Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1934-1945 9781503623927

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TWO REVOLUT IONS

TWO REVOLUTIONS Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi,

1934-1945

PAULINE B. KEATING

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

1997

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP

data are at the end of the book

Preface

DENG XIAOPING's rural reforms in the early 198o's promised cooperatives a second chance in China. Decollectivization was justified with the argument that a "cooperative economy" would flourish once the collectives were dismantled, that smaller and more autonomous agricultural cooperatives could replace the unwieldy, bureaucratized "people's communes." With this development, scholarly interest in the subject revived. The Party's experiments with rural cooperatives during the decade or so before Mao Zedong's 1955 lurch leftward and first "big mistake" (the decision to speed up the "socialist transformation" of rural China) were now, in the light of failed collectivism, carefully reexamined. I was studying history at Nanjing University in 1981-82, a time when Deng's reforms and "de-Maoification" policies in general were enthralling China's scholars. When I expressed an interest in the history of the CCP's rural revolution, my Nanda advisers steered me toward concentrating on the cooperative movements in the wartime base areas. I collected a lot of data on the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region's rural cooperatives in particular, largely because documentary material from that area (home of the CCP Central Committee from 1935 to 1947) is particularly rich and, for the foreign scholar in China in the early 198o's, accessible. Among Western scholars at this time, however, it had become somