SUCP, the Comintern and Chinese National Revolutionary Movement]. Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 1997. Zhongguo geming bowuguan, ed. Xinmin xuehui ziliao [Source Materials of the New People Society]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980. Zhou, Zuoren. “Riben de xincun” [The New Village in Japan]. Xinqingnian [New Youth] 6, no. 3 (1919): 266–273.

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Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP

In 1952, a dictionary entry defined suku – speaking bitterness – as an activity of “articulating one’s history of being oppressed and exploited by class enemies and thus stimulating others’ class hatred, and in the meantime consolidating one’s own class standpoint.”1 Speaking bitterness can be also seen as a ritual of “storytelling,” which was reinvented as a specific form of political culture by Mao in the Yanan period, and was “accomplished through reenactment, the unification of historical memories and individual experiences.”2 “Speaking bitterness” has been regarded as the most effective means of mass mobilization since the Land Reform Movement began in central China in May 1946.3 By the second half of 1947, two-thirds of the Liberated Area had “solved the land problem.”4 In this chapter, I argue that “speaking bitterness” was not only a technique and strategy of mass mobilization for the Civil War against the Nationalist government but it also had the goal of transforming the culture, mentality, and power relationship in rural society by empowering the peasants and the peasant-soldiers of the PLA.5 In other words, the symbolic meaning and educational function of speaking bitterness needs a closer study as part of “alternative modernity” in the process of the Chinese socialist revolution, as Arif Dirlik suggests.6 Past studies tend to search for China’s modernity in urban settings and elite culture and politics; this study, however, suggests that the ideology and techniques used in the speaking-bitterness campaign was also “modern” in the Chinese context of rural revolution, and its modernity lies in the organizational power of the Party (state) and the technology of control, individualized political education, politicization of memory, indoctrination of class, and nationalist consciousness in lieu of traditional attachment to clan, as well as introduction of modern political language in rural and army life.7 Land Reform as Socio-Cultural Movement The Land Reform movement was launched not only to address the issues of uneven land distribution and the economic exploitation of peasants by landlords, nor was it merely a strategy to mobilize the masses to join the army. It also attempted to eliminate old ideologies, such as “clan, family, conscience, DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-3

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and fate,” that were held to impede peasants’ political awakening.8 In fact, Land Reform had a limited impact on the conscription of the PLA, and many peasants were even more reluctant to join the army after they acquired land.9 The organizers of the Land Reform campaign were well aware that what truly ruled peasants was not only the economic and material power of the landlord, but, more importantly, his “symbolic capital,” to use the words of Pierre Bourdieu, that is, thought, style, and attitudes.10 Therefore, the purpose of Land Reform and of speaking bitterness, in particular, was to destroy the “hierarchical relations in the Chinese villages,” and to subvert “the core value of submission to authority” among Chinese peasants.11 For Du Runsheng, an organizer of Land Reform in South China, and a specialist in agrarian economy, public bitterness speaking had the following advantages: (1) it made peasants understand the landlord class and know who they should oppose; (2) it enlightened poor peasants and awakened their class consciousness; (3) it alienated peasants from landlords by drawing a line between them; (4) it was a good method of peasant self-education; (5) it helped establish an intellectual foundation for the mass’s execution of the Party’s policies; and (6) it made cadres realize feudal society and promote class sentiments; thus the speaking movement was an “enlightenment movement of class consciousness.”12 The enlightenment theme here is echoed in another directive of the Central Southern Bureau, which states that speaking bitterness was an “enlightenment movement of class’s self-education.”13 The degree of land concentration and exploitation, one important theoretical justification of the Communist land revolution, varied greatly. A survey conducted in the 1930s under the Nationalist government, involving 113,549 households in 11 counties of Hubei Province, showed that ownerpeasants constituted 48.26% of the rural population and were thus the majority. Yet the official propaganda of the Communist Party never wavered in insisting on the formula that landlords and rich peasants owned 70–80% of the land of China.14 The Confucian philosopher and social reformer Liang Shu-ming confirmed that over 90% of rural households in Shandong’s Zouping county owned land, and in Ding County of Hebei Province landless tenants and laborers constituted 5% of 8,062 households of Liusan Village.15 In most of central Hebei Province, there were no big landlords, either in 1936 or in 1946.16 In Qin Village of middle Jiangsu Province, there was only one upper-middle peasant household, five lower-middle peasant households, and all others were poor peasants who cultivated land under tenancy. In other words, there was no “landlord” in the village.17 An agrarian survey in Wudian Village, in the Liangxiang County of Hebei Province, shows that only a few people there were absentee landlords who did not live in the village, and their families rented land out due to a shortage of labor.18 A majority of the peasants in this village cultivated their own land while, at the same time, rented land from landowners. Therefore, there is no clear-cut line of demarcation between landlord and tenant. In Lengshuigou Village of Shandong, most villagers cultivated family land. Though ten families rented

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out a small portion of land, and fifteen families rented others’ land, they all had their owned land and cultivated it. In another village, all peasant households were owner-cultivators.19 A similar situation was found in a village of northern Zhejiang Province. According to the land registration form of this village, in 1951, among ten middle peasant households, who were theoretically owner-cultivators without renting in or renting out land, only one household did not rent out land. The other nine households both rented in and rented out land.20 In Shanxi Province, landowners and tenants usually signed a land lease of three years; both parties had equal rights. Tenants were able to terminate a lease before it expired.21 It was not unusual that traditional ethical norms persisted, and some former tenants secretly helped their former employers even after the latter were purged. According to the 1951 diary of Wu Mi, a professor of English literature at Sichuan University, after one landlord’s land, real properties, books, and hidden silver dollars were confiscated, the Peasant Association put the 60-year-old landlord naked in water and then tied him onto a tree. A former tenant gave him food, but he was stopped by the Peasant Association. Wu Mi noted, with smaller Chinese characters: “(the old tenant has) no hostility towards (the landlord), and all were coerced by Peasant Association and the political director.”22 In late 1951, the historian Tan Qixiang was a member of a land reform work team. He admitted in his diary that In the past days the work was difficult. The masses’ hatred towards landlords was not intense enough. They hate local bullies and slackers instead. There are minor grievances among the masses, and the target of bitterness-speaking was very often not landlords.23 The problem for the CCP was thus less the reality of landownership but more the fact that, during the Land Reform, “the Communists are leading the peasant masses who are ill-prepared mentally, short of collective life, and short of struggling art to fight landlords and rich peasants who are treacherous and possess advantages both spiritually and materially.”24 Above all, Land Reform was not only elimination of the economic base of the rural elite but also a top-down socio-cultural process that promoted class consciousness and transformed rural society. It is in this context that speaking bitterness can be better understood. Speaking Bitterness as Education, Enlightenment, and Mobilization Despite a complexity of landholding mentioned above, social tensions between the rich and the poor were common.25 All these were addressed by the Communists, who showed a strong “ability to mobilize along a range of local grievances.”26 The goal of Land Reform through mass political participation was based on exploiting these grievances, and a theoretical assumption that the confrontation between the exploitive and exploited classes was a given fact in

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any human society in the period between primitive communism, and the communism after all classes were eliminated.27 A “revolution of the mind” among peasants became a prerequisite for their political emancipation, according to the Communist emphasis on the primacy of ideological transformation. One work report of Hebei Province in 1946 asserts that speaking bitterness played the biggest role in raising the mass’s class consciousness. It called speaking-bitterness sessions “turn-over-mind meeting [fanxin hui].”28 Another work report in that same year emphasized that “turn-over-mind” was the precondition of “turn-over-body [fanshen],” that is, that a thorough change of mentality through recalling and public speaking of bitterness must precede the true emancipation of peasantry from landlords’ oppression.29 As a neologism, fanxin is a practice that captures speaking-bitterness’ nature of “both political mobilization and revolutionary pedagogy.”30 One directive of the Central Southern Bureau of the CCP in 1950 stated that speaking bitterness was an “enlightenment movement of a class’s self-education,”31 which suggests that, while class conflict is a fact, consciousness needs to be raised because peasants do not have “a clear understanding of where their poverty comes from.”32 In one province, the educational goal of speaking bitterness was well defined as establishing “three clear ideas”: (1) the idea of differentiating enemy, friend, and “we,” which would convince peasants that their conflicts with landlords were not reconcilable; (2) the idea of solidarity and struggle, which would ensure that peasants understand they need to be united to maximize their power; and (3) the idea of being the boss, which would let peasants realize that they enjoy political rights under the new government, and that they should learn to manage their own affairs.33 Here, the ultimate purpose of the Enlightenment was to invent and reinforce a dualist, totalitarian ideology that opposed “the pure ‘we’ to the evil ‘they’.”34 As a process of empowerment, education was defined as “provocation of class hatred,” whose purpose was to eradicate the ideological control landlords exerted on peasants. This control made peasants passive and fatalistic and led them to regard landlords’ ownership of land and their better standard of living as manifestations of “good fate.”35 For tenants who rented land from landlords, many thought that “where the land belonged to landlords, through legitimate purchases or inheritance, the rent should be paid.”36 Some peasants also accepted landlordism because of a popular belief that there was no perpetual ownership of property, and that land-holding was a channel for upward social mobility that was theoretically open and equal to all.37 The existence of backward thought among the masses justified the necessity of “persuasion and education.”38 Therefore, the de-legitimization of landownership and wealth became a “cultural task facing any oppressed group,” which was “to undermine or explode the justification of the dominant stratum.”39 For Western observers of Chinese Land Reform, before the masses became the true “masters of the house,” they needed to eliminate the fear of landlords in their inner hearts, and the best move to achieve this was “to hold a grievance meeting,” which allowed poor peasants to confront

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landlords as a collective, to right past wrongs, and to look to the future.40 In this sense, the cultural and symbolic meaning of Land Reform and speaking-bitterness campaigns overrode the substantial meaning of land redistribution.41 Communist Land Reform work teams drew on an extensive repertoire of techniques. A work team was primarily composed of educated outsiders to work as agents of change. They would first locate the poorest and the most oppressed peasants, and then honored and dignified them.42 A work team that went to Youfangdian Village of Shangcheng County, Henan Province shared its experience of engaging poor peasants and establishing direct contact with the masses through “Three Together—eat together, live together, work together” as an effective means to build trust between work team members and poor peasants, those hesitant to share their bitter experiences with strangers. Only “Three Together” could make peasants feel that the work team members were their families. The “Three Together” itself was a pleasant experience for work team members because they felt trusted.43 Different from the moderate United Front agrarian policy during the AntiJapanese War, when middle peasants were relied upon as the main agents of the campaign to reduce rent and interest, Land Reform saw a shift of the chosen agent of social change from the middle peasant to the previously ignored poor peasant.44 In some regions, the poorest peasants were called “mothers [muqin],” some of whom eventually became activists in land reform after training. In some areas, the poor people who were sought out were called “lords of bitterness [kuzhu]” or “roots [genzi].” They were hardworking, politically clean, and needed to be further cultivated. These poor peasants were educated with new theories about the root cause of peasant’s poverty: the exploitation of landlords rather than “fate.” Organizing speaking bitterness emphasized shared experiences and a common class identity. Though the purpose of speaking bitterness was to achieve the political awakening of the poor peasant as a class, it first appealed to individual feelings and experiences. A formerly poor peasant was expected to “personally step forward to denounce his landlord,” so that his or her “traditional awe” would vanquish.45 Once one individual person’s bitterness was enticed and uttered, he or she was expected to use their bitter story to provoke other people who had similar experiences. This technique was called “inducing bitterness with bitterness [yi ku yin ku].” After bitterness became a common and collective experience, the target of struggle was expanded from individual landlords to the whole landlord class. Class became the most important concept to be indoctrinated and the sole interpretative tool for all suffering.46 The masses were guided to realize that there were only two families in the world: one family with the surname “the rich” and the other group named “the poor.” This new identity based on economic status and common grievances cut across lineal and neighboring relationships and emotional attachments.47 “Harmony” and “friendly feeling,” the concepts that were particularly valued by the Confucian reformer Liang Shu-ming,

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were now purposefully challenged by the ideology of “struggle” in Maoism.48 In one village, where there were no middle peasants, but mainly landlords and tenants, the first stage of land reform was “fomentation, investigation, and registration.” Poor tenants were mobilized to “pour bitter water [dao ku shui]” and “dig out poor roots [wa ku gen]” in public meetings. Former tenants and current chairmen of the Peasant Association and the commander of militia spoke their bitterness about working as hired laborers for more than ten years; one middle peasant articulated seventeen methods of landlord exploitation. After the emotional level was raised, land reform in the village entered the second stage, which was when peasants settled accounts with landlords.49 As with the peasant movement during the National Revolution of the 1920s, priority was given to political struggle over economic targets.50 Wherever direct economic exploitation was less important for peasants, work teams appealed to peasants’ ethic of frugality. Peasants compared their own food and clothing with the landlords’ luxurious life, or they would accuse landlords with stinginess when poor peasants have urgent needs for cash.51 Visualization became a major technique for peasants to concretize this sense of inequality. In some areas, this was achieved by “exhibition of fruits [zhanlan guoshi],” which allowed peasants to see with their own eyes the objects landlords took from them, and to see the rotten crops in the granaries of the landlords due to overabundance. Peasants then moved on to “speaking bitterness by pointing to the objects [zhiwu suku],” in which they compared and contrasted their own life to that of the landlord.52 For a work team, the speaking had to escalate step-by-step from a small group meeting to a village meeting, and eventually to multi-village mass meeting. The organizers realized that starting from small-scale speaking guaranteed ample time for peasants to intellectually and emotionally prepare for the large-scale meeting, which was in essence a public accusation and trial.53 At each stage, the main speaker’s crying, and the mass loud crying triggered by the speaker, was considered a sign of success.54 One work report emphasized that among the 5,184 bitterness speakers in Huanghuang County of Hebei Province, 4,551 cried badly when speaking, and, among them, 12 people fainted on the spot; 195 became ill after crying.55 In one area of Sichuan Province, speaking bitterness was combined with funerals to achieve better effects. In the mass meeting, attended by thousands of peasants, the masses mourned the deaths of the victims of landlord violence before Land Reform, which was then followed by the accusation of the families, and finally one or two landlord-murderers were executed. For the writer Yang Hansheng, who participated in Land Reform work and observed a funeral and execution, the purpose of this combination was twofold: one purpose was to educate the peasants by making them feel their power, and the other was to intimidate landlords and scare them away from potential resistance.56 Starting from individual, familial, and class feelings, speaking bitterness became a unique way through which peasants related their own life

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experiences to world affairs and to nationalism. Most villagers lived in their self-contained rural community, where “they had almost no knowledge of national affairs.”57 The Party knew this well. A Party document defined this as the “political short-sightedness of peasantry.”58 In another work report, a Land Reform leader asserted that “Self-serving and self-profiting are serious problems among peasants.”59 They argued that the speakers should be trained on how to organize their narrative and how to progress “from small things to big things, from individual to class, from low ebb to high tide.”60 Speaking bitterness before 1949 followed the logic that the Nationalist Party and Chiang Kai-shek were the representatives of rich people who inflicted suffering on the poor; therefore, hatred and anger should ultimately be directed to the Nationalist Party and Chiang.61 Through the Anti-Japanese War, many peasants learned new political concepts, such as “China,” the “Chinese nation,” “Chinese traitors,” and “Japanese bandits.” Land Reform in the early 1950s further expanded political knowledge to Korea and America.62 After China entered the Korean War in the winter of 1950, the Party placed “a new emphasis on political matters”63 in carrying out land reform. For instance, speaking bitterness in the Central South Region of China in 1950 and 1951 was linked with the “Resist-America; Aid-Korea” campaign by following the radial scheme called “From the near to the far.” This scheme stated that “personal and family hatred should be first promoted to the level of class, from anti-feudalism to anti-imperialism, from Anti-Japan to Anti-America, and finally reach the high level of patriotism.” In another place, this method was also called “tracing the backstage,” and the final backstage should be “American (Harry) Truman.”64 Women became vanguards of struggle and speaking bitterness in the Land Reform movement. For one work team, the best choices for bitterness speakers were women because “they were emotionally vulnerable and easily shed tears. Their memories are good, and their tears can bring tears of more people.”65 In one village of northern Shaanxi’s Mizhi County, 60 or so women participated in Land Reform around 1946, and a dozen women struggled against landlords by speaking bitterness. Their husbands did not allow them to speak publicly, but the women insisted. One Communist martyr’s daughter told listeners about how her father was murdered by a landlord in collaboration with a reactionary army of Nationalists. Another woman told the audience how she was raped by a landlord. The bitter experience caused indignation amongst her children, who cried and beat the accused landlord.66 Some scholars have studied the connection between the Chinese tradition of bridal lament and classical literary archetype of articulate women and the Communist reinvention of the female speech genre of public grievance.67 The goal of mobilizing women to speak bitterness was political awakening and empowerment. Through speaking bitterness, the mobilizers wanted women to come to the realization that “land reform meant overthrowing the landlords who exploited the peasants. That is, we poor people wanted to be

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our own masters.”68 Here the reminiscence of a woman activist shows the two goals of the mobilization: the first was an emphasis on “exploitation,” and the second was the peasants’ aspiration to not just eliminate economic exploitation but to empower themselves and to assert political rights as a class. Thus, the gender-specific bitterness would finally be channeled by the organizers of speaking bitterness to class awareness.69 Speaking Bitterness in the People’s Liberation Army The education of civilian peasants and PLA soldiers were similar in the late 1940s. Since 1943, there had been a close connection made between the army and the population in Communist border areas. The commissars at the grassroots level were usually secretaries of the local party committee.70 After the May Fourth directive was issued in 1946, the PLA’s Shanxi-ChaharHebei Military Region and Shanxi-Suiyuan Military Region actively undertook the mass work in Land Reform by publicizing the meaning of land confiscation and redistribution among the peasants in areas where the troops were stationed.71 In that same year, some military units were carrying out “Anti-Civil War Speaking-Bitterness Meetings [fan neizhan suku dahui]” to transform the thought of Nationalist captives.72 During the massive New Style Army Reorganization campaign [xinshi zhengjun] of 1948, the method of “troops and civilians speaking together [jun min tong su]” was also used.73 Unlike speaking bitterness in rural areas, which had face-to-face confrontations and accusations, the PLA campaigns were carried out without the presence of the accused. PLA soldiers were also not directly involved in economic struggles with landlords concerning land and property. However, the initial motivation to launch speaking bitterness in the army was similar to that in villages, which was to address the issues of morale and political enlightenment by appealing to bitter memories and a sense of injustice. Finally, the individual, traumatic experience of soldiers was directed towards larger targets: the Nationalist Army and Chiang Kai-shek. In the summer of 1947, the 3rd Army of the Northeast Democratic Army, which was under the general command of Lin Biao, initiated the campaign of speaking bitterness among newly enlisted soldiers, who showed some tendencies of being wary of hard life. Two soldiers and one former Nationalist captive were selected to report to fellow soldiers about their sufferings before joining the PLA.74 Upon learning this new form of political training, Tan Zheng, director of the Political Department of the Communist Northeast Democratic Army, was very attracted to speaking bitterness. He went down to the 20th Regiment of the 3rd Army to investigate, and eventually promoted the experience of speaking bitterness in the whole 3rd Army. With the approval of Luo Ronghuan, the commissar of the Northeast Democratic Army, Northeast Daily published an editorial on August 26, 1947, which endorsed the campaign as the “future direction of education in the army.” On September 28, the 3rd Army’s work report on speaking bitterness was approved by Mao Zedong and Zhu De, who

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called for a Three Checks Campaign [sancha], that is, check class background, check thought, and check fighting will among soldiers.75 In contrast with the myth of the Communist Army’s popularity among the people, recruitment for the Communist Army was not always an easy job. In the legendary Long March of 1934–1935, the Red Army experienced difficulty in recruiting soldiers and had to rely on coercion and deception. The March was also fraught with desertions.76 Despite the conventional wisdom that Land Reform greatly stimulated the peasants’ enthusiasm to join the PLA, peasants still evaded service in the PLA during the Civil War of 1947–1949.77 Some resisted the crass trade of land for recruitment, and some peasants stayed home to enjoy the fruits of Land Reform.78 In some areas, the Communist conscription of soldiers was compulsory, regardless of land redistribution or even class status.79 In the meantime, the People’s Liberation Army incorporated a large number of captives from the Nationalist army due to its sweeping victories in areas where the Communist Party did not have a solid social basis, and this drastically changed the PLA’s composition. In one company, captives made up as many as 80% of its total number of soldiers. In one of the most famous battles of the Civil War, the Battle of Menglianggu, the Communist army, under the command of the generals Chen Yi (1901–1972) and Su Yu (1907–1984), encircled and eliminated the elite 74th Division of the Nationalist Army in May 1947. Many captives among the 19,676 POWs later joined the PLA. Mao Zedong quickly realized the value of war prisoners. In September, after the Chen-Su army won another battle at Shatuji in southwest Shandong, they received a telegram from Mao Zedong pointing out that “your new recruits are mainly captives, and [you] should implement the principle of ‘immediately incorporating captives for replacements’ [ji fu ji bu].”80 The massive recruitment of Nationalist soldiers also happened in the Northwestern Field Army, which was expanded from 26,000 soldiers in February 1947, to 75,000 soldiers in the winter of that same year.81 The more than 50,000 soldiers the PLA gained after the CCP conquest of Ji’nan in 1948 came over from the army of GMD General Wu Huawen, who had also defected to the Japanese during the Anti-Japanese War.82 Apparently, lacking long-time of political indoctrination, the new recruits with various political backgrounds were not ideologically prepared for the Communist liberation war. Some soldiers were often confused why they needed to fight the Civil War right after the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Some complained, “Fighting Civil War is no good. Both the Nationalist Party and the Communist should be responsible [for the instigation]. As long as there is peace, I would rather eat one less meal per day.” Some PLA soldiers had low morale and bad discipline, and they went as far as to rob or rape after a major battle.83 Educating Soldiers with Speaking Bitterness In 1948, Mao emphasized that the CCP troops “to defeat Jiang mainly come from prisoners” and “the training of war prisoners must be well-organized.”84

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But it was Mao’s generals who came up with the concrete and effective way of political training. General Yu Qiuli provides a detailed account of how he used the method of speaking bitterness. In November 1947, Yu Qiuli (1914–1999), the commander of the 358 Brigade of the Northwest Army, under the general command Peng Dehuai, carried out the “Speaking Bitterness and Three Checks [suku he sancha] Campaign. Yu Qiuli required captives to fundamentally change their standpoint by speaking out the bitterness they suffered in “the old society and in the old army.”85 “Where was the bitterness?”; “Why bitterness?” Yu Qiuli details the mobilization of bitterness speaking in his memoir, published in 1996. According to Yu, some soldiers from extremely poor families were sought out while they were marching, and once they settled down in a camp a meeting would be convened where soldiers and officers were required to discuss “why the rich are rich and why the poor are poor.” Yu admitted that, although all soldiers were from poor families, they actually did not know much about exactly how the rich exploited the poor, nor did they know a lot about the luxurious life of landlords. Yu asserted that soldiers were very clear about their own suffering and that of their families. As in the villages, it was effective to encourage soldiers to start from their personal experiences. One example came from a captive named Lu Xinli. Lu was a young soldier with lots of complaints and low morale; he was looking for an opportunity to defect back to the Nationalists. One night, the company political director found Lu running out of the camp while other soldiers had fallen asleep. He followed Lu. To the director’s surprise, Lu produced a paper tablet, burned candles and incense, and then knelt down on his knees to pay homage to his dead parents. On the second day, the director invited Lu to make a public speech about his personal experience, in which Lu said that his father, the hired laborer of a landlord in Shandong Province, was worked to death. To support his mother and younger sister, Lu became a worker at a salt field, and salt water inflicted great pain on his feet because he did not have leather shoes. Soon, his mother starved to death. When the Nationalist Party came to the salt field to conscript him, his nine-year-old sister cried fiercely, but he had never seen her again since the separation, nor did he know of her whereabouts. The speaking bitterness of Lu concluded with his political enlightenment, in which he allegedly said: “Now through speaking bitterness I understand who made me suffer, and who I should shoot with my rifle,” and “I will fight well in the PLA and avenge the deaths of my families.”86 Soldiers with similar bitter stories were called “exemplars [dianxing],” and a total of three of them, including Lu, were invited to address the audience. According to Yu Qiuli, their speeches deeply shocked the heart of every listener and “awakened the miserable memories that had long been buried at the bottom of their hearts.” After the meeting, cries could be heard everywhere. The soldiers in the audience followed suit and started to tell their own stories of misery, including stories of the exploitation of poor peasants by landlords through high rent, the abuse of hired laborers, begging, and the

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forced selling of children. Some captives told their stories of being abused in the Nationalist army. Eventually, participants of speaking bitterness in the brigade were guided to arrive at a realization that “all poor people under Heaven suffer; all poor people are one family. It is a group that is antagonistic to landlords and capitalists. Thus [the soldiers] emanated class consciousness in that all laboring people belong to one class, and they drew a line between the exploitative class and themselves.”87 While class consciousness was the first step in the scheme of politicizing the soldiers, the second step was to guide the soldiers to comprehend the socio-economic relationship between those who exploit and those who were exploited. The first questions raised in the discussion session included: “Who nurtured whom?”; “Does peasant raise landlord, or the opposite?” The answer was an apparent “peasant raises landlord,” because landlord lives off the labor of a peasant, and the high rent they provide. Another classic question for discussion was “Should the land of landlord be divided and redistributed?” One soldier, named Zhao Pinxiang, gave a negative answer because he thought that a landlord inherited land from his or her ancestors. Another soldier said yes, because landlord ate and slept well without working. The former then explained the historical legitimacy of landholding with a “good fate” of landlord, but the latter refuted this, saying, “What good fate? What he eats and uses are all exchanged with the blood and sweat of laborers.” In the squad of nine soldiers, only one solider supported the man who said that the confiscation and re-distribution of a landlord’s land was reasonable. The discussion was then brought up to the level of platoon, and the political director of the company participated. The director interpreted the vernacular term “blood and sweat [xuehan]” as a neologism meaning “labor [laodong].” He also explained the value of labor by saying that labor makes originally worthless stuff – such as water and rocks – into commodities by transporting them from where they are to the market, where they are sold at a price. The explanation of the director provoked the thoughts of the soldier, and one of them said: land will be laid barren without cultivation. Hired laborers work on it and there is a harvest. Theoretically, whoever poured “blood and sweat” should own the harvest, but it is taken away by landlord who does not work. This is called “gain without pain [bu lao er huo],” and we poor people are exploited.88 Some PLA soldiers from better-off families found it particularly difficult to accept the notion that their own landlord parents “exploited” tenants rather than provided tenants land to work on, and felt the campaign targeted and insulted them.89 The third step involved doing calculation, as in the villages. One soldier with the surname Zhang recalled that he and another hired laborer worked on the land of a landlord, and that the annual general output of grain was around 98 dan (1 dan of grain weighs approximately 60 kg). The calculation goes that each of the two laborers produced 49 dan which ended up 24 dan and 5 dou (fine grain) after processing. After deducting seeds, cost of using

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oxen, and wages, the landlord earned a net profit of 12 dan and 5 dou based upon each laborer’s work. The wage paid in cash to this soldier, however, was only enough to buy 1 dan and 8 dou in rice. This 12 dan and 5 dou was what was extracted from him by the landlord. To make it worse, the money he actually received could only buy 7 dou of rice due to overdue wage payments. As a result, he was “exploited” 13 dan and 6 dou of rice each year, and, after three years of working for the landlord, a total of 40 dan and 8 dou was extracted out of him.90 It is at this stage that new knowledge and vocabulary of “labor value [laodong jiazhi]” and “surplus value [shengyu jiazhi]” were imparted to the soldiers.91 After the third step was completed, the solider Zhao Pinxiang, who defended the landownership of the landlord, was awakened, and was convinced that Land Reform meant returning the object to its former owner.92 Yu Qiuli then moved on to step four: tackling the “why” question. The questions posed to provoke the soldiers included: “Why are landlords everywhere are so evil, and their hearts are so black?”; “Why are poor people under Heaven so bitter?”; “There are more poor peasants than rich landlords, but why is it the minority can ride on the shoulders of the poor majority and enjoy themselves?”; “The Communist Party struggled against landlords and to redistribute the land to liberate the poor majority, but why did the Nationalist Party and Chiang Kai-shek not allow them?”; “For whom do we fight?”; and “How can we thoroughly take revenge?” Finally, the soldiers, as with peasants in the villages, captured the “general root” of bitterness: The general representative and head of landlords and rich men is Chiang Kai-shek. He is the arch enemy of the poor people. All poor people under heaven are one family. If you want to thoroughly change your life and live good life, then follow the Communist Party and knock down Chiang Kai-shek.93 One solider named Liu Sihu was used as an example to showcase the outcome of speaking bitterness. Liu blamed “fate” for his father’s plight of not being compensated by a landlord after breaking his leg. After speaking bitterness, Liu learned that the root cause was the rule of the Nationalist Party, which must be overthrown, and Liu later became a military hero.94 Impact of Speaking Bitterness on the PLA In the PLA, the Three Checks followed the speaking bitterness campaign. In the process of checking class background, work, and fighting will, one’s regiment’s loss in battle was explained as the result of weak fighting will, which was further explained as the manifestation of a lack of firmness in mind. The lack of firmness was in turn explained as low-class consciousness, which needed to be addressed by a new round of public speaking bitterness. The end result, according to Yu Qiuli, was the “elevation of class awareness, understanding of class dividing lines, criticism and self-criticism, and improved work efficiency, solidarity, and creativity, and subsequently an increase in fighting ability.”95 In December 1947, Yu Qiuli reported on speaking bitterness and the three checks

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to Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), the commander of Norwest Field Army. Peng Dehuai went to Yu’s regiment and learned the details of how to run speaking bitterness. Peng was so impressed with the story of Lu Xinli, who cried in the wild at midnight, that he retold the story in his memoir, written around 1970, when he was purged and jailed. Peng said: The form of speaking bitterness meeting is very good. During the periods of the Red Army (1927–1937) and Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945), we did not find this method. If we did, then the recruitment of captives in to the Red Army would have been much faster and much larger.96 In January 1948, Mao Zedong asked Yu Qiuli how speaking bitterness was initiated. Yu emphasized that it was a process of mobilizing the masses through the influence of exemplars, and that organizers guided the masses to further trace the sources of bitterness after their enthusiasm was aroused. Mao said, “This is correct. [We] should follow the wishes of the masses. We will not succeed if we only follow our own wishful thinking.”97 Mao showed deep interest in learning the conditions of captives, and, after hearing the story of Lu Xinli, Mao said: “Very good! Very good! We have long been looking for a good method to educate the captive soldiers since the days of the Central Soviet Area (1929–1934), and the method of speaking bitterness and three checks solved the problem.”98 It is likely that Mao knew of the use of speaking bitterness in Land Reform, but did not think of its potential applications in the army, where landlords were not present. For Peng Dehuai and Zhang Zongxun (1908–1998), the commander and vice commander of Yu Qiuli’s Northwest Field Army, their army needed a period of serious reorganization and training because too few soldiers had been politicized. The agenda included (1) elevating class awareness by carrying out speakingbitterness movement and discipline education; (2) a training rotation of cadres of all ranks and all types; and (3) expanding the party organization. The first step of reform was marked by the campaign of speaking bitterness, in which captives were mobilized to articulate their miserable pasts under the Nationalist rule. Telling of personal histories based on traumatic memory was encouraged by a new slogan that linked the demands of the poor to the political agenda of the Communist Party: “[If] The poor want fanshen; annihilate the Chiang family army”99 [qiongren yao fanshen, xiaomie Jiangjia jun] Though the slogan did not show direct logical relation, it was clear that captives were taught to turn against the Chiang Kai-shek government and redress past grievances. The New Style Army Reorganization promoted the techniques of speaking bitterness and of the three checks throughout the entire PLA. The campaign lasted from December 1947 to the summer of 1948, and was considered a landmark of political work, and played a significant role in the final victory of the PLA in the Civil War. The Communist general Huang Kecheng (1902–1986) confirmed in his memoir that its implementation “greatly elevated the fighting ability of the troops” in the Northeast battlefield.100 To use the words of Mao, the “democratic and mass-based” campaign should be continued because it made the PLA ‘invincible.”’101

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The ideological indoctrination of the modern Chinese army can be traced back to the Nationalist Army during the National Revolution, with the establishment of the system of party representatives, political bureaus, and party branches.102 Since the time of the armed struggle of the Red Army in the Jinggang Mountains in 1927, the Communist Red Army had used songs, posters, cartoons, and plays to engage soldiers and transform captives who were suspicious of or indifferent to the Red Army.103 The Communist Party successfully connected the soldiers’ personal experience of suffering and bitterness with the larger agendas of revolution and liberation. Conclusion Arif Dirlik reminds us that Chinese modernity cannot be separated from its “Third World historical context,” and Maoist vision might also lead to “a better and more thorough modernization,” and more importantly, that teleological, Eurocentric modernity has been contested while there is an absence of any agreement about modernity and its meaning in Chinese history.104 It is against this background that this chapter argues that speaking bitterness was a form of Chinese modernity which combined modern ideology, mobilizational capability of the state, and its political language with traditional Chinese culture. Speaking bitterness became a modern political “ritual,” which for Clifford Geertz, is “not just a pattern of meaning” but “also a form of social interaction.”105 The Party called for peasants to speak their bitterness, based on their own feelings, and it offered guidance rather than coercion.106 Public accusations of landlords and face-to-face struggles and namecalling empowered the formerly lower-class people, who, for Communist leaders of Land Reform, “did not dare to talk, let alone talk boldly in front of educated people.”107 Recalling bitterness and articulating it without the presence of a landlord helped redirect the indignation of PLA soldiers to the Nationalist troops and to Chiang Kai-shek. From a cultural perspective, speaking bitterness was a political reinvention of public storytelling based on the value of past bitter memory to drive a person to pursue a certain political goal. This technique also involves sharing personal trauma to turn it into a collective asset. Open expression of sorrow and crying in public are not stigmatized, but are met with sympathy and are encouraged. Eventually, the collective feeling of “public anger” as an outcome of speaking bitterness had a traditional legitimization in Chinese culture, and it was this aroused public anger that drove the peasant masses to execute landlords and soldiers to kill the enemy.108 The CCP eventually won the peasant-based communist revolution largely because the party changed the rural power relationship in which peasants were subjugated to the moral and cultural authority of the elites, and transformed and reorganized rural society by empowering peasants, women, as well as new recruits in the PLA with a variety of political techniques.

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Notes 1 Chen Beiou, Renmin xuexi cidian [Dictionary of people’s learning] (Shanghai: Guangyi shuju, 1952), 331. One earlier article focusing on “speaking bitterness” is Charlene Makley, “‘Speaking Bitterness’: Autobiography, History and Mnemonic Politics on Sino-Tibetan Frontier,” Comparative Studies in Society, vol. 47, no. 1 (January 2005): 40–78. 2 David E. Aptor and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 70. 3 For the mobilization purposes of speaking bitterness, see Li Lifeng, “Tugai zhong de suku: yizhong minzhong dongyuan jishu de weiguan fenxi” [Speaking BItterness in Land Reform: A Microanalysis of a Technique of Mass Mobilization] Nanjing daxue xuebao [Journal of Nanjing University], no. 5 (October 2007): 97–109. 4 Jin Chongji, Zhuanzhe niandai: Zhongguo de 1947 nian [The Year of Turning: The 1947 of China] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2002), 380. 5 During the Civil War, there was “no distinction between the military and nonmilitary.” See Ying-Mao Kau, The People’s Liberation Army and China’s Nationbuilding (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, INC, 1973), xxvii–xxviii. 6 See Arif Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Arif Dirlik, et al., eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 59–83. Also see Dirlik, “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity,” Social History, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 2002): 16–39. 7 For the urban-based studies of Chinese modernity, see Wen-Hsin Yeh, Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). David Strand notices that modernity means not only a cosmopolitan way of life but the state’s organizational power and technology of control. See Yeh, “Introduction,” in Becoming Chinese, 9. 8 Du Runsheng, “Dangqian tudi gaige zhidao zhong de jige wenti [Several questions in guiding the Land Reform work in current time],” in Zhongnan junzheng weiyuanhui tudi gaige weiyuanhui [The Land Reform Committee of the CentralSouthern Military and Political Commission], ed., Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian [Compiled important documents and experiences of Land Reform] (n.p. 1951), 349. 9 Wang Youming, Jiefangqu tudi gaige yanjiu: 1941–1948: yi Shandong lunan wei gean [A study of Land Reform in liberated areas] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2006), 109–111. 10 See Philip Huang, “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995): 109. 11 Godwin C. Chu, “Communication and Cultural Change in China: A Conceptual Framework,” in Godwin C. Chu and Francis L.K. Hsu, ed., Moving a Mountain: Cultural Change in China (Honolulu: The East-West Center, University of Hawaii, 1979), 13–14. 12 Du Runsheng, “Dangqian tudi gaige zhidao zhong de jige wenti,” in Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 352. 13 Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, “Zhonggong zhongyang zhongnanju guanyu fangshou fadong qunzhong chedi wancheng tudi gaige jihua de zhishi [The directive of the Central China Bureau of the CCP Central regarding thoroughly mobilizing the masses and completing Land Reform],” 375.

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14 Jiayan Zhang, “Who Owned More Land? Reappraising Land Ownership in Pre1949 China—A Case Study of the Jianghan Plain,” The Chinese Historical Review, vol. 16, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 184, 202. 15 Liang Shu-ming, Zhongguo wenhua yaoyi [Essence of Chinese culture] (Shanghai: shiji chuban jituan, 2005), 130–131. 16 Edward Friedman, et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 86. 17 Huaiyin Li, Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 16. 18 Qu Guiping, Huabei xiangcun minzhong: shiye zhong de shehui fenceng jiqi biandong [Rural People in Northern Chinese Villages: Social Stratification and Its Change in perspective] (Beijing: renmin chubanshe, 2011), 168. 19 Ibid., 168. 20 Xie Youtian, Xiangcun shehui de huimie [The destruction of rural society] (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 2010), 211. 21 Qu, Huabei xiangcun minzhong: shiye zhong de shehui fenceng jiqi biandong, 171. 22 Wu Mi, Wu Mi riji xubian [Selected diary entries of Wu Mi] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2006), 66. 23 Tang Qixiang, Tan Qixiang riji [Diary of Tan Qixiang], ed. Ge Jiangxiong (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 1998), 3–4. 24 Mao Zedong, “Xin jiefangqu tugai douzheng celue (Strategy of Land Reform struggle in newly liberated areas),” in Mao Zedong wenji, vol. 5 (Beijing: renmin chubanshe, 1996), 37. 25 See Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 375–385. In southern provinces Jiangxi and Guangdong, the average rent rate was between 40% and 60% of the output of land, and rent in Jiangxi could be as high as 80%. See Chen Po-ta [Chen Boda], A Study of Land Rent in Pre-liberation China [Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1958], 36–37; Chen Han-seng, Landlord and Peasant in China: A Study of the Agrarian Crisis in South China (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, Inc., 1973), 45; C.K. Yang, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (Technology Press, MIT, 1959), 49. Fu Yiling suggests that rent in some Jiangxi villages could be as high as 70–80%. See Fu Yiling, MingQing nongcun shehui jingji/Mingqing shehui jingji bianqian lun [Rural social economy in the Ming and Qing/An account of the change of social economics in the Ming and Qing] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 84. Lucien Bianco also points out that peasants-landlord enmity was not the major tension in rural China. See Lucien Bianco, Peasants Without the Party: Grassroots Movements in 20th-Century China (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). 26 Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 252. 27 For a discussion of stages of human society and its relevance to Land Reform, see “Zhonggong zhongyang tudi gaige zhong ge shehui jieji de huafen jiqi daiyu de guiding,” in Zhongyang dangan guan [Central Archives], ed., Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tudi gaige wenjian xuanji [Selected Source Materials of Land Reform during the Period of the Liberation War] (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981), 173. 28 Hebei Sheng dang’anguan [Hebei Provincial Archives], Hebei tudi gaige dang’an shi liao xuanbian [Selected archival materials of Land Reform in Hebei] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1990), 98. 29 Ibid., 122. 30 For a discussion of fanxin, fanshen, and suku, also see Fangchun Li, “Class, Power, and the Contradictions of Chinese Revolutionary Modernity: Interpreting Land

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31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48

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Reform in Northern China, 1946–48” (PhD dissertation, University of California at Los Angles, 2008), 35, 229–237. “Zhonggong zhongyang zhongnanju guanyu fangshou fadong qunzhong chedi wancheng tudi gaige jihua de zhishi,” Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 375. Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 310. Chen Zhengren, “Ruhe fenxiang fencun shenru tudi gaige douzheng [How to deepen the struggle of Land Reform village by village and town by town],” in Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 751. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973), 197–98. Chen Zhengren, “Ruhe fenxiang fencun shenru tudi gaige douzheng [How to deepen the struggle of Land Reform village by village and town by town],” in Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 751. Zheng Linzhuang, “Douzheng dizhu shi you ganbu tiaobo qilai de ma? [Was the struggle against landlords simply instigated by cadres?],” in Guangming ribao bianjisuo, ed., Tudi gaige yu sixiang gaizao, 75–76. William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage books, 1966), 129. Helen F. Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 127. James R. Townsend, Political Participation in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 74. Barrington Moore Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978), 84. Isabel Crook and David Crook, Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 133–134. See Philip Huang, “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995): 113. Sulamith Heins Potter and Jack M. Potter, China’s Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 40. Zhao Dingyuan, “Shangcheng xian Youfan xiang shenru gupinnong zhagen suku chuanlian fadong pingunong de jige zhuyao jingyan [Several Key experiences of going deep into poor peasants and organizing speaking bitterness in Youfan Town, Shangcheng County],” Zhonggong zhongyao lishi wenxian ziliao huibian teji zhi shiwu [Compiled important historical source materials of the Chinese Communist Party] (Los Angeles: Zhongwen chuban fuwu zhongxin bian, 2000), 819. For the reliance on middle peasant during the anti-Japanese war in north China, see David S.G. Goodman, Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2000), 165–169. Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 32. For the explanatory role of class in villages, see Yang Su, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 107. Luo Zhaohui, Funong yu xin funong: ershi shiji qianbanqi huabei xiangcun shehui bianqian de zhujue [Rich Peasant and New Rich Peasant: Main Characters in the Social Change of Northern Chinese Villages in Early 20th Century] (Beijing: remin chubanshe, 2010), 88–93. This Confucian vs. Communist approaches to rural reconstruction is thoroughly discussed in Guy S. Alitto in The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 215–225.

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49 Zhang Yun, “Tantan huazhong de tudi gaige (August 1, 1947) [A Discussion on Land Reform in Central China gaige (August 1, 1947)],” in Zhonghua quanguo funü lianhe hui funu yundong lishi yanjiu shi ed., Zhongguo funu yundong lishi ziliao (1945.10—1949.9) [Historical Source Materials of Chinese Women’s Liberation (1945.10—1949.9)] (Beijing: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1991), 182–183. 50 See Roy Hofheinz, Jr., The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 123. 51 Zhang Yiping, Diquan biandong yu shehui chonggou: Sunan tudi gaige yanjiu, 1949– 1952 [The Change of Land Ownership and Reconstruction of Society: A Study of Land Reform in Southern Jiangsu, 1949–1952] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chuabanshe, 2009), 167. 52 Hebei Sheng dang’anguan, Hebei tudi gaige dang’an shi liao xuanbian, 122. 53 Ibid., 296. 54 Zhao Dingyuan, “Shangcheng xian youfan xiang shenru gupinnong zhagen suku chuanlian fadong pingunong de jige zhuyao jingyan,” Zhonggong zhongyao lishi wenxian ziliao huibian teji zhi shiwu, 820. 55 Hebei Sheng dang’anguan, Hebei tudi gaige dang’an shi liao xuanbian, 162. 56 Yang Hansheng, Yang Hansheng riji [Diary of Yang Hansheng] (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1985), 488. 57 C.K. Yang, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, MIT, 1959), 107. 58 Liu Jianxun, “Hubei sheng bannian tudi gaige zongjie ji jinhou gongzuo wenti [Summary of the Land Reform Work in Hubei Province in the Past half Year and Several Problems Regarding Future Work],” in Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 662, 664. 59 Zhao Dingyuan, “Shangcheng xian youfan xiang shenru gupinnong zhagen suku chuanlian fadong pingunong de jige zhuyao jingyan,” Zhonggong zhongyao lishi wenxian ziliao huibian teji zhi shiwu, 827. 60 Ma Te, “Tudi gaige gongzuo shi zenyang jinxing de? [How Was Land Reform Work Conducted?],” in Guangming ribao bianjisuo, ed., Tudi gaige yu sixiang gaizao, 53. 61 Li Lifeng, “Tugai zhong de suku,” 107–108. 62 For peasants’ acquisition of political neologisms, see Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 5. 63 Ezra Vogel, “Land Reform in Kwangtung 1951–1953: Control and Localism,” The China Quarterly, vol. 38 (June 1969): 36. 64 Zhongnan junzheng weiyuanhui tudi gaige weiyuanhui, Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 662. 65 Li Lifeng, “Tugai zhong de suku,” 104. 66 Shanganning bianqu fulian, “Shanganning bianqu tugai yundong zhong funü gongzuo de gaikuang (August 4, 1948) [An outline of women’s work during the Land Reform of Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border region],” in Zhonghua quanguo funü lianhe hui funü yundong lishi yanjiu shi ed., Zhongguo funü yundong lishi ziliao (1945.10—1949.9) (Beijing: Zhongguo funu chubanshe, 1991), 265. 67 Anne E. McLaren, “The Grievance Rhetoric of Chinese Women: From Lamentation to Revolution,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, no. 4 (September 2002). Last accessed October 20, 2013. http:// intersections.anu.edu.au/issue4/mclaren.html 68 Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 78, 69. 69 Ibid.

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70 Harlan W. Jencks, From Musket to Missiles: Politics and Professionalism in the Chinese Army, 1945–1981 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 44. 71 Jiang Siyi, Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zhengzhi gongzuo shi [A History of the PLA’s Political Work] (Beijing: Jiefangjun zhengshi xueyuan chubanshe, 1984), 365. 72 Sun Jiangang, Cheng Dongtian, “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai xibei yezhanjun de yuanqi [The rise of new style army reorganization in northwestern army],” Handan zhiye jishu xueyuan xuebao, vol. 15, no. 3 (2002): 92. 73 Jiang Siyi, Zhongguo renmin jiefangju zhengzhi gongzuo shi, 412. 74 Huang Yao et al., Luo Ronghuan zhuan [Biography of Luo Ronghuan] (Beijing: dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, 1991), 427. 75 Chen Xiangming and Hao Lei, “Xinshi zhengjun yundong de lishi kaocha ji qishi [Historical review of the new type of ideological education movement in the army and its enlightenments],” Junshi lishi, no. 6 (2008): 47. Also see Jiang Siyi, Zhongguo renmin jiefangju zhengzhi gongzuo shi, 409. 76 See Sun Shuyun, The Long March: The True Story of Communist China’s Founding Myth (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 2007). 77 Yang Su, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution, 115. 78 Susanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949, 294–95. 79 79 Wang Youming, Jiefanqu tudi gaige yanjiu, 1941–1948, 109–112. Official Party and Army histories emphasize the correlation between land redistribution and peasants’ enthusiasm, and in recent years, attention has been paid to the PLA’s strategic changes and improvements in weaponry to explain its rapid victory against the Nationalist army. See Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 75. 80 Jin Chongji, Zhuanzhe niandai: Zhongguo de 1947 nian, 343. 81 Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun di yi yezhanjun zhanshi [The Battling History of the First Field Army of the PLA) (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1995), 108–09. Cited in Jin Chongji, Zhuanzhe niandai: Zhongguo de 1947 nian, 356. 82 Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 201. 83 Sun Jiangang, Cheng Dongtian, “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai xibei yezhanjun de yuanqi,” 84 Westad, Decisive Encounters, 201. 85 Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli huiyilu [Memoir of Yu Qiuli] (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1996), 338. 86 Ibid., 342. 87 Ibid., 344. 88 Ibid., 346. Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli Huiyilu, 348. 91 Guo Zhihua, “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai liandui,” 45. 92 Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli Huiyilu, 348. 89 Guo Zhihua, “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai liandui,” Dangshi wenhui [Materials from CCP history], no. 10 (2002): 45. 90 Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli Huiyilu, 348. 91 Guo Zhihua, “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai liandui,” 45. 92 Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli Huiyilu, 348. 93 Ibid., 349. 94 Jiang Siyi, Zhongguo renmin jiefangju zhengzhi gongzuo shi, 410. 95 Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli huiyilu, 354. 96 Peng Dehuai, Peng Dehuai zishu [Self-portrait of Peng Dehuai] (Beijing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe, 2002), 259–260. 97 Yu Qiuli, Yu Qiuli huiyilu, 357. 98 Ibid., 358.

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99 Jin Chongji, Zhuanzhe niandai: Zhongguo de 1947 nian, 356. 100 Huang Kecheng, Huang Kecheng zishu [Self-portrait of Huang Kecheng] (Beijing: renmin chunbanshe, 2004), 241. 101 Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun junshi kexueyuan, Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun dashi ji [A chronicle of PLA] (Beijing: Junshi kexue chubanshe), 269. 102 For political work in Nationalist army, see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 300–301. 103 Huang Yao, Luo Ronghuan (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1996), 194–199. 104 Dirlik, “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity,” 28–29. See also Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Arif Dirlik, et al., eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, 67. 105 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 168. 106 For this mainly persuasive approach, also see Huaiyin Li, Village China Under Socialism and Reform, 4. 107 Li Xiannian, “fadong qunzhong zhong de jige wenti [Several Questions in the Mobilization of the Masses],” Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian, 639. 108 For an anthropological analysis of expression of anger and sorrow in Chinese culture, see Potter and Potter, China’s Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution, 186–187.

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Duara, Prasenjit. Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Friedman, Edward, et al. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Fu, Yiling. MingQing nongcun shehui jingji/Mingqing shehui jingji bianqian lun [Rural social economy in the Ming and Qing/An Account of the Change of Social Economics in the Ming and Qing]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1973. Goodman, David S.G. Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2000. Guangming ribao bianjisuo, ed. Tudi gaige yu sixiang gaizao [Land Reform and Thought Reform]. Beijing: Guangming ribao zong guanli chu 1951. Guo, Zhihua. “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai liandui,” Dangshi wenhui [Materials from CCP history] no. 10 (2002): 45–47. Hebei Sheng dang’anguan [Hebei Provincial Archives]. Hebei tudi gaige dang’an shi liao xuanbian [Selected Archival Materials of Land Reform in Hebei]. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1990. Hershatter, Gail. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Hinton, William. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Hofheinz, Roy Jr. The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922–1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Huang, Kecheng. Huang Kecheng zishu [Self-portrait of Huang Kecheng]. Beijing: renmin chunbanshe, 2004. Huang, Philip. “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution.” Modern China 21, no. 1 (January 1995): 105–143. Huang Yao et al. Luo Ronghuan zhuan [Biography of Luo Ronghuan]. Beijing: dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, 1991. Jencks, Harlan W. From Musket to Missiles: Politics and Professionalism in the Chinese Army, 1945–1981. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982. Jiang, Siyi. Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zhengzhi gongzuo shi [A History of the PLA’s Political Work]. Beijing: Jiefangjun zhengshi xueyuan chubanshe, 1984. Jin, Chongji. Zhuanzhe niandai: Zhongguo de 1947 nian [The Year of Turning: The 1947 of China]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2002. Johnson, Chalmers A. Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1937–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. Kau, Ying-Mao. The People’s Liberation Army and China’s Nation-building. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, INC, 1973. Li, Fangchun. “Class, Power, and the Contradictions of Chinese Revolutionary Modernity: Interpreting Land Reform in Northern China, 1946–48.” PhD diss. University of California at Los Angles, 2008. Li, Huaiyin. Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948–2008. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Liang, Shu-ming. Zhongguo wenhua yaoyi [Essence of Chinese culture]. Shanghai: shiji chuban jituan, 2005.

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Li, Lifeng. “Tugai zhong de suku: yizhong minzhong dongyuan jishu de weiguan fenxi” [Speaking Bitterness in Land Reform: A Microanalysis of a Technique of Mass Mobilization] Nanjing daxue xuebao [Journal of Nanjing University] no. 5 (October 2007): 97–109. Li, Xiaobing. A History of the Modern Chinese Army. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Luo, Zhaohui. Funong yu xin funong: ershi shiji qianbanqi huabei xiangcun shehui bianqian de zhujue [Rich peasant and new rich peasant: Main characters in the social change of northern Chinese villages in early 20th century]. Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 2010. Mao, Zedong. Mao Zedong wenji, vol. 5. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1996. McLaren, Anne E. “The Grievance Rhetoric of Chinese Women: From Lamentation to Revolution.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, no. 4 (September 2002). Last accessed on October 20, 2013. http://intersections.anu. edu.au/issue4/mclaren.html Moore, Barrington Jr. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978. Makley, Charlene. “ ‘Speaking Bitterness’: Autobiography, History and Mnemonic Politics on Sino-Tibetan Frontier.” Comparative Studies in Society 47, no. 1 (January 2005): 40–78. Peng, Dehuai. Peng Dehuai zishu [Self-Portrait of Peng Dehuai]. Beijing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe, 2002. Pepper, Suzanne. Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Potter, Sulamith Heins, and Jack M. Potter. China’s Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Qu, Guiping. Huabei xiangcun minzhong: shiye zhong de shehui fenceng jiqi biandong [Rural People in Northern Chinese Villages: Social Stratification and Its Change in Perspective]. Beijing: renmin chubanshe, 2011. Schurmann, Franz. Ideology and Organization in Communist China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Siu, Helen F. Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Sun, Shuyun. The Long March: The True Story of Communist China’s Founding Myth. New York: Doubleday Publishing, 2007. Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. Su, Yang. Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Sun, Jiangang, and Cheng Dongtian. “Xinshi zhengjun yundong zai xibei yezhanjun de yuanqi [The Rise of New Style Army Reorganization in Northwestern Army].” Handan zhiye jishu xueyuan xuebao 15, no. 3 (2002): 91–94. Tang, Qixiang. Tan Qixiang riji [Diary of Tan Qixiang], edited by Ge Jianxiong. Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 1998. Townsend, James R. Political Participation in Communist China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Vogel, Ezra. “Land Reform in Kwangtung 1951–1953: Control and Localism.” The China Quarterly, 38 (June 1969): 27–62.

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Wang, Youming. Jiefangqu tudi gaige yanjiu: 1941–1948: yi Shandong lunan wei gean [A Study of Land Reform in Liberated Areas]. Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2006. Westad, Odd Arne. Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Wu, Mi. Wu Mi riji xubian [Selected Diary Entries of Wu Mi]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2006. Xie, Youtian. Xiangcun shehui de huimie [The Destruction of Rural Society]. Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 2010. Yang, C.K. A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition. Technology Press, MIT, 1959. Yang, Hansheng. Yang Hansheng riji [Diary of Yang Hansheng]. Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1985. Yeh, Wen-Hsin. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Yu, Qiuli. Yu Qiuli huiyilu [Memoir of Yu Qiuli]. Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1996. Zhang, Jiayan. “Who Owned More Land? Reappraising Land Ownership in Pre-1949 China—A Case Study of the Jianghan Plain.” The Chinese Historical Review 16, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 178–207. Zhang, Yiping. Diquan biandong yu shehui chonggou: Sunan tudi gaige yanjiu, 1949– 1952 [The Change of Land Ownership and Reconstruction of Society: A Study of Land Reform in Southern Jiangsu, 1949–1952]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chuabanshe, 2009. Zhongnan junzheng weiyuanhui tudi gaige weiyuanhui [The Land Reform Committee of the Central-Southern Military and Political Commission], ed. Tudi gaige zhongyao wenxian yu jingyan huibian [Compiled important documents and experiences of Land Reform]. n.p. 1951. Zhonggong zhongyao lishi wenxian ziliao huibian teji zhi shiwu [Compiled Important Historical Source Materials of the Chinese Communist Party]. Los Angeles: Zhongwen chuban fuwu zhongxin bian, 2000. Zhonghua quanguo funü lianhe hui funu yundong lishi yanjiu shi ed. Zhongguo funu yundong lishi ziliao (1945.10—1949.9) [Historical Source Materials of Chinese Women’s Liberation (1945.10—1949.9)]. Beijing: Zhongguo funü chubanshe, 1991. Zhongyang dangan guan [Central Archives], ed. Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tudi gaige wenjian xuanji [Selected Source Materials of Land Reform during the Period of the Liberation War]. Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981.

3

Historiography, Memory, and Myth in Maoist China

The relationship between memory, history, and collective identity has drawn much research interest in recent years.1 Scholars from multiple disciplines have explored modern Chinese historical traumas and their representation: Peter Zarrow has studied the role of traumatic memory in anti-Manchuism in late-Qing China and argues that it played a complex role in instigating nationalist feelings, giving vent to Han Chinese anxieties, and essentializing two different and confrontational races; Klaus Mühlhahn focuses on the impact of traumatic experiences on individuals and their communities, and, more importantly, how narrative and memory were used by Chinese writers to create connections with the past; Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik discusses how the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine from 1958 to 1959 were remembered and represented in Chinese official historiography and more liberal literary works in post-Mao China. Paul G. Pickowicz examines the reminiscences of a rural intellectual about the Chinese revolution and collectivization, while Ban Wang approaches the issue of trauma and memory by analyzing Chinese film and fiction.2 But there is a lack of research on the role collective memory played in the enactment of rural class struggle and the portrayal of the pre-Communist “old society [jiu shehui],” as well as the multiple forms of production and distribution carried out in the name of socialist education.3 Maurice Meisner describes the Socialist Education Movement of 1962–1965 as “an attempt to counter the bureaucratization of Chinese political life,” and focuses on the different approaches of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969).4 This study argues that, driven by both the ideological need to indoctrinate peasants and future generations about class struggle and a genuine interest in historical (re) writing from the bottom up, the socialist/class education campaign was also a grassroots-level cultural movement that attempted to reconstruct the modern Chinese historical narrative and let workers and peasants tell their own life and history. In other words, it aimed at the transformation of class and historical consciousness rather than simply attacking local bureaucratism.5 This chapter traces how individual memories of the formerly oppressed were gradually teased out by the Chinese socialist state to construct a classbased collective memory of the pre-1949 “old China [jiu Zhongguo]”; how DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-4

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these memories were utilized and reworked in the campaigns of mass writing of personal and communal histories; and how the writing and publication in turn helped facilitate the recalling-bitterness campaign. Different from “speaking bitterness [suku]” in the Land Reform movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s discussed in Chapter 2, which was mainly implemented as a technique of mobilization, the “recalling bitterness [yiku]” campaign in the 1960s aimed at reenacting class struggle and reinforcing class awareness by invoking collective memory.6 During this process, which was largely interactive and involved different levels of the Chinese state apparatus, history became personalized and also gradually fictionalized, and the oral presentation of memory became ritualistic and volatile to suit the needs of different political agendas. This project of ideology-driven and class-based historical writing and oral articulation was interestingly conducted mainly by writers of fictional works or manipulated by cultural officials of the state, and there was a gradual blurring of the boundary between history and fiction. Many family history stories appeared in literary magazines rather than journals of historical research. Finally, past bitterness not only became the articulation of individual and collective memories, but also involved rituals and performance, and thus was successfully incorporated into the larger institution of propaganda and Chinese popular culture.7 As a result, all depictions of the old society in the recalling-bitterness movement were dissociated from “objective realities” and became “representational realities.”8 Finally, postMao cynicism and skeptical attitudes toward the recalling-bitterness literature and performance remind us that the party-state’s successful domination of historical imagination has provoked resistance and alienation.9 From “Four Histories” to “Recalling Bitterness” In a broader sense, the Socialist Education Movement [shehui zhuyi jiaoyu yundong] should not be understood as only the anti-bureaucratic campaign that started in 1962. It had an ideological concern beyond the economic and organizational ones that are most often discussed by scholars, and even a longer history.10 The early 1950s saw peasant resistance to high procurement of grain by the state and to collectivization, which resulted in lowered incomes. A 1956 survey showed that among 183,000 households in 20 provinces, 28.1% had lower incomes than before collectivization. Some peasants petitioned to higher authorities, wanting to withdraw from co-ops.11 The party-state changed its strategy of coping with peasant discontent from violent suppression to a nonviolent method of “persuasion and education [shuofu jiaoyu]” to defend socialism and collectivism.12 In July 1957, while the Anti-Rightist Movement was underway, Mao asked the Party to carry out a “Socialist Education Movement.” A formal directive was issued in August, requiring a “large-scale socialist education campaign targeting the rural population.”13 In a 1958 speech, Kang Sheng (1898–1975), the Party ideologue and Mao’s confidant, emphasized that socialist education was not only a top-down campaign

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targeting the masses but should also be a bottom-up movement in which the masses also educated the Party with their collective wisdom.14 In that same year, the Agricultural Bureau and the Cultural Bureau of Guizhou Province collaborated to collect and exhibit “materials that can highlight the feudal landlord class’s cruel oppression and exploitation of peasants and materials that can compare and contrast the lives of landlord and peasant.”15 It was also in 1958 that Chinese academia saw an upsurge of “historiographical revolution,” which stressed that historical research should meet the needs of the party-state and emphasize class struggle.16 The writing of commune histories as a grassroots-level cultural movement appeared in this context of political and academic radicalization. The Xushui People’s Commune of Hebei Province produced one of the earliest commune histories, which was co-edited by the Xushui County’s Committee of Writing Movement and the county’s Federation of the Art and Literature Circles. Published in 1959, A History of the Xushui People’s Communes [Xushui renmin gongshe shi] recorded the county’s struggles in the Boxer Rebellion of the late 1890s and in the Anti-Japanese War of the 1940s, as well as peasants’ participation in the Great Leap Forward [da yuejin] of 1958. The four parts of the book each had between three and ten articles from local writers, an essay from the modern writer Kang Zhuo (1920–1991), and transcripts of interviews of peasants.17 The overall tone of the book was actually positive and optimistic, and none of the pieces focused on the hardships the peasants had suffered under the old landholding system. Nor were there any articles on their rebellion. Later that year a book review pointed out this weakness, describing it as a sign of the neglect of class struggle as the main moving force of rural history.18 After the downfall of Peng Dehuai, the Minister of Defense, at the Lushan Conference in 1959, Mao – for the second time – called for socialist education in the countryside.19 In the meantime, the new Minister of Defense, Lin Biao approved the campaign of “Two Recalling; Three Examining [liang yi san cha]” within the People’s Liberation Army in 1960, in which soldiers were mobilized to recollect the “bitterness of class [jieji ku]” and the “national grievance [minzu hen].” Lin Biao emphasized that this campaign was a “living education” that could effectively overcome the mentality of pacifism and enhance the soldiers’ will to fight. “If the past bitterness is not understood, the present sweetness will be unknown. [Some] might regard today’s sweetness as bitterness,” Lin Biao said.20 In February 1960, the CCP’s Jiangsu Provincial Committee decided to launch a socialist education campaign and a two-line struggle between socialism and capitalism. This was followed by a similar directive from the Beijing Municipal Committee in November 1961.21 With Mao’s influence, the Party center issued an official document requiring nationwide socialist education that year, which was reiterated at the 10th plenum of the 8th CCP National Congress in 1962. After the 10th plenum, two local leaders, Wang Yanchun (1910–1984) of Hunan Province and Liu Zihou (1909–2001) of Henan Province, discussed socialist education with Mao during his inspection tour of the provinces. At

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the central working conference in February 1963, Mao urged attendees to carry out the campaign, distributing reports from Hunan and Henan concerning socialist education and the rectification of working styles and the communes. Mao stated that such a campaign was necessary because “sharp class struggle” was occurring in Chinese society, which was manifest in the re-emergence of exploitation, counterrevolutionary sabotage, and usurpation of the revolutionary power.22 Mao saw sabotage and the lack of thoroughness of the democratic revolution as the root cause of the Great Famine, and decided that socialist education was the best way to address the issue.23 Worried about the return of the old exploitative ruling classes and their thought, Mao attempted to educate peasants to identify with the socialist vision of life and the virtue that he represented.24 The post-Great Leap Forward famine changed the outlook of peasants and ground-level cadres, pushing them to seek incentives and economic liberalization, but, in Mao’s eyes, the widespread resentment among people of all walks of life and the masses’ loss of interest in collectivization were manifestations of class struggle.25 During the Great Leap Forward, many peasants had complained about public mess halls. In 1960, the worst year of the famine, some workers with “wrong thoughts” in the Anshan Steel Company complained: “In the past, when working for the landlord, I was allowed to eat as much as I could!” and the old society was no good, but you could eat fish, shrimp, [and] meat and drink wine [ … ] everything; the new society is good, but there is nothing to purchase. This is not as good as working as hired labor for a landlord, and is even worse than pigs and dogs in the past. One peasant living in a suburb of Shanghai said, “Under Jiang Jieshi (1887–1975), we suffered but we ate rice; Under Chairman Mao we enjoy happiness [ … ] but eat rice porridge only.”26 As a result, grassroots-level officials had to organize discussion meetings to encourage peasants to compare present-day life with pre-Liberation life, and to convince them that successes outnumbered failures. Yet only poor peasants were allowed to speak at these meetings; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced.27 By the end of 1962, Sichuan and Shandong Provinces had completed their collection of “reactionary” folksongs and were fully prepared to launch the socialist education campaign to reverse the trends of skepticism and cynicism among the people.28 Mao might have exaggerated the degree of class conflict in the countryside, or he might have misperceived the problem. Having initiated the campaign, though, he searched for effective forms and policies to carry out socialist education. He soon found one experience from the grassroots level to be useful: summoning the past to defend the present. In Jinxian County, Liaoning Province, the Party Committee emphasized the “education” of the masses, and this approach was approved by the CCP’s Northeastern Bureau. The bureau dispatched an official to Yuji Commune in the county to help with this work, and special attention was paid to class education among the youth in that province. Song Renqiong (1909–2005), the secretary of the

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CCP’s Northeastern Bureau, submitted a report to Mao Zedong on April 10, 1963, advocating the encouragement of self-education among the masses and class education targeting youths. On May 2, Mao commented favorably on Song’s report and decided to disseminate it among high-ranking officials so that others could learn from the experiences in the Northeast. Mao remarked: “The method, as mentioned by Comrade Song Renqiong […] is widely doable.”29 On May 10, Mao signed off on a formal order in the name of the Party urging all regional bureaus and provinces to accelerate rural socialist education.30 At the Party’s Hangzhou working conference in May 1963, Mao went so far as to say that “Researching history won’t do without combining it with reality. Studying modern history without conducting research on village history and family history is like bullshit.” He considered the empirical study of village and family histories to be as valuable as the archaeologists’ discovery of oracle bones testifying to the existence of the Shang Dynasty.31 With the promulgation of a “Draft Directive on Some Problems in Current Rural Work” (also known as the “First Ten Points” or Qian shitiao) in late May, the Socialist Education Movement was transformed from a limited rectification in selected areas into a full-blown nationwide Campaign.32 In the “First Ten Points,” the Henan experience of combining the history of the revolutionary struggles with the history of agrarian collectivization to remind the older generation of the suffering they sustained in the old society was mentioned and praised as a good method of indoctrination.33 To see the writing of micro-histories as merely a political strategy of mobilization is over-simplification.34 The year 1964 was the year Mao Zedong warned Chinese communists against the dilution of communism, which he believed had occurred in the Soviet Union, by attacking Khrushchev’s “Phony Communism.”35 It was in this same year that Mao showed intense interest in historiography. He perused the ancient classic, the Records of the Grand Historian [Shiji], and the modern historian Fan Wenlan (1893–1969)’s A Brief History of China [Zhongguo tongshi jianbian], and wrote a poem titled “Reading History” [Dushi]. In this poem, Mao continued his historical thinking, placing class struggle at the center of the evolution of history as the driving force of human progress. He also extolled the role of the peasant uprising.36 Also in 1964, Mao reemphasized his interest in writing history from the bottom up. For Mao, an atomized study of various dimensions of history was the very foundation of writing general histories, and he had long been an enthusiastic reader of local gazetteers.37 When some local Party officials published “A Tentative Discussion of the Significance of Compiling and Studying the ‘Four Histories,”’ Mao was immediately attracted. He underlined and commented on the article.38 This chapter seemed a positive response to a directive Mao issued in 1964, which urged professional historians to get involved in the writing of the Four Histories – “mass history” that reflected the point of view of the masses who were not able to articulate themselves in old times.39 Mao’s directive was dispatched to the historians at the Modern Chinese History Institute of the

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Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, including Liu Danian (1915–1999), Li Shu (1912–1988), and Li Xin (1918–2004), who were conducting the Four Cleanups [siqing] in Zhangye County, Gansu Province. Liu Danian was very enthusiastic about Mao’s new directive concerning historical writing, but he and the others felt quite confused about how to enact it. What puzzled them, according to Li Xin’s memoir, was how to integrate the materials of family, village, and commune histories into the academic research of history, while also being politically correct. Li Xin knew that historiography in Mao’s time was expected to serve proletarian politics and that only good things could be said about poor people. However, what he saw during his work in the Four Cleanups Campaign, the rural economic aspect of the Socialist Education Movement, was nothing more than poverty, backwardness, and the dark side of socialist China. In addition, none of the historians in the Modern History Institute were familiar with “factory history [changshi].” In fact, Li Xin and his colleagues only paid lip service to the idea of the Four Histories. In private conversations in 1964, Li Shu and Li Xin even questioned Mao’s radical historical thinking that considered “hatred and struggle” a permanent and absolute pattern in landlord-peasant relations.40 An editor of the authoritative journal Historical Research [Lishi yanjiu], Li Shu adopted a “scientific” and “historicist” attitude towards historical research as early as 1961, and it was clear that he was uncomfortable with Mao’s radical assumption of class struggle as the key to historical study, let alone Mao’s extremely populist methodology of digging up the individual, familial, and communal experiences of peasants’ past suffering.41 In spite of the skepticism of many trained historians, the CCP’s Beijing Municipal Committee, which was sending its work teams to the countryside to carry out socialist education, immediately responded to Mao’s call. Without relying on professional historians, the work team “borrowed” some people with strong writing abilities – including the prominent short story writer Ai Wu (1904–1992) – to work on a publishing project that compiled village and family histories. The literary writers’ participation in interviews – and their work transcribing, polishing, and editing the life stories – implicitly, yet fundamentally, challenged the legitimacy of historical research based on the critical selection and careful interpretation of reliable source materials. At the same time, the displacement of trained historians and the engagement of fiction writers in historical writing made the literary flavor and character of historiography a default value, blurring the line between fact and fiction.42 Local history written in this climate of class struggle was selective and politicized. In September 1963, Wugong Village, Hebei Province, produced its own history aimed at educating young people in class awareness and revolutionary traditions. In their local history, the authors “exaggerated suffering in the first half of the 20th century and were silent on the state policies that caused starvation in the early 1960s.”43 By November 1963, a writing group in Beijing produced several volumes, including a “history of blood and tears” of poor peasants in Louzi Village and an account of the crimes of its landholding class. Another

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was a compilation of family histories based on interviews of formerly oppressed people, who invoked their memories of the old society. The accounts of past bitterness included one hired laborer’s frustration that he was not able to get his mother a piece of watermelon that she desired before her death. A tenant forced to flee his creditors was eventually crippled by frostbite. A young man was unable to have normal bowel movements after eating the hard shells of grain. The process of Four-History writing prompted the authors to write an essay titled “A Tentative Discussion of the Significance of Compiling and Studying the ‘Four Histories’ [Shi lun bianxie he yanjiu ‘sishi’ de zhongda yiyi],” published in Historical Research in 1965.44 In a 2006 article, the main compiler recalled the process of reproducing peasant memories. He reiterated that the goal of writing local and family histories was to educate the people, and he admitted that the writing group which he joined was composed of three to five writers and that the completed work would be read and approved by the Party organization at higher levels. The article recalled the selection process for the interviewees, and also the time limitations of storytelling because all the narratives were supposed to focus on the oppression and exploitation of peasants immediately before Liberation in 1949.45 In the preface to Poor Peasant’s “Family Tree” through Ten-Thousand Generations [Pinnong jiapu wandai chuan], the editors claimed that one of the outcomes of Louzi Village’s historical writing was that the poor and lowermiddle peasants conducted a large-scale class education campaign through “Recollecting Bitterness and Pondering Sweetness [yiku sitian].” The peasants, they explained, not only compared and contrasted past and present, but also elevated their consciousness from individual, familial, and fragmentary bitterness to the bitterness of the whole class, and in so doing educated the youth and refreshed the memories of old people. The editors detailed the methods adopted: members of the Communist Youth League in the village were mobilized to interview former hired laborers and poor peasants among the elderly. Additionally, sessions for families to speak bitterness were organized to collect source material, which was edited and polished into drafts, which then were extensively discussed and supplemented by the peasants. Thus, the book was considered a composition of the masses as a collective.46 The preface to the Beijing Series of the Four Histories of 1964 illuminates the educational purpose of the compilation and the significance of remembering the past: The younger generation is the successor to the revolutionary cause, and it has heavy duties and a long way to go. Only when youth truly learn the hardships of the old generation […] recollecting bitterness and pondering sweetness, can they not forget the past and never forget where they come from.47 In the postscript, the editors reiterated the necessity of educating youths who had not experienced life in the old society. Due to their lack of life

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experiences in the dark old society as well as in class struggle, the article reasoned, young people were vulnerable to the corruption of bourgeois ideology. At the same time, some people who had lived in the old society were “forgetting” the class hatred and suffering of the past. According to the postscript, their minds had “faded,” and thus, all people needed an education by reading family histories that focused on bitterness, hatred, and misery.48 To encourage the cultural and historiographical trend of writing family and village histories, the People’s Daily published a polemical article, entitled “Write History of Peasants; Write History for Peasants [Xie nongnin de lishi, wei nongmin xie lishi],” that challenged the elitist tendency of historical writing. Peasants love learning history, the article asserted, but they were deprived of the opportunity to learn “correct” and “scientific” historical knowledge and were largely misled by folklore that was fabricated by the exploitative class. The article argued that peasants had deep feelings about the history of the motherland and the communist revolution and what they needed were good books and proper guidance. The article confirmed the educational power of historical knowledge and pointed out that historical knowledge was an ideological arena in which Marxists wrestled with reactionaries, fighting for the support of the young audience. Writers must prioritize the history of the peasants’ own struggle, because the peasants had been the main players in Chinese history for thousands of years. To achieve this, historians needed to change their methods and go deep into the villages to investigate the past and present of the countryside and understand the living conditions, emotions, and demands of the peasants. The article lauded the campaign of writing the Four Histories as a “great movement of selfeducation” and called on historians to get involved. Based upon feedback from the peasants themselves, the main weaknesses of existing historical works were summed up: they were boring, suffered from a lack of vivid narratives, used overly scholarly language, and lacked familiarity and relevance.49 From Memory to Fiction Collective memory can be defined as “recollections of a shared past ‘that are retained by members of a group, large or small, that experienced it’,” and this “socially constructed, historically rooted collective memory functions to create social solidarity in the present.”50 During the process of socialist education, the party-state attempted to build a class identity grounded in a shared memory of past suffering, but did so by gradually compromising historical authenticity. “Pure memory” was reworked to take on “quasi-hallucinatory forms” when it was put into images to configure tragedy and trauma.51 Emphasizing class confrontation, hatred, and bitter memory, the narrative schema of semifictional family histories demonstrates several common characteristics. First, many family histories during the socialist education movement appeared in multiple literary magazines at national and provincial levels or were published in volumes dedicated to reportage literature [baogao wenxue],

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emphasizing “vividness [shengdong]” and “literary character [wenxuexing]” in addition to “educational meaning.”52 The famous myth about a female tenantfarmer named Leng Yueying (1911–1984) being locked up in landlord Liu Wencai’s (1887–1949) “water dungeon [shui lao]” was published as fact-based “reportage literature” in 1963, which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 4.53 Many works in this genre were written by authors of fiction and essays. The short story writer Ai Wu wrote an article entitled “Miserable Childhood [Ku’nan de tongnian]” to tell the stories of two peasants in the Beijing suburbs. The stories were published by the leading literary magazine People’s Literature [Renmin wenxue] in February 1964. The same issue also contained another family history written by the famous essayist Yang Shuo (1913–1968). Second, landlords and capitalists were portrayed as extremely brutal and inhumane, particularly to women and children. Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., points out that the post-famine recalling-bitterness propaganda was aimed at altering the villagers’ memory of the Great Famine (the “bitterness” produced by the CCP) and replacing it with the “bitterness” from the years before 1949.54 Yet, if the memory of the Great Leap Forward and the famine was more about bodily pain and hunger, the bitterness in pre-1949 China presumably had a much broader spectrum, ranging from physical pains and emotional frustrations to sociopolitical inequality, and emphasized the sense of humiliation and de-humanization in the old society. One such story recounted the experience of a boy named Xiaotieliang, who said that he was a helper in the house of landlord Kang and was beaten all day long. He would be beaten if he got up late, if he moved slowly, if the landlord’s little son cried, or if the pig got sick or a chicken died. If a landlord was a local philanthropist, then the story was meant to reveal his true face as a sham who hoodwinked laboring people.55 In Guizhou, the provincial literary magazine published a story entitled “The Suffering of Two Generations [liangdairen de ku’nan],” in which a female narrator told about how the landlord’s wife pinched her breasts, causing her milk to spray several inches. This story was written by the Writing Group of the Four Histories.56 A reader whose letter was published in the October 1964 issue of Shandong Literature [Shandong wenxue] was deeply moved by the three family histories that had appeared in the magazine earlier that year. The reader said that the stories were all true and very educational, and offered his own examples of bitter experiences. He knew a 13-year-old girl, Xu Ronghua, who had worked as a servant and had had to carry the landlord’s daughter on her back to school. Grandma Zhang, another servant, was forced to drink her employer’s urine. Of the Zhangs’ twelve children, three were tortured to death by capitalists, six were starved to death, and the remaining three were sold. However, the author of the letter said that the family stories also provided evidence of how sweet the new society was. Xu Ronghua survived and became a Party member, and the sold children were returned to Grandma Zhang with the aid of the communist government. The details cited in the letter repeated the sadistic plots of the bitter story: as a wet nurse, Grandma Zhang’s breasts were pinched by her

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employer, Landlord Chen Number Three, with wood splints to produce more milk until her breasts became red and swollen. To prevent Zhang from breastfeeding her own child, Chen was said to have used iron rings to encase Zhang’s nipples when she went out and to have them checked when she returned.57 Third, narratives about the plight of poor peasants in the pre-Liberation countryside all emphasized their inability to rebel. The stories include comments such as: “The hired laborers had to endure no matter how hard they were exploited and oppressed by the landlords” and “For those in dire poverty who owned nothing, no matter how capable they were in the old society, they still had to jump into the fire pit even if they knew [the consequence]. Otherwise, how could they survive?”58 Peasants were presented as weak and hopeless in the stories, which all ended with salvation coming from the Communist Party and Chairman Mao. However, while the Party exaggerated the weakness and passivity of the poor to highlight its own role as the savior of the oppressed classes, it simultaneously undermined another historiographical and ideological tradition of its own – the prominence the Party gave to peasants’ rebellions and revolution as the driving force of Chinese history to replace the influence of the bourgeoisie in Western Marxist historiography. On the one hand, ruthless landlords, as depicted in the stories, made no concessions at all. On the other, the oppressed peasants never attempted to rebel.59 This lack of coherence implies a tension between the narrative of the peasant revolution and the emphasis placed on the leading role of the Party. Overall, historicity in its strict sense was less relevant now that the historical narrative by the people had become the revolutionary aesthetic. Hayden White’s summary of Schopenhauer applies: “Fantasy is superior to fact, which means that poetry is superior to history.”60 Fourth, the history of ethnic minority families also followed the oppressionliberation master narrative pattern by denouncing slave owners among the Tibetan and the Yi people. A collection of stories was edited by the Chinese Department of Sichuan Teacher’s College and published under the general title Unyielding Serfs [Buqu de nongnu]. In the stories, Tibetan Buddhist Lamas were portrayed as violent and abusive people who whipped the narrator, a hungry little slave who stole butter from the temple. A Lama then threw him into the monastery’s jail, where he was nailed to a wooden board. A recurring theme was that serfs who offended chiefs might have their eyes scooped out or a tendon removed. In the stories, a living Buddha was called a reactionary, and the abused serfs were said to have privately cursed Bodhisattva and Dharma for being hypocritical.61 A family history book on the experience of the Yi people in Sichuan’s Xiaoliangshan mountain area contained one story about a slave whose owner gave her sheep excrement to eat, which the slave refused. Another story told of how the narrator’s children were pulled away and sold by a slave owner, forced to work when they were four and five years old. Besides the fixed pattern proclaiming that all slaves were emancipated by the Communist Party and Chairman Mao, one story particularly emphasized that

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“The Han nationality big brother is our closest family,” in the words of one former slave.62 When dealing with bitter stories in monasteries, the stories tended to emphasize the “class” divide between “upper-class monks” and “lower-class monks” in terms of different standards of living.63 Fifth, while fictitious stories were often told in the name of “reportage,” sometimes they featured a real person as the main character. The famous soldier-writer Gao Yubao (1927–?), an orphan who had labored for a landlord, published his autobiographical account titled Gao Yubao in 1951, which was reprinted in 1972. Gao explained how his experiences were written and revised as a semi-fiction: With the help and cultivation of the Party and the leaders, I finally completed the first draft of the xiaoshuo, fiction.64 Later, the Party Committee of the army dispatched experts to help me revise. Based on the draft, we cut, concentrated, and summarized the characters and the plots, and thus finished this novel.65 Here Gao does not deny that his work is a fictional xiaoshuo based on personal experiences, and that it had been reworked by the author and professional writers to meet the needs of political propaganda. Gao further discussed how his understanding of how to write xiaoshuo was deepened: When I started to write Gao Yubao […] I did not have time to study some political theories and lacked profound understanding of the great Mao Zedong Thought […] Particularly I did not know what xiaoshuo means, nor did I know that the personas and plots can be created. As a result, what I wrote was nothing but an autobiography […] When revising it, I reasonably highlighted the spirit of rebellion of Yubao and the masses, and enhanced the class feelings among the laboring people in their consolidated struggle. I also deepened my exposure of the reactionary nature of the exploitative class. In addition, I added […] the Party’s influence on Yubao.66 For the reader, an autobiographical account whose title is identical to the author’s name is easily accepted as truth, but Gao did not mind blending real experiences with imagination and editing based on political need. In addition to writing, the visualization of class education became another form of preserving and reinforcing the collective memory of victimization. The theme was soon boiled down to two key words: bitterness/suffering [ku] and hatred [chou]. The documentary “Never Forget Class Bitterness, Forever Remember the Hatred in the Sea of Blood [Buwang jieji ku, yongji xiehai chou],” made in 1965, was based on an exhibition promoting class education in Shandong Province. The film showed the objects on display, including a leather whip, club, and walnuts filled with lead that capitalists allegedly used to beat workers. These items were interpreted in the voiceover narrative as

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part of the “so-called bourgeois civilization.” The documentary showed a photo of an unemployed worker selling his daughter. Most other images were painted pictures with motifs such as child laborers burying, with agony, the dead body of their little colleague, headmen watching them with whips in their hands; a child worker with a fever who fainted into a wok filled with boiling water; and a sick child buried alive in a wooden box while he was striking it from inside with his fists. The plight of the peasants was another main theme of the exhibition and of the documentary, both of which displayed a quilt that a poor peasant family had allegedly used for three generations, a wooden pillow that was said to have been used for four generations, and the one pair of pants that a poor couple had shared for many years. The forced separation of families by poverty was a recurring theme of the exhibition and recalling-bitterness literature. Parents were forced to sell their children; a wife was sold to a human trafficker to pay her husband’s debts to the landlord. The documentary ended with the liberation of the people and the founding of the People’s Republic. The voiceover stated, In the socialist society, class struggle still exists. All these that have passed, we can never forget! The blood debt owed by imperialism, the crimes committed by landlords and capitalists, and all the suffering inflicted on us—can we forget them? Afterward, the documentary showed a village history tablet that bore an inscription of four characters, Yong Bu Wang Ji: “never forget.” The voiceover concluded: “No, we cannot. This hatred is as deep as the sea and the animosity is as heavy as a mountain, and let them be inscribed on the rock and let our offspring never forget.”67 All the textualized and visualized recalling-bitterness stories pointed to one goal. The evilness of the old society must not be forgotten. People’s hatred of it must be perpetuated. The stories all contributed to the social imagining of the old society. It is very difficult – and perhaps not relevant – to authenticate or debunk these stories. It is more appropriate to see them as rhetoric to serve the purpose of socialist propaganda and education. As rhetoric, they were important then for the party-state to tell its version of historical truth, as it is important now for us to understand how the partystate constructed historical imagination.68 Stage Bitter Memory: Political Ritual and Public Performance In the 1960s, the party-state sought to indoctrinate students through face-toface oral reports by older people that emphasized their suffering before Liberation. One document of the Chinese Communist Youth League Central Committee in 1963 urged all middle and high schools to use the bitter memory of the older generation to educate students so that they would not forget the past, and it reminded the people that without timely education,

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even those with good class backgrounds could degenerate into counterrevolutionaries.69 Turning a personal, bitter story of an older 67 Anonymous, “Bu wang jieji ku, laoji xuehai chou” [Never Forget Class Bitterness, Forever Remember the Hatred in the Sea of Blood] person into a public political asset was the essence of the recalling-bitterness sessions around the country. They operated on the belief that traumatic memory and emotional power could perpetuate revolutionary enthusiasm and a love for socialism. Selecting the right person to speak and creating the appropriate theatrical atmosphere was crucial to the success of recalling bitterness and evoking emotional responses from the audience. In their study of Chen Village, Anita Chan et al. describe the “recall past bitterness” meetings that were held every evening in the village’s cultural hall: “kerosene lamps were extinguished to evoke the darkness of the past,” and trained peasant orators would gulp wordlessly in pain when their narrations reached a climax. Listeners at such events would cry out slogans such as “Down with the old society!” “Down with the Guomindang reactionaries!” or “Down with the landlord class! Long live Chairman Mao!”70 The ability to touch the audience was the main criterion in selecting speakers. After being chosen, the speakers were trained further to ensure they were eloquent, emotional, and able to cry easily.71 One speaker, Master Hao, showed good skills in sobbing, talking, eating a steamed bun, and wiping off tears – almost at the same time.72 The audience for the recalling-bitterness speeches varied, but on the Yanglin village farm in August 1963, the sessions started as a forum to educate young farm workers who were thought to lack the experience of being oppressed and exploited and to have low levels of class hatred. The Rural Work Department of the CCP’s Liaoning Provincial Committee confirmed in its report that largescale recalling-bitterness meetings at one farm worked very well among its 250 workers. The report said that recollection and speaking bitterness were the best methods to elevate class consciousness and provoke class hatred. The document also explained how the department picked and cultivated four orators with “big bitterness and deep hatred” to address the meeting, which stimulated widespread bitterness-speaking among listeners.73 On a Jiangsu Province farm, sent-down youth constituted 54% of the workers by November 1963, and the farm targeted the sent-down youth to carry out thought work by inviting a Red Army veteran to tell his story of the Long March. According to a report, the young workers often compared the standard of living on the farm with that of their native city of Nanjing and felt unhappy about rural life. However, after the bitterness-recalling, they started to contrast their lives with those of Red Army soldiers, stating: “After the contrast, we found we were living in happiness without knowing it!”74 In one People’s Commune in Hebei Province, the masses were organized to recall bitterness caused by four evil forces: imperialism, feudalism, capitalism, and the small-peasant economy. The report submitted to the Party center and circulated to all provinces recounted the youths’ alleged statements: “Those bitter things shown in films were actually experienced by my parents” and “This was not just bitterness of one or two

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families, but all the families of the oppressed class had it.” However, some students seemed to be overly dramatic in the recalling-bitterness meeting because of the emotional atmosphere and feelings of peer pressure, and the genuine effect was questionable. One former student later said: All the students cried when they heard the stories. The atmosphere was that if you didn’t, others might think you didn’t have class consciousness. There was this type of suppression […] and it became a show […] For about ten days after the recalling-bitterness meeting, most of the students would become more activist […] and do more good things in the dormitory […] However, after that, they’d revert to their usual behavior.75 Besides educating the younger generation, who were assumed to lack the experience of living in the old society, recalling bitterness was also used to influence older peasants who did have such experiences. In late 1963, a commune in Shaanxi Province held its first recalling-bitterness, ponderingsweetness meeting. The speakers were the most miserable and poorest peasants in the area, and other peasants were required to attend the meeting so their enthusiasm for “loving the new society and the collective” could be fully aroused. One former middle peasant who attended the meeting even wrote a folksong based on the content of a speaker’s report, in which he listed past sufferings from the old society, including rent, debt, labor service, conscription, and beatings.76 While the famine had greatly frustrated and disappointed the peasants, the post-famine meetings of recollection, comparison, and contrast encouraged, to some extent, the peasants to think positively and to continue to trust the Party.77 A former poor peasant family in Hebei Province applied for membership in the poor-peasant association in 1965, and their application letter stated that the socialist education campaign had enabled them to “more deeply realize that the current happiness is brought forth by Chairman Mao and the Communist Party,” and the “contrasting of current happiness” with “the past bitterness” made them hate the old society even more.78 Each recalling-bitterness meeting had its own specific but generally volatile agenda, depending on the political climate and needs of the time. In the Four Cleanups Campaign targeting grassroots-level officials, speaking bitterness by former poor peasants was utilized as a means to attack the village powerholders. The first task was to reveal the crimes of landlords before Liberation and then accuse the bad elements that had snuck into the Party after Liberation. In Yanggao County, Shanxi Province, a brigade mobilized 127 women over 16 years old to participate in recalling-bitterness sessions, and one woman accused her parents-in-law as well as local cadres who withheld food from her.79 One purpose of remembering the past in Chen Village, Guangdong, was to reinforce the awareness of China being encircled by enemies, such as the US and the USSR, and to emphasize the importance of guarding “political power” on behalf of the Chinese and other oppressed

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peoples in the world.80 In Chen Village, such recalling-bitterness sessions commonly sought two goals. One was to reiterate that peasants’ lives were improving, and the other was to call on the peasants to examine themselves and denounce their personal acts of selfishness.81 As an organizer and observer of this method in 1964, Yang Shangkun (1907–1998) was convinced that recalling bitterness was the best way to seize power from grassroots leaders. For him, it was an education provided to the work team by the masses, and not just a method of self-education for the masses.82 Reflections on the Recalling-Bitterness Experience During the Cultural Revolution, peasants were encouraged to participate in the political education of the sent-down youth from urban areas.83 The re-education of the urban youths by peasants through the emotional transmission of bitter experiences changed the traditional power relationship between educated elites and less-educated peasants. In the scenarios of speaking-bitterness sessions, bitterness became the symbolic capital of the peasants, who were now teaching budding intellectuals. Peasants were thus empowered, and the intellectual superiority of students was undercut because they lacked valuable life experiences.84 Many memoirs of the Cultural Revolution’s sent-down youths, written in the 1980s and 1990s, recall how formerly urban students were re-educated by old peasants about past bitterness. Yet, these reminiscences are mixed, showing both the effect and the limits of state propaganda and its politics of memory, as well as the audiences’ skepticism and resistance, the unintended consequences of recalling bitterness.85 During the Cultural Revolution, the promotion of hatred through imagining the evil old society did contribute to Red Guard activism. The diary of one Red Guard shows that in a class at Peking University in July 1966, the recalling of bitterness by an invited old worker was directed against Lu Ping (1914–2002), the Party Secretary. After the report, one student said with tears on his face: “Lu Ping [ … ] wants to restore capitalism at Beida, and inflict suffering on poor peasants for the second time. We children of workers-peasants-soldiers will never agree!”86 The deep sense of victimization was effectively used to justify the violence and physical abuse of Red Guards. One former Red Guard recalled that when he and his peers were reluctant to beat students with bad class backgrounds, one radical student stood out to do “thought work.” He talked about the bitterness and hatred of the laboring people, the slaughter of revolutionary masses by the Nationalist Party, and the death of his uncle in the Civil War. Through tears, the student asked: “Back then, who sympathized with us? Who pitied us? Today, can we have mercy on these people? Can we pity them?” Upon hearing this, some students’ eyes turned red, shouting: “No, we can’t!” Some turned back and slapped the face of the student who had been beaten, though doing so half-heartedly.87 Other former students, however, recalled their experiences with skepticism. One former sent-down youth working in

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Inner Mongolia wrote that recalling-bitterness meetings became the “privilege” of a chosen few in his village. However, the content was never consistent, he reported. The orator first said that he became a shepherd for the landlord at 12, but then he would say that was when he was ten. The village chief would go so far as to speak about the bitterness he suffered during the Great Famine in 1961 and 1962.88 In Yunnan Province in 1969, the Provincial Revolutionary Committee issued a directive requiring ideological education for sent-down youth. In one village, there was a famous female orator who had been an adopted daughter-in-law. With innocent eyes, a tanned face, and big, rough hands, the old woman convinced listeners of her past suffering. When her talk reached its climax, she burst into tears and cried out loud. Her crying, which was in itself an accusation, automatically triggered the crying of the audience, and was followed by slogan shouting. The sent-down youth who provided the reminiscence, however, said that he was later told that the old woman’s four brothers starved to death during the famine of 1960, and the bitterness under communism, which she was forbidden to mention, might have been the real cause of her crying.89 Very often, an invited bitterness speaker confused preLiberation bitterness and post-Liberation suffering, as recounted by a low-level government official, Party Secretary Ye. According to Ye, the local government usually invited a person whose “living conditions improved significantly after the Liberation” to address the youngsters. Once, however, an old man described the “difficult time he experienced after the failure of the Great Leap Forward: how much hunger he had suffered during that period, and how many people he had seen die.” The host of the event wanted to stop him, but found that the young audience listened with amusement, that is, until the host himself began to feel like laughing.90 For the sentdown youth Zhu Xueqin (1952-), who later became a famous historian, an old peasant’s anachronism in accusing collectivization under communism, the starvation of the villagers, and deprivation of the right to beg for food, was much more enlightening than it was entertaining, because it destroyed his youthful dream of revolution in toto.91 Another influential ritual of recalling bitterness was called “eating a recalling-bitterness meal,” in which low-quality materials were used to make a meal so that young people could imagine how poorly the oppressed, laboring people ate before Liberation. Some recalling-bitterness meals were made of tree leaves, potherb, bran, and white mud.92 How the barely edible food was eaten was considered a sign of political attitude; those who ate fast would be praised, and those who ate slowly or threw the food away were criticized.93 One essay published in 1998 recounted the author’s experience of eating a recalling-bitterness meal when he was an elementary school student in the early 1970s. The ritual followed this order: after the announcement was made by the Commune’s party secretary, a female teacher sang a well-known propaganda song, which went, “Stars in the sky, the moon is bright/A meeting is called in the production team/And we speak bitterness and utter grievances.” The song was followed by the speaking bitterness from former poor peasants. If one of the peasants was too shy to talk in public, a militia

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leader spoke bitterness on his or her behalf. After shouting the slogan, “Never forget class bitterness, firmly remember the hatred of blood and tears,” the assembled ate the recalling-bitterness meal. The author detailed the materials used to cook the educational meal, including steamed buns made from the flour of ground sweet potato vines, added to the leaves and starch of sweet potatoes. After the coarse buns were finished, the teacher asked the school children, “Was it good?” To the astonishment of the teacher, the kids all joined the chorus: “Yes!” For the children, the sweet potato-based bun was actually not much different from what they normally ate at home. Prepared for an ideological education, the teacher was ready to say, “Yes, comrades, it was indeed very bad. In the evil old society […].” Yet the reply of the students contradicted his expectations. Infuriated, the teacher pinched the ear of a boy and stared at him, saying: “Say it again and say it is good or bad!” The boy replied: “No—good.” The teacher turned to other kids, saying: “Everyone should be honest. Was it good or bad?” The enlightened students then shouted: “No—good!” “That’s correct, comrades,” the teacher replied, and then started his lecture about past bitterness and present sweetness.94 In his novella, My Two Realms–Yin and Yang: Love in the Revolutionary Era [Wode yinyang Liangjie/geming shiqi de aiqing], the writer and former sent-down youth Wang Xiaobo (1952–1997) showed the deepest cynicism towards the recalling-bitterness education he experienced. Wang mocked the cliche´s and fabrications of recalling-bitterness speeches during the Cultural Revolution: “All the speeches would say how bitter the past was and how the poor ate poorly, and how sweet it is today: We can even eat rice. It suffices to hear just one,” the narrator of the novella says. His girlfriend then retells a bitterness story originally told by a PLA officer and supervisor of student military training, who recalled how he and his elder sister depended on each other in the evil old society. On one New Year’s Eve (“This type of story always occurs at the New Year’s Eve,” the narrator notes), when it was snowing badly (“It was always snowing,” the narrator comments), the sister and brother went out begging for food. The protagonist-narrator then interrupts his girlfriend, saying, “I know what will happen—the sister will be bitten by the dog of a landlord.” But the narrator is wrong. His girlfriend says that the sister found something on the snowy ground that looked like a sweet potato, and she picked it up and brought it home. Unfortunately, the sweet potato-shaped item was, in actuality, the frozen excrement of the landlord. In the novella, the narrator and his girlfriend discuss the meaning of this bitterness story. His interpretation is that the story showed that poor people not only had to eat bad food, but were also forced to eat excrement. His girlfriend, however, believes that the landlord defecated sweet-potato-shaped excrement on purpose to humiliate the poor peasant. In conclusion, Wang Xiaobo jokes that the old landlord must have been born with a vicious anus and that the story, if one accepts the analysis of the girlfriend, is creative, and even romantic. The novella goes on to narrate another bitterness story full of sexual connotations in a report given by the same officer. In the second story,

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the four young aunts of the PLA officer are kidnapped by Japanese invaders, brought to a rundown temple, and raped in the darkness of night. The speech exposes the girlfriend-listener to the word and concept of “rape” for the first time. Instead of cultivating national hatred, the huge impact makes the adolescent girl develop a masochistic sexual fantasy, in which she is one of the four raped aunties.95 Conclusion Beginning in the 1950s, writing, speaking, and staging history from the bottom up emerged as a cultural movement aiming at persuading and educating the people in socialist China about the misery in the old society and the legitimacy of the new socialist state. Its multiple forms, including writing local and family histories, articulating recalling-bitterness stories in public, eating recallingbitterness meals, and publishing stories of bitter history died out only with the end of the Mao era. After that China entered a new period of reform and opening-up under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997). This was also when Chinese historiography started its turn to the master narrative of modernization, and the focal points became reform, elites, and urbanization in modern Chinese history.96 In this context, Chinese historians also started to retreat from the mythologization of history and switched to an approach based on empirical study.97 This chapter delineates the process of the political reconstruction of the old China that started as a mixed mission of popularizing historical writing as well as ideological education. It, too, had mixed legacies. On the one hand, it narrated the life-world of peasants who lived in pre-1949 China. The many interviews done by cadres and writers with the peasants and workers remain a valuable source of the memories of the people and in showing new directions for historians to engage ordinary people and redefine the discipline. The Maoist strategy of reshaping memory was certainly successful and had a profound effect: the influence of the practices of the 1960s – the writing of local history from the bottom-up, the transformation of personal experiences into public memory, the use of memory and its open articulation for ideological indoctrination, the state’s manipulation of the production of politicized memory, the fictionalization of historical narrative, rituals of speaking bitterness and eating recalling-bitterness meals, and class education exhibitions as a practice of politicized public history representation – have been ingrained in contemporary Chinese culture, helping construct a nexus of representation and imagination of “old society” and “landlord” in contrast to the “new society” and the Communist Party. Ironically, the recalling-bitterness, ponderingsweetness narrative strategy was unconsciously inherited by authors who grew up in the Mao era and later chose to emigrate to the West, when they wrote memoirs about their “bitter” experiences in Maoist China.98 However, in spite of its seemingly plausible methods, the cultural movement had obvious flaws. First, the interviewees were selected by the Party, and all

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articulations pointed to one teleological end: the bitter old society must be overthrown to usher in the new society led by the CCP. Any “sweet” or neutral memory of the old society was purged by the power of the state. Second, during the process, the experience was politically organized to fit into a standardized narrative. In addition to contributing to Red Guard violence, the exaggeration and fictionalization of the bitter past created not only false and abused memory but also epistemological difficulty for future generations seeking solid historical knowledge. Third, quasi-religious rituals such as eating recalling-bitterness meals were often unpopular and even counterproductive. The power of memory and its enactment never ended. Right after the Cultural Revolution, a series of “scar films” used flashbacks “motivated by a character remembering their suffering back then in the ‘Cultural Revolution.”’99 Jiao Guobiao (1963–), a former Peking University professor of journalism who was expelled because of his open attack on the CCP’s Department of Propaganda, launched an unofficial online magazine named “The Black Five Types Recall Old Times [Heiwulei yijiu]” in 2010. It publishes reminiscences by political outcasts in Maoist China, mainly the surviving children of landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists. The pieces in the magazine often read like new recalling-bitterness literature, yet they are about pain and suffering in the post-1949 new society. Similarly, bitter collective memory helps build new group identity among former rightists and the offspring of the “black five types” based on traumatic experience, memory, and a shared sense of victimization.100 Old “rightists” founded their own magazine, modestly titled “Small Scars of the Past [Wangshi weihen],” in 2007 in order to “tell all people in China and our descendants about our suffering.” It is notable that the editors of both magazines consciously call for tolerance, love, and harmony, but also for “rejecting forgetting [jujue yiwang].”101 At least as rhetoric, these narrations of the past, no matter how bitter they remain, are now invoked only to combat forgetfulness, to preserve memory, and to fight censorship and self-censorship, not to perpetuate hatred and struggle. Notes 1 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 2 Peter G. Zarrow, “Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China,” History and Memory 16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 67–107; Klaus Mühlhahn, “‘Remembering a Bitter Past’: The Trauma of China’s Labor Camps, 1949–1978,” History and Memory,16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 104–39; Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Trauma and Memory: The Case of the Great Famine in the People’s Republic of China (1959–1961),” Historiography East and West 1, no. 1 (2003), 39–67; Paul G. Pickowicz, “Memories of

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Revolution and Collectivization in China: The Unauthorized Reminiscences of a Rural Intellectual,” in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, ed. Rubie S. Watson (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), 127–47; Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University, 2004). Philip Huang points out that past scholarship on the “Four Cleanups” campaign in the countryside has not paid enough attention to the reenactment of landreform class struggle when focusing on struggle against rural cadres. See Philip Huang, “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 21, no. 1 (January 1995), 140. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 288–92. Roderick MacFarquhar sees the Socialist Education campaign as Mao’s effort to prevent revisionism, mainly targeting rural cadres, but he briefly mentions the “recitals of bitterness” during the process. For MacFarquhar, the organization of recalling bitterness was less about showing the communist cadres’ solidarity and ability to confront peasants’ resistance. See Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution vol. 3 The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 334, 341–342. Stephen Uhalley Jr. discusses the conflict between Mao and Liu and the intensified class-struggle theory and practice, and how the established historian Luo Ergang was criticized for his interpretation of the Taiping hero Li Xiucheng, but this approach is more focused on professional historians rather than the grassroots-level historical writing of the period. See Stephen Uhalley Jr., A History of the Chinese Communist Party (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1988), 130–139. Maurice Meisner also discusses the debates on history between 1962 and 1965, but he is still mainly focused on prominent scholars. See Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 299–300. Most research on modern and contemporary Chinese historical writing focuses on CCP leaders, trained scholars, or official histories rather than popular, mass-based historical writing that was assisted by writers. See Albert Feuerwerker, ed., History in Communist China (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968); Axel Schneider, “Between Dao and History: Two Chinese Historians in Search of a Modern Identity for China,” History and Theory 35, no. 4, Theme Issue 35: Chinese Historiography in Contemporary Perspective (December 1996): 54–73; and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Party Historiography in the People’s Republic of China,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 17 (January 1987): 77–94. For the study of speaking bitterness in Land Reform, see Li Lifeng, “Tugai zhong de suku: yizhong minzhong dongyuan jishu de weiguan fenxi” [Speaking Bitterness in Land Reform: A Microanalysis of a Technique of Mass Mobilization], Nanjing daxue xuebao no. 5 (May 2007): 97–109. For the characteristics of propaganda in socialist China, see Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 7, 14. For Chinese propaganda art during the Cultural Revolution, see Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 247. For the distinction between objective and representational realities, see Huang, “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution,” 105–143. For this framework of studying both dominance and resistance, see Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 19.

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10 The anti-bureaucratic dimension of the Socialist Education Movement was better known as the “Four Cleanups”—clean up politics, ideology, organization, and economy. See Richard Baum, Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party, and the Peasant Question, 1962–1966 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). Richard Madsen points out the importance of the ideological dimension of the movement in Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984), 69. 11 Li Ruojian, Zheshe: Dangdai Zhongguo shehui bianqian yanjiu [A Study of the Social Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Society] (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 2009), 103. 12 Huaiying Li, Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Macro-History, 1948–2008 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4. 13 Jin Chunming, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo jianshi, 1949–2007 [A Short History of the People’s Republic of China, 1949–2007] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2008), 74; Ezra Vogel, Canton under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949– 1968 (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 205. 14 Kang Sheng, “Kang Sheng zai Chengdu gaodeng jiaoyu gongzuo zuotanhui shang de jianghua” [Kang Sheng’s Speech at the Higher Education Work Conference in Chengdu], January 11, 1958. File No. 90, Cataloguing No. 1, File 1696, Guizhou Provincial Archives (hereafter GPA). 15 Guizhou sheng nongye ting guanyu xuanchuan jiaoyu gongzuo de zhishi [Guizhou Provincial Agricultural Department’s Directive Concerning the Work of Propaganda and Education], File No. 90, Cataloguing No. 1, File 1682, GPA. 16 Huaiying Li, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 132. 17 See Xushui xian xiezuo yundong weiyuanhui; Xushui xian wenxue yishujie lianhe hui[Writing Movement Committee of Xushui County; Xushui County Federation of Literature and Art], ed., Xushui renmin gongshe shi [A History of the People’s Communes in Xushui] (Baoding: Baoding diqu renmin chubanshe, 1959). 18 Xiao Wen, “Ping Xushui renmin gongshe shi,” Dushu no. 2 (1959), accessed February 30, 2011, http://www.cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTotal-DSZZ195923007.htm. 19 Xiao Donglian, Qiusuo Zhongguo: “Wenge” qian shinian shi [The Search for China: A History of the Decade before the Cultural Revolution] (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 2011), 993. 20 Ji’nan tieluju geming weiyuanhui zhenggongzu [Political Work Group of Jinan Railway Bureau], Xuexi cailiao [Materials for Studying], June 5, 1970 (Los Angeles: Zhongwen chubanwu fuwu zhongxin, 2002), 3. 21 Gao Hua, “Dayuejin yundong yu guojia quanli de kuozhang: yi Jiangsu sheng wei li” (The Great Leap Forward and the Expansion of State Power), in Gao Hua, Geming niandai (The Age of Revolution) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2010), 256. 22 Xiao, Qiusuo Zhongguo, 1007. 23 Gao Hua, “Jieji shenfen he chayi: 1949–1965 nian Zhongguo shehui de zhengzhi fenceng” [Class Identity and Stratification: 1949–1965], in Gao Hua, Zai lishi de fengling dukou [At the Fengling Ferry Crossing of History] (Hong Kong: Shidai guoji chuban gongsi, 2005), 326. 24 Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, 82–83. 25 Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 7, 40.

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26 Gao Hua, “Da jihuang zhong de liangshi shiyong zengliang fa yu dai shipin” [Food Substitutes during the Great Famine], in Gao, Zai lishi de fengling dukou, 168. 27 Vogel, Canton Under Communism, 207–08, 253. 28 Gao Hua, “Da zaihuang yu siqing yundong de qiyuan” [The Great Famine and the Origin of the Four Cleanups Campaign], in Gao, Zai lishi de fengling dukou, 195. 29 Song Renqiong, Song Renqiong huiyi lu [Memoir of Song Renqiong] (Beijing: Jiefangju chubanshe, 1994), 390. 30 Mao Zedong, “Zhongyang guanyu zhuajing jinxing nongcun shehui zhuyi jiaoyu de pishi” [The Center’s Instruction on Promoting Socialist Education in the Countryside], in Mao Zedong, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, di shi ce [Articles and Notes of Mao Zedong after 1949, vol. 10] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 297. 31 Mao Zedong, “Zai Hangzhou huiyi shang de jianghua” [Speech on the Hangzhou Conference], Mao Zedong sixiang wansui [Long Live Mao Zedong Thought], Unofficial publication of the Red Guards, n.p. 1969, 471. Here Mao did challenge the traditional understanding of the historian’s professionalism and called for historical research to be relevant to ordinary people’s lives. For a similar critical analysis of the role of historians among modern Western scholars, see Cubitt, History and Memory, 37. 32 Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 289. 33 Cited in Baum, Prelude to Revolution, 26. 34 For this technique and indoctrination, see Richard Baum and Frederick C. Teiwes, Ssu-Ch’ing: The Socialist Education Movement of 1962–1966 (Berkeley: The Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, 1968), 26. 35 Stephen Uhalley, Mao Tse-tung: A Critical Biography (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 145. 36 Zhang Tao, Shi Haiwei, “Cong Hexinlang dushi, kan Mao Zedong de shixue sixiang” [A Study of Mao Zedong’s Historical Thought in Light of His Poem Hexinlang/Reading History], Lilun xuekan, no. 11, serial no. 153 (2006): 101. 37 Zhang Yijiu, Mao Zedong du shi [Mao Zedong’s Reading of History] (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe, 2010), 35. 38 Ibid., 34. 39 For this turn of historiography, see John Bryan Starr, Continuing Revolution: The Political Thought of Mao (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 270. 40 Li Xin, “Siqing ji” [An Account of the Four Cleanups], in Guo Dehong and Lin Xiaobo, eds., Siqing yundong qinli ji [Personal Experiences during the Four Cleanups Campaign] (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 2008) 267–268. 41 For Li Shu’s historical thinking in the early 1960s, see Susanne WeigelinSchwiedrzik, “On Shi and Lun: Toward a Typology of Historiography in the PRC,” History and Theory 35, no. 4 (December 1996): 89, and Huaiying Li, Reinventing Modern China, 192–203. For Chinese historians’ attempt to achieve intellectual independence from the Soviet Union’s historiography, see Edward Q. Wang, “Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese Historiography and the Soviet Influence, 1949–1963,” Journal of Contemporary China 9, no. 23 (2000): 95–111. 42 The challenge to historicity and emphasis on the literary characteristics of historiography is actually a very post-modern way of thinking, and it was the tendency of Hayden White in Metahistory. See Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “On Shi and Lun,” 94. 43 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 37.

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44 Zhao Youfu, “Nongcun ‘siqing’ yundong zhong xie ‘sishi’ de chengxiao he qishi” [The Achievement of Writing the Four Histories in the Countryside], Beijing dangshi, no. 6 (2006): 52. 45 Ibid., 53. 46 Beijing shi louzizhuang renmin gongshe cunshi bianxiezu, Pinnong jiapu wandai chuan: Louzi zhuang renmin gongshe cunshi, jiashi xuanbian [Poor Peasant’s “Family Tree” through Ten-Thousand Generations: A History of the People’s Commune in Louzi Village] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1964), 2–3. 47 Ibid., 3. 48 Beijing sishi congshu bianji weiyuan hui, Beijing Sishi congshu 5: Erqi nutao gungun liu [Beijing Four Histories Series No. 5: Angry Waves of February Seventh] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe,1965), 1, 121. 49 Xia Xiang, “Xie nongmin de lishi, wei nongmin xie lishi” [Writing History of Peasants; Writing History For Peasants], Remin ribao, November 12, 1965. 50 Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 5–6. 51 This process of phenomenological construction is thoroughly analyzed by Paul Ricoeur in History, Memory, Forgetting, 52–55. For both Frederick Jameson and Paul Ricoeur, the capacity of organizing experience “narratively” is crucial, and both Hayden White and Jameson acknowledge that literature does help people understand the nature of human relationship with the past. See Frank Ankersmit, “The Dialects of Jameson’s Dialectics,” History and Theory: Studies on the Philosophy of History 51 (February 2012): 100. We might argue that the CCP had a purposeful blindness to the difference between novels and historical writing, as long as both allegedly capture the essence of the past. 52 See the editors’ preface to Zhongguo zuojia xiehui nongcun duwu gongzuo weiyuanhui, ed., Baogao wenxue, di yi ji [Reportage Literature] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1963), 2. 53 Li Lei, Zhi Guang, “Cong shuilao li huo chulai de renmen” [People Who Survived the Water Dungeon], in Baogao wenxue, di yi ji, 3–27. For how the water dungeon myth was challenged in recent years, see Guo Wu, “The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 142–46, included in this book as Chapter 4. 54 Ralph A. Thaxton, Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origin of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 303. 55 Beijing shi Louzizhuang renmin gongshe cunshi bianxiezu, Pinnong jiapu wandai chuan, 13. 56 Zhonggong Guiyang shiwei xuanchuanbu “wushi” bianxiezu [“Five Histories” Compilation Group of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Guiyang Municipal Committee], “Liangdai ren de zaoyu” [The Experiences of Two Persons], Shanhua (November/December 1964), 60. 57 Lu Hui, “Huanying zheyang de jiashi” [We Welcome Family History Like This], Shandong wenxue (October 1964), 77. 58 Ibid, 14. 59 For an assessment of the PRC historiography on peasant rebellion and its role in Chinese history, see Kwang-ching Liu, “World View and Peasant Rebellion: Reflections on Post-Mao Historiography,” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (February 1981): 295–326. For the Chinese Communist view of the role played by the peasant wars, see James P. Harrison, “Chinese Communist Interpretations of the Chinese Peasant Wars,” in Feuerwerker, History in Communist China, 189–215. 60 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 241.

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61 Ganzi Zangzu zizhizhou wenjiaoju/Sichuan shifan xueyuan zhongwen xi, eds., Buqu de nongnu [Unyielding Serfs] (Chengdu: Sichuan minzu chubanshe, 1977). 62 Ninglang Yizu zizhixian geweihui zhenggong zu, Buyuan zuo nuli de renmen [People Who Do Not Want to be Slaves] (Kuming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1972). 63 Jia Shanren: Dizhu zuixing lu [A Record of the Crimes of a Landlord] (Beijing: Nongcun duwu chubanshe, 1965), 32. 64 Xiaoshuo is a generic word in Chinese for fictional novels, novellas, and short stories. 65 Gao Yubao, Gao Yubao (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1972), 168. 66 Ibid., 169–71. 67 Anonymous, “Bu wang jieji ku, laoji xuehai chou” [Never Forget Class Bitterness, Forever Remember the Hatred in the Sea of Blood] Dianying wenxue, no. 4 (April 1966): 26–36. 68 For the importance of rhetoric rather than facts in studying the history of ideas in Foucault’s historical thinking, see Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993), 106–16. 69 “Gongqingtuan zhongyang pizhuan Chongqing jiuzhong he Anren zhongxue guanyu dui xuesheng jinxing jieji jiaoyu de jingyan” [CCYLCC’s Dissemination of the Work Experience of Class Education Undertaken by Chongqing No. 9 Middle School and Anren Middle School], my personal collection, November 21, 1963, 3. 70 Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 79. 71 Zhonggong Lezhi xianwei dangshi yanjiushi, Lezhi xian wenhua dageming yundong jishi (A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution in Lezhi County) (n.p., 2007), 172. 72 Wu Nailong, “Yikufan” [Recalling-Bitterness Meal], accessed November 16, 2011, http://wu-nailong.hxwk.org/2011/11/15/%E5%BF%86%E8%8B%A6%E9%A5%AD/. 73 Zhonggong Liaoning sheng wei nongcun gongzuo bu, “Guanyu Panjin nongkenju Xi’an nongchang shehuizhuyi jiaoyu yundong shidian gongzuo baogao” [Report on the Xi’an Farm’s Socialist Education Work under the Farming Bureau of Panjin], File No. 90, Cataloguing No. 1, File 3334, GPA. 74 “Jiangsu Yuntai nongchang dui chengshi xia chang qingnian shi zenyang jinxing zhengzhi sixiang gongzuo de?” [How Did the Yuntai Farm of Jiangsu Province Conduct Thought Work on Reeducated Urban Youths?], File No. 90, Cataloguing No. 1, File 3334, GPA. 75 Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985), 55–56. 76 Hou Yongfu, Nongmin riji [Diary of a Peasant] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2006), 124–25. 77 Positive feeling after the recalling-bitterness sessions can be also found in the discussion of rural politics in Peng Zhengde, Shengcun zhengzhi: guojia zhenghe zhong de nongmin rentong: yi 1950–1980 nian de Hunan sheng Liling xian wei ge’an [Politics of Subsistence: Peasant Identity in the Process of State Integration: A Case Study of Liling County, Hunan Province, 1950–1980] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2010), 209. 78 Huadong shifan daxue dangdai zhongguoshi yanjiu zhongxin, ed., Zhongguo dangdai minjian shiliao jikan [Non-Official Historical Source Materials of Contemporary China] vol.1 (Shanghai: Dongfan chubanzhongxin, 2009), 69. 79 Xing Long et al., Yue dang du shi: beifang nongcun de jitihua shidai [Consulting Archives, Reading History: The Collective Era of Rural North China] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2011), 231. 80 Chan et al, Chen Village, 78.

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81 Ibid., 79. 82 Yang Shangkun, Yang Shangkun riji (Diary of Yang Shangkun) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2001), 442. 83 Thomas P. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 167. 84 Pan Mingxiao (Michel Bonnin), Shiluo de yidai: Zhongguo de shangshan xiaxiang yundong 1968–1980 [Generation Perdue: Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits a la champagne en Chine, 1968–1980], trans. Annie Au-Yeung (Beijing: Zhongguo dabaike quan shu chu banshe, 2009), 29. Also see Deng, Zhongguo zhiqingmeng, 66. 85 For a theoretical position on the limits of the totalitarian state and its dominance of memory, see Rubie S. Watson, “Memory, History and Opposition,” in Watson, Memory, History and Opposition, 14–15. 86 Chen Huanren, Hong weibing riji [Diary of a Red Guard] (Hong Kong: Xianggang zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2006), 220. 87 Wen Dayong, Hong weibing chanhui lu [Redemption of a Red Guard] (Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe youxian gongsi, 2000), 283–84. 88 Fu Zhong, “Nao hong weibing na nian” [The Year that Saw the Red Guard Turbulence], in Benshu bianweihui, ed., Caoyuan qishi lu [Revelations of the Grassland] (Beijing: Zhongguo gongren chubanshe, 1991), 17. 89 Deng Xian, Zhongguo zhiqingmeng [Dreams of Chinese Sent-down Youths] (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2009), 64–66. 90 Huang Shu-min, The Spiral Road: Change in a Chinese Village Through the Eyes of a Communist Party Leader, 2nd edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 83–84. 91 Zhu Xueqin, “Li Hongxin de mimi” [The Secret of Li Hongxi], Nanfang zhoumo, February 23, 2005 92 Chen, Hong weibing riji, 180. 93 Deng, Zhongguo zhiqingmeng, 61. 94 Liu Jungang, “Yiku fan” [Recalling-Bitterness Meal], Shandong wenxue, July 1998, 66. 95 Wang Xiaobo, Wo de yinyang liang jie/Geming shiqi de aiqing [My Two Worlds: Yin and Yang/Love in the Era of Revolution] (Harbin: Beifang wenyi chubanshe, 2006), 204–06. 96 Huaiyin Li, “From Revolution to Modernization: The Paradigmatic Transition in Chinese Historiography in the Reform Era,” History and Theory, no. 49 (October 2010): 336–60. 97 Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 284–88. 98 Peter Zarrow, “Meanings of China’s Cultural Revolution: Memoirs of Exile,” Positions 7, no.1 (Spring 1999): 165–91. 99 Chris Berry, “Seeking Truth from Fiction: Feature Films as Historiography in Deng’s China,” Film History 7, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 90. 100 The online magazine Wangshi weihen, accessed May 14, 2011, www. chinainperspective.com/ArtShow.aspx?AID513903. 101 Tieliu, statement of his motivations and guidelines, accessed May 14, 2011, http:// boxun.com/news/gb/china/2011/07/201107230115.shtml.

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Li, Huaiying. Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Macro-History, 1948–2008. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Li, Lifeng. “Tugai zhong de suku: yizhong minzhong dongyuan jishu de weiguan fenxi” [Speaking Bitterness in Land Reform: A Microanalysis of a Technique of Mass Mobilization]. Nanjing daxue xuebao no. 5 (May 2007): 97–109. Li, Ruojian. Zheshe: Dangdai Zhongguo shehui bianqian yanjiu [A Study of the Social Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Society]. Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 2009. Liling County, Hunan Province, 1950–1980]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2010. Liu, Jungang. “Yiku fan” [Recalling-Bitterness Meal], Shandong wenxue, July 1998. Liu, Kwang-ching. “World View and Peasant Rebellion: Reflections on Post-Mao Historiography.” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (February 1981): 295–326. Lu, Hui. “Huanying zheyang de jiashi” [We Welcome Family History Like This]. Shandong wenxue, October, 1964. MacFarquhar, Roderick. The Origins of the Cultural Revolution vol. 3: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Madsen, Richard. Morality and Power in a Chinese Village. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984. Mao, Zedong. Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, di shi ce [Articles and Notes of Mao Zedong after 1949, vol. 10]. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996. Mao, Zedong. Mao Zedong sixiang wansui [Long Live Mao Zedong Thought], Unofficial publication of the Red Guards. n.p. 1969. Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Mittler, Barbara. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Asia Center, 2012. Mühlhahn, Klaus. “‘Remembering a Bitter Past’: The Trauma of China’s Labor Camps, 1949–1978,” History and Memory 16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 104–139. Ninglang Yizu zizhixian geweihui zhenggong zu, Buyuan zuo nuli de renmen [People Who Do Not Want to be Slaves]. Kuming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 1972. Pan, Mingxiao (Michel Bonnin). Shiluo de yidai: Zhongguo de shangshan xiaxiang yundong 1968–1980 [Generation Perdue: Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits a la champagne en Chine, 1968–1980]. Translated byAnnie Au-Yeung. Beijing: Zhongguo dabaike quan shu chu banshe, 2009. Peng, Zhengde. Shengcun zhengzhi: guojia zhenghe zhong de nongmin rentong: yi 1950–1980 nian de Hunan sheng Liling xian wei ge’an [Politics of Subsistence: Peasant Identity in the Process of State Integration: A Case Study of Pickowicz, Paul G. “Memories of Revolution and Collectivization in China: The Unauthorized Reminiscences of a Rural Intellectual.” In Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism. Edited by Rubie S. Watson. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), 127–147. Ralph, A. Thaxton. Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origin of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

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Schneider, Axel. “Between Dao and History: Two Chinese Historians in Search of a Modern Identity for China.” History and Theory 35, no. 4, Theme Issue 35: Chinese Historiography in Contemporary Perspective (December 1996): 54–73. Shue, Vivienne. The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Song, Renqiong. Song Renqiong huiyi lu [Memoir of Song Renqiong]. Beijing: Jiefangju chubanshe, 1994. Stephen, Uhalley. Mao Tse-tung: A Critical Biography. New York: New Viewpoints, 1975. Tieliu, statement of his motivations and guidelines, accessed May 14, 2011, http:// boxun.com/news/gb/china/2011/07/201107230115.shtml Uhalley, Stephen Jr. A History of the Chinese Communist Party. Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1988. Vogel, Ezra. Canton under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949–1968. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Wang, Ban. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University, 2004. Wang, Edward Q. “Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese Historiography and the Soviet Influence, 1949–1963.” Journal of Contemporary China 9, no. 23 (2000): 95–111. Wang, Xiaobo. Wo de yinyang liang jie/Geming shiqi de aiqing [My Two Worlds: Yin and Yang/Love in the Era of Revolution]. Harbin: Beifang wenyi chubanshe, 2006. Wangshi weihen online magazine, accessed May 14, 2011, www.chinainperspective. com/ArtShow.aspx?AID513903. Watson, Rubie S. ed. Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. “Trauma and Memory: The Case of the Great Famine in the People’s Republic of China (1959–1961).” Historiography East and West 1, no. 1 (2003): 39–67. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. “On Shi and Lun: Toward a Typology of Historiography in the PRC.” History and Theory 35, no. 4 (December 1996): 74–95. Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. “Party Historiography in the People’s Republic of China.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 17 (January 1987): 77–94. Wen, Dayong. Hong weibing chanhui lu [Redemption of a Red Guard]. Hong Kong: Mingbao chubanshe youxian gongsi, 2000. Wen, Xiao. “Ping Xushui renmin gongshe shi.” Dushu no. 2 (1959), accessed February 30, 2011, http://www.cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTotal-DSZZ195923007.htm White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Wu, Guo. “The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 142–146. Wu, Nailong. “Yikufan”[Recalling-Bitterness Meal], accessed November 16, 2011, http://wu-nailong.hxwk.org/2011/11/15/%E5%BF%86%E8%8B%A6%E9%A5%AD/ Xia, Xiang. “Xie nongmin de lishi, wei nongmin xie lishi” [Writing History of Peasants; Writing History For Peasants]. Remin ribao, November 12, 1965. Xiao, Donglian. Qiusuo Zhongguo: “Wenge” qian shinian shi [The Search for China: A History of the Decade before the Cultural Revolution]. Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 2011.

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Xing, Long et al. Yue dang du shi: beifang nongcun de jitihua shidai [Consulting Archives, Reading History: The Collective Era of Rural North China]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2011. Xushui xian xiezuo yundong weiyuanhui; Xushui xian wenxue yishujie lianhe hui [Writing Movement Committee of Xushui County; Xushui County Federation of Literature and Art], ed., Xushui renmin gongshe shi [A History of the People’s Communes in Xushui]. Baoding: Baoding diqu renmin chubanshe, 1959. Yang, Dali. Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Yang, Shangkun. Yang Shangkun riji [Diary of Yang Shangkun]. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2001. Zarrow, Peter. “Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China.” History and Memory 16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 67–107. Zarrow, Peter. “Meanings of China’s Cultural Revolution: Memoirs of Exile” Positions 7, no.1 (Spring 1999): 165–191. Zhang, Tao, and Shi Haiwei. “Cong Hexinlang dushi, kan Mao Zedong de shixue sixiang” [A Study of Mao Zedong’s Historical Thought in Light of His Poem Hexinlang/Reading History] Lilun xuekan no. 11, serial no. 153 (2006). Zhang, Yijiu. Mao Zedong du shi [Mao Zedong’s Reading of History]. Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe, 2010. Zhao, Youfu. “Nongcun ‘siqing’ yundong zhong xie ‘sishi’ de chengxiao he qishi” [The Achievement of Writing the Four Histories in the Countryside]. Beijing dangshi, no. 6 (2006): 52–53. Zhonggong Guiyang shiwei xuanchuanbu “wushi” bianxiezu [“Five Histories” Compilation Group of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Guiyang Municipal Committee]. “Liangdai ren de zaoyu” [The Experiences of Two Persons] Shanhua, November/December, 1964. Zhonggong Lezhi xianwei dangshi yanjiushi [CCP Lezhi County Committee Party History Research Office]. Lezhi xian wenhua dageming yundong jishi [A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution in Lezhi County].n.p., 2007. Zhonggong Liaoning sheng wei nongcun gongzuo bu [CCP Lianning Provincial Rural Work Department]. “Guanyu Panjin nongkenju Xi’an nongchang shehuizhuyi jiaoyu yundong shidian gongzuo baogao” [Report on the Xi’an Farm’s Socialist Education Work under the Farming Bureau of Panjin], File No. 90, Cataloguing No. 1, File 3334, Guizhou Provincial Archives. Zhongguo zuojia xiehui nongcun duwu gongzuo weiyuanhui[Chinese Writers’ Association Work Committee for Rural Readers], ed., Baogao wenxue, di yi ji [Reportage Literature, vol.1]. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1963. Zhu, Xueqin. “Li Hongxin de mimi” [The Secret of Li Hongxi], Nanfang zhoumo, February 23, 2005.

4

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory

The Chinese Revolution can be described a series of aesthetic experiences and activities (Wang, 1997). It did not only produce sublime images, but also portrayed the evil and lowly.1 People with “difficult reputations” in modern Chinese history personified the exploitative classes that inflicted pain, bitterness, and a traumatic past to the exploited under classes of “old China.”2 The landlord, the important cultural icon of villain and victimizer, dominated the Chinese imagination of pre-1949 society. Since the late 1940s, through repeated cultural constructions of historiography, fiction, film, and other art works – such as sculpture – under state control, landlords have been portrayed as a class that inflicted suffering, pain, and bitterness on the Chinese peasant class, and individual landlords became the personification of the “evil old society.” The best-known Chinese landlords, both fictional and historical, included Huang Shiren in White-Haired Girl, an opera and later film and ballet; Nan Batian in Red Detachment of Women, a film and a ballet; Zhou Bapi in the semi-fictional personal memoir Gao Yubao; and Liu Wencai, a real person who died in 1949, and who had henceforth gone through a long process of demonization, and recently, attempted rectification. As archetypes, the names of these landlords pervaded the political vocabulary and historical imagination of the Chinese so much so that Chinese growing up after 1949 easily refer to these names when they think of the terms “landlord” and “old society,” and thus, identify themselves with the “new society.” Although the landlord as villain “had been removed permanently” from China’s fictional works after agricultural collectivization was launched, these political and cultural icons remained prominent in visual media: operas, film, ballet, children’s comic books, puppet shows, and sculptures – as the Communists knew that history “was best told visually” (Hung, 2011: 13).3 Focusing on the most notorious villains who brought suffering to the people in fiction as well as in reality, my analysis in this chapter follows the method of the sociologist Gary Alan Fine, outlined in his Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial, and examines the continuous and complex process of historical reputation building of a few Chinese landlord archetypes as part of the larger discourse of class oppression and emancipation, and addresses following issues: DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-5

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(1) How were the hostile imagination and negative reputations constructed by propaganda officials and artists?; (2) How were they modified and have evolved over time, and what were the motivations behind later modifications?; and (3) How did the audience accepted these villain images initially and contested them in recent years? At the same time, I also consider the uniqueness of the Chinese creation of bad reputations in the context of state propaganda as “project” (Cheek, 1997: 13–18). This means that the comprehensive system of state propaganda machine supervised this process. My analysis is based on contextualized and historicized research of the process and textual analysis of the changing narrative strategy of the stories and the implications, as well as my own on-site experience in the Liu Wencai Landlord Manor and interviews with Liu’s grandson in 2011. Constructing the Archetype of the Evil Landlord in Theater: The Case of Huang Shiren The Chinese Communists attacked landlords as a class as early as 1922, and tolerated them during the Anti-Japanese war (1937–1945).4 With a blueprint of social and psychological revolution, as well as a need for winning the popular support of the peasants to join the revolution and overthrow the Nationalist government after the end of the Japanese war, the CCP promulgated the May Fourth directive in 1947, which laid down the principle of all-around land redistribution and the elimination of landlords as a class. Although the CCP’s official policy emphasized that landlords should be politically wiped out as a class but not mistreated as individuals, the new state and land reform work teams tolerated the abuse of landlords and their families as an outcome of the indignation of the masses. For work teams, most peasants did not have the awareness about where their sufferings came from, and thus needed to be educated through open struggle and “speakingbitterness” [suku] sessions, where they were empowered to confront landlords.5 It is in the context of promoting peasants’ hatred of landlords that the image of the landlord named Huang Shiren (literally and ironically meaning “Huang who has been benevolent for the whole life”) was created. According to He Jingzhi, one of the authors of the earliest versions of the opera, the story about a “white-haired goddess” spread in the Communist Border Region in northwest Hebei in 1940, and the living “goddess,” who was very much worshipped by local villagers, was later found out by an inquisitive communist cadre to be a peasant girl with a bitter past. Around 1931, one wicked landlord drove the girl’s father to commit suicide on the pretext of collecting rent, and he carried off the girl and raped her. Upon knowing that the girl was pregnant, the landlord wished to kill her so he could take an official wife. With the help of a kind-hearted maidservant, the girl fled and hid in a mountain cave, where she gave birth to a child. As she was often hungry and cold, and was seldom in the sun, the girl’s hair turned white, He

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Jingzhi continues, and the villagers sacrificed to her because they thought she was a goddess. Finally, the seemingly anonymous but deeply moved cadre brought the girl out of the mountain and helped her start a new life.6 After pondering if it is desirable to write the story into a libretto with an antisuperstition theme, the communist writers He Jingzhi and Ding Yi captured the story’s character as a superb folk tale and political message that contrasts the suffering of the peasants in old China and their salvation in new China. In the preface He Jingzhi contributed to the English version of the libretto, he emphasized that the opera was actually an outcome of collective effort and the input of experts, artists, and peasants, all of whom enthusiastically watched rehearsals and made “excellent suggestions” during two major revisions in 1947 and 1949.7 The opera effectively aroused people’s hatred of landlords. Once staged in Yan’an in 1945, The White-Haired Girl became an immediate success, and peasants who watched it shouted: “Landlord Huang, you bad egg!” (Ho and Ting, x). While Meng Yue focuses on the image and sexuality of the changing narrative of Xi’er, the daughter of Tenant Yang Bailao (literally meaning “Yang labors in vain”) and the abused peasant girl in the opera,8 I would like to switch attention to Landlord Huang Shiren and examine how Huang’s image was portrayed and modified over time. In the libretto of the five-act opera, which won the Stalin Prize of 1951, Huang Shiren is a landlord in his thirties and a widower who lost his wife one year before he was enthralled by Xi’er. In the play, Huang is under pressure from his mother to remarry, but feels freer without a wife at home. He is convinced that “women are cheap as dirt.” Huang is not only sexist but also cruel, because he forces Yang Bailao to pay rent by the midnight of New Year’s Eve. This particular setting is well designed to highlight, or to exaggerate, the brutality of landlord, and has never been modified, because the eve of the Chinese New Year is a precious moment for a family reunion, and thus any disruption for any reason would have been seen by the audience as extremely odious.9 Huang dispatches his family steward, Mu, to bring Yang to see him just when Yang has been in hiding rent for days and returns only to join his daughter for the evening. Yang is caught when he is preparing for dinner and Mu forces Yang to put his fingerprint on the prepared contract to use the daughter to offset the debt. More importantly, Huang not only attempts to take the daughter away from the father but also robs Xi’er from her sweetheart, a poor peasant youth named Dachun. Therefore, the vicious nature of landlord is two-fold: he disrupts the father-daughter bond and undermines the traditional value of filial piety, and he also disrupts the bond between Xi’er and Dachun. In one scenario, when the steward Mu confronts Dachun, he audaciously “His-erh [Xi’er] was promised to you before, but she belongs to our Landlord Huang now” (Ho and Ting, 1954: 38). Here the important message is that Landlord Huang not only exacts land rent from the peasant, which seems economically understandable in the old society, but also severs family ties and deprives them of their basic rights to

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marriage and sex. The portrayal of the love between the virgin Xi’er and Dachun, followed by Huang Shiren’s abduction and rape, would undoubtedly stimulate deep agony and hatred among younger male peasants, who would easily identify themselves with Dachun. Thus, Landlord Huang Shiren is not just “licentious and money-grubbing” (Wilkinson, 1974: 169) in a general sense, but is also particularly evil in denying the young male peasant’s basic right to sex by becoming a privileged competitor for Xi’er’s body and chastity. At the end of the play, when Dachun rescues Xi’er, salvation is achieved at both levels. On the public and political levels, Dachun, as a Communist army soldier and thus the embodiment of the Party, rescues an abused peasant girl; on the private and personal level, Dachun liberates his own fiancée and redeems his own sin of being unable to help Xi’er when she is taken away. When Dachun presides over the public trial and, in later versions of the story, the execution of Huang Shiren, it should be natural that his public and private emotions are blended. This is exactly what the Land Reform Campaign and public struggle meetings aimed to do. Yet, Huang Shiren is a complex persona in the five-act opera. J. Norman Wilkinson correctly points out that Huang Shiren was not merely a villain; he was given life. He sings, boasts, and he “preens himself on his ways with women and on how easily it is to arrange to have any woman he fancies” (Wilkinson, 1974: 169). He Jingzhi further complicated the image of Huang Shiren by introducing a mirror image between the father-daughter relationship of Xi’er-Yang Bailao and mother-son relationship between Huang Shiren and his mother, Mrs. Huang. Mrs. Huang is a stereotypical female landlord, a matriarch who is extremely demanding and abusive to Xi’er. However, the opera portrays Huang Shiren as a typical, filial son who is submissive to his mother. Huang Shiren attends to his mother’s health, comforts her, and follows her instruction of how to deal with the pregnant Xi’er. Though Huang Shiren says in private that he would rather sleep around than get married, and while a second marriage is desired by his mother, he never openly defies her – he finally accepts his marriage. In terms of treating the widowed parents, Xi’er and Huang Shiren both live up to the expectation of filial children in Chinese culture. At the same time, Huang Shiren seems very concerned about how his friends and the bride’s family respond to the relationship between him and Xi’er. Huang says to his mother regarding Xi’er’s pregnancy, “If outsiders hear of this, it will be too bad,” and Mrs. Huang replies, “If the bride’s family hears of it we will be in an awkward position” (Ho and Ting, 57). This conversation ironically suggests that impregnating a poor peasant girl and housemaid is far from an accepted norm among Chinese rural elites, and it is no less scandalous among landlords than among peasants. The theme that the landlord undermines the marriage of Xi’er and Dachun is only hinted at in the opera in its finalized 1949 script; however, in the feature film of the same name, made in 1950, the mutual love and upcoming marriage between Xi’er and Dachun, with parental consent and mutual love, is

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enhanced. Unlike the opera that starts with the depiction of father-daughter relationship, the film starts by demonstrating the close relationship between Xi’er, Dachun, and parents on both sides: Xi’er’s widower father and Dachun’s seemingly widowed mother. The film portrays the two families laboring together in the field, helping each other. The conversation among the two adults and a concerned neighbor, Old Zhao, is dotted with references to “wedding cake” and comments such as, “Xi’er can’t go wrong getting married to him [Dachun].” The film even goes as far as to suggest that Xi’er is taken away one day before her own wedding. Whereas the opera mentioned only that it is the father Yang Bailao who brings the daughter a red ribbon to tie her hair at New Years Eve, the film showed Dachun visiting Xi’er that night and gives her a hairpin and a velvet flower. Xi’er sings “Rich people dress up when they marry. My father has no money to buy nice clothes.”10 Yet, in the earlier, opera version, there is no mention of Xi’er’s upcoming wedding. As mentioned above, the film’s emphasis on Huang Shiren, a bald, middle-aged man, destroying the wedlock of Xier and Dachun in a village where men can be so poor that they stay single in their 50s makes Huang’s image much more deplorable than a typical landlord, who only violates the subsistence ethic in the landowner-tenant relationship. The opera The White-Haired Girl was adapted to be a ballet for the first time in 1958, when it was used at a reception to entertain a visiting Japanese Ballet Troupe. In 1965, it became a revolutionary modern ballet (Wilkinson, 1974: 171–172), and the ballet was filmed in 1972 (Clark, 1987: 165). The image of Huang Shiren becomes even worse in the ballet. Now he and his bailiff, Mu, kill Yang Bailao when he tries to resist and protect his daughter, while in the opera and feature film, Yang kills himself out of desperation. The modification has two advantages. The first is an apparent further demonization of Huang Shiren as a murderer. The second is that it makes Yang more heroic. But another modification is curious: Xier is not raped in the ballet. From the point of view of giving prominence to the peasant spirit of rebellion and struggle, it seems wise not to show Xi’er as a victim of sexual assault. Yet, this censoring seems to have equally sacrificed the symbolic power of rape, which can be understood as a violation of the peasant class’s female chastity and male peasants’ sexual rights. J. Norman Wilkinson reminds us that letting a seven-month-pregnant woman dance ballet is technically awkward and problematic (Wilkinson, 1974: 172). Rosemary A. Roberts argues that the erasure of rape in the ballet version of The White-Haired Girl denotes a usurpation of male potency in Landlord Huang as counter-revolutionary, while Xier is increasingly empowered and masculinized; she now represents “the revolution” (Roberts, 2010: 253). I argue that the erasure of rape does not mean that Huang Shiren loses his male potency because he gets more violent compared with former versions by directly killing Yang Bailao in the ballet. A more plausible explanation here lies in the narrative transition from the old model of landlord as victimizer and peasant as victim in opera and film, to a new model

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in that, as Roberts suggests, the confrontation is between revolution and counter-revolution. It is acceptable for counter-revolutionaries to murder or lash, but not to rape a revolutionary, because rape is considered more as humiliation than physical violence in Chinese culture. In the process of Xi’er’s rising empowerment, she also increasingly safeguards her own chastity and loyalty (Meng, 1993: 284). Indeed, both the opera and the feature film portray Xi’er and Yang Bailao often as scarred, trembling, crying, and confused in front of the threat of Huang, Mu, and Huang’s mother. Yet in the ballet, the normal intimidation of the peasants is thoroughly replaced by their rebellion and struggle. As Joe Huang correctly points out, the portrayal of villainous landlord is so subtle that if they are too powerful or too cunning then they might appear to overpower the heroes and thus become “anti-heroes” in the eyes of the audience. (Huang, 1973: 47) Moreover, the censure of rape is a convenient technique of narrative. When the story reaches its happy ending in that Dachun and Xi’er start their new life, Xi’er is still a virgin, and the revengeful Dachun does not have to face the awkward situation of raising Huang Shiren and Xi’er’s illicit child.11 During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a series of children’s comic books [lianhuanhua] were published by the Shanghai People’s Fine Art Publishing House, featuring the stories of the Model Operas.12 The 196-page comic book, The White-Haired Girl, is adapted from the ballet version of the story. The comic book portrays the bond between Xi’er and Dachun as class feelings, but also suggests that they are two youth who “share breath and destiny,” and “look forward to the beautiful future.” In the comic book, Huang Shiren, rather than dispatch his bailiff, Mu, to talk to Yang Bailao, visits Yang’s home by himself with the companion of Mu and other bodyguards on New Year’s Eve. Yang says that he has nothing to turn in, and Huang threatens that no debt can be extended to the next year, and that all debts must be cleared by the evening. When Yang continues to resist, Huang strikes Yang’s head with his stick, forcing the fingerprint of the fainted Yang on the “body-selling contract.” Here the narrative strategy exempts Yang from his sin and animosity of selling his own daughter due to his loss of consciousness, but reinforces the image of Huang as an archetype of evil landlord by letting him do the jobs done by his agent, Mu, in the earlier versions of the story. Now portrayed as a revolutionary peasant, Yang is no longer passive. He wakes up and beats Huang with his bamboo-carrying pole. Unfortunately, Yang is beaten by Huang with the stick again when his carrying pole is captured by Mu, and this is followed by a third blow, this time by Mu. With the death of Yang, Huang leads a group of armed bodyguards to take Xi’er away. In the comic book, Dachun is portrayed as a martial artist and superhero who defeats the bodyguards of Huang. Here the book solves the problem that given the prowess of Dachun, there is no reason that Xi’er would be taken away. A new tactic here is the pistol that Huang uses to shoot in the air. Everyone is shocked by the gunshot, and Xi’er is dragged away in the chaos. In the opera, Dachun and other peasant youths are stopped by

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Uncle Zhao because “they have the whip hand, what can we do?” In the comic book, the emphasis is placed upon the weapons possessed and used by the landlord and his guards. Guns play several roles: they excuse Dachun’s failure to save Xi’er, justifying the need for an armed revolution under the leadership of the CCP, and further reinforce the evil menace of Huang Siren as a class enemy. In the comic book, rape is revised into Huang Shiren’s attempt to sexually harass Xi’er, yet once Huang sneaks into the family Buddhist worshipping hall, Xi’er slaps him on his face. The fight is interrupted by the maid, who later helps Xi’er to escape. We thus far delineate the evolution of the image of Huang Shiren from opera to film to ballet, and to a child’s comic book. It is clear that the human aspects of Huang Shiren in the earliest version was gradually reduced to nonexistent, and Huang transitions from a landlord who exploits tenants, takes away a tenant’s daughter, indirectly causes the suicide of the father, and rapes the girl, to a landlord who undermines the wedlock and chastity of the peasant girl, and finally is portrayed as a brutal murderer but also a clumsy molester, and a caricature to showcase the cruelty and stupidity of Chinese landlord. In the meantime, Yang Bailao and Xi’er become heroic fighters by eliminating the former timidity under the terrorization of the tyrant. The official propaganda, and authors such as He Jingzhi, places a special emphasis on the “collective” character of The White-Haired Girl and its nature as a work of the “Chinese people themselves”; however, the delineation above demonstrates an implicit but clear scheme of propaganda workers such as He Jingzhi, Ding Yi, and the directors the film and the ballet in continuously demonizing the image of a fictional tyrant-landlord. Museum, Sculptures, and the Imagination of Class Oppression: The Case of Liu Wencai Another important figure created by cultural and propaganda workers in China is the notorious Liu Wencai (1887–1949), a landlord in western Sichuan, famous for his luxurious manor, the “water dungeon” to lock up his tenants who fail to pay rent, and the clay sculptures in the “Rent-Collection Courtyard.” Unlike the fictional Huang Shiren, Liu Wencai is a historical figure, a wealthy and powerful landowner, merchant, and local gentryman in Dayi County, Sichuan Province. In July 1957, while the anti-rightist movement was under way, Mao required a socialist education campaign targeting rural populations to address the peasants’ resistance of rapid collectivization. Mao’s request was turned into a formal directive in August of that year, requiring a “large-scale socialist education campaign targeting the rural population.”13 Between August and September of 1958, the central government’s Ministry of Culture called two conferences of antiques and museums in Zhengzhou and Hefei. The resolution passed by the conferences called for campaigns of “establishing museums in every county,” and “establishing an exhibit room in every village.” The Bureau of Culture of Sichuan Province, in its own directive, decided that the big

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landlord Liu Wencai of Dayi County was very prominent in exploiting and oppressing peasants, and his manor should be preserved and transformed into a museum. In October of that year, the Party Committee of Dayi County issued a notice announcing the formation of a preparatory committee to construct the museum, with members coming from the Propaganda Department of the CCP’s County Committee, Rural Work Department, Industrial Bureau, and the Bureau of Culture, Education, and Health.14 It is notable that the propaganda upsurge of 1958 corresponded to the beginning of famine due to the high procurement of grain by the government. In Anren Commune of Dayi County (the former Anren Town where Liu Wencai lived), three-fourth of the agricultural output was taken away by the state in 1958, and by February 1959, even the grain stored for household consumption was seized. Starting from the spring of 1959, peasants of the Western Sichuan Plain, where Dayi is located, which had long been a famous agricultural bastion of Sichuan, witnessed waves of starving refugees attempting to flee to cities (Dongfu, 2008: 140, 188).15 The correlation between the famine caused by collectivization on the one hand, and the enhanced propaganda and construction of museums, on the other, can be established here: the state needed to convince resentful peasants that the years before 1949 were much worse off, and they should not lose confidence in the correct roads of socialism and collectivization. The past was reconstructed to legitimize the present, and to reassure peasants, and the cultural producers themselves, of the superiority of socialism. The re-construction of the Liu Wencai Manor therefore began. During the Chinese New Year of 1959, the preparatory committee held its unofficial but open exhibition after collecting and registering the objects and property formerly belonging to the manor, which had been confiscated and divided among peasants after the Land Reform. The first trial exhibition had 19 exhibiting rooms belonging to three main categories: Liu’s luxurious life, his complex social network involving bureaucracy, banditry, warlords, and a secret society, and the instruments he used to torture laboring people. In 1960, the local government designated the exhibition in the Liu Wencai manor as a site for class education, and wax figures were placed to showcase the crimes of Liu Wencai. The seventeen tableaus of wax figures were lifesized, showing how Liu Wencai and his bodyguards beat peasants, jailed them in a water dungeon, raped women, killed babies, and forced peasants to mourn the death of Liu’s dog. The gazetteer of the museum admits that these exhibits “concentrate many landlords’ crimes and are presented artistically” (Xiaoshu, 2008: 11). In that same year, one cultural official from Chengdu questioned the emphasis on the extravagant lifestyle of Liu Wencai, because it might only make the audience envy Liu’s lifestyle, but did not stimulate their class hatred. According to this opinion, the exhibit shifted to a keynote emphasizing the horror and cruelty of the manor. After Mao issued his warning to “Never forget class struggle” in 1962, the manor underwent a new round of additions, and these were completed in 1964 at the climax of the

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Socialist Education campaign, the prelude to the Cultural Revolution. This main change this time was to add tableaus that focused on the rebellion of the tenants, and was in line with the contemporaneous empowerment of Yang Bailao and Xi’er in The White-Haired Girl. The museum and its visualization, as with other war and revolution-related museums in China, played an important role in creating a discourse of victimization.16 In November 1963, a pocket-sized picture album was published to present the story of Liu Wencai to the readers. Titled “The Evil Manor of a Landlord,” the album, which was reprinted 730,000 copies by 1965, calls Liu Wencai a “living king of Hell” and demonstrates photos and cartoons that illustrate the extravagant lifestyle and cruel exploitation of the tenants. The album stresses that Liu Wencai built behind his Buddha shrine a water dungeon with an iron cage full of knives and iron thorns, and all builders were murdered after they finished the project.17 The water dungeon myth was further enhanced by the public sharing Leng Yueying’s life stories. She was said to be jailed in Liu’s water dungeon a few days after she gave birth to her child due to her family’s failure to pay rent. Born in 1911, the peasant woman Leng Yueying was sold into a landlord’s house as a servant girl at eight and became a beggar at ten. During the Land Reform campaign, Leng became an activist who participated in the local anti-banditry and anti-tyrant campaigns and was recognized by the government as a heroine. As a party member and activist in the collectivization campaign, Leng Yueying led a mutual aid group, and was awarded the prize of “outstanding worker.” The post-Cultural Revolution biographical account of Leng has gradually erased her experience of being jailed in the water dungeon (Xiaoshu, 2008: 24). From the 1960s to the 1970s, Leng made numerous reports to the masses and students, accusing Liu Wencai of putting her into the water dungeon inside Liu’s manor. Xiaoshu, a researcher of Liu Wencai, points out that Leng Yueying did mention once, around 1951, that she was locked up by Liu Wencai’s nephew, Liu Bohua, but due to the principle of “concentration,” the nephew’s basement was changed into Liu Wencai’s water dungeon. In 1958, one basement in Liu’s manor was filled with water, and Leng Yueying told the audience that she was thrown into the water dungeon for seven days because she owed grain to the Liu’s. In 1962, work of investigative journalism about Leng Yueying, titled, “The Person Who Survived the Water Dungeon,” was published in the most influential literary magazine of China, the People’s Literature. Leng Yueying was invited to become a main orator of numerous “Recalling Bitterness, Pondering Sweetness” meetings, as we have seen in Chapter 3, and her story was also incorporated into Chinese high school textbooks. In a 1967 version of Leng Yueying’s report at a recalling bitterness meeting, she told the story of how Liu Wencai’s bodyguards grabbed grain from her home for rent and forced her to see Liu a day after she gave birth to her second child: After I was dragged into Liu Wencai’s manor, I made a few turns and walked down a few steps, and then I smelt bad, bloody odor … the water is

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 101 as high as my waist. What is this water? It is icy cold and so stinking that I wanted to throw up. I fell down, and caught a human bone with one hand and stepped on a human skull. The running dog of Liu Wencai used a stick to push me into an iron cage. I lost consciousness … I woke up because of the pain … there was once I opened my eyes and with the dim light I saw something in the water dungeon: the bones of dead men are everywhere; iron nails stuck out at the top and bottom of the iron cage that made it impossible for you to sit. I was inside the cage, and outside it I saw three men, sitting and soaked in water. One of them died one day after. After this sensational description, Leng Yueying explained how she was able to survive such a hellish place. She went on to say that her husband borrowed money at high interest to redeem her, and Liu Wencai also thought it inauspicious to let a woman who just gave birth to a child die inside his manor (Xiaoshu, 2008: 29–31). Questioning the water dungeon myth has been going on for decades. As early as 1964, one former friend of Liu Wencai, named Wang Anmao, who had been to Liu’s manor more than ten times, denied the existence of the water dungeon. Wang asserted that Liu had an opium storage room, which burned down in 1945, and in the same location, Liu built a basement; thus, Leng Yueying’s story about her jail in 1937 (and sometimes 1943) were not just inconsistent, but totally impossible. One concubine of Liu Wencai is confirmed that the room, which was later presented as a water dungeon, was just a basement. It was built to collect underground water during the summer and the residents inside the manor seldom went there (Xiaoshu, 2008: 36–37). In 1981, a staff member visited Leng Yueying to authenticate the water dungeon. At the age of 72, Leng said she had forgotten how old she was when she was jailed, and she could not remember if she was thrown into an iron cage. During my own visit to Liu’s manor in the summer of 2011, I saw that the basement now carries a new plate that identifies it as “Opium Storehouse.” When I interviewed Liu Xiaofei, Liu Wencai’s grandson, he said it was not even an opium storage room; it was just a basement. Liu Xiaofei also indicated that it was absurd for a landlord to bring a woman who just gave birth to child into his own manor, because culturally, any man, except the husband, avoids postpartum women who are supposed to stay in confinement for recovery. Finally, Leng Yueying admitted that all she said was arranged by the Daiyi County’s Party Committee (Xiaoshu, 2008: 38–39). When I visited the Liu manor in 2011, the museum’s guide explained to visitors that Leng Yueying finally admitted that the Party Committee made her say such and such, and I heard from among the visitors: “Lying! She was lying!” On the wall, the introduction about Leng Yueying deleted any mention of the water dungeon experience of hers. Instead, it says that her story was well-known in that “unusual” historical time period. Leng Yueying was a real person who told a false story, while the Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures is an artistic work aimed at condensing the

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entire old society on Liu Wencai and his notorious manor, under the supervision of the government. In 1964, the director of the manor class education exhibition hall proposed a suggestion to use clay sculptures to represent the scenario of peasants’ payment of rent before 1949. The Propaganda Department of the Prefectural Party Committee approved the idea, and dispatched investigative teams to villages to collect materials. The team also invited actors and actresses of a Sichuan Opera troupe to perform and take photos. After three revisions, the work team changed the scenario of one family paying rent to multiple families paying rent to “jump out of the narrow circle and to analyze and to display the contradiction and struggle between rural landlord class and rural peasant class in the semi-feudal, semi-colonial society” (Xiaoshu, 2008: 44). To accomplish this ambitious project, the exhibition hall sought help from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1965, and some faculty members and students joined the project, along with the staff of the exhibition hall and local folk artists. Though all these people collaborated and collectively contributed to the work, making it hard to attribute to any single artist, the propaganda workers set the goal and the standard. The Sichuan Provincial Culture Bureau laid down the principles of artistic creation as: (a) the sculptures should represent the miserable life of the peasants, but also their unyielding rebellion; and (b) it should demonstrate the viciousness and cruelty of landlords, but also their fears and vulnerabilities. Struggle in the old society should be the keynote of the sculptures. The Rent Collection Courtyard’s public display became an immediate success and was praised by the an editor of People’s Daily, the famous cartoonist Hua Junwu, and also by a leading scholar of aesthetics, Wang Zhaowen, both of whom made special tours from Beijing to Dayi to visit. Hua Junwu published an article calling the Rent Collection Courtyard a “Great Revolution of the Sculpture Circles.” The replica sculptures, which were made to meet the demands of the audience outside of Sichuan, were then exhibited in Beijing’s China Art Gallery in December 1965, and the leading cultural bureaucrat, historian, poet, and philologist, Guo Moruo, wrote a poem for the sculptures. Zhou Yang, the cultural Czar of Communist China, saw a new direction for contemporary Chinese art after examining the sculptures by commenting that the figures are concrete, vivid, and full of emotion. He also commented that the success of the Rent Collection Courtyard changed his stereotypical view that Chinese sculpture is backward and incomprehensible by the masses. Peng Zhen, the Party boss of Beijing and a member of the Politburo, said the two best works that represented the landlord’s oppression of peasants are The White-Haired Girl and Rent Collection Courtyard because they revealed the truth of history by undermining the old pattern of beautifying the landlord class (Xiaoshu, 2008: 49–52). The finished group sculptures feature 114 life-sized figures under four main themes that follow the order of rent payment and the response of the peasants: paying the rent, checking the rent grain, settling accounts, forcing rent,

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 103 and rebellion. Though the figures are made with clay, the eyes are made with glass to enhance the real-life effect. To appeal to the audience’s family values, the Rent Collection Courtyard sculpture places special emphasis on how peasant family bonds are severed. The English-language propaganda book titled, Rent Collection Courtyard: Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt, was published in 1968 and used a caption to win the sympathy of the audience: “This exhausted woman with her children, all skin and bones, brings her last half bag of grain to pay the rent.” Mortgaging her child to clear the debt, the same theme of The White-Haired Girl, recurs in a sculpture where a blind old man had to sell his granddaughter to the Lius as a bondmaid in lieu of the rent he owes, while the girl is the only family he can count on in the world. One mother is portrayed as griping the bars while her children cry. Another woman was separated from her own baby and mother-in-law because she had to feed Liu Wencai with her milk because Liu has to “drink fresh human milk every day,” according to the propaganda book of 1968. That Liu Wencai had to be fed with human milk is likely another myth, much like the water dungeon. According to the tour guide’s script, a local peasant woman named Luo Erniang breast-fed Liu Wencai. The bitter story was used to appeal to the emotional bonds between parents and children: At that time Luo Erniang was dragged in just like that because she was not able to pay rent, and her own child was starved to death. In the beginning, Liu Wencai let Luo Erniang squeeze several cups of her milk every day. Later he asked Luo Erniang to breast-feed him directly. Once, Luo Erniang just finished feeding her own starving child, and Liu Wencai wanted milk, so Luo Erniang sent her nipple into the mosquito net. Liu Wencai sucked it and there was no milk, so he bit hard. Immediately, fresh blood gushed. Luo Erniang was so hurt that she rolled over on the floor and the scar is still there on her nipple. It records the deep hared of the laboring people! Comrades, who does not have parents? Who does not have families? Who was not born by mom? If your mom suffered like this, what do you feel?18 In various “speaking bitterness” meetings, peasant woman Luo Erniang repeated the story of how she breastfed Liu Wencai and how her nipple was bitten. She even said that Liu attempted to rape her. An article written by Liu Wencai’s grandson, Liu Xiaofei, who spent the past 20 years on the rectification of his grandfather’s name, describes how Luo Erniang’s narration uses licentious language to describe the sexual harassment. Luo’s narrative was so despised by the audience that her own son criticized her. According to Liu Xiaofei, Luo’s nephew told him that Luo Erniang never set foot in the courtyard. The nephew also said that Luo Erniang did not mention things like breast-feeding until the Socialist Education Campaign of the 1960s, and he obviously did it under the guidance of a work team member, Zhu Binkang, a female vice director of the

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Organization Department of the County, who lived in the home of Luo Erniang for a few months during the campaign. Luo Erniang’s story differs from Leng Yueying’s in that Luo’s shows Liu Wencai not just brutalizing his tenants, both male and female, for the purpose of collecting rent, but also as a pervert. None of the materials explains why exactly an adult man like Liu Wencai thinks he needs to be breastfed every day. Propaganda workers, very likely including the female cadre who lived in the home of Luo Erniang, are convinced that adults drinking fresh human milk is a powerful symbol of extravagance and decadence, and that this is done at the cost of Luo’s own child’s needs. The sense of deprivation and competition here is similar to Xi’er’s being taken away from Dachun. However, the later twist of Liu Wencai sucking Luo Erniang’s nipple becomes a scenario that compromises the male potency of the villain Liu Wencai. In the narrative, Liu suddenly behaves like an infant: he wants to suck the nipple of his wet nurse, and when there is no milk, he starts to bite, although as with Huang Shiren, Liu Wencai is also portrayed as a bald, and older man Luo Erniang did not say that she was raped, so she preserved her chastity, but her body was injured by the almost mischievous Liu Wencai, who fights over milk with her baby and inflicts pain and wounds on her. Another interesting phenomenon is the open and public description of breast-feeding and biting by the woman herself. If it is true that as Liu Xiaofei learns from the interviews he conducts, Luo had never been to the Liu Wencai manor, and she was never an attractive and popular woman. If she is “the ugliest and the most unclean” woman in town, then the repeated narration becomes a process of sexual fantasy for Luo Erniang, who subconsciously desired Liu Wencai’s attention or an opportunity to gain the political limelight. A television documentary produced the by Beijing Television Station (the former China Central TV), in 1966, titled Rent Collection Courtyard, is a valid source to analyze the ideological modification of the creation, and how bitterness stories, as told by the sculptures, were interpreted politically and emotionally. The documentary opens with a quotation from Mao Zedong in an article his written in 1949, which is read out loud by the narrator: “The existence of class and class struggle is a fact; some people deny this fact and deny the existence of class struggle. This is wrong. The theory that attempts to deny the existence of class struggle is a totally erroneous theory.”19 The documentary then moves on to footages showing how the peasants of Dayi work happily and diligently to build socialism under the leadership of the CCP. The voiceover stresses that the proletariat must seize the gun and official seal to safeguard the good life. In contrast with the “sweetness” in the new society, the camera first shoots the recalling bitterness session of Leng Yueying, emphasizing her being jailed by Liu Wencai for seven days and seven nights. The documentary then moves on to highlight Liu’s luxurious life, his bed and consumption of opium, his “violation” of over five hundred women, and his killing of innocent peasants. Many stories in the Rent Collection Courtyard, as demonstrated above, are about how a family was

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 105 separated. It is true that “one salient feature of political culture is the subtle way it draws on the individual’s infantile emotional dependence on parents and the libidinal need for a love-subject” (Wang, 1997: 203). To present a desperate woman with her two children, who has to pay her last bag of grain to Liu, the female voiceover states: “Look at this widow with her son and daughter! They eat wild vegetables all year long and nearly starve to death. The little daughter carried on the back can no longer suck mom’s milk! She is not able to cry or to move.” The camera then moves to the older son. The voiceover goes on: “How can a kid know the bitterness of mom? Mom, I am hungry! I am hungry!” Sorrowful music begins while there is a close-up of the woman’s face. The exhibition of the Liu Wencai manor, and the creation of the Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures in Dayi, occurred later than the writing and performance of The White-Haired Girl, but it was no less powerful. Many visitors shed tears and shouted slogans while touring the manor. As with The White-Haired Girl, the sculptures also had a process of statemanipulated modification, which added to the horrific and scary atmosphere at the manor museum. But “adding” the Liu Wencai myth is more prominent because Liu was explicitly designated as an archetype of the whole landlord class; or, as the 1966 TV documentary calls him, a “four-inone: landlord, bureaucrat, warlord, and bandit.” All of the evil of the exploitative class that people could imagine, from forcing rent, locking up people, beating people, separating families, drinking human milk, and sexual harassment, to the connection with the Nationalist government, warlords, and secret societies, were “concentrated” on Liu Wencai, while Landlord Huang Shiren follows a relatively simple storyline of forcing rent, killing tenant, and (attempting) raping a peasant girl. From the very beginning, the Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures highlight the theme of rebellion, which was later added to The White-Haired Girl. The Rent Collection Courtyard is a seemingly sophisticated depiction of the rent payment procedures with many details, such as checking the quality of the grain by winnowing. It also tells multiple stories in one scenario, which sends a strong message that there was not just one family, but the whole class, that suffered in the old society. More importantly, Liu Wencai died a natural death in 1949, right before Liberation, and the manor was still there, so any fabrications about his life and atrocities, supported by objects and visual images, were easily accepted and internalized as true history, and later he was also reinterpreted by the state propaganda in the 1970s as sharing the same ideology with Lin Biao. Assessing the responses of audiences to the cultural production of Maoist China can be an impossible job.20 The fictionalization of Liu Wencai as a political symbol of the evil landlord class was reinforced by horrible museum displays, sensational narrations, vivid sculptures, speaking bitterness presentations based on “real” experiences, documentaries, and textbooks, which finally became the most influential modern Chinese myth. There was a

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conversation between a journalist and a fifth-grade student after the “Recalling Bitterness, Pondering Sweetness” meeting held in the manor: Q: What is the landlord class? A: Liu Wencai Q: What is called exploitation and oppression? A: Liu Wencai means exploitation and oppression. Q: Why was there a Liu Wencai before Liberation? A: Because he was rich. Q: Then why the Communist Party lead the people to overthrow the old society? A: To knock down Liu Wencai. (Xiaoshu, 2008: 61) My own interview with a man in Anren Town, where the Liu Wencai manor is located, is anecdotal, but also tells about the attitude of the local people. When I asked the owner of a family-run teahouse with the surname Yue, he said he was a middle school student in the 1960s, and heard the report of Leng Yueying and the water dungeon. I asked him if he believed it or not, and he replied, “How can you not believe it? I did not grow up in the old society, and then of course would believe what she said.” “But it has been denied now,” I pressed. Mr. Yue was not surprised. He said, with a touch of cynicism: “They said there was such a thing, and then there was. If now they say there is not, then there is not. That’s the Communist Party!”21 Also during my visit to the Anren Town and the Rent Collection Courtyard, I noticed that the amount of the tableaus today have shrunk, and the statues that emphasize the collective rebellion and revolution which appear in the propaganda book, The Rent Collection Courtyard, are no longer on display.22 The bad reputation of Liu Wencai has been challenged recently by historians, journalists, and more importantly, by Liu Wencai’s grandson, Liu Xiaofei, who was born in 1946 and stays single due to his terrible family background, and because he was addicted to his life-long endeavor of contesting the bad reputation imposed on his grandfather. This is not without progress. The influential liberal newspaper, the Southern Metropolis, published an article on March 2, 2011 that depicts Liu Wencai as a rich, but benevolent, local gentry elite, and philanthropist who founded the famous private Wencai Middle School and donated to road construction and hydraulic projects (Han, 2011). Located in the town where Liu lived, this middle school is more prestigious than any middle school in the county seat since its founding in 1947, largely because of Liu Wencai’s generous investments and dedicated, successful management. In my 2011 visit to the town, I found the middle school now only left with its buildings was renamed “Anren Middle School” to avoid mentioning the name of

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 107 Liu Wencai by adopting the name of the town, but in introducing its history in front of the gate, there is a fair assessment of Liu Wencai’s contribution to the founding of the school. Contesting the Bad Reputation: The Case of Zhou Bapi It is not unusual for propagandists to portray the enemy as a rapist and as a threat to motherhood. This manifests in the images of Huang Shiren and Liu Wencai.23 Zhou Bapi, another notorious, semi-fictional landlord, reveals how a bad reputation was constructed in Maoist China in a comical way, and was then contested in post-Mao China due to a process of pluralism and historical revisionism since the 1990s. This attempt can be seen in a wave of disenchantment at the state’s control of collective memory and the production of official historical narratives, mainly initiated and supported by people outside of the state apparatus. The choice of Zhou Bapi (literally, “Zhou who rips off your skin;” – his real name was Zhou Chunfu) is based on following: First, Zhou is not as brutal as either Huang Shiren or Liu Wencai. Instead, he acts, as we see below, in silly, comedic ways to exploit the peasants. Second, the relationship between Landlord Zhou and the peasants is not tenancy, as in the previous two stories, but that of employment between landlord and hired laborers. Third, the man who tells the story of Zhou Bapi is still alive and the grandson of the prototype of Zhou Bapi has published a book to contest the accusations, continuing the contested memory into the present Fourth, the representation of Zhou Bapi’s story is as comic as the story itself. It was later transformed into a puppet show targeting children rather than a more sophisticated opera, film, or class education museum and sculptures. Zhou Bapi appears in another modern myth, known as “Rooster Crowing at Midnight,” originally a chapter in the semi-autographic account of an author named Gao Yubao, a self-educated former young laborer, who joined the PLA, and later became a writer. In the postscript of the second version of the book, titled Gao Yubao, Gao tells how he started to write his past. He was an orphan from Liaoning Province who lost his parents and younger brother because of the exploitation and abuse of Japanese and Chinese traitors. To survive, Gao became a child laborer at nine. On November 19, 1947, Gao Yubao joined the PLA, while the army carried out the New-Style Army Organization, which used the approach of “speaking bitterness” and selfexamination to promote the morale of the soldiers. Gao asserted that it was this campaign that helped him make a decision to use a pen to write his bitter past and accuse the evil old society. His writing was supported by the officers and fellow soldiers, and these allies helped him become literate. Gao Yubao had the life experience and desire to write, and his writing was improved by the “experts,” while, at the same time, remolded into a fiction that allows “cutting” and “concentration.” Gao also started to use imagination after he realized that xiaoshuo legitimizes it, and inserted political content voluntarily,

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very likely under the direct guidance of his collaborators and copy editors, to serve the agenda of Party propaganda. However, the book’s name is the name of the author, and unlike the collective, and thus anonymous authorship of The Rent Collection Courtyard, the fiction Gao Yubao is very easy for the readers to receive as a true autobiography, in spite of his own explanation. Under the pretext that the whole story is fictional, it is easy to interpret the famous anecdote called “rooster crowing at midnight.” As Gao tells in the story, one day the hired laborers were confused why, once they fell asleep, the landlord’s rooster crowed, and once the rooster crowed, Zhou Bapi drove them up the mountain to work in the dark. One night, because of diarrhea, Gao Yubao visits the outhouse frequently. Suddenly, the boy Yubao sees a suspicious man approaching the chicken coop. He is curious about who is stealing chickens, but thinks that it is not bad for the annoying rooster to be stolen. To his surprise, Yubao finds the thief mimicking rooster crow, which provokes all roosters in the coop, who all start crowing. Yubao has identified that it is Zhou Bapi, but does not say anything. After a while, Zhou shouts, “Hurry up and go up to the mountain! Rooster has crowed!” Yubao tells what he saw to the complaining adults, who go to the field but do not work. The author Gao Yubao provides an explanation about why Zhou uses this method by arguing that mimicking a rooster’s crow was a unique skill passed down to Zhou for several generations, and the purpose is to exhaust and frustrate the laborers so they will quit without receiving their yearly pay. While the adults are infuriated because they cannot come up with a good way to deal with Zhou, the young Yubao has an idea. He asks all fellow workers to prepare sticks and ambush the coop on the second night, when Zhou sneaks into the coop, and then they beat Zhou Bapi as if they are beating a real thief (fig.8). One laborer asks mischievously: We thought it was thief. You are our boss. Why do you come to catch chicken at midnight?” Zhou almost weaps, saying, “Don’t mention it. I was sleeping in my room, and I have no idea what draws me here.” (Gao, 1972: 93–96) Zhou Baipi has the stereotypical bad qualities of an evil landlord. He is greedy and cunning, but also stupid. This story is also entertaining in that first, Zhou is less cruel than Huang Shiren and Liu Wencai, for he does not kill or rape, and he even works hard every night in mimicking a rooster himself. Second, there is a contrast between a silly landlord and a clever child whose wisdom surpasses other adult peers, and the landlord, who can do nothing about it. The authenticity of the story, however, is obviously problematic, because a rooster will not crow after a human mimicking. The book also does not clarify if there is an agreement between Zhou and the laborers that their working schedule is based on the first round of a rooster’s crow, no matter what time that is. It is also hard to explain what the laborers can do in the field at midnight except continue sleeping, and there is no mention who is their field supervisor, who also has to wake up at midnight. All these problems notwithstanding, the story was accepted widely in

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 109 China, and was included in textbooks and made into a puppet show, which was filmed in 1964. The fictionalization of the prototype of Zhou Bapi through Gao Yubao’s writing, as well as later artistic creations, had the same detrimental effect on Zhou’s own reputation and his descendants as it did on Liu Wencai and Liu’s children and grandchildren. In the book, No Rooster Crows at Midnight: Revealing the True Face of Landlord Zhou Bapi, Zhou Chunfu’s great grandson, Meng Lingqian, details his family history, the fabrication of the Zhou Bapi story, and his face-to-face meeting and conversation with Gao Yubao. According to Meng, who based his book on archival research, interviews, and personal memories, his great grandfather, Zhou Chunfu, was a self-made man who accumulated 100 mu of land through his own hard labor and management by 1947, when he died during the Land Reform. Zhou Chunfu was harsh on his sons, but polite to his hired laborers. Meng questions the historicity of the Zhou Bapi story by raising following issues: first, his interviews with some old men who were hired by the Zhou family show that Gao Yubao was not hired by Zhou Chunfu, so Gao could not have firsthand experience about how Zhou treated his workers. Meng’s grandfather provided a testimonial that Gao Yubao visited the village in 1963, telling everyone that “Zhou Bapi” actually means “all landlords in the whole country,” and he urged villagers not to deny the existence of such a person and the stories he wrote (Meng, 2011: 35). Second, Gao Yubao’s reminiscences in the 1990s said that he was illiterate until 1948, yet in 1951, he magically published his autographical account in 200,000 Chinese characters. For Meng, this was far-fetched. More importantly, Meng found, in 2008, that the book purportedly written by Gao was actually written by another PLA writer, Guo Yongjiang (a.k.a. Huangcao), who was the associate editor-inchief of PLA Literature in the early 1950s. Guo retired in 1956 when he was forty due to his health, and also permanently lost authorship of the book. Guo’s account of the process of writing the story corresponds to Gao’s own memory in one thing: both admit that Gao was at first worried about the authenticity of the story, though he later accepted the notion that the book was written to educate the people and that absolute authenticity was not essential (Meng, 2011: 196, 205). Third, Meng consulted an expert of husbandry who confirmed that crowing is a signal of the sexual maturity of a rooster, and the response of a rooster’s optic nerve to the dim light of the early morning. In other words, a rooster will not crow at a wrong time just to respond to the mimicking crowing of any human being (Meng, 2011: 303–304). Meng Lingqian might sound fastidious in defending his greatgrandfather, but the Zhou Bapi story was a great trauma of his childhood. When he was a fourth-grade student at an elementary school, the inclusion of the story in the Chinese textbook made him feel extremely humiliated. The teacher asked Meng to read the text, and he stood up and did so, trembling, and with tears in his eyes, while his classmates giggled (Meng, 2011:219–220).24

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Conclusion Constructing the Chinese collective memory and social imagination of the pre-1949 China has actually been an important job of the Chinese party-state since the 1960s. This is done not only through academic historiography that boosted the status of peasant uprisings in Chinese history and followed a paradigm of revolution and rebellion, but also through a complex process of visualization and storytelling that created villains in film, opera, ballet, museums, cartoons, and puppet shows. To some extent, it was these fictional villains, and people with bad reputations, that shaped the Chinese imagination of the past: a bitter, old society when the poor people were exploited, abused, and dehumanized. As one former Red Guard, who beat people, recounts in her memoir: “These are class enemies, bad people. Before Liberation they lived a decadent life, sucking the blood of the working people and treating our revolutionary martyrs brutally” (Zhai, 1992: 96). Motivated by class struggle ideologies and the need of the people and preventing revisionism, the state mobilized writers, artists, filmmakers, and performing artists to visualize the old society, the bitterness, and the liberation. One of the most influential landlords, the fictional Huang Shiren, was portrayed as greedy, cruel, and licentious, and the later revisions of the figure in different art forms gradually reduced him from a bad landlord to a caricature. The case of Liu Wencai shows, first, how the state orchestrated the creation of a class education museum and sculptures in Dayi county, using the name Liu Wencai to embody the whole landlord class, and second, how the RentCollection Courtyard sculptures appealed to a subtle dimension of Chinese and political culture – specifically, family and the bond between parents and children – and third, how the oral testimonials of Leng Yueying and Luo Erniang, the two living female victims of Liu Wencai, were fabricated, and how their stories were contested later. The third story shows another unique case in which a true landlord was demonized by an illiterate soldier and his ghost writer assigned by the state, as well as how the rooster crowing myth has been systematically and decisively challenged by the great-grandson of the accused landlord, Zhou Chunfu. The process of creating, editing, and contesting images with difficult reputations in contemporary Chinese revolutionary art and literature reminds us of the Chinese revolution’s character as an aesthetic movement, of a statecontrolled network of cultural production, distribution, classroom education, museumification, and of its foreign propaganda. It also helps us rethink the of the definitions of “history” and “art” in China, as we see that the Zhou Bapi story uses the real names of the laborer-author, the village, and the landlord, but coined a far-fetched story of rooster crowing at mid-night with an implicit principle of revolutionary aesthetics in China. The point is that details and concrete plots can be fabricated as long as it is essentially true in revealing the exploitation and oppression existing in history, which can educate younger generations by provoking and perpetuating class feelings. The cultural war is

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 111 going on in post-revolutionary China with the gradual de-emphasis of class struggle and erosion of the state-controlled ideology and media.25 Liu Xiaofei is persistent in interviewing villagers to testify as to the good heart and reputation of Liu Wencai, and Meng Lingqian has invalidated the Zhou Bapi myth through what he called “archeology” [kaogu].26 Here we see a “historical consciousness that critiques the engrained historical narrative via memory will keep alive unfinished possibilities and unfulfilled dreams” (Wang, 2004:3). The writer Mo Yan published a novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Out [shengsi pilao], in which Ximen Nao, a 30-year-old, wealthy landlord in Gaomi County, is shot in Land Reform as a victim of rural class struggle, and his animal reincarnations provide a highly cynical account of the history of the PRC from 1950 through 2000.27 China’s younger generation, born in the 1980s, is also concerned about the archetype of the landlord, and there is debate among female high school students about whether Xi’er should marry Huang Shiren so that she could enjoy her life as the wife of a wealthy landlord. This online discussion opens with a brief, yet provocative, foreword: “In fact, Huang Shiren is merely a literary persona, but we very often perceive literary works as historical truth.”28 This statement implicitly reflects on the long-term effects of the Chinese “propaganda state” (Hung, 2011: 17–21). The construction of the image of an evil landlord in socialist China includes mass-based articulation, repeated state-orchestrated storytelling, collaborative visualization, creations of archetypal evil people, and more importantly, a deeply entrenched historical imagination, which will take a long time to be demystified. Notes 1 For discussions of villains in Chinese socialist literature, see Huang (1971). Huang points out that a man becomes a villain if he betrays his kinsman, and in other cases, a villain’s behavior becomes an ingredient of the class war. In classical Chinese fictions of the theme of national security, villains are described as people who do damage to the country or to corrupt the emperor. See Ma (1975). A villain is also hated because of his bullying of a woman and her relatively powerless male family members can be seen in the classical novel Water Margin [Shui hu zhuan], in which the butcher Zheng abuses a young woman and her father and is punched to death by the hero Lu Da. Another villain in the same novel, Gao Qiu, attempts to murder Lin Chong and to take over his wife. 2 For studies on the historical, literary and filmic construction of trauma, see Wang (2004) and Berry (2008). 3 For the statement that the landlord was removed from Chinese fictional works, see Huang (1973), seems to apply only to novels in the form of books, but not visual to artworks and theatrical performances. 4 The Communist Peng Pai started to organize peasants against landlords in Haifeng of Guangdong Province in July 1922. See Marks, 174–193. Mao Zedong endorsed the radicalism among Hunan peasants in attacking local elites in his famous Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan based on his fieldwork in 1927. See Guillermaz, 115–120. The issues of unequal rural land distribution and class relations was fully discussed by Mao in his Report from Xunwu, written around 1930. See Mao (1990).

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5 For landlord reform and mobilization of peasants, see Hinton (1966); Crook and Crook (1979); and Pepper (1978). 6 The authenticity of the original story as told by He Jingzhi was challenged by an article written by Cheng Yinghong, published in Shijie zhoukan [The World Weekly], supplement of the Shijie ribao [The World Journal], a Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. In this chapter, the author argues that the cult of the white-haired goddess was deeply rooted in local folklore in the villages, which often distracted the peasant from the political meetings called by the Communists. So, He Jingzhi and other writers fabricated the story first to attack superstition, and then shifted to the theme of class struggle. See Cheng (1999), available at http://hi.baidu.com/dahezhijian/blog/item/4cbc5f4e2f43860ab2de0563.html But we should consider a general background of the Chinese theater since the May Fourth Movement placed emphasis on current-events drama and pledged the authenticity of the story as a real case. See Lean, 66–67. It is plausible to read The White-Haired Girl and its pledge of authenticity also in this context. 7 In a foreign propaganda work published in Beijing in English, the piece that introduces The White Haired Girl, and also emphasizes the nature of the play as a product of the Chinese people themselves. See Folk Arts of New China, 51. In spite of this rhetoric, scholars also point out the elitist status of intellectuals as leaders who evaluated and incorporated opinions from the masses in the process of revising The White-Haired Girl. See Ip, 186. 8 See Meng (1993: 119–124). 9 In fact, it is culturally almost impossible for anyone to visit another family for any reason on New Year’s Eve in China. Debts should be settled by the end of the year but not right on New Year’s Eve. 10 The translation here is adopted from The White-Haired Girl—Film Script, translated by Pete Nestor and Tom Moran, published by MCLC Resource Center, 2006. 11 I disagree with Meng Yue’s analogy of Xi’er’s salvation with the story to Cinderella. See Meng (1993: 343). In Cinderella’s story, the prince as the rescuer is not related to the past of Cinderella, and they do not know each other before the ballroom party. Yet, Dachun is in a relationship with Xier. He fails to even help her, but comes back as a hero with a mixed mission of seeking reunion, avenging her suffering, and redeeming his own inability. Perhaps Dachun is closer to Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 12 It is notable that they were reprinted in 2010 as “Reader of Outstanding Chinese Comic Books” without any modification of the content and artistic style of the Cultural Revolution. 13 Vogel, 1969: 205. 14 Xiaoshu, 2008: 4. 15 A chart of Sichuan’s grain output and demography shows the year 1958 as the first year that saw the decrease of the Sichuan population. The population reduction continued into 1961. See Dongfu, 370. 16 For the museums that emphasize Japanese atrocities and commemorate Chinese struggle, see Denton (2007: 248). 17 See Sichuan wenhuaju meishi gongzuo shi, Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1965: 27. 18 This is cited in Liu Xiaofei’s online article, “Shouzuyuan shi zenyang bianzao chulai de.” 19 This is a quote from Mao’s article “Abandon Fantasy; Be Prepared for Struggle”[Diu diao huanxiang, zhunbei douzheng], written in 1949 and right before the full-scale Communist triumph against the Nationalist party. 20 Paul Clark notices this difficulty in study of the Cultural Revolution. See Clark, 3–4. 21 My interview with the resident of the town, Mr. Yue, June 2011.

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 113 22 Liu Xiaofei confirmed the removal of the tableaus about rebellion and revolution with me in his email. When I visited the manor, the tour guide working for the manor-museum jokingly made analogy between Liu’s appropriation of tenants’ property and the violent demolition of houses in today’s China. 23 For an analysis of propaganda art and the pattern of portraying the enemy, see Keen (1986). 24 When I interviewed Liu Xiaofei in June 2011, Liu told a similar story about how he was humiliated and tormented by the Liu Wencai stories taught in his elementary school. 25 Meng Lingqian expressed his skepticism of the Zhou Bapi story on the Internet. He published his book in mainland China, and it was soon banned. The version I refer to was published in Taiwan. For the post-Mao preservation of the class ideology and its dilution, see Misra, 129–143. 26 Yet this archaeology is different from the archaeology in Foucaultian sense, which examines the representations of the past through symbols, images, and rhetoric. What Zhou did was excavating “facts,” at least as he defined his agenda as such. Zhou’s might be better understood as “reconstruction.” For this difference, see Hutton (1993: 149). 27 See Mo Yan (2006). 28 http://news.ifeng.com/opinion/topic/huangshiren/

Bibliography Anonymous. 1954. Folk Arts of New China. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Anonymous. 1966. Shouzu yuan [Rent Collection Courtyard]. Beijing TV Station. Anonymous. 1970. Rent Collection Courtyard: Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Anonymous. 2006. White-Haired Girl-Film Script. Tr. Peter Nestor and Tom Moran. MCLC Resource Center. URL: http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/moran2.htm. Benshe. 2010. Zhongguo lianhuanhua youxiu zuopin duben: Baimaonü [Selected reader of outstanding Chinese children’s comic books: The White-Haired Girl]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe. Berry, Chris. 2008. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Cheek, Timothy. 1997. Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia. New York: Oxford University Press. Cheng, Yinghong. 1999. “Baimaonü: cong minjian chuanshuo dao zhengzhi Shenhua” [The White Haired Girl: from folk legend to political myth]. Shijie zhoukan (March 21). URL (last accessed 5/9/13): http://hi.baidu.com/nkiipdtwnsbepzd/item/52b1 4275b63db645ef 1 e53f9. China Ballet Troupe. 1972. Red Detachment of Women – A Modern Revolutionary Ballet. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Clark, Paul. 1987. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949. New York: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Paul. 2008. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Crook, Isabella, and David Crook. 1979. Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village. New York: Pantheon. Denton, Kirk. 2007. “Horror and Atrocity: Memory of Japanese Imperial- ism in Chinese Museums.” In Ching-kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioning the

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Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 247–280. Dongfu. 2008. Mai miao qing, cai hua huang: da jihuang Chuanxi jishi [Wheat sprouts are green and flowers are yellow: Western Sichuan in the Great Famine]. Hong Kong: Tianyuan shuwu. Erickson, Britta. 2010. “The Rent Collection Courtyard, Past and Present.” In Richard King, ed., Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 121–135. Fine, Gary Alan. 2001. Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gao Yubao. 1972. Gao Yubao. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Guillermaz, Jacques. 1972. A History of the Chinese Communist Party 1921–1949. Tr. Anne Destenay. New York: Random House. Han, Fudong. 2011. “Fengfeng yuyu Liu shi zhuangyuan: dizhu xiangshen Liu Wencai shenhou shi” [The Liu Family manor in wind and rain: the posthumous story of landlord and local gentry Liu Wencai]. Nanfang dushi bao (March 2): A06–A07. Hinton, William. 1966. A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York: Random House. Ho, Ching-chi, and Yi Ting. 1954. The White-Haired Girl: An Opera in Five Acts. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Huang, Joe C. 1973. Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life. New York: Pica Press. Huang, Joe C. 1971. “Villains, Victims and Morals in Contemporary Chinese Literature.” The China Quarterly 46 (April–June), 331–349. Hung, Chang-tai. 2011. Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hutton, Patrick H. 1993. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England. Ip, Hung-yok. 2010. “Mao, Mao Zedong Thought, and Communist Intellectuals.” In Timothy Cheek, ed., A Critical Introduction to Mao. New York: Cambridge University Press, 169–195. Keen, Sam. 1986. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. New York: Harper and Row. Lean, Eugenia. 2007. Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republic China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liu, Xiaofei. 2011. “Shouzu yuan shi zenyang bianzao chulai de” [How Rent Collection Courtyard was fabricated]. URL: http://www.observechina.net/info/ artshow.asp?ID=72831. Ma, Y. W. 1975. “The Chinese Historical Novel: An Outline of Themes and Contexts.” Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 2: 277–294. Mao, Zedong. 1990. Report from Xunwu. Tr. Roger R. Thompson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marks, Robert B. 1984. Rural Revolution in South China: Peasants and the Making of History in Haifeng County 1570–1930. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Meng, Lingqian. 2011. Banye ji bu jiao: jiekai dizhu Zhou Bapi de zhenshi mianmu [No rooster crows at midnight: Revealing the true face of landlord Zhou Bapi]. Taipei: Xiuwei. Meng, Yue. 1993. “Female Images and National Myth.” In Tani E. Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 118–136.

The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords 115 Meng, Yue and Dai Jinhua. 1993. Fuchu lishi dibiao: Zhongguo xiandai nüxing wenxue yanjiu [Surfacing onto the horizon of history: A study of modern Chinese women’s literature]. Taipei: Shibao wenhua. Misra, Kalpana. 1998. From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China. New York and London: Routledge. Mo, Yan. 2006. Shengsi pilao [Life and death are wearing out]. Beijing: Zuojia. Pepper, Susanne. 1978. Civil War in China: The Political Struggle 1945–1949. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roberts, Rosemary A. 2010. Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Leiden: Brill. Sichuan sheng Dayi jieji jiaoyu zhanlanguan ed. 1974. Kong Lao’er, Lin Biao, Liu Wencai [Confucius, Lin Biao, and Liu Wencai]. Chengdu: Sichuan renmin. Sichuan sheng wenhua ju meishu gongzuoshi ed.1965. Zui’e de dizhu zhuangyuan: Sichuan Dayi xian “dizhu zhuangyuan chenlie guan” jieshao [The evil manor of a landlord: Introducing the “Landlord’s Manor Museum in Dayi County, Sichuan”]. Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe. Vogel, Ezra. 1969. Canton under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949–1968. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, Ban. 1997. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in TwentiethCentury China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wang, Ban. 2004. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, History, and Memory in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wang Guanyi. 2011. “Shouzuyuan xiang yuanzidan: shaowei renzhi de neimu” [Like an a-bomb: The unknown story of Rent Collection Courtyard]. Beijing qingnian bao (April 1) URL (last accessed 5/12/13): http://bjyouth.ynet.com/article.jsp?oid= 77614909. Wilkinson, J. Norman. 1974. “The ‘White Haired Girl’: From ‘Yangko’ to Revolutionary Modern Ballet.” Educational Theatre Journal 26, no. 2 (May): 164–174. Xiaoshu. 2008. Da dizhu Liu Wencai [The big landlord Liu Wencai]. Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zhai, Zhenhua. 1992. Red Flower of China. New York: Soho.

5

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution

Makeshift jails, represented by the “cowshed” [niupeng], during the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976, were neither authorized by state law enforcement organizations, which were under attack during the mass-based revolts, nor were they private confinements. The various forms of extrajudicial detention locked up and tortured many innocent people who were deemed politically susceptible. There are very few studies on the forms of imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. Research on the Cultural Revolution also often fails to differentiate jail and prison from other mass-based or state-delegated detention sites established under various circumstances for different purposes.1 Since the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), legal pretrial detention included jails [kanshousuo], shelter for investigation centers [shourong shencha suo], and police lockups [ juliusuo] at various levels.2 Even during the Cultural Revolution, these institutions continued to jail common criminals.3 Whereas past studies on the Chinese law enforcement system paid more attention to the institutionalized Chinese incarceration and the system of laogai, that is, “reform through labor,” this study aims to focus on the makeshift and extrajudicial nature of confinement, its founders, management, the use of violence, the experience of the detainees, and the contextual meaning of the Chinese socialist political apparatus and revolutionary/military ideology.4 To this author, temporary imprisonment in Maoist China was also different from the Soviet Gulag, for the former was less institutionalized and bureaucratized, more ad hoc and on-site, and also the cowshed, in particular, lacked obvious economic purposes.5 Temporary imprisonment was also different from the May Seventh Cadre School established in the late 1960s – another Chinese form of penalizing and re-educating cadres and intellectuals – in that the former emphasized compassionate social relief and re-education while the latter stressed the integrating of intellectuals with workers and peasants through engagement in hard labor.6 The innovative forms of incarceration during the Cultural Revolution were characterized by politicization, multiple founders, various objectives, denial of personal freedom, arbitrary sentences, and extensive use of violence. This chapter thus calls for an alternative approach to study the mechanism of disciplinary penalty during the Cultural Revolution, which complemented DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-6

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 117 the existing judiciary and prison apparatus in a decentered way.7 There are two forms of law enforcement in China. One is the jural (formal) model of codified rules, and the other is socially approved norms and values.8 This study focuses on the working mechanism of the latter by examining state agents’ use of discretionary power to purge politically undesirable or suspicious elements. As an outgrowth of Mao Zedong’s contempt for a formal legal system, his instrumentation with the laws, his preference for informality in imposing sanctions and for confinement demonstrated more populist, spontaneous, and decentered characteristics of mass politics.9 Michel Foucault in fact conceptualized this Maoist practice. In the early 1970s, Foucault delegitimized the people’s court as “petty bourgeoisie,” praising the September 1792 massacre and applauding the proletariat’s direct exercise of dictatorial power in removing any “intermediary” and “mediator.”10 In Foucault’s view, the people’s court was not a natural expression of people’s justice, which should be sought from “among the masses.” He also rejected the concept of “state apparatus” under proletarian dictatorship, for it divided the masses.11 During the Cultural Revolution, as Foucault hypothesized, the Public Security Bureau, the People’s Procuratorate, and the People’s Court were all considered superfluous intermediaries between the masses and the enemy, and should thus be “smashed” [zalan] with Mao’s approval.12 Two catchphrases emerged: “mass dictatorship” [qunzhong zhuanzheng] and “case handling by the masses” [qunzhong ban’an]. Similar to any revolution, the Cultural Revolution epitomized “a rapid, discontinuous, violent change that burst the bonds of the legal system.”13 While the French Revolution also witnessed massacres during the early stages, they were limited in number, and from 1789 to 1790, there indeed emerged “a conciliatory and indulgent justice that reflected the humanitarian assumptions of the pre-revolutionary judicial reform movement.”14 This chapter provides a new methodology for studying the unlawful deprivation of citizens’ physical freedom in Maoist China based on the agents and functions typology, which will deepen our understanding of the phenomenon. It also analyses the shared features of the detention sites founded by different political actors. The author argues that the permeation of mass incarceration was an implicit implementation of a Foucauldian alternative, direct, and mediator-free penal system with neither the French-style humanitarian assumptions nor the Soviet institutionalism. In spite of the spontaneous and decentralized character and the newly emerging political actors such as workers and students, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still loomed large in the mass participatory execution of the state power, assuming the forms of the Party, the army and the “masses” who were de facto agents of state ideology and power. The Party merely “rearranged the power to punish,” to quote from Foucault, but never relinquished the centralized power.15 Rather, the CCP “chose to outsource” or delegate the task to the masses.16 Therefore, pervasive spontaneous arrests and unlawful deprivation of personal freedom manifested the contradiction between the

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Chinese communist revolutionary ideology and its formal socialist legality, represented by the socialist state and the budding legal apparatus.17 As most detention sites were unofficial and mass-based, there were few official records in government documents, speeches, and minutes of meeting, let alone accounts of personal experiences of inmates, thus posing challenges in terms of methodology of research. Contemporary provincial gazetteers provide vague accounts of the paralysis of the police and judicial organs, and of the arbitrary arrests and internments that “caused a large number of wrong cases and persecutions of many cadres and the masses” during the Cultural Revolution.18 To reconstruct the narrative of internal management and daily life, this research also draws upon memoirs published in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, in addition to available official documents, speeches, and local histories. Origins and a Tentative Typology of the Extralegal Incarceration The Chinese communist practice of confinement for investigation purposes may have begun with the Yan’an Rectification, particularly its radical scrutiny of cadres in 1943 when hundreds of officials and intellectuals were interned, tortured, and forced to “confess” to spying.19 There was also a trend towards “simplifying” and “innovating” rules and legal procedures in the 1950s and early 1960s.20 The establishment of the Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants [pinxia zhongnong zuigao renmin fayuan] – also known as a Chinese “kangaroo court,” in Daoxian county of Hunan province in August 1967 – was another simplified form of the judiciary system during the Cultural Revolution. In a rural commune, these supreme courts at commune and brigade levels sentenced 128 people to death within two weeks.21 In the following discussion, the author outlines several types of extralegal and pretrial incarcerations during the Cultural Revolution based on the founder, the purpose, and the identity of the victims, in chronological order. Confinement under the Work Team

In 1966, after the publication of the CCP Centre’s Decision Concerning the Cultural Revolution, i.e., the May 16th Notice, Mao Zedong left Beijing and toured the south. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were entrusted to handle the movement. Liu and Deng dispatched many work teams to take charge of the college campuses where Party secretaries and presidents were purged after Mao endorsed the big-character posters created by Nie Yuanzi et al. that accused Lu Ping, Song Shuo, and Peng Peiyun, who were leaders of Peking University. At the initial phase spanning from May to July 1966, the Cultural Revolution was steered by work teams or existing Party committees that led the campaigns to purge “black gangs” and “ox ghosts and snake spirits.”22 The work teams used illegal confinement at this stage to deal with rebellious students.

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 119 Kuai Dafu, a student rebel accused as a “counter-revolutionary,” challenged the authority of the work team and was locked up at Tsinghua University by Wang Guangmei, wife of Liu Shaoqi and a work team leader on July 4. On that same day, Kuai staged a hunger strike to protest the persecution, asserting that the personal freedom of citizens of the PRC is inviolable, as stipulated by the constitution. Kuai was later transferred to another university building where he was closely monitored by 24 people standing guard on four shifts until he was released on July 22, 1966, two days after Mao criticized the work teams.23 These purges and confinements of radical students by the work teams from May through July, however, constituted serious crimes repudiated by the masses between August and September as evidence of “bourgeoisie reactionary line” [zichan jieji fandong luxian].24 There were more than 800 students who were labeled counterrevolutionaries by the work team due to their support for Kuai, who for being “crowned” with the counter-revolutionary “cap,” lost his freedom and was confined and kept under guard day and night.25 In restoring order and meting out punishment, the work team at Tsinghua University deprived Kuai Dafu and his sympathizers’ of their personal freedoms, while neglecting the fact that it violated the right to personal freedom of PRC citizens, as Kuai had correctly pointed out. In some cases, work teams sent down by the higher authorities targeted politically suspicious and vulnerable people, such as teachers, who were usually considered intellectuals in China’s Maoist parlance. In Baishui county, Shaanxi province, the work teams dispatched by the county’s Party committee intruded into local middle schools and assigned some of the teachers to the “teacher’s team of concentrated training” [jiaoshi jixun dui]. This detention center, being maintained from September 2, 1966, to January 2, 1967, first confined a total of 109 teachers in a local theater and then in a government shelter. During the four months of incarceration, the detained teachers were all denied their personal freedom. They had to engage in hard manual labor in the daytime and write confessions at night, and also report to the guards before using the restrooms. Their families were allowed to visit them and bring them things, which however had to be thoroughly checked. A male teacher, who was less fit and exhausted from the heavy labor of transporting rocks to a quarry, ended up taking his own life.26 Incarceration by the Party Committee

When the work teams on college campuses withdrew after Mao’s intervention in July 1966, most local Party committees and their secretaries did not fall – rather, they actively suppressed the rebellious mass organizations that challenged them, although Mao already issued the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s (CCPCC’s) Decision Concerning the Cultural Revolution on August 8, 1966, that is, the “sixteen points.”27 Under the rule of Li Jingquan, south-west regional Party leader in Sichuan, teachers at the Chengdu Institute

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of Technology were purged in August 1966, excluding those who were previously designated as bad elements. Detained inside the college, these ousted teachers were forced to engage in hard labor and write up a “reform-throughlabor plan” and a “reform-through-labor journal.”28 Zhang Pinghua, Hunan provincial Party secretary, launched a campaign called “capture black ghosts” in September 1966, aiming to purge and detain workers and non-student masses, since it was stated explicitly in the “sixteen points” to protect students.29 Purges of rebels by incumbent Party secretaries continued in waves until they themselves were attacked and locked up for being representatives of the bourgeoisie reactionary line in early October 1966.30 For repudiating the Party secretary at his work unit, a 23-year-old man named Guo Jiahong, who was a team leader in a sericulture farm in Jiangsu province, was branded as an “ox ghost and snake spirit” and locked up by Zhenjiang municipal Party committee for four months from June 17, 1966, to October 12, 1966. Guo’s basic civil rights of correspondence during confinement was denied, and all his personal letters, whether outgoing or incoming, were confiscated and checked. In order to regain freedom, and also due to repeated interrogations and coercions, Guo eventually relented and confessed that he was a counter-revolutionary. In a letter of accusation, Guo also mentioned that he overheard mention of “sixteen points” on radio broadcasts, but the Party committee personnel denied him the access to information by turning off the radio.31 In October 1967, the Party Center called for restoration of the Party’s centralized leadership.32 After the CCP’s Ninth National Congress in 1969, the Party committees at different levels, which had been sidelined since October 1966, were re-established. From April 1970 to early 1973, Wu Dasheng, Party Secretary of Jiangsu province, organized the province’s “dig deeply for the May 16 elements” campaign. Wu defined the “May 16” elements as criminals who opposed the red flag and targeted Chairman Mao while raising the red flag. During those three years, 260,000 “May 16” elements were purged and 130,000 were thrown into extralegal, makeshift jails, known as “study classes” at the time. A total of 2,540 people died in confinement.33 Beginning in February 1971, the “dig deeply for the May 16 elements” campaign in Suzhou University, Jiangsu province, labeled 396 out of its 688 faculty members as May 16 elements. One female teacher was raped by an investigator during the interrogation.34 “Cowshed” Founded by Red Guards

Student Red Guards played a major role in setting up unofficial confinement sites. Since the work team dispatched to Peking University by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee was disbanded in late July 1966, the Peking University Cultural Revolutionary Committee took over the campus. Nie Yuanzi, well known for her poster that attacked the Peking University’s senior leaders, became the head of the committee. All of the departments also set up their own departmental Cultural Revolution committees. Hao Bin, a

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 121 young assistant professor of the history department, was alleged a counterrevolutionary and was openly humiliated and tortured in July 1966. On September 27, 1966, Hao, along with 23 other faculty members, was sent by the department’s Cultural Revolution committee to Taipingzhuang, a village in Beijing’s suburban Changping district, where they were deprived of personal freedom and placed under round-the-clock surveillance. As Hao reminisced in his memoir 40 years later, the “concentration camp” was officially called a “reform-through-labor team” [laogaodui] by student Red Guards. Inside the camp, the confined professors followed a daily routine: wake up at 6 a.m.; assemble for roll call; read for an hour before breakfast; and engage in manual labor for four hours in the morning and another four in the afternoon. After dinner, they were required to study the Selected Works of Mao Zedong and then write their confessions. Only Sunday afternoons were designated for attending to personal matters such as having a haircut, doing laundry, or sending letters. As a form of soul-cleansing rite, the Red Guards ordered the professors in daily discussion sessions to plead guilty in front of Mao’s portrait before mealtimes, and to avow before the Red Guards, who were their former students, that they would reform themselves thoroughly.35 According to Ji Xianlin, a leading scholar of South Asian languages and member of the rebellious “Jinggang Mountain Corps,” the detainees at Peking University were treated like real criminals. The “Rules for Criminals under Labor Reform” [laogai zuifan shouze] hanging on the wall were reminders of their status; labeled as “black gangsters,” they had to get up at 6 a.m. and run in the courtyard before breakfast; copying and memorizing Mao’s most recent “supreme directives” was mandatory before they began their day of hard physical labor, which were tasks of former university bluecollar workers but assigned to reformed intellectuals. The Red Guards, most of whom were Peking University students, might summon a prisoner randomly anytime and anywhere to recite the directives of Mao. If the professor failed to recite accurately, he or she would be slapped in the face. These professors were sent down to factories to carry bricks, rocks, coal, or sand. They were not allowed to have eye contact with the guards and were required to lower their heads when the student guards showed up. Worst of all, the student guards even appointed informers to spy on other inmates.36 In the aforementioned cases, these confinement sites were best known as “cowsheds” [niupeng] among the victims. The History of Xiamen University defines niupeng as a site for “concentrated study under supervision and reform through labor.”37 Both Hao Bin and Ji Xianlin used the term niupeng in the title of their memoirs. Hao said he first heard of the word in 1969 from a student, after his release from the three-year off-campus internment. To him, niupeng aptly encapsulated the meaning since it confined “ox ghosts and snake spirits” [niu gui she shen], the Chinese terminology for cadres, intellectuals and other targets of political purge.38 Wang Youqin highlighted that “cowshed” was an unofficial name given to these detention houses set up after 1968 by “work units” [gongzuo danwei] across the country following the

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launch of “cleansing the class ranks” [qingli jieji duiwu] campaign. Wang also pointed out the purpose attributed to the origin of the name “cowshed” because it locked up “ox ghosts and snake spirits.”39 Both Wang and Hao agreed that the name “cowshed” had an underlying dehumanizing tone in its objective to reform and deprive social elites of personal freedom. The term “ox ghosts and snake spirits” had its origin in Buddhism and was first coined by Tang dynasty poet Du Mu.40 As some scholars had noticed, the tendency to designate political enemies as evil demons demonstrated the persistence of the demonological paradigm in modern Chinese political culture that began in the Taiping Rebellion.41 In 1955, Mao used “ox ghosts and snake spirits” with a derogatory connotation to indicate unwanted images in Chinese theatre. By 1965, Mao had already used the term to refer to potential enemies in his precautionary warning to internal security personnel that they should be watchful that “ox ghosts and snake spirits will come out to sabotage the state when it is at war.”42 In 1966, it became a label for all anti-Party and antisocialist elements in society.43 On June 1, 1966, the People’s Daily published an editorial titled “Sweeping Over All Ox Ghosts and Snake Spirits,” calling for old thoughts, old culture, old customs, and old habits, that is, the “Four Olds” to be smashed. Therefore, this figurative term implicitly demonized and criminalized the subjects under investigation, reducing them to the subhuman level, and justifying violence and torture. The Role of the People’s Liberation Army in Confinement of Rebels

During the Cultural Revolution, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also played a leading role in confinement and punishment of rebels starting from 1967, when it assumed the judicial role. On January 21, 1967, Mao ordered the PLA’s intervention of rebellion and power seizure by supporting the leftist revolutionary masses, known as the “three supports and two militaries” [sanzhi liangjun].44 On March 19, 1967, the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC) issued a formal directive on supporting agriculture and industry, and implementing military training and military control.45 Most provinces were put under military control prior to the establishment of the revolutionary committee, which was completed by September 5, 1968, and the military control commission nationwide thus “replaced the police, the legal apparatus, and the People’s courts during the Cultural Revolution.”46 In Nanning, capital of Guangxi Zhuang Minority Autonomous Region, the military region replaced the judicial apparatus on 23 January 1967, and in June 1968, the military control commission jailed 975 rebels, among whom 37 were beaten to death and 29 committed suicide.47 In February 1967, the PLA confined over 10,000 Xiang River and Red Flag Army activists in Changsha, Hunan province.48 In the spring of 1967, the Chengdu Military Region detained close to 100,000 rebels for about two months in Sichuan. The detainees were locked up in temporary confinement facilities where 12 people were squeezed within a 9-square-meter space, and had to share a chamber pot and another pot for washing rice bowls.

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 123 “Some were locked in underground cells without any sunlight and without being able to move at all.”49 In March 1967, Generals Xu Shiyou and Du Ping, two chief leaders of the Nanjing Military Region, founded the Jiangsu Provincial Military Control Committee in Jiangsu province to stop factional conflicts and to restore social order after the downfall of the old Provincial Party Committee. The military control commission placed Jiangsu province under martial law, and imprisoned hundreds of rebels, whom it labeled as counter-revolutionaries.50 In fact, the PLA played a leading role in jailing people in Jiangsu when students left the cities to take up assigned jobs or went to the countryside in the second half of 1968.51 Mass Dictatorship under the Revolutionary Committee

The revolutionary committee, which had its origin in Heilongjiang province in 1967 and was later promoted nationwide by the Party center as the ideal form of local power, adopted the “three-in-one” combination of revolutionary cadres, the masses and PLA representatives to replace the old, parallel dual-power organizations of the Party and government. Within this power structure, however, army representatives still played a major role.52 In March 1968, Jiangsu founded its own revolutionary committee, led by General Xu Shiyou, who continued to be trusted by Mao. In August 1968, the Jiangsu revolutionary committee convened its “Mao Zedong thought study class” [Mao Zedong sixiang xuexiban] to repudiate and reform those anti-revolutionary committee rebel faction members.53 The “Mao Zedong thought study class,” which Mao himself personally endorsed as a “good method” to solve “many problems,” was actually a temporary detention facility.54 The revolutionary committee was directly responsible for implementing the “cleansing the class ranks” [qingli jieji duiwu] policy in May 1968, although Jiang Qing first mooted the idea in November 1967.55 In Changchun, capital of Jilin province, the cleansing campaign officially kicked off in May 1968, three months after the founding of the provincial revolutionary committee. A Mao Zedong thought propaganda team run by the army entered a small company affiliated with Changchun Agricultural Machinery Company to help build the company revolutionary committee and at the same time select members to work in “Mass Dictatorship Corps” [qunzhong zhuanzheng dui]. They declassified all personal documents to purge staff that had questionable personal history. The Mass Dictatorship Corps detained 64 staff (out of 230) in its improvised cells for background screening. One of the victims received eight months of incarceration, and most received terms ranging from 20 days to three months. Inside the cowshed, the “masses” resorted to rampant use of torture, including beating, kicking, and forced kneeling.56 Guangxi Regional Revolutionary Committee established a “political work group” [zhenggongzu] on September 20, 1968 to supervise the detention of higher-level officials under investigation in “custody houses” [jianhusuo], and of middle-level officials and

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intellectuals in “Mao Zedong thought study classes,” which served as interrogation facilities.57 During the cleansing campaign, which screened all people without fixed criteria such as background or current status, many workers were also detained in the cowshed because of their alleged past problems that were as petty as complaints or some casual remarks made before 1949. For instance, a worker from a factory in Henan province liked to use English words such as “ok” and “hello” to others, and during the campaign, the English words were regarded as codes for clandestine communication, and he was locked up by the factory revolutionary committee, after the “masses” reported on him. Another worker was shown to the factory’s detention room when he joked in a cafeteria about tasting the “Khrushchev-style” beef and potato stew and then comparing that with the vegetable soup he had during the Great Famine in 1960. For people who had more serious historical problems and had launched more vicious attacks on Mao and the Cultural Revolution, the factory’s special case group, that is, the detainees’ colleagues, would be responsible for investigation, public denunciation, and torturing, as well as the daily management of the incarceration.58 Workers who had been rebels before were likely to be victims of the cowshed set up under the revolutionary committee’s rules. For Chen Yinan, a young worker–rebel leader in Hunan province, the nightmare began at the Ninth Party Congress in 1969 and particularly the launch of “one strike, three-anti” [yida sanfan] campaign beginning in February 1970. The company that Chen was affiliated with was overseen by an army representative, while officers of the 47th Corps, who were dispatched to support the leftists and to stabilize the situation of the province, largely dominated the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee. According to Chen, his company set up “rooms for repentance” [fanxing shi] in an abandoned hotel that used to be run by the company. There were 15 rebel workers who were suspended from work and subject to self-examination. Each of them was assigned a room equipped with a bed and a desk, and they were closely monitored by the company security staff. No rebel worker could leave the room without the permission of the company’s special office in charge of the “one strike, threeanti” campaign. All they could do was to confess and wait to be scrutinized by case managers. They were not permitted to communicate with each other either.59 Two weeks later, Chen and his colleagues, along with about 100 other people, were transferred to a “Mao Zedong thought study class” where they were forced to study Mao’s quotations and the Party center’s policies. The detention period in study class ranged from two months to one year, and the objective was to repudiate and screen former rebels. Anyone found guilty of intentional jury or homicide in their past armed struggles would be sentenced and thrown into formal prison. In addition, those detained in the study class were not permitted to go out or home, nor could they make phone calls. Detainees were subject to round-the-clock coerced confessions until some detainees broke down and gave false confessions. Detainees who

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 125 refused to give in as well as those without any evidence of misconduct would finally be released after the class was disbanded.60 During the cleansing campaign under the revolutionary committee, the state’s mobilizing power, the PLA’s efficiency, and the masses’ enthusiasm were factors that had driven greater participation in the incarceration, which also resulted in the prevalence of unofficial detention sites in work units. Investigations were usually carried out by a team called the “special case groups” [zhuan’an zu].61 First set up by the Ministry of Public Security in the 1950s as ad hoc operational task forces, special case groups were charged with the function of investigating political cases.62 During the Cultural Revolution, special case groups proliferated to all units and became so effective in detaining any suspects because they were empowered by the masses. Extralegal Incarceration and the Maoist Party-State The extralegal incarceration sites, as epitomized by the cowsheds, share some commonalities despite their varying purposes and agents: (i) the detention sites, although known by different names, were all highly politicized. The objectives were to punish, investigate, screen, or control political deviants and suspects, not common criminals such as thieves or rapists; (ii) the sites of confinement were arbitrarily chosen, contingent on the available space locally; (iii) most, but not all detention sites meted out forced labor as punishment to inmates or detainees, while others only curtailed detainees’ movements and deprived them of freedom and communication. Accounts of sudden and arbitrary arrest, brutal treatment, and rigidly routine life were corroborated by official records as well as personal experiences of victims like Ji Xianlin, Hao Bin, and Nie Yuanzi, etc., who belonged to different factional affiliations or were in conflict; (iv) as these extrajudicial detention sites did not impose fixed prison terms because of the temporary, investigative and punitive nature of the facilities, a change in the political climate and dominant political force or in investigation result could be pivotal to the release of detainees; (v) state ideology loomed large even though the mass incarceration was not subject to the judicial system. It should be noted that work teams, local Party committees, the army, the worker/army propaganda teams, and the revolutionary committees were all agents and arms of the Party-state, although the confinement of professors and other political deviants by Red Guards and the masses were seemingly outside the state apparatus. That said, the internalization of the Party’s violent and populist ideology spawned the aforementioned forms of arrest and detention that often mimicked a real prison in practice. In other words, the Party, in endorsing extrajudicial confinement and use of violence, had outsourced the penalizing power to the politically empowered students and masses, which became an alternative source of authority. The state’s mixed official responses to the massive incarceration, however, revealed the existence of serious tensions and contradictions between societal

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norms and codified rules in Maoist China, manifesting an inherent schism between a revolutionary party’s idealist need to carry out revolutionary popular justice and a socialist state’s duty to maintain formal legality. Following the founding of the PRC, direct Party interference in mass justice and people’s tribunal, ranging from the “suppress the counter-revolutionaries” campaign to the “five-anti” movement, was already evident from 1951 to 1953.63 The CCP had implicitly permitted extrajudicial penalties because in 1957, it openly violated the legal principles in the 1954 Constitution, which had won wide appeal from the masses by purging rightists. As is evident in Kuai Dafu’s protest on July 4, 1966, college students were clearly aware of the Constitution and basic civil liberty, yet the entire political climate had impeded the respect for and compliance with them. On August 8, 1966, the CCPCC issued the “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” which encouraged the masses to “educate themselves,” the Party officials to “respect [the] initiatives,” and the masses to “distinguish between right and wrong and between correct and incorrect ways of doing things.”64 These directives not only gave “mass dictatorship” a free hand but also legitimatized the trial-and-error process. The Beijing Municipal Military Control Committee for Public Security cited Mao Zedong’s sanction that authorized the Red Guards’ purge of the unwanted elements in Beijing: “Our great leader Mao Zedong teaches us that to reactionaries we must exercise dictatorship, and we must suppress them. We only allow them to be well-disciplined, not to act at will. If they act at will, then we must stop them immediately and penalize them.”65 Hence, the Maoist acquiescence in mass-based immediate punishment justified all illegal detentions and tortures, and effectively nullified any attempts to regulate the arbitrary arrest and incarceration operations. Even the Party’s own documents contained contradictory provisions. An article in the “Directive of the Central Committee on the Great Proletarian Culture Revolution in Rural District (Draft)” issued in December 1966 attempted to protect dissident views, stipulating that anyone labeled “counter-revolutionary” or “saboteur” for expressing such views should be vindicated; but the document, at the same time, listed five personality types that were targets of mass dictatorship: landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists. The two provisions contradicted each other to the extent that any dissidents could be easily purged and labeled as one of the five undesirable elements for expressing dissident views.66 Nevertheless, during its early founding years of the PRC, China did make some progress in normalizing and institutionalizing its legal work prior to 1966, and the leaders paid lip service to the protection of personal rights. The 1954 Constitution of the PRC, a promising landmark of socialist legality, provided protection against arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, which Kuai Dafu cited to protect himself. By 1957, a complete judicial system was established, and criminal law and criminal procedure law were being drafted in the same year.67 Mao hardly mentioned or commented on the extrajudicial confinement phenomenon except to articulate his general support for the

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 127 enthusiasm of the Red Guards and the “masses.” At an enlarged central work conference in 1962, Mao emphasized in his speech that although “a few people have to be arrested and executed … we must not arrest people lightly, and we must especially not execute people lightly.”68 On 18 November 1966, the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee issued an “Important Notice” emphasizing that “[n]o factory, mine, school, organization or other unit is allowed to set up houses of detention without authorization, to set up courts of trial without authorization, or to arrest and torture people without authorization.”69 Two days later, the Party center endorsed the notice and circulated it to all local Party committees. At a speech on November 27, 1966, Premier Zhou Enlai stressed that the purpose of the notice was to protect the people’s freedom, and that unauthorized detention was wrong because it “took [the] place of the dictatorial power.”70 In February 1967, Zhou ordered the mass organizations in Inner Mongolia “not to engage in armed struggle, not to beat, smash and loot, and not to carry out any arbitrary confinement.”71 On June 6, 1967, the CPCCC, the State Council, CMC, and the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG) issued a joint circular order, in which the highest authorities of China stipulated that “[a]part from organs of dictatorship of the State which may carry out their duty of making necessary arrests and detentions according to orders and law, nobody or individual is allowed to make arrests, to set up courts or a disguised form of private courts.”72 Many rebel groups echoed the directive by issuing their own declarations that avowed to “firmly safeguard the Circular Order issued on 6 June.”73 A CCP Centre Circular, dated June 24, 1967, reiterated that “[n]o arrests or detentions are to be made” to the mass rebellion factions that were expected to hold a meeting in Beijing.74 Military control during the Cultural Revolution also overruled the formal procedures. While individuals were forbidden from carrying out arrests and detentions, the PLA, or any “organs of dictatorship” [zhuanzheng jigou] were explicitly authorized to do it, as the highest authorities were constantly cautioning about the existence of counter-revolutionaries. On April 6, 1967, Mao endorsed an order of the CMC, which stated that “[a]rbitrary arrests are forbidden, particularly large-scale arrests. Counterrevolutionary elements, against which conclusive evidence has been found, should be arrested. But the evidence must be conclusive, and the arrests must first be approved.”75 That said, the authorization and restriction of arrests were articulated in vague language and left to the discretion of the PLA. On July 10, 1968, Zhou Enlai made a comment on a report about the beating and death of Professor He Sijing, chair of the Department of Law at Renmin University of China: I suggest the Ministry of Public Security tell the Beijing Municipal Military Control Committee for Public Security [Beijing shi gonganju junshi guanzhi weiyuanhui] to form a special institution to follow such cases. They need to be checked thoroughly. Otherwise, any mass organization is able to

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exercise unauthorized arrest and interrogation, and to beat people to death. It is not a good policy for the dictatorship organs to just let it go.76 Zhou’s seemingly legalist and rational “suggestion,” however, demonstrated that all past notices against arbitrary arrest had fallen on deaf ears in practice. His current one was no exception either, at a time when the law was subordinate to the revolution and the “dictatorial power” had already been delegated to the masses. Further evidence of the contradiction came earlier in that same month, when the CCPCC, the State Council, CMC, and CCRG issued a joint notice, known as the “July 3rd Notice,” calling for “acting counterrevolutionaries to be penalized according to law” in Guangxi. The notice from the highest authority authorized revolutionary committees at all levels to conduct rampant arrests, confinements, and abuse of suspects, causing the death of 85,000 people.77 Between the Party apparatus’ “June 6th Circular Order” in 1967 and its “July 3rd Notice” in 1968 lie the fundamental ideological and institutional weaknesses that precipitated state-led mass incarceration, namely the constitutional protection and seemingly lenient expedient notices notwithstanding. Clearly, the Party’s revolutionary ideology conflicted with the rule of law and its own effort of rationalization. Conclusion The extrajudicial incarceration, as a political phenomenon, epitomized the collaboration and mutual reinforcement of despotism of the state and the Chinese masses, despite the apparent breakdown of the formal state judicial apparatus. The long-held tradition of “populist legality” was the fundamental cause of the pervasive illegal deprivation of personal freedom regardless of its obvious violation of the codified rules and the follow-up legal constraints.78 The revolutionary nature of the Chinese Party-state and its culture of operating with an informal, simplified style would easily “call for the participation and involvement of the masses in all aspects of government, including law.”79 By bypassing the established and professional law enforcement organs of the state, or Foucauldian “mediator,” the Party became more pervasive through delegation of the discretionary power to the Party leaders, army, students, and the masses.80 During the process, new political actors emerged to forge alternative mechanisms of penalizing and incarcerating. In this sense, as Michael Dutton pointed out, the “so-called ‘popular power’ and ‘bureaucratic’ power are deployed simultaneously,” and these two forms are only “alternative technologies.”81 In post-Mao China, a socialist legal order was re-established. The Party gradually retreated from the practice of radical legal populism and power outsourcing, and denied the masses the power of illegal confinement, for example, in its own pursuit of legal professionalism, the state no longer delegated penalizing and investigative powers to the people. However, the Party’s extrajudicial and pretrial arrests, segregations, and investigations did

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 129 not die out. The CCP Central Disciplinary and Inspection Commission, charged with the task of investigating and sanctioning political disciplinary violations and corruption of Party leaders, began to take coercive measures, including detention. The solitary confinement by Disciplinary and Inspection Commission, known as “double designations” [shuanggui], or “confession of problems in designated places within designated time” was not subject to due procedural process, making shuanggui an “authorized illegal practice” of confinement.82 The term of pretrial confinement, for the purpose of investigation before the convicted official was transferred to judicial organs, was not fixed. Nor was it regulated by any laws. It seems that this disciplinary and extrajudicial censure through incarceration and coerced confession was a modern, though more institutionalized and centralized, resurgence of the extrajudicial confinement during the Cultural Revolution, continuing to demonstrate the Party’s paramount status over the state legal apparatus. In the historical perspective, the radical populist justice and extra-judiciary mass incarceration during the Cultural Revolution was an excess of revolutionary ideology and aberration of socialist legality, which the Party later attempted to amend. However, what had happened was inevitable due to the intrinsic institutional contradictions and ambiguities in the relationship between the legal system of the PRC and the ruling CCP, with the residue of its revolutionary–military tradition and the largely non-legal background of its leaders. Notes 1 Some recent research works on the Cultural Revolution focus on the Red Guard movement, see Andrew G. Walder, The Beijing Red Guard Movement: Fractured Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), or on rural violence, see Su Yang, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Other research continues the interest in the Mao cult and also examines its international influence; see Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Alexander Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Some scholars focus on the cultural and artistic forms during the Cultural Revolution, see Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Since the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), legal pretrial detention included jails [kanshousuo], shelter for investigation centers [shourong shencha suo] and police lockups [juliusuo] at various levels. Even during the Cultural Revolution, these institutions continued to jail common criminals. Whereas past studies on the Chinese law enforcement system paid more attention to the institutionalized Chinese incarceration and the system of laogai, i.e., “reform through labor,” this study aims to focus on the makeshift and extrajudicial nature of confinement, its founders, management, the use of violence, the experience of the detainees, and the contextual meaning of the Chinese socialist political apparatus and revolutionary/military ideology. To this author, temporary imprisonment in Maoist China was also different from the Soviet Gulag, for the former was less institutionalized and bureaucratized, more ad hoc and on-site, and

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also the cowshed, in particular, lacked obvious economic purposes. Temporary imprisonment was also different from the May Seventh Cadre School established in the late 1960s – another Chinese form of penalizing and re-educating cadres and intellectuals – in that the former emphasized compassionate social relief 2012). For public security work and internal surveillance before and right after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, see Michael Schoenhals, Spying for the People: Mao’s Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). In Mao’s Last Revolution, for example, Roderick MacFarquar and Michael Schoenhals focus more on beating, murder, and mass killing as manifestations of the Red Terror than detaining and confinement. When the two authors refer to the internment in the cowshed, they use the word “arrest” and sometimes “detain,” while arrest or daibu in Chinese is used only as an act of the government. See Roderick MacFarquar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 257. Kate Saunders, Eighteenth Layers of Hell: Stories from the Chinese Gulag (London and New York: Cassel, 1996), pp. 1–2. In China, the place that holds people who are convicted of crimes by the court is called jianyu [prison]. Wang Xuetai mentioned that he was taken into a jail [kanshou suo] as a counterrevolutionary in 1975, but most of the inmates he saw were common criminals. See Wang Xuetai, Jianyu suoji [Reminiscence of Prisons] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2013), 56. For studies on Chinese prison in the first half of the 20th century, see Frank Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and Prison in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For the post-1949 system of punishment, see Frank Dikötter, “Crime and Punishment in Post-Liberation China: The Prisoners of a Beijing Gaol in the 1950s,” The China Quarterly, no. 149 (March 1997): 147–159. Hongda Harry Wu provides a very detailed examination of the Laogai system of China in his Laogai – The Chinese Gulag, trans. Ted Slingerland (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). For a systemic inquiry into the pre-Cultural Revolution Chinese judiciary system, see Jerome Alan Cohen, The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1963 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). For post-Mao Chinese Criminal Justice, see Leng Shao-Chuan and Chiu Hungdah, Criminal Justice in Post-Mao China: Analysis and Documents (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985). It should be noted that it was lawful in early American history to confine a person convicted of a crime and put him to hard labor. See Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 41. For the economic goal of the Soviet political camps, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 55. Hongda Harry Wu also mentioned in his book, Laogai – The Chinese Gulag, how the labor camps in China were disguised as “farms” and “factories,” where prisoners engaged in production. For a study of the detention-re-education centers for vagabonds and prostitutes in Beijing in the 1950s, see Aminda M. Smith, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). Often, the May Seventh Cadre School which sent officials and intellectuals down to the countryside to do hard labor, was also loosely called the cowshed, see Zhao Feng, Hongse niupeng: Wuqi ganxiao jishi [Red Cowsheds: Facts in May Seventh Cadre Schools] (Xining: Qinghai renmin chubanshe, 1999). The author would like to argue that there was a major difference between the cowshed and the May Seventh Cadre Schools. According to Yang Jiang, she still received a “high salary” in the May Seventh Cadre School, where she was “re-educated” (cowshed internees were usually only allocated a

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minimum stipend for food). Yang also mentioned that some scholars were sent down to the cadre school in the rural area after they were released from the cowshed in the academy. See Yang Jiang, Ganxiao liuji [Six Chapters about My Life in Cadre School] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1991), 3, 35. At a cadre school set up in Jiangxi province after 1969 for about 2,000 Peking University [Beida] faculty and staff, the professors lived together with peasants and engaged in farming, building, popularizing agricultural mechanization, and recruiting and educating local students. Some faculty members lived and worked in the cadre school with their spouses and children. Beida faculty in the cadre school continued to receive their normal monthly salary. See Chen Pingyuan, ed., Liyuzhou jishi [Chronicle of Liyuzhou] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2012), 35–6, 93, 167–190. Even during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese prisons were still functioning, and criminals and counter-revolutionaries were still being tried and sentenced. For an account of the imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution by the late economist Yang Xiguang (aka Yang Xiaokai), who was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp, see Yang Xiguang and Susan McFadden, Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Also, see Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, trans. Susan Wilf (New York: W.W. Norton & Company; reprint ed., 2008). Lu Li’an, a college student and founder of the North Star Study Society [Beidouxing xuehui] was accused of being an “acting counter-revolutionary who viciously attacked Chairman Mao” and was formally arrested by the Hubei Provincial Revolutionary Committee. His cell in the prison was about 12 square meters large, accommodating three to four prisoners. See Lu Li’an, Yangtian changxiao: yige danjian shiyi nian de hongweibing yuzhong yu tian lu [Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution], e-book (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005). Leng and Chiu, Criminal Justice in Post-Mao China: Analysis and Documents, 7. For Mao’s attitude towards the law, see Leng and Chiu, Criminal Justice in PostMao China, 9–10. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 323–325. Foucault expresses his opinion in his debate with a French Maoist leader Victor in 1972. See David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 299–300. For the full transcript of the conversation, see Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 1–36. Bu Weihua, Zalan jiushijie: wenhua dageming de dongluan yu haojie [Smashing the Old World: Havoc of the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008), 599, fn 131. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 21. Barry Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789–1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35–43. For the ideas that the power to punish may have been rearranged or shifted, and that the French monarch is a “super-power,” see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Press, 1977), 80–82. For the contradiction between the CPC’s emphasis on centralization and its reliance on the mass line, see Stuart Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Zedong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97–98. It is noted that Michel Foucault went as far as to anticipate and sanction the proletariat’s exertion of its power “that is violent, dictatorial and

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20 21

22 23 24 25 26

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even bloody over the class it has supplanted.” See Wolin, The Wind from the East, 324. Michael Schoenhals, “Outsourcing the Inquisition: Mass Dictatorship in China’s Cultural Revolution,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no.1 (2008): 5. The contradiction between the Party and the state was pinpointed by Zheng Shiping; see Zheng Shiping, Party vs State in Post-1949 China: The Institutional Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). “Sichuan sheng difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Sichuan sheng zhi/gong’an sifa zhi [Provincial Gazetteer of Sichuan/Public Security and Judiciary] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1997), 6. Shi Zhe, Wo de yisheng: Shi Zhe zishu [My Whole Life: Self-Portrait of Shi Zhe] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2001),162–164, 168; Hu Qiaomu, Hu Qiaomu huiyi Mao Zedong [Hu Qiaomu Reminiscing about Mao Zedong] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2003), 275–276. While Shi Zhe and Hu Qiaomu both emphasized the role of Kang Sheng in the purge, Chen Yung-fa pointed out that Mao merely shrewdly detached himself from Kang Sheng’s concrete deeds while stressing his opposition to confinement and forced confession. See Chen Yung-fa, Zhongguo gongchan geming qishinian, xiuding ban shang [Seventy Years of the Chinese Communist Revolution, Revised Ed., vol. 1] (Taipei: Lianjing chuban gongsi, 2001), 395. In fact, Hu Qiaomu also mentioned that it was Mao who proposed the purge of “counter-revolutionaries” and “spies” during the Rectification. See Hu, Hu Qiaomu huiyi Mao Zedong, p. 274. Chen Yung-fa highlighted that Mao already knew his own order would inevitably lead to an “excess” but he still connived with Kang Sheng, see Chen, Zhongguo gongchan geming qishinian, 394. For similarities between the internment during the Yan’an Rectification and the confinement at the grassroots level during the Cultural Revolution, see Chen, Zhongguo gongchangeming qishinian, 812. For information about “simplifying” the system of mutual restraints among the police, the procurator and the court from 1957 to 1963, also see Cohen, The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1963, 17. Tan Hecheng, Xue de shenhua: gongyuan 1967nian Hunan Daoxian wenge datusha jishi [The Myth of Blood: An Account of the Massacre in the Daoxian County, Hunan Province in 1967] (Hong Kong: Tianxingjian chubanshe, 2010), 259. The English here is my literal translation before the appearance of its official English version now titled The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution, translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Yin Hongbiao, “Pipan zichan jieji fandong luxian: zaofang yundong de xingqi” [Criticize Criticising the Bourgeoisie Reactionary Line: The Rise of the Movement of Mass Rebellion], Ershiyi shiji, no. 31 (October 1995), 61. Xu Aijing, Qinghua Kuai Dafu [Kuai Dafu of Tsinghua] (Hong Hong: Zhongguo wenge lishi chubanshe, 2011), 77. Yin Hongbiao, “Pipan zichan jieji fandong luxian: zaofang yundong de xingqi,” 65. William Hinton, Hundred Days War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 55. Du Junfu, “Wenge chuqi de zhongxiaoxue jiaoshi jixun” [Concentrated Training of Middle School and Elementary School Teachers in Shaanxi during the Early Years of the Cultural Revolution], Zuotian [Yesterday] online journal, no. 11 (November 2012), http://prchistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2012%E5% B9%B4-11%E6%9C%88-30%E6%97%A5%E7%AC%AC-11%E6%9C%9F.pdf accessed 27 August 2014.

Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 133 27 Tong Xiaoxi, Jiduan niandai de gongmin zhengzhi [Civic Politics in an Era of Extremities] (Hong Kong: Zhongguo wenhua chuanbo chubanshe, 2011), 111–2. 28 Ibid., 143. 29 Ibid., 153. 30 Ibid., 169–170. 31 Guo Jiahong, “Kongsu shu: fennu kongsu Zhenjiang shiwei gongzuozu dui wo jianjin sige yue de zhengzhi pohai” [Letter of Accusation: An Angry Accusation of Zhenjiang Municipal Party Committee’s Four-Month Confinement and Persecution of Me], 12 October 1966, in Zhongguo wenhua dageming wenku (Chinese Cultural Revolution Database, CD-ROM), ed. Song Yongyi et al. 32 Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 158. 33 Wang Chunnan, “Wen’ge zhong pipan qingcha wuyiliu yundong” [The Campaign of Purging the “May Sixteenth” during the Cultural Revolution], Chinese News Digest online magazine, 【华夏文摘增刊】第九七八期（zk1502b）（作者：尹曙 生，王春南，陈徒手，钱江） | CND刊物和论坛accessed 6 February 2015. 34 Zhu Zinan, “Yisuo gaoxiao qingchao wuyiliu de beiju” (Tragedies at an Institution of Higher Education during the Movement of Cleansing the May 16th Elements), Chinese News Digest online magazine, 【华夏文摘增刊】第九八八期 （zk1504d）（作者：华新民，张成洁，张顺清，朱子南） | CND刊物和论坛 accessed 28 April 2015]. 35 Hao Bin, Liushui heceng xi shifei: Beida niupeng yijiao [The Past Has Not Been Washed Away: A Glimpse of the Cowshed at Beida] (Taipei: Dakuai wenhua chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 2014), 73–76. 36 Ji Xianlin, Niupeng zayi [Reminiscences in the Cowshed] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1999), 138–179. 37 Xiamen daxue dang’anguan, ed., Xiamen daxue xiaoshi [The History of Xiamen University], vol. 2 (Xiamen: Xiamen daxuechubanshe, 2006), 161–165. 38 Hao, Liushui heceng xi shifei: Beida niupeng yijiao, 23. 39 Wang Youqin, Wenge shounanzhe [Victims of the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: Kaifan zaizhi chubanshe, 2004), 14. 40 “Fojiao qutan: jiemi niu gui sheshen de zhenshi laili” [Anecdotes about Buddhism: True Story of Ox Ghosts and Snakes Spirits], at 人间佛教 - 峨眉山佛教网 (emsfj.com) accessed 12 August 2014. 41 Berend J. ter Haar, “China’s Inner Demons: The Political Impact of the Demonological Paradigm,” in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, ed. Chong Woei Lien (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 27–60. 42 Anonymous, ed., Mao Zedong sixiang shengli wansui [Long Live Mao Zedong Thought] (Beijing, 1969), 54. This is a compilation of Mao Zedong and Lin Biao’s quotations published in 1969 for “internal study.” 43 Mao Zedong “Zai Zhongguo gongchandang quanguo xuanchuan gongzuo huiyi shang de jianghua” [Speech given to the CPC National Propaganda Work Conference], March 1955, in Mao Zedong xuanji di qu juan [Selected Works of Mao Zedong], vol. 5 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1977), 416; The People’s Daily on 1 June 1966 carried an editorial calling the masses to “sweep over all kinds of ox ghosts and snake spirits.” 44 Mao Zedong, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao [Remarks and Speeches of Mao Zedong after the Founding of the PRC], vol. 12 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1998), 197. 45 Bu, Zalan jiushijie, 410. 46 Feng Jicai, Voices from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 53.

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47 Zhonggong Guangxi quwei zhengdang bangongshi [CCP Guangxi Party Rectification Committee], Wenge jimi dangan: Guangxi baogao [Confidential Archives of the Cultural Revolution: Reports from Guangxi] (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 2014), 55, 205. 48 Wu Yiching, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism at Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2014), 152. 49 MacFarquar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 178. 50 Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder, “Local Politics in the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Nanjing under Military Control,” The Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 2 (May 2002), 430. 51 Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder, “From Truce to Dictatorship: Creating a Revolutionary Committee in Jiangsu,” The China Journal, no. 68 (July 2012), 27. 52 In Hubei province, the ratio of army representation within the revolutionary committee was as high as 98%. See Bu, Zalan jiushijie, 728. 53 Dong and Walder, “From Truce to Dictatorship,” 27. 54 Wang, Jianyu suoji, 184. 55 Bu, Zalan jiushijie, 673–676. To further understand the close relationship between the Revolutionary Committees and the campaign of Cleansing the Class Ranks, also see MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 254. 56 Jiang Dongping, “Qingli jieji duiwu, weizui zisha zhe tebie duo” [So Many Took Their Lives during the Cleansing the Class Ranks Campaign] Wenshi jinghua, no. 12 (2004), http://news.china.com/zh_cn/history/all/11025807/20050526/12345384_3. html accessed 18 August 2014]. In Beijing, the cleansing campaign under the revolutionary committee detained 80 to 100 “class enemies” from May through midNovember 1968, and 430 people were beaten to death in July and August. See Bu, Zalan jiushijie (Smashing the Old World), 677. 57 Zhonggong Guangxi quwei zhengdang bangongshi [CCP Guangxi Party Rectification Committee], Wenge jimi dangan: Guangxi baogao [Confidential Archives of the Cultural Revolution: Reports from Guangxi], 326–360. 58 Yang Qichu, Fafeng de daqiang [The Insane High Walls] (Hong Kong: Wuqi xueshe chubangongsi, 2013), 61, 88–90. 59 Chen Yinan, Qingchun wuhen: yige zaofanpai gongren de shinian wenge [A Rebel Worker’s Life during the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2012), 387–388. 60 Ibid., 392–397. 61 Wang, Wenge shounanzhe shounanzhe [Victims of the Cultural Revolution], 14, 140–55. 62 Schoenhals, Spying for the People: Mao’s Secret Agents, 1949–1967, 71–72. While Schoenhals uses “case groups” to translate the Chinese term zhuan’an zu, I prefer a more literal translation, “special case groups” to reflect the ad hoc characteristic and individualized connotation. 63 Zheng, Party vs State in Post-1949 China, 56–57. 64 Michael Schoenhals, ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, Not a Dinner Party (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 36. 65 Cited in Wang, Wenge shounanzhe [Victims of the Cultural Revolution], 153. 66 William Hinton, Shenfan (New York: Random House, 1983), 513. 67 Zheng, Party vs State in Post-1949 China, 60. 68 Mao Zedong, “Talk at an Enlarged Central Work Conference,” in Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956–1971, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 184. 69 “Important Notice,” appendix to “Circular of the CCP Central Committee Concerning the Transmission of Important Notice of the CCP Peking Municipal Committee of November 18,” in Union Research Institute, ed., CCP Documents of

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70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82

the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967 (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1968), 122. Ibid., 187. Gao Shuhua and Cheng Tiejun, Neimeng wenge fengyun: yiwei zaofanpai linxiu de koushushi [Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia: Oral History of a Rebel Leader] (Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 2007), 241. “Circular Order of the CCP Central Committee, the State Council, the Central Military Commission and the Central Cultural Revolution Group Concerning the Strict Prohibition of Armed Struggle, Illegal Arrest and Looting and Sabotage,” issued on 6 June 1967, also known as Liuliu tongling [6 June Circular Order, included in Union Research Institute, ed., CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967 (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1968), 461–464. A scanned copy of such a declaration can be found on Zhongguo wenge wang [Chinese Cultural Revolution Research Network. www.wengewang.org/read.php? tid=33362 accessed 27 August 2014. “Circular of the CCP Central Committee, Chung-fa No. 199 (67),” in Union Research Institute ed., CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967, 466. “Order of the Central Military Commission,” in Union Research Institute ed., CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967 (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1968), 409. Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi [CCP Central Historical Materials Research Office], Zhou Enlai nianpu [Yearly Chronicle of Zhou Enlai] (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2007), 244. Zhonggong Guangxi quwei zhengdang bangongshi, wenge jimi dang’an, 278–279, 317. Yang Su suggested that the collective killings occurring in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution were not the consequence of direct state mobilization but indirect influence of state ideology and its combination with temporary structural “failures,” “lapses,” or “breakdowns.” See Yang Su, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19–23. However, the author suggested that the Party-state never failed, but its self-contradiction and ambiguity left much space for the masses to maneuver the situation. For populist legality and its tension with professionalism under the CPC, see Benjamin L. Liebman, “A Return to Populist Legality? Historical Legacies and Legal Reform,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, ed. Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 165–188. Victor H. Li, “The Role of Law in Communist China,” The China Quarterly, no. 44 (1970), 66–111. For the Party’s status above the apparatus of the state in China, see Franz Schurman, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 109–111. Michael R. Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 266. Li Ling, “The Rise of Discipline and Inspection Commission, 1927–2012: Anticorruption Investigation and Decision-Making in the Chinese Communist Party,” Modern China 42, no. 5 (2016): 468.

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Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 137 Haar, Berend J. ter. “China’s Inner Demons: The Political Impact of the Demonological Paradigm.” China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives. Edited by Chong Woei Lien. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Heilmann, Sebastian and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds. Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Hinton, William. Hundred Days War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Hu, Qiaomu. Hu Qiaomu huiyi Mao Zedong [Hu Qiaomu Reminiscing about Mao Zedong]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2003. Ji, Xianlin. Niupeng zayi. Reminiscences in the Cowshed. Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1999. Kang, Zhengguo. Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, translated by Susan Wilf. New York: W.W. Norton & Company; reprint ed., 2008 Leese, Daniel. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Li, Ling. “The Rise of Discipline and Inspection Commission, 1927–2012: Anticorruption Investigation and Decision-Making in the Chinese Communist Party” Modern China 42, no. 5 (2016): 447–482. Li, Victor H. “The Role of Law in Communist China” The China Quarterly, no. 44 (1970): 66–111. Lu, Li’an. Yangtian changxiao: yige danjian shiyi nian de hongweibing yuzhong yu tian lu [Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution]. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005. MacFarquar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Mao, Zedong. Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao [Remarks and Speeches of Mao Zedong after the Founding of the PRC], vol. 12. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1998. Mittler, Barbara. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Perry, Elizabeth J., and Li Xun. Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997. Saunders, Kate. Eighteenth Layers of Hell: Stories from the Chinese Gulag. London and New York: Cassel, 1996. Schoenhals, Michael. Spying for the People: Mao’s Secret Agents, 1949–1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Schoenhals, Michael. “Outsourcing the Inquisition: Mass Dictatorship in China’s Cultural Revolution” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 1 (2008): 3–19. Schoenhals, Michael ed. China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, Not a Dinner Party. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Shao-Chuan, Leng, and Chiu Hungdah. Criminal Justice in Post-Mao China: Analysis and Documents. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985.

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Extrajudicial Incarceration during the Cultural Revolution 139 Zhao, Feng. Hongse niupeng: Wuqi ganxiao jishi [Red Cowsheds: Facts in May Seventh Cadre Schools]. Xining: Qinghai renmin chubanshe, 1999. Zheng, Shiping. Party vs State in Post-1949 China: The Institutional Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Zhonggong Guangxi quwei zhengdang bangongshi [CCP Guangxi Party Rectification Committee]. Wenge jimi dangan: Guangxi baogao [Confidential Archives of the Cultural Revolution: Reports from Guangxi]. Hong Kong: Mirror Books, 2014. Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi [CCP Central Historical Materials Research Office]. Zhou Enlai nianpu [Yearly Chronicle of Zhou Enlai]. Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2007.

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Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed during the Cultural Revolution

Not a comprehensive study of the contemporary Chinese formal and informal prison system, this chapter focuses on one rarely studied aspect of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: the cultural life in formal and make-shift prisons. Past studies have revealed how numerous reading circles emerged in China from 1967 to 1976 to borrow, lend “internal” books of Western history and political theory, and share reading experience through organizing society, engaging in salon discussion and correspondence.1 Although the reading group members ran the risk of being arrested or being executed, reading and acquisition of books were less challenging because of the relative personal and correspondence freedom and relatively easy access to reading materials, many of which diffused to society from the library and formally exclusive circles of internal circulation. The breakdown of the school surveillance system and more free time for students due to cancellation of school facilitated intensive reading of non-pedagogical literary, historical, and political works.2 Barbara Mittler’s study of the culture during the Cultural Revolution supports an earlier assumption that books were widely available, and libraries might have been sneaked into, or its books were dispersed after the ransack and loot of the Red Guards. Literary works were popular among the readers, and names such as Romain Rolland, Leo Tolstoy, and Soviet authors were frequently mentioned in reminiscences.3 Robert Darnton asks, “What did 18th-century Frenchmen read?” when examining the French literary underground of the ancien régime.4 Chapter 1 of this book has answered the question about what radical leftist youth read in China in the 1920s. When studying the PRC history, we may take the same question further by inquiring that in the Chinese context what books were truly attractive to the reading public in the 1960s, when there was a state-sanctioned reading list that includes popular revolutionary stories such as The Song of Ouyang Hai [Ouyang Hai zhi ge]and The Diary of Lei Feng [Lei Feng riji], and furthermore, what people exactly read when they were incarcerated. Although reading could be dangerous during the Cultural Revolution for urban students, it was conceivably much harder for prisoners to even acquire reading materials, and their correspondence with the outside world was under regular censorship. Examining the political ritual, reading, and storytelling DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-7

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 141 under incarceration provides a new, cultural, as well as legal angle to revisit the Cultural Revolution. The prison or any detention sites are uniquely enclosed socio-political spaces where different agents engage in struggles for domination and autonomy, often epitomized by the regulation of rituals and reading, and the concept “space” is used here in a socio-political sense, for space represents mobility and possibility, and place represents fixity, rigidity, and control.5 Analytical Framework This chapter attempts to piece together the prison experiences of political prisoners during the Cultural Revolution and interpret them with sociological and critical theories, focusing on how the prisoners dealt with political rituals, compulsory reading, critical reading, censorship, and their acquisition of knowledge, information, and entertainment in a broader sense. The sociologist David Garland provides a cultural analysis to the practice of punishment.6 According to Garland, penal institutions should also be considered as “sites of ritual performance and cultural production.”7 Informed by Garland, prisons, including make-shift cowshed and formal, institutionalized prisons during the Cultural Revolution can be regarded as an ideal scenario to attest the theory that penal institutions could be used as viable space of cultural and ritualist production. Here I use both terms: the prison and the cowshed to indicate two types of incarceration of political deviants during the Cultural Revolution. The former indicates the formal building for legal confinement, and the prisoner including political deviants and common criminals. The latter was a spontaneous, makeshift space that held political deviants for unfixed term during the Cultural Revolution, and the practice of mass incarceration for political investigation can be traced back to the CCP’s wartime years in Yan’an and its pursuit of “simplifying” and “innovation” of legal procedures in the 1950s and early 1960s, as discussed in Chapter 5 of this book. The cowshed was often merely a “room reserved for the punishment of class enemies,” and “The term derives from the use of the term ‘cow—along with ‘snake,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘demon’.”8 It was usually established by the work unit as a pre-trial detention site, where the inmates worked, as a form of “mass dictatorship,” while the prison during the Cultural Revolution was taken over by the army after the judiciary organs were smashed, and the inmates in prison received formal sentence. Regardless of the difference in the founding and management between the cowshed and the prison, there was a common nexus of power relationship existing between the guards as the agent of the state and the inmates as its victim. It is here that we can use the theory of Pierre Bourdieu to enunciate the structural relations inside the prison where each person took a position. The guards monopolized the field (in this case the prison/cowshed) of cultural production, dissemination, and definition, and imposed the standard interpretation upon the inmates, who maintained their autonomy although placed

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at the bottom of the hierarchy.9 By combining Bourdieu’s conceptualization of “field,” “space,” and “structure” in cultural production with Garland’s more specific study of the penal institution, I draw attention to the internal structural relations of Chinese prison with the main goal of demonstrating how they play out in a dual process of the state’s control of the flow of knowledge and information on the one hand, and the inmates’ unquenchable zest for intellectual freedom on the other. In addition, to see the prison/cowshed as a site of struggle is also to affirm the important Foucauldian notion that “power is not to be taken to be a phenomenon of one individual’s consolidated and homogenous domination over others … ” and “Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain.”10 In the scenario of a Chinese prison/cowshed, the exercise of state power was also not only a one-directional imposition of political authority, but also a “net-like” dynamic process in which each involved individual is its vehicle and power is exercised “simultaneously.”11 With this premise, we can use the Chinese sites of confinement during the Cultural Revolution as a case study to address the Foucauldian concern that “in what ways punishment and the power of punishment are effectively embodied in a certain number of local, regional, material institutions, which are concerned with torture or imprisonment.”12 More importantly, books were also agents and vehicle of ideas with their own social life.13 So far, I have sketched a new analytical framework to revisit the cultural activities of the incarcerated political deviants during the Chinese Cultural Revolution under specific spatial arraignments by affirming three premises: (1) prison/cowshed can be a site of cultural and ritualistic production; (2) the spatial/relational structure of power inside prison should be carefully analyzed based upon empirical evidences; (3) the exercise of power in prison/ cowshed is a circulation and it can be individual-based and reciprocal. This current study is thus essentially an inquiry of the mechanism of power in the Chinese prison during the Cultural Revolution and the networks of communication through the lens of political prisoners who experienced, reflected, and articulated. It does not attempt to become an exhaustive general study of the Chinese prison system, nor is it an overview of the life of the millions of prisoners as a collective. Daily Ritual and Reading of Mao’s Works In the unofficial cowshed during the Cultural Revolution, daily life was highly structured and centered around Mao cult and confession. Hao Bin (1934–), a history professor at Peking University was labeled as a “black gangster” [heibang]in the summer of 1966. He was removed from the Peking University campus and relocated to the Taiping Village in the northern suburb of Beijing with another 22 professors “black gangsters” in September that same year. Hao Bin was jailed in this cowshed under the name of “half-work-half-study

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 143 base” [bangong bandu jidi] for three years until he was released in the summer of 1969, when the cowshed was abolished. His memoir provides a detailed account of the daily routine of the cowshed managed by the student Red Guards: Get up at 6 am. A quarter later assemble for roll call. Wash face and brush teeth. Before breakfast there was one hour for ‘daily reading’ (of newspapers). Breakfast. Four hours of labor in the morning and another four hours in the afternoon. After dinner, study the Selected Works of Mao Zedong [Mao Zedong xuanji], and write confessions. Only Sunday afternoon is free from labor and the time was reserved for laundry, haircutting, or mailing letters.14 According to Hao Bin, pleading guilty in front of Mao’s portrait was an important political ritual occurred three times a day prior to each meal. All the confined professors should line up in front of Mao’s portrait, lowering their heads. One designated inmate would read a quotation from Mao aloud, which was followed by a collective slogan shouting: “I plead guilty to the great leader Chairman Mao!” Then each inmate should announce his own name, which was prefixed with his “hat” [maozi], i.e., charge, such as “acting counterrevolutionary.”15 A former English professor at Peking University, Wu Ningkun (1920–2019) also emphasizes in his memoir the close relationship between meals and the ritual of Mao cult: “But no one was to line up for food before he or she bowed to the Chairman’s portrait on the wall and recited a quotation from the Little Red Book. When one finished eating, he or she went back to the portrait and shouted, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’!”16 Besides reciting Mao’s quotations, Ji Xianlin (1911–2009), an eminent scholar of Indology at Peking University, is particularly stricken by the cowshed rules that prohibited inmates “from looking up while walking” and “sitting with their legs crossed.”17 The student-guards of the cowshed also organized confession meetings for the professors to exchange their experiences in pleading guilty, and each week the inmate would have to submit a confession in Hao Bin’s cowshed. Wu Ningkun, who was teaching English in Anhui Province before jailed, provides the full-text of the confession of him and his colleagues in the cowshed: Most beloved and revered Great Leader Chairman Mao, the Red Sun in our hearts: We are a group of counterrevolutionaries who have sinned against you, against the invincible Mao Zedong Thought, and against your glorious revolutionary line. Our sins are grievous and innumerable. A thousand deaths could not redeem us from our mortal sins. But this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution you have launched and directed in person is touching us to our very souls. We solemnly vow that we will examine our sinful past with the microscope of Mao Zedong Thought and make every effort to turn over a new leaf and return to your glorious revolutionary line

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as soon as possible. Long live the Great Leader Chairman Mao! Long Live the Great Savior of the Chinese People! Long live the invincible Mao Zedong Thought! Long live the glorious revolutionary line of Chairman Mao!18 In Hao Bin’s case, under the close surveillance of the student Red Guards, it was almost impossible for the inmates to read anything other than newspaper and Mao’s essays in the cowshed. For Hao Bin and Peking University professors, memorizing designated passages from the Selected Works of Mao Zedong in daytime and waiting for public recitation in the evening was another daily routine, when the inmates would either be picked by the student keeper or be put into pairs to check each other’s memorization.19 Sidney Rittenberg, an American scholar who joined the Chinese revolution and became a Communist Party member was imprisoned in 1968, wrote in his memoir that every time when he was interrogated, he was ordered to “bow to Chairman Mao’s portrait on the wall and ask for forgiveness” and he had to recite quotations from Mao.20 What happened inside the cowshed reflected the political climate and practice outside out it. The ritualistic worship of Mao and the routine of “asking for instructions in the morning and reporting back in the evening,” and the compulsory “daily reading” of Mao’s works had been pervasive in social life since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and was officially endorsed and promoted by the CCP Center’s document “Zhongfa [67] 350” in 1967.21 For the inmates, writing confessions and pleading guilty in front of Mao’s portrait were two more specific activities related to their status as political outcasts. The cowshed was established on the spot and its space can be randomly chosen. While Peking University set up its cowshed in the Taiping Village, one research scientist was suspected of stealing top secret government documents from the national nuclear research base where he worked. He was then locked up in one room which was a former lab and now emptied and guarded by several PLA soldiers, who peered inside to observe the inmates through a peephole on the door. The lab was filled up with prisoners and two men had to share one bed, and the only reading material allowed was the pocket-sized Quotations from Chairman Mao [Mao zhuxi yulu]. What the prisoners were required to do was to undergo interrogation and confess past misbehavior, and they could go to sleep as late as 2:00 am.22 In a formal prison, however, solitary cell provided a private space for counter-rituals as opposed to the Mao-worshipping rituals sanctioned by the state. For Lin Zhao (1932–1968), a female “acting counterrevolutionary” and later martyr who was sentenced to the Shanghai Municipal Prison, popularly known as Tilanqiao Prison in May 1965, solitary incarceration in her cell meant that she was able to perform Christian ritual to baptize the soul of a Chinese Communist leader Ke Qingshi (1902–1965), who was believed by Lin to have been murdered by Mao Zedong. A Christian, Lin Zhao made an altar

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 145 in her cell, sang hymns, said prayers, and “conducted her one-person worship in her cell.” She also made an offering with food to her late father in front of his alter.23 Miscellaneous Book Reading In some cowsheds, reading of non-Maoist materials was possible. The historian Zhang Kaiyuan (1926–2021) of Central China Normal College was locked up in a classroom-turn-cowshed, and he could go to the library of the History Department to get some books: mainly politically safe literature and history books to avoid getting in trouble.24 My father in his unpublished memoir recalled how he read a novel entitled We Plant Love [Women bozhong aiqing]in the cowshed, managed by the army representatives who had suppressed the April-11 rebellion corps, of which my father was a member. He made a fake cover with a handwritten title made up by himself: We Plant Corns. He also read the Chinese version of John Fairbank’s The United States and China in the cowshed under the fake cover saying it was Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. I am not very sure about how my father got these books and from whom, but he did have chance to meet friends who would deliver letters to him. But my father mentioned several times to me that reading Fairbank enlightened him, for the book gave him a brand-new angle to rethink China’s history and reality. It might be safe to say that in the cowshed founded in a factory and managed by the PLA, it was not impossible to smuggle books into the cell. When Wu Ningkun and other fellow “ox demons” were moved from student dormitory to Nanzhuang village in rural Anhui, where they lived in the new cowshed of the Foreign Language Department of Anhui University and participated in labor. In the village, one fellow “demon” named Chen Yu read The Dream of the Red Chamber [Honglou meng], a Chinese literary classic of the 18th century and the modern historian Guo Moruo’s essay commemorating the three-hundredth anniversary of the peasant revolution led by Li Zicheng which toppled the Ming Dynasty. When inquired by the supervisor about why he did not read Chairman Mao’s works, Chen always relied that these were recommended by Mao. Chen also read the Chinese translation of Spartacus.25 In general, more latitude of reading was allowed in after-trial prison or even pre-trial jail than in the informal cowshed. According to Yang Xiguang, aka Yang Xiaokai, the prison that confined him had its own reading room, which was reopened after the death of Lin Biao in September 1971. Many suspended magazines also resumed publication after the Cultural Revolution lost momentum because of Lin Biao’s death. Prisoners were now allowed to subscribe to any magazines with their name printed on a catalogue. The political dissident and economist Yang Xiguang chose Science and Technology Abroad, Chinese Science, and Learning and Criticism.26 However, the prison regulation specifically banned the use of foreign languages within the cells, and prisoners

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were not permitted to subscribe to non-Chinese publications, not even official publications.27 Sending outside reading materials to the prison for the inmates to read was not easy but it was possible. Yang Xiguang recalled in his memoir Captive Spirits: Prisoner of the Cultural Revolution that his sister Yang Hui failed several times to send a three-volume set of Das Kapital to him while he was imprisoned, because the cadres did not want the Shengwulian rebel leaders such as Yang to “use Marxism to refute Mao Zedong thought.”28 However, another prisoner with the surname Chen eventually supplied Yang a set of Das Kapital with unknown sources. The prison discouraged the reading of Marx and Lenin while exclusively promoting Mao’s works. Sidney Rittenberg was permitted to keep Mao’s Little Red Book in his cell for the guard wanted him to “learn from what it says and apply it to your situation,” for it “will show you the way.”29 In 1969, Lu Li’an (1946–), a Wuhan-based Red Guard and founder of a study society that engaged in critical reading and intellectual inquiry, was sentenced to the No. 1 Prison of Hubei Province, charged with the crime of acting counterrevolutionary. Upon arrival, the guard gave Lu a set of Selected Works of Mao Zedong to read, urging him to memorize the classic “Old Three Pieces”: “The Old Fool Moves the Mountain,” “Serve the People,” and “In Memory of Norman Bethune.”30 Lu told that prison keeper that he wanted to read some books by Marx and Lenin such as The State and Revolution and Civil War in France, but the guard said studying Mao Zedong’s essays “On Coalition government,” “On New Democracy,” and “Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” would be sufficient because “Mao Zedong thought is the apex of contemporary Marxism, according to Lin Biao.” “Whatever in the works of Marx and Lenin you can find in Chairman Mao’s works,” the guard argued, “even if things that were not brought up by Marx and Lenin, Mao has discussed them creatively.”31 The control of the reading list had its modification. A worker rebel Chen Yinan, who was thrown into the cowshed set up by his company, known as Mao Zedong Thought Study Class, in 1970, also mentioned that the endorsed reading in the “confession room” excluded the works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. However, after Chen Boda (1904–1989), the leading CCP theoretician and Mao’s political advisor, was purged in the Second Plenum of the Ninth Party Congress of that year and accused by Mao as a “phony Marxist and swindler,” the authorities permitted the reading and citing of Marx and Lenin to answer Mao’s call for reading Marxist works so that people would not be fooled by Chen Boda. After this, Chen Yinan legitimized his reading of Marx and Lenin, and he became proud of his ability of reading and explaining Marxism and Leninism to his guards, who could not understand the foreign works and asked Chen to lecture them.32 At first, the only material Lu Li’an could read other than Mao’s works was the “Regulation for Prisoners” in the cell. It requires the prisoners to study hard, reform thoughts, to obey the cadres. It also asks the prisoners not to damage the property, not to graffiti the wall, and not to communicate with

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 147 each other in foreign languages. Like Yang Xiguang, Lu Li’an also relied on his sister to deliver books to him from outside. Once his sister sent him some medical books to read. Lu also asked his mother to send him an unofficial collection of Mao’s early works and speeches during the Cultural Revolution called Long Live Mao Zedong Thought [Mao Zedong sixiang wansui], which was unofficially compiled by Red Guards. The book, along with The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) [Lian’gong(bu) dangshi jianming jiaocheng]were confiscated by the army representative who was managing the prison with the excuse that the book was not an authorized publication. In the summer of 1970, Lu Li’an began to write a biographical novel about his life and struggle of a Red Guard while in the prison. In the prison, the power relations were multi-directional. In Lu’s case, his individual power was reinforced by his families who were outside of prison yet could assist him to break the thought control inside the prison by sending in books. Yet, the struggle between Lu and the guards also concerns the multifaceted character of Mao Zedong as a person and Mao Zedong Thought as an intellectual system, as well as the tension between Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism and the censored Mao thought. The prison would not accept the copy of Long Live Mao Zedong Thought because it was an unauthorized collection of Mao’s speeches and remarks compiled and printed by the Red Guards, not the officially edited and updated Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Nor would the prison, in Chen’s case, legitimize the reading of the original works of Marx and Lenin until Mao himself endorsed it. For the prison authorities, Marxism and Leninism became irrelevant or superfluous to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, because only the officially interpreted Mao Zedong thought could be read by prisoners, while the anticipation was to force word-by-word memorization rather than to encourage in-depth critical thinking. Expanding and diversifying the reading list even within the scope of revolutionary ideology thus also became a new site of struggle, in which the political prisoners were empowered by their more sophisticated understanding of Marxism/Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought not as an official ideology but schools of thought, and their knowledge of original Marxism and Leninism earned respect from the guards, as happened in Chen Yinan’s case. Censorship, Resistance, and Reverse Influence For Lu Li’an, the censorship of book in prison was loosened after Lin Biao’s death on September 13, 1971. Lu could then receive the magazine English Learning, a dictionary Origins of Words, classical novel Dreams in the Red Mansion, and the Complete Works of Lu Xun mailed in by his sister. Yet he had to defend his right of reading by debating with Guard Wang who questioned his motive of learning English. The guard’s logic to dissuade Lu was purely anti-intellectualistic: the only meaningful thing for a prisoner to do was to reform his worldview by studying Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought. But Army Representative Wei seemed to be more open-minded,

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since he carried all the English-learning magazines to Lu’s cell and put them on his bed.33 The censorship of books could also be arbitrary. One leader with surname Zhang told Lu Li’an that all books, if they are not officially banned, could be sent into the prison. With his permission, Lu not only secured Origins of Words [Ciyuan]published in 1933, which “largely enriched” his “knowledge in classical Chinese culture,” but also Essential English published in Hong Kong, which impressed him with the “rich Western culture and history.” Lu also got Selected Pieces from the Records of the Grand Historian [Shiji]and Fan Wenlan’s Shortened General History of China [Zhongguo tongshi jianbian], and by comparing these two books, Lu acquired some long-awaited knowledge about ancient Chinese prison system. Finally, Lu concluded that his reading experience was facilitated by the fall of Lin Biao and the sympathy or the “remaining human nature” in Guard Wei. Reading, Lu recalls, opened a window for his mind to break out of confinement. There could be positive interactions between the guards and the prisoners. For Wu Ningkun, punitive labor under surveillance in the countryside was an opportunity to influence the student guard, an English major named Sun Shaoru, a shy and earnest young man who wanted to learn while the college was suspended. Wu Ningkun used the standard English reader for sophomores to teach Sun while cautioning him against a mechanic approach to the study of English. Wu urged Sun to read classical Chinese literature, especially poetry, which Mao also loved reading and writing. At Sun’s request, Wu Ningkun also taught him French. While his soul was being reformed as a cow demon, Wu believed that as a professional teacher, he was obligated to “help to enrich his (Sun’s) sensibility and add dimensions to his vision of life.” Yet, all these instructions had to be done very carefully so that Sun would not be caught.34 In a prison in 1967, a former female Public Security Bureau officer Liu Liying also won sympathy from the guard, who secretly passed newspapers to her from outside and dissuaded her from committing suicide.35 Deciphering Newspapers and Radio to Acquire Information One important way for the prisoners to smell the change of political climate was to scrutinize newspaper. In Lu Li’an’s account, one guard in prison read internally circulated Reference News, which mainly carries foreign media’s reports on China, to the prisoners, added by his own criticisms. Yang Xiguang noticed the disappearance of Lin Biao after his defection and death and the reappearance of the sidelined Foreign Minister, Marshall Chen Yi. He also interpreted the temporary disappearance of leftists Zhang Chunqiao (1917–2005) and Jiang Qing (1914–1991) and the presence of Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) in Hunan Daily as a signal hinting at Mao’s passivity and Zhou’s assertiveness after the death of Lin Biao.36 Sidney Rittenberg was also a keen observer of the news report in the People’s Daily, which he could read in prison. He also noticed that the frequent appearance of Lin Biao and Lin’s

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 149 associates such as Huang Yongsheng (1910–1983), Wu Faxian (1915–2004), and Qiu Huizuo (1914–2002) before September 13, 1971 stopped after the next day: “All mention of Lin Biao and his cohorts, all phrases and slogans associated with them completely vanished from the People’s Daily. It was too obvious to miss.”37 Reading and decoding newspaper was an equally effective way of understanding high-level politics for Yan Weibing (1918–1986), wife of Lu Dingyi (1906–1996), a politburo member and one of the earliest victims of the Cultural Revolution purge. When Yan Weibing, who was held in Beijing’s Qincheng Prison, had not seen Lin Biao’s name and picture in the People’s Daily for a while, she laughed and said to the prison guards: “Ha-ha, an important thing happened in the Party!” She then said sarcastically, “The biggest secrets of the Party are always in the newspaper!”38 For Lu Li’an, the change was felt when the guard stopped reading Reference News [Cankao xiaoxi]to the prisoners since mid-September 1971, and gradually he found some curious wording in Party newspapers such as “political swindler,” and Mao’s directives about being open and candid, not being treacherous, etc. He also noticed that some formerly side-lined old generals reappeared in the newspaper. Several years later, while still in prison, Lu happened to encounter a piece of Reference News which carried a foreign report about Lin Biao’s plane crash in Mongolia.39 Radio was another source of information for the inmates of both cowshed and prison. The former vice-premier Bo Yibo (1908–2001), charged with historical treason, was thrown into a prison in early March 1967. Bo could read newspapers and listen to semiconductor transistor radio. The Case Group observation describes that “When he heard the broadcast about the contents of the criticism against Peng Dehuai and Luo Ruiqing (1906–1978), he abruptly turned it off.”40 After Lin Biao’s death on September 13, 1971, Lu Li’an noticed that the radio broadcasting only wished “Chairman Mao long life without end”, yet it no longer mentioned Lin Biao’s name. In Peking University’s cowshed. Hao Bin and other Peking University professor tried their best to capture the change of political climate through newspaper and radio. Hao Bin and others relied on the cowshed cook to purchase newspaper for them to read, but it was at the discretion of the student Red Guards to decide whether they were distributed to the confined professors. One colleague of Hao Bin named Fan Daren had a self-assembled crystal radio, which became the main source of information for the five confined professors. “Editorials in the People’s Daily, Red Flag [Hongqi]magazine, and the PLA Daily [Jiefangju ribao], and the long articles were our focuses,” and “We always wanted to gather some information between the lines of these (broadcasted) articles,” Hao Bin recalls.41 Storytelling, Dialogue, and Music A main form of entertainment and cultural exchange in prison was storytelling, through which the inmates related to each other and transformed the

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cell into a clubhouse. Yang Xiguang recalled how illiterate prisoners told stories such as Journey to the West [Xiyou ji], Three Knights and Five Cavaliers [Sanxia wuyi], Burning Red Lotus Temple [Huoshao hongliansi], which they became familiar with from exposing to tea house before being imprisoned, while intellectual-prisoner could share translated Western stories such as Tale of Two Cities, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Camille.42 Between two well-educated inmates there could be meaningful conversations. The young poet Zhang Langlang (1943–) was arrested in 1968 as the organizer of a poetry society, and he became the roommate of the famous dissident Yu Luoke (1942–1970), who was to be executed in 1970 in the Beijing Municipal Jail. Zhang recalled that in the prison he told Yu that he had read Sartre and Existentialism before his arrest, while Yu was a staunch Marxist fundamentalist who loathed those French “petty intellectuals.” According to Zhang Langlang, He (Yu Luoke) and I made an agreement: every day at rest time, we took turns to lecture the other with a topic one is familiar with. I lectured him about ‘Modern Western Art History’ Abstractionism, Impressionism, etc., and he memorized all the content. He told me about the ‘Current State of World Film’. He was so professional and so comfortable with using the jargons and statistical numbers. I was puzzled about how he could know so much about film while he was a film major. Only later did I know that he got the knowledge from another inmate by trading his. He kept learning and cherished the precious knowledge, but when I shared with him the stories in Catcher in the Rye, Room at the Top, and On the Road. He became irritated, saying what the hack are these?43 Zhang Langlang’s reminiscence also reveals that one jailed old official kept a set of old version of Selected Works of Mao Zedong published in Yanan before 1949, and Yu Luoke borrowed it from him and carefully compared this version with the prevailing version that they were studying, taking notes of the differences between two versions.44 In the Peking University cowshed which was later relocated to Building 38 on campus, Hao Bin stayed in the same room with historian Deng Guangming (1907–1998), and Hao learned a lot about the academic debates and scholars’ life in the 1930s from his conversation with Deng, and he admitted that it was only possible in the unique environment of cowshed.45 Here we may differentiate the prisoners, who constructed “the space of positions” in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, into two main categories based on the limited source materials available: (1) elite inmates such as the old cadre who possessed an older version of Mao Zedong’s works, and young radicals such as Yu Luoke, Zhang Langlang, and Yang Xiguang who read Western classical and modern classics, shared the stories with inmates verbally, and even engaged in intertextual criticism of Mao’s works; (2) grassroots-level prisoners who were better-versed in traditional Chinese folk literature, among

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 151 whom some were common criminals. In Zhang Langlang’s reminiscence, many grassroots-level prisoners admired Yu Luoke, and he even gave them lectures. These two main categories that crossed paths in prison, however, shared the alternative discourse distinct from the dominant official ideology which was epitomized by dogmatized Maoist works and propaganda materials. When there were no physical books, the empowered inmates resisted the state-imposed discourse by invoking their memories of non-Communist literary works, be they ancient Chinese novels or Western works. Storytelling, singing, and mutual lecturing made the prison cell a new field of cultural reproduction, which did not necessarily invent new works, but maintained the transmission of the works that mentally supported the inmates. Zhang Langlang’s retelling of the stories in the novels of the American “Beat Generation” and the British “Angry Young Men” authors in prison again points to the cultural phenomenon before and during the Cultural Revolution: legitimate and underground reading of foreign books. Xu Youyu’s research reveals that many of his interviewees admitted that the biggest intellectual influence they received during the Cultural Revolution was from translated Western novels. It was ironic, Xu suggests, that a large quantity of translations of Western novels in the 1950 and 1960s occurred simultaneously with the criticism of them, but the criticism was weak, because these classical works possessed irresistible enchantment to Chinese readers.46 Modern Soviet novels such as The Forty-First, The White Ship, and The Cranes Are Flying were also popular in Maoist China due to their expression of human emotions.47 The dispute between Yu Luoke and Zhang Langlang in prison manifested two related yet also distinct intellectual strains among the educated Chinese youths during the Cultural Revolution: those who took interest in the Marxist-Leninist political theory, and those who were more immersed into modern Western avant-garde literature and art.48 For Zhang Zhiyang (1940–), a philosopher and Cultural Revolution prisoner, music broadcasted in the loudspeaker of the prison became the marker of daily routine: “The East Is Red blasts over the loudspeaker and it’s time to get up … The ‘International’ reverberates through the air and it’s time for bed, leave the lights on.” In solitary confinement, Zhang tried to kill time by memorizing German adverbs and he eventually “developed the habit of putting words in order … because this makes them easier to remember.” The result was that Zhang composed a poem titled “Bayonet.” Most of the time, Zhang relied on his wild, poetic “imagination” to overcome the loneliness in his solitary cell.49 Singing non-revolutionary songs was not particularly prohibited in prison sometimes. Zhang Langlang also mentioned how he sang Soviet Russian songs when he was confined in the single room for condemned prisoners: In death cells, each person was assigned to a single room. You could not see each other, and the only way of communication was voice. Newcomers like us were so shocked that we used the method of opening party to ward

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off fear. When the guard came, we pretended to sleep, and when they left, we sang with deep voice. I sang a Soviet song called ‘Die Gloriously’ … in one moment, hot blood burst in my bosom, and I couldn’t help but singing out loud, in Italian: O sole/O sole mio/sta ‘nfronte a te!50 Xu Xiao (1954–), a young female writer who was thrown into jail in 1975 for pretrial detaining wrote in her memoir that for the first time she ever heard the lyric pop song “Serenade of the Green Island,” originally sung by the famous Taiwan singer Deng Lijun (Teresa Teng) was from an inmate who was arrested for “hooliganism” because she took nude pictures with her boyfriend. Xu recalls that she heard many songs that she had never heard from this girl, who often burst into tears while singing in the jail.51 Prisoners during the Cultural Revolution might have chance to formally appreciate the performance of jailed first-rate Chinese actors, singers, and violinist, because the prison would organize performances to entertain inmates at the Chinese New Year parties. In the Second Prison of Hebei Province to which Zhang Langlang was transferred from the Municipal Jail, he listened to the performance of China’s then best violinist Yang Bingsun, who was released in 1977 and accompanied and translated for the visiting American violinist Isaac Stern in 1979. As Zhang Langlang says, “the prisoners in the Number 1 Prison of Beijing might never imagine that they could one day hear the singing of the (most famous Chinese tenorist) Liu Bingyi (1935–); the prisoners in the Shenxia County Jail of Hebei Province might never conceive of a single chance in their lifetime that they could watch the performance the famous actor Ying Ruocheng (1929–2003) in such a short distance, while he appeared in an excerpt of the play Tea House [Chaguan].” Zhang then continues, “Well, it was not that bad being jailed in those years. For one thing, you perhaps avoided worse fate, and for the second, you never knew who you would meet next time. You could never see some of the celebrities if they had not been thrown into the prison.”52 Prison during the Cultural Revolution thus became a curious meeting ground of a motley group of people. And it is interesting that Ji Xianlin notices that the struggle sessions against intellectuals like himself became a spectacle and alternative form of entertainment for their worker-guards to substitute the traditional comedic art form known as crosstalk.53 Spatial Arrangements of the Cowshed and the Prison Except a few cases, prison usually allowed more freedom of reading, discussion, and storytelling than cowshed. This was because cowshed was usually a single room watched from outside by several guards, who were spatially extremely close to the confined room. In one reminisce, the author and his family were locked up in a warehouse, which was their “cowshed.”54 Wu Ningkun was jailed in a “student dormitory.”55 In most cases, the cowshed had nothing to read except Selected Works of Mao Zedong.56 Prison, however, is a

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 153 structured building compound with its professionalized planning and compartmentalized functions. In a typical modern Chinese prison, the work zone of the prison keepers and the cells are demarcated by an iron gate. The guards have their own dormitory and office, and they patrol on fixed schedule, known as “checking the cells.” The functional segregation allowed leeway for the prisoners to read, to talk, to sing, and even to lecture. The prison may also have its own library, which serves as a specialized space for acquiring knowledge and information. Reading in Prison under GMD and CCP: A Historical Perspective By putting the transformative reading practice in prison in historical perspective, we will find visible continuity between the Chinese Communist government and its warlord and Nationalist predecessors. In fact, the reformative role of modern Chinese prison was affirmed in the 1900s, and by the 1920s, Buddhists, YMCA, and the Salvation Army all began to influence the inmates. Prisons in the 1920s let the prisoners read materials of political indoctrination such as Essential Reading for Citizens and A Short History of National Shame.57 The Nationalist government, which was proclaimed in 1928, often “used Buddhist morality books to instill repentance into prisoners” in the 1930s.58 Confucian moral teaching material in the prison in the 1930s also included the late Qing Confucian statesman Zeng Guofan (1811–1872)’s The Family Letters of Zeng Guofan [Zeng Guofan jiashu].59 One Nationalist prison keeper of Zhazidong Prison named Huang Maocai wrote in his unpublished manuscript that: “On the wall and pillars of the prison there were anti-Marxist and antiMao Zedong slogans, and there were transformative words such as ‘Youth Goes without Return’ and ‘Think Carefully’, as well as slogans with strong Buddhist ‘No Escape in the Maze/Turn Around You Will Find the Shore’.”60 The political prisoners were required to write weekly reflections, but Keeper Huang admitted that “it actually did not work at all.”61 The power dynamics between the keeper and the prisoner had also been at work in Republican China under the rule of the Nationalist Party. Huang, who was later sentenced to life in prison in 1953 as a “counterrevolutionary” by the Communist government and released in 1982, confirmed that as a guard he delivered letters for Communist prisoners and bought them newspapers, mainly independent and outspoken papers such as the Dagongbao, at their request, and he himself was very sympathetic with the Communist prisoners.62 Conclusion Due to the inaccessibility of the archives of prison, the disappearance of the extralegal, makeshift cowsheds, and the passing of the generation that had the experience of being jailed during the Cultural Revolution, piecing together the life and especially reading experience in confinement in the 2010s

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is a daunting job.63 Fewer people read, exchanged opinions in prison, survived the incarceration, and were able or willing to write it out retrospectively. Based on the available materials, it is arguable that the site of incarceration during the Cultural Revolution can be analyzed as a space where rituals and readings were forced upon the prisoners to achieve the goal of “thought reform,” or ideological disciplining. The daily routine in confinement centers around a series of disciplinary, formulaic, and symbolic acts: bowing, recitation, slogan-shouting, and repeated reading of the canonized Maoist writing, and imagined communication with Chairman Mao, aiming at the salvation of a sinful soul. It is this “disciplinary mechanism” in a specific, enclosed space and institution of “social quarantine,” in Foucault’s words, as well as the quasi-religious character of the Mao cult in jail, that attracted my attention.64 Although Foucault’s study takes the 18th-century European experience and the exercise of the Bourgeois legal power as the object of analysis, this analytical framework can be applied to socialist incarceration against political criminals. The cowshed on the college campus was particularly significant because it was not the traditional dynamics between the prison keeper and the prisoner, but instead a new power relational mode that thoroughly subverted traditional Chinese social hierarchy. At Peking University, students became the new political player, agent of the Cultural Revolution, and authority of revolutionary Maoism, who forced their professors, the old academic authority, to memorize and to recite Mao’s works; workers enjoyed the struggle sessions against the scholars. In the meantime, while we fully acknowledge the inherent inequality of power relations between the prisoner and the guard, the empirical study of Chinese political prisoners during the Cultural Revolution reveals a more complex picture in which the prisoners capitalized on their outside connections, formed internal cohorts, read and decode available texts, and used their knowledge to articulate their rights of acquiring knowledge or exert their authority of understanding the canons at a deeper level. Although they were unable to defy the formal rituals and daily routines imposed by the penal institution, the inmates never stopped reading, critical thinking, debating, communicating, and invoking their memory of the books they read in the past, or even maintained their own religious and personal rituals. They exploited all available resources and opportunities to resist the penal institution’s disciplinary quarantine and their censorship of information to maximize the freedom of reading. In some cases, they won the sympathy from the guards. The political prisoners’ experiences, as shown in their memoirs, witnesses’ reminiscence, and historians’ reconstruction, illustrate that during the Cultural Revolution, the site of confinement and penalty was a significant field of contention and production of meaning. The prisoners were less than passive victims, but proactive agents who sought individual autonomy and solidarity. The network of power relations on the sites of confinement were full of sharing, negotiation, struggle, and tricks, while information, knowledge, and memory

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 155 found a new space to survive and thrive through the inmates’ unrelenting resistance. Michel Foucault was correct in saying that the prison was but a failure, because “people know it didn’t reform but on the contrary manufactured criminal and criminality.”65 This is particularly true for thought criminals, as Zhang Zhiyang, whom I mentioned earlier, said wryly in hindsight: “However, I must admit the crime forced upon me in order to become a free human being.”66 Notes 1 Song Yongyi, “A Glance at the Underground Reading Movement during the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 16. No. 51 (2007), 325–333. 2 Xu Youyu, “Hongweibing xingwei dongyin de diaochao he fenxi” [Survey and Analysis of the Motives of the Red Guards], in Li Hui, ed., Canque de chuanglanban [The Broken Window] (Shenzhen: Haitian chubanshe, 1998), 143–144. 3 Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 131–132. Interviews with scholars Xu Youyu and Zhu Xueqin both show that they were deeply influenced by the individualism and revolutionary heroism in The Gadfly by Irish writer Ethel Voynich. Carma Hinton dir. Morning Sun, 2003. 4 Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 173. 5 Beth E. Notar, Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 6 David Garland, “Concepts of Culture in the Sociology of Punishment,” Theoretical Criminology, vol.10 (4) (2006): 419–447. 7 Ibid., 421. 8 Feng Jicai, Voices from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, 1991), 36. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Randal Johnson ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–42. 10 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Colin Gordon ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 98. 11 Ibid. 12 Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Colin Gordon ed., 96–97. 13 Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 169, 182, 199. 14 Hao Bin, Liushui heceng xi shifei: Beida niupeng yijiao[How Could Flowing Water Wash Away the Past: A Glimpes of the Peking University Cowshed] (Taipei: Dakuai wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2014), 74. 15 Ibid., 16 Wu Ningkun, A Single Tear: A Family’s Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993), 233. 17 Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, trans. Chenxin Jiang (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 96–97. 18 Wu Ningkun, A Single Tear, 215–216. 19 Hao Bin, Liushui heceng xi shifei, 132. 20 Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 392. 21 Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 198. 22 Feng, Voices from the Whirlwind, 231–240.

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23 Lian Xi, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 156, 172, 217. 24 Zhang Kaiyuan, “Wo de wenge suiyue” [My Years during the Cultural Revolution] Minjian lishi [Unofficial History] online database, Chinese University of Hong Kong, http://mjlsh.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/Book.aspx?cid=4&tid=3406, accessed February 8, 2017. 25 Wu Ningkun, A Single Tear, 240. 26 Feng Jicai, Voices from the Whirlwind, 183. 27 Ibid., 233. 28 Yang Xiguang and Susan Mcfadden, Captive Spirits: Prisoner of the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), 102. 29 Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, 393. 30 Lu Li’an, Yang tian chang xiao: yige danjian shiyi nian de hong wei bing yuzhong [Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press,2012). Kindle version by Rainbow Limited. 31 Ibid. 32 Chen Yinan, Qingchun wuhen: yige zaofanpai gongren de shinian wenge [A Rebel Worker’s Life during the Cultural Revolution] (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press,2006). Kindle version by Rainbow Limited. 33 Lu Li’an, Yang tian chang xiao. 34 Wu Ningkun, A Single Tear, 255–256. 35 Liu Liying, Wangshi huishou [Reminiscences of the Past] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2009), 101–102. 36 Yang and Mcfadden, Captive Spirits, 184. 37 Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, 412. 38 Ye Yonglie, “Jiemi: Liangbao yikan xielou zhongguo zuida jimi” [Declassified: The Biggest Secret of the CCP was Revealed by Its Two-Newspapers-and-OneMagazine] available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2013-02/06/c_124328394. htm, accessed April 23, 2017. 39 Lu Li’an, Yang tian chang xiao. 40 Wu Linquan and Peng Fei, excerpt from “Caolan Chunqiu” [Springs and Autumns in Caolan] (Beijing: remin chubanshe, 1988), cited in Michael Schoenhals ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969 Not a Dinner Party (Armonk, M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 131. 41 Hao Bin, Liushui heceng xi shifei: Beida niupeng yijiao[How Could Flowing Water Wash Away the Past: A Glimpes of the Peking University Cowshed] (Taipei: Dakuai wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2014), 101–102. 42 Yang Xiguang, 211. 43 Zhang Langlang, “Zai sixing hao de rizi” [My Days in the Death Cell] http://news. 163.com/10/0414/16/648BIO2R00014AEE.html accessed at 4/2/2017. 44 Ibid. 45 Hao Bin, Liushui heceng xi shifei, 205–206. 46 Xu Youyu, “Hongweibing xingwei dongyin de diaochao he fenxi,” in Li Hui, ed., Caique de chuanglanban, 143. 47 Ibid., 169. 48 One such an underground modern art group can be found in “Wuming” [Nameless]. See Wang Aihe, “Wuming, An Underground Art Group during the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Modern Chinese History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2009), 183–199. 49 Zhang Zhiyang, “Walls,” translated by Nancy Liu and Lawrence Sullivan, Chinese Studies in Philosophy, vol. 25, No. 3, Spring 1994, cited in Michael Schoenhals ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, 340, 345. 50 Ibid.

Ritual, Reading, and Resistance in the Prison and Cowshed 157 51 Xu Xiao, Bansheng weiren [Half of My Lifetime as a Human Being] (Beijing: Tongxin chubanshe, 2005) online edition available at http://read.jd.com/12863/ 616073.html, accessed on April 5, 2017. 52 Zhang Langlang, “Jianyu li de Yang shouxi” [Concert Master Yang in Prison], Chinese News Digest, online journal available at http://hx.cnd.org/2017/03/20/ (zk1703d), accessed at April 9, 2017 53 Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed, 62–63. 54 Wen Wen, “Yancha xiaodian” [Cigarette and Tea Store], Li Hui ed., Caique de chuanglanban [The Broken Window] (Shenzhen: Haitian chubanshe, 1998), 278. 55 Wu Ningkun, A Single Tear, 215. 56 Hao Bin, Liushui heceng xi shifei, 205. 57 Jan Kiely, The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 48, 68. 58 Frank Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 289. 59 Jan Kiely, The Compelling Ideal,107. 60 Huang Maocai, “Zhazidong xiezhen: Shaowei kanshouyuan huiyilu” [True Life in Zhazidong Prison: Memoir of a Second Lieutenant Prison Keeper], unpublished manuscript. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 It is not possible to conduct the research in China by consulting prison and policy archives as Robert Darnton did to the archives of the Bastille and the French police in Paris of the 1740s–1750s, and even the police archives of the French police were considered by Darnton as inadequate in showing the inmates’ “attitudes and behavior patterns.” See Robert Darnton, Poetry and Police: Communication Networks in 18th-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 55. Chinese local gazetteers may, or may not mention the imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, but there are only statistical numbers, not the real life of any individual person. 64 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vantage Books, 1995), 215–222. 65 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 45. 66 Zhang Zhiyang, “Walls,” cited in Michael Schoenhals ed., China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969, 354.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Darnton, Robert. Poetry and Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Dikötter, Frank. Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Feng, Jicai. Voices from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. New York: Random House, 1991. Garland, David. “Concepts of Culture in the Sociology of Punishment.” Theoretical Criminology 10, no. 4 (2006): 419–447.

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Hao, Bin. Liushui heceng xi shifei: Beida niupeng yijiao [How Could Flowing Water Wash Away the Past: A Glimpes of the Peking University Cowshed]. Taipei: Dakuai wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2014. Huang, Maocai. “Zhazidong xiezhen: Shaowei kanshouyuan huiyilu.” [True Life in Zhazidong Prison: Memoir of a Second Lieutenant Prison Keeper]. unpublished manuscript. Kiely, Jan. The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Leese, Daniel. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Li, Hui, ed. Canque de chuanglanban [The Broken Window]. Shenzhen: Haitian chubanshe, 1998. Lian, Xi. Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China. New York: Basic Books, 2017. Liu, Liying. Wangshi huishou [Reminiscences of the Past]. Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2009. Lu, Li’an. Yang Tian Chang Xiao: Yige Danjian Shiyi Nian de Hong Wei Bing Yuzhong [Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution]. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2012. Kindle version by Rainbow Limited. Mittler, Barbara. A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Notar, Beth E. Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Rittenberg, Sidney, and Amanda Bennett. The Man Who Stayed Behind. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Schoenhals, Michael, ed. China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969 Not a Dinner Party. Armonk, M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Song, Yongyi. “A Glance at the Underground Reading Movement during the Cultural Revolution.” Journal of Contemporary China 16, no. 51 (2007): 325–333. Wang, Aihe. “Wuming: An Underground Art Group during the Cultural Revolution.” Journal of Modern Chinese History 3, no. 2 (2009): 183–199. Wu, Ningkun. A Single Tear: A Family’s Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993. Xu, Xiao. Bansheng weiren [Half of My Lifetime as a Human Being]. Beijing: Tongxin chubanshe, 2005, online edition available at http://read.jd.com/12863/616073.html, accessed on April 5, 2017. Yang, Xiguang and Susan Mcfadden. Captive Spirits: Prisoner of the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ye, Yonglie. “Jiemi: Liangbao yikan xielou zhongguo zuida jimi” [Declassified: The Biggest Secret of the CCP was Revealed by Its Two-Newspapers-and-OneMagazine]. Accessed April 23, 2017. http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2013-02/06/c_ 124328394.htm Zhang, Kaiyuan. “Wo de wenge suiyue” [My Years during the Cultural Revolution]. Minjian lishi [Unofficial History] online database, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Accessed February 8, 2017. http://mjlsh.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/Book.aspx?cid=4& tid=3406

Conclusion

Prior to December 2022, the Chinese government enforced a strict three-year lockdown policy in response to Covid-19. Overseas Chinese nationals often likened the personnel donning all-white protective suits, nicknamed “dabai” or “big whites,” to the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. These volunteers were even referred to as “White Guards,” or “bai wei bing,” on Chinese-language social media worldwide. The comparison was more than just a satirical allusion, as the White Guards, empowered by their suits and with their faces covered, were able to lock up residential buildings and restrict the personal freedom of individual citizens in the name of fighting Covid-19. Even the urban Residential Committee, which had previously been nearly non-existent for most urban Chinese with full-time jobs, became proactive in implementing lockdown policies. They used bullhorns to propagate staying home, distributed rationed food to families under lockdown (especially the elderly), registered individuals for mandatory nucleic acid testing, prompted them to take the test, and provided passes for those who had to leave home due to emergencies. During a phone call with a close friend of mine, a successful businessman who recently migrated to Canada in late 2022 after experiencing the threeyear-long lockdowns, he confirmed that the Chinese government’s normally invisible agencies at the grassroots level were fully mobilized during the campaign against Covid-19. I responded by noting that this was a prime example of the “outsourcing” of state power downwards. However, it’s worth noting that outsourcing state power was not a new phenomenon in Chinese history. During crises, the Qing dynasty state would occasionally outsource its local defense to private, clan-led militias that were still under state control.1 After over two decades of living in the US, I was amazed by how effectively the Chinese system was still functioning, even after the suspension of the country’s zero-Covid policy. However, debates on social media continued to rage. Observers raised several pointed questions, including: Is the Residential Committee [ jumin weiyuan hui] a government branch or a selfgovernance entity? If it is a self-governance organization, who authorized it to deprive people of their constitutional right to personal freedom? And, if the “White Guards” were delegated with the power of enforcing building DOI: 10.4324/9781003440222-8

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lockdowns and mandatory quarantine, what distinguishes them from the Red Guards who used violence to enforce their policies during the Cultural Revolution? The White Guards disappeared overnight after the lockdown ended, and no one was held accountable for atrocities like beatings and suicides that occurred just weeks before. Similar to the Red Guards of 1966, the “White Guards” of 2022 did not require identifiable personal names as individuals. Despite China’s tremendous material progress and infrastructural prosperity, it is disheartening to note that at a deeper level, things have not changed much after 40 years of reform and opening-up, with arbitrary denial of personal freedom, public humiliation of violators, imposition of temporary inactivity, and the use of propaganda by state leaders to emphasize the need to fight an “annihilation battle.” There are Chinese citizens who express concern that society has forgotten the three years of Covid-19 and the strict policies that were implemented during that time. The issue of collective memory in China is complex and multifaceted. While the government actively promotes the remembrance of revolutionary heroes and martyrs, there are also challenges to the reception of revolutionary hagiography in recent years. These challenges are partly a result of the liberalized social climate since the 1990s, which has enabled a cultural current of doubting and negating revolutionary myths. Additionally, critical Chinese intellectuals have also contributed to the questioning of revolutionary heroes and martyrs. It is interesting to note that while the government actively shapes and controls the narrative of memory in some areas, such as promoting the memory of revolutionary heroes, it seems to adopt a politically correct memory of oblivion in other areas, such as the three-year-long lockdown policy implemented to cope with Covid-19. The way in which collective memory is shaped and remembered in China reflects the complex interplay between state control, cultural currents, and intellectual discourse. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s statement about the danger of “historical nihilism” in 2013 signaled a new campaign to tighten control over historical memory and promote a positive image of the Communist Party’s past. The term was used to describe those who challenge the Party’s official version of history and criticize its past leaders, including Mao Zedong. Since then, the Chinese government has cracked down on dissenting voices and intensified its efforts to promote a nationalist and patriotic narrative in history education and public discourse. In a speech delivered to a CCP Central Committee seminar asked and answered himself, “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the CPSU collapse? One major cause was the fierce ideological struggle. The history of the USSR and the CPSU was negated, with Lenin and Stalin being negated as well. People’s thoughts became disoriented, and the Party organizations at all levels no longer functioned. Even the army was no longer under the control of the Party.”2 Xi alerted his comrades that “The main issue with historical nihilism is its attempt to completely deny the guiding role of Marxism, the necessity of China’s

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historical progression towards socialism, and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”3 Therefore, the issue of how to treat China’s revolutionary history was not only seen as an academic debate or a matter of diverse public opinion but also as a critical political issue that concerned the credibility and security of China’s socialist state. Xi Jinping was particularly concerned with eradicating “historical nihilism,” which he saw as a root cause of the downfall of the USSR and the CPSU. Concurrent with Xi’s speech and attention to the issue of defending the historical narrative of the Chinese communist revolution, two incidents occurred in 2013 that fell under the category of historical nihilism. On September 9, 2013, Hong Zhenkuai, a historian and executive editor-in-chief of the liberal magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which focused on CCP history, was removed from his position. Hong Zhenkuai published an online article on September 9, 2013, in which he questioned the authenticity of the famous revolutionary legend of the “five heroes on the Langya Mountain.” This story tells of five communist soldiers who, while under siege by the Japanese invaders, killed themselves by jumping from the top of the mountain. The story had been included in mainland China’s elementary school Chinese textbook for decades and had been internalized by generations of readers. Hong’s article interrogated the details of the story, asking “where” and “how” the five soldiers exactly jumped, and whether the heroes pulled the masses’ turnips during the battle.4 In the same year, a netizen named Sun Jie published an article on one of the most popular Chinese social media platforms, Sina Weibo, in which he mocked Qiu Shaoyun, a martyr from the CPVA (Chinese People’s Volunteer Army) who was burned to death by an enemy firebomb without moving while he and his comrades were executing a lurking task. Sun Jie’s reference to Martyr Qiu Shaoyun was co-opted by a cold herbal tea company for the purpose of marketing, and the company made a joke about “human flesh barbecue” out of Qiu Shaoyun’s sacrifice.5 In 2013, scholars, netizens, and companies in China began to question and challenge the revered status of some “textbook martyrs,” generating academic, political, and legal repercussions. While earlier CCP martyrs were not disputed, the criticism of these “textbook martyrs” was linked by official scholars to the trend of “historical nihilism,” which was in turn connected to the downfall of the USSR and CPSU. In a 2015 article, scholar Meng Wei from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences defined “historical nihilism“ as a complete denial of history. He argued that this trend had a long history in China, dating back more than a century to the country’s defeat by Western imperialism in the Opium War of 1839–1842, which led to excessive selfreflection on the inferiority of the Chinese nation.6 The author suggests that another wave of iconoclasm occurred during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, when the Chinese people “smashed the old world” and “eagerly bade farewell to tradition,” resulting in the destruction of many valuable cultural artifacts.7 Meng also discussed the tactics used by those who criticize revolutionary history, which include questioning the authenticity of the

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experiences of heroic figures and the overall history of the CCP and PLA, framing the sacrifices of martyrs as mere “cannon fodder,“ and casting doubt on the credibility of CCP’s historical narratives.8 Meng highlighted that this trend had a harmful effect on people’s minds and the social stability of China, especially the young generation who rely heavily on the internet for information and knowledge. While the CASS scholar focused on the character, consequence, and main audience of the counter-cultural discourse that challenged the heroes of the CCP, his analysis did not directly address the question of whether the cynicism was valid. In 2015, a news article listed various points raised by skeptics regarding the death of Qiu Shaoyun. Since 2008, doubts had been cast on the story by various individuals, including an elementary school teacher who questioned why the ammunition Qiu was carrying did not explode, why the enemy failed to find him despite being only 60 meters away, and why the original text was vague on details such as the length of “noon hours” and the number of troops involved. There were also doubts about the authenticity of the story because a military school student did not believe staying still while being consumed by fire was consistent with human physiology.9 So far, I have only come across one plausible response that addresses the question of human physiology. A 2015 news report stated that PLA media were actively defending the heroism and authenticity of Qiu Shaoyun, and “some netizens” cited the example of Vietnamese Buddhist monks who selfimmolated to demonstrate the power of faith.10 The Chinese official media and state-funded scholars primarily employed a strategy of attacking the tactics of “historical nihilism” in general, repeatedly exposing its anti-Party motive and political incorrectness. One comment written by a professor in 2015 went like this: “Historical nihilism takes the exaggeration of the ‘negatives’ as a selling point, exploits the ‘emotional’ and ‘fragmentary’ features of online mass communication, and seizes certain controversial events to stir up mass sentiments, in order to create a ‘post-truth’ context in which emotion leads fact and questioning overwhelms consensus …”11 Despite the key points raised by the questioners of Qiu Shaoyun’s martyrdom, the official critiques largely focused on attacking the questioners’ alleged exaggeration, emotionalism, and deliberate online agitation. However, it is worth noting that in this ideological battle, the Party’s spokespersons were also concerned with maintaining a “consensus” based on the orthodox propaganda discourse. The quote cited earlier suggests that this task is becoming increasingly challenging in the age of the internet. Meng Wei, the official scholar cited earlier, also observed that “historical nihilism” was “facilitated by the empowerment through the internet, by decentralization, and by a distorted understanding of freedom and openness in public opinion.”12 Despite doubts raised about the details surrounding the death of Qiu Shaoyun, state-employed scholars evaded the issue, while Chinese media upheld the authenticity of Qiu’s martyrdom, citing the testimony of his comrade and contemporaneous reports. In 2019, Xinhua News Agency

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published a feature perhaps in response to online questioning of Qiu’s martyrdom, clarifying that his comrades had annihilated the “entire reinforced company of the US army.”13 A 2021 feature by Tongliang News, Qiu’s hometown newspaper, acknowledged that Qiu Shaoyun had served in the Nationalist army, and his corps had surrendered to the PLA in December 1949. The report further stated that in December 1950, Qiu joined the CPVA’s 15th Army in Korea, and in 1952, he and 500 other soldiers were assigned to take over Height 391, where they had to camouflage themselves overnight on October 11. The incident allegedly occurred on the morning of October 12 when an American bomber dropped a firebomb on the battlefield. Although Qiu was able to extinguish the flames by rolling into a nearby puddle, he did not move until his death. The story was first reported by army reporter Zheng Dafan and later reprinted in the authoritative People’s Daily and PLA Daily.14 While two journalist feature articles managed to clarify certain doubts raised by netizens, they also exposed new loopholes in the Qiu Shaoyun story. The most influential version of the story appears in a Chinese fifth-grade textbook published by the People’s Education Press. However, the text was not written by reporter Zheng Dafan but by Qiu’s comrade Li Yuanxing in the first person. In the textbook, Li recalls that they began to lurk “before daybreak” on the same day, which differs from Xinhua News Agency’s version where the operation began in the evening of the last day. Li also claimed that they were so close to the enemy’s position that they could hear their conversations.15 The author did not specify whether the “enemies” referred to in Li Yuanxing’s account were South Koreans or Americans. It seems implausible that 500 Chinese soldiers lurking so close to the enemy would not be discovered. In another online article, however, the author stated that the CPVA troops were lurking “300 meters” away from the enemy.16 The various versions of the Qiu Shaoyun story are inconsistent in their descriptions of the enemy and the details of the incident. While the local Tongliang News claimed that a US plane “dropped” a fire bomb, the Xinhua News Agency referred to a US army that “launched” a fire shell, and the school textbook vaguely stated that the enemy “used” [shiyong]fire bombs.17 Moreover, there are discrepancies in authorship, with different versions of the text attributing authorship to either reporter Zheng Dafan or Qiu’s comrade Li Yuanxing. Given these uncertainties and discrepancies, readers and Chinese teachers have a right to ask for clarification, especially given that the story is designated for elementary school students. As previous research on “recalling bitterness” stories has shown, many of these revolutionarypedagogical legends have been doubted and proved false over time. The questioning of Qiu Shaoyun’s death is not an isolated case. The disputes over historical authenticity soon turned into lawsuits and the dissenting voices, as with those in the Cultural Revolution, were suppressed. On May 21, 2015, Qiu Shaohua, the younger brother of Qiu Shaoyun, sued Sun Jie and the canned herbal tea company for maliciously defaming Qiu Shaoyun. On

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September 20, 2016, judgment was given against the plaintiff and the court ordered Sun and the company to apologize to Qiu Shaohua and also publish an announcement that must run for five consecutive days. In addition, Qiu Shaohua was to receive a symbolic compensation of one yuan. The case of “five heroes vs. Hong Zhenkuai” concluded on June 27, 2016, with Hong Zhenkuai being ordered by the court to apologize to the sons of the heroes. The Supreme People’s Court criticized Hong for neglecting the positive contributions of the heroes while obsessing over minor details and speculations. The court emphasized the importance of the spirit of the “five heroes” and their heroic contributions to China’s struggle for the benefit of its people. According to the court, “The enduring spirit of the “five heroes of Langya Mountain” continues to inspire and guide the dedicated efforts of the Chinese people to serve and benefit our nation and its people. The heroic deeds and sacrifices of these martyrs, and the widespread recognition of their contributions by the Chinese people, are an integral part of our nation’s collective memory and a foundational pillar of our national ideology.”18 The Supreme Court went on to stress that “While the article in question may not contain explicit insults, its focus on irrelevant details and attempts to sow doubt regarding the brave and selfless spirit of the heroes undermines the authenticity of the facts, tarnishes the image of these heroes, and diminishes their spiritual value.”19 It is apparent that the Supreme Court conducted a political trial based on the perceived impact of Hong’s article among modern readers and netizens, and its negative effect on the heroes’ image and spiritual value. As a result, the National People’s Congress passed a new law to protect heroes and martyrs in similar cases. Another example of this is the case of Luo Changping, a journalist who allegedly mocked and insulted a CPVA company on the internet that was frozen to death while carrying out an ambush mission in the harsh winter weather of North Korea. In May 2022, Luo was indicted for slandering martyrs and was sentenced to seven months in prison in addition to a public apology. To conclude, I will stick with the “ideology-military-propaganda” model to summarize the CCP’s revolutionary ideology and practices from its early days to the present, the continued use of propaganda, and the (quasi-)military control of society. This model is significant because it highlights the CCP’s continuous production of revolutionary history and multiple heroic or profane images, which bolster the legitimacy of the Chinese revolution in defending China and protecting the proletariat. Additionally, the CCP maintains absolute leadership and stringent social control through (quasi-) military means and the instrumentation of socialist legality. Despite this controlling structure, the CCP has managed to improve China’s infrastructure, utilize high-tech to make daily life more convenient and enjoyable, and instill a sense of satisfaction and confidence in many Chinese citizens. The combination of these factors contributes to the state’s stability, even though it is not fully accountable. Considering the intricate relationship between modern Chinese intellectuals and the state, society, and revolution, figures like young Yun Daiying, Lin

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Zhao, Liu Xiaofei, Wang Xiaobo, and Hong Zhenkuai, among others discussed in this book, stood out as critical thinkers who challenged established ideas and proposed alternative solutions during different historical periods or simply mocked the master narrative. During a class session in Spring 2020, I had my students read and discuss Chapter 6, which detailed how political prisoners in China engaged in reading and intellectual discussions while incarcerated. One of my American students, a history major, chuckled and remarked, “Intellectuals… think too much.” As amusing as the comment was, I couldn’t help but agree with it. Perhaps intellectuals do tend to overthink things. Ultimately, this study aims to broaden our understanding of “Chinese Studies.” By examining the dominance of ruling ideology, ubiquitous propaganda, demonization of the enemy, thought control, mass incarceration, and use and abuse of history, as well as various forms of skepticism, cynicism, and resistance to other societies, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of modern China. Notes 1 Yuhua Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 35–36, 44. 2 Cited in “Pibo lishi xuwu zhuyi yifa hanwei yinglie zunyan” [Debunking Historical Nihilism; Defending the Dignity of Martyrs], www.12371.cn, accessed April 6, 2023. 3 Qiao Maolin, Liu Yang, “Xi Jinping fandui lishi xuwu zhuyi de sixiang jiegou yu qishi,” [What We Can Learn from the Intellectual Structure of Xi Jinping’s Opposition to Historical Nihilism] www.qizhiwang.org.cn, accessed April 2, 2023. 4 “Pibo lishi xuwu zhuyi yifa hanwei lieshi zunyan.” 5 Ibid. 6 Meng Wei, “Dizhi ‘yingxiong dihui shuo’: ‘lishi xuwei zhuyi’ de wangluo nixi jiqi kefu”[Resisting the “Defaming of Hero”: Cyber Attack of Historical Nihilism and Its Submission] 抵制“英雄诋毁说”：“历史虚无主义”的网络逆袭及其克服 (scds.org.cn), accessed April 3, 2023. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Anonymous, “Yuqing ke: ‘Liehuozhong de Qiu Shaoyun’ zaojiu yinqi zhenglun,” [A Lesson of Steering Public Opinion: A Long Debate Over ‘Qiu Shaoyun On Fire’] in 舆情课：〝烈火中的邱少云〞早就引起争论 (kannewyork.com), accessed April 3, 2023. 10 Anonymous, “Jingti lishi xuwu zhuyi de ‘huati xianjing’” [Be Cautious with the “Discourse Pitfall of Historical Nihilism”], 警惕历史虚无主义的“话题陷阱” - 中 国频道 - 中国日报网 (chinadaily.com.cn), accessed April 4, 2023. 11 Yang Jianyi, “Jingti shishi xuwu zhuyi de ‘Tacitus Trap’” 警惕历史虚无主义的“塔 西佗陷阱”_中国网 (china.com.cn), accessed April 6, 2023. 12 Meng Wei, “Dizhi ‘yingxiong dihui shuo’: ‘lishi xuwei zhuyi’ de wangluo nixi jiqi kefu.” 13 Zhou Wentao, “Qiu Shaoyun: zai liehui zhong yongsheng” [Qiu Shaoyun: Eternal Life in Flames] 邱少云：烈火中永生-新华网 (xinhuanet.com), accessed April 7, 2023.

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14 Chen Gang, “Qiu Shaoyun: zai liehui zhong yongsheng” [Qiu Shaoyun: Eternal Life in Flames] tlrb04bTLRB04BC722 (xepaper.com), accessed April 3, 2023. 15 Li Yuanxing, “Wo de zhanyou Qiu Shaoyun” [My Comrade Qiu Shaoyun], in Yuwen [Textbook of Chinese Language and Literature], (Beijing: remin jiaoyu chubanshe), 107–21. 16 Anonymous, “Yuweshu di 13 ke ‘Wode zhanyou Qiu Shaoyun’ zuozhe de ziliao”[Source Materials Concerning the Author of My Comrade Qiu Shaoyun], 语文书第13课《我的战友邱少云》作者的资料_百度知道 (baidu.com), accessed April 8, 2023. 17 In the Chinese language, the word dan 弹in the word compound ranshaodan 燃烧 弹, or fire bomb, is a vague term in that dan is a generic abbreviation that can indicate bullet, shell, or bomb depending on circumstances. 18 “Zhidao anli jiushijiu hao: Ge Changsheng su Hong Zhenkuai mingyuquan, rongyu quan jiufenan” [Case Under Guidance No.99: Ge Changsheng vs. Hong Zhenkuai over the Violation of Right of Reputation] https://www.court.gov.cn/ shenpan-xiangqing-136381.html 19 Ibid.

Bibliography Anonymous. “Jingti lishi xuwu zhuyi de ‘huati xianjing’” [Be Cautious with the “Discourse Pitfall of Historical Nihilism”]. Accessed April 4, 2023. china.chinadaily.com.cn/ fdlsxwzy/2015-08/23/content_21679475.htm Anonymous. “Pibo lishi xuwu zhuyi yifa hanwei yinglie zunyan” [Debunking Historical Nihilism; Defending the Dignity of Martyrs]. Last accessed April 6, 2023. www.12371.cn Anonymous. “Yuweshu di 13 ke ‘Wode zhanyou Qiu Shaoyun’ zuozhe de ziliao”[Source Materials Concerning the Author of My Comrade Qiu Shaoyun]. Last accessed April 8, 2023. https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/18342908.html Anonymous. “Yuqing ke: ‘Liehuozhong de Qiu Shaoyun’ zaojiu yinqi zhenglun,” [A Lesson of Steering Public Opinion: A Long Debate Over ‘Qiu Shaoyun On Fire’]. Last accessed April 3, 2023. www.kannewyork.com/news/2015/04/16/10203. html Chen, Gang. “Qiu Shaoyun: zai liehui zhong yongsheng” [Qiu Shaoyun: Eternal Life in Flames] tlrb04bTLRB04BC722 (xepaper.com). Last accessed April 3, 2023. Li, Yuanxing. “Wo de zhanyou Qiu Shaoyun” [My Comrade Qiu Shaoyun]. Yuwen [Textbook of Chinese Language and Literature]. Beijing: Remin jiaoyu chubanshe. Meng, Wei. “Dizhi ‘yingxiong dihui shuo’: ‘lishi xuwei zhuyi’ de wangluo nixi jiqi kefu”[Resisting the “Defaming of Hero”: Cyber Attack of Historical Nihilism and Its Submission]. Last accessed April 3, 2023. www.scds.org.cn/2021-10/11/887-60487344.htm Qiao, Maolin, and Liu Yang. “Xi Jinping fandui lishi xuwu zhuyi de sixiang jiegou yu qishi,” [What We Can Learn from the Intellectual Structure of Xi Jinping’s Opposition to Historical Nihilism] Last accessed April 8, 2023. www.qizhiwang. org.cn Wang, Yuhua. The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. Yang, Jianyi. “Jingti shishi xuwu zhuyi de ‘Tacitus Trap’.” Last accessed April 6, 2023. www.china.com.cn//opinion/theory/2019-06/25/content_74918576.htm

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“Zhidao anli jiushijiu hao: Ge Changsheng su Hong Zhenkuai mingyuquan, rongyu quan jiufenan” [Case Under Guidance No.99: Ge Changsheng vs. Hong Zhenkuai over the Violation of Right of Reputation] Last accessed April 6, 2023. https:// www.court.gov.cn/shenpan-xiangqing-136381.html Zhou, Wentao. “Qiu Shaoyun: zai liehui zhong yongsheng” [Qiu Shaoyun: Eternal Life in Flames]. Last accessed April 7, 2023. www.xinhuanet.com//politics/2019-07/ 11/c_1124737799.htm

Index

Anti-Japanese War 51, 64, 93 Anti-Rightist Movement 63, 98 Bao Huiseng 25, 26 Benefiting Group Bookstore 13, 19–22, 24–27 Chiang Kai-shek 45–46, 50–52 Chen Duxiu 21 Chen Tanqiu 21, 26 Civil War 7, 39, 46–47, 51, 76 collective memory 92, 107, 110 Comintern 13, 24–26, 29 cowshed(s) 9, 116, 120–125, 140–150, 152–154 CPVA (Chinese People’s Volunteer Army) 161, 163–164 Cultural Revolution 76, 80–81, 97, 100, 116–122, 124–129, 140–147, 149, 151–154, 159, 161, 163 Deng Xiaoping 67, 79, 118 Dirlik, Arif 13, 17, 39 Dong Biwu 26 Gao Yubao 72, 108–109 Great Leap Forward 62, 64–65, 70 Hao Bin 120–121, 125, 142–144, 149–150 historiography 5, 62, 66–67, 71, 79, 92, 110 Hong Zhenkuai 161, 164–165 Huang Fusheng 15 Huang Shiren 92–98, 104–105, 107–108, 110–111 Ji Xianlin 121, 125

Ke Qingshi 124 Kropotkin 14–15, 23 Kuai Dafu 119 Land Reform Movement 39, 63 Leng Yueying 70, 100–101, 104, 106, 110 Li Dazhao 24 Li Hanjun 25 Li Shuqu 15 Liao Huanxing 18, 24 Liang Qichao 6, 28 Lin Biao 46, 64, 105, 145, 148–150 Lin Yu’nan 15, 18–19, 21, 26–27, 28–29 Lin Yuying 21, 26–27, 29 Lin Zhao 9, 144 Liu Renjing 15, 24–25 Liu Wencai 1, 4, 92–93, 98–99, 100–111 Liu Shaoqi 62, 118–119 Mao Zedong 2, 6, 14, 24, 62, 117–118, 123–124, 126, 143–144, 146–148, 153, 160 Marxism 3, 6, 23–24, 27, 146–147 May Fourth Movement 1, 17 May Seventh Cadre School 116 Meisner, Maurice 62 Mutual Aid Society 13, 15, 16, 19, 24–27, 29 Nationalist Party/GMD 2, 45, 47, 50, 76, 152–153 Nie Yuanzi 118, 125 Peking University 76, 80, 118, 120–121, 142–144, 149, 150 Peng Dehuai 48, 51 People’s Liberation Army/PLA 4, 39–40, 46–47, 52, 64, 122

Index 169 Qiu Shaoyun 161–163 “Recalling Bitterness” 63, 74–77, 104, 106 Red Army 7, 47, 51–52 Red Guards 9, 76, 120–121, 127, 140, 144, 147, 149, 159 Revolutionary Committee(s) 7, 120, 122–125, 128 Socialist Education Movement 63, 66, 69 “Speaking Bitterness” 4, 7, 39–40, 42–52 Spencer, Herbert 28 Wang Xiaobo 78, 165 White-Haired Girl 92, 94, 96–98, 100, 102–103, 105 work team(s) 41, 43–45, 67, 76, 93, 102–103, 108–120, 125 Wu Ningkun 143, 145, 148

Xi Jinping 161 Xu Xiao 152 Yanan 39, 150 Yan Fu 6, 28 Yang Shangkun 76 Yang Xiguang 145–147, 150 YMCA 4, 15, 29 Yu Jiaju 19, 24 Yu Qiuli 48, 50–51 Yun Daiying 1, 2, 4, 6, 13–14, 16–27, 128, 164 Zhang Kaiyuan 145 Zhang Langlang 150–152 Zhang Zhiyang 151, 155 Zhang Zongxun 51 Zhou Zuoren 18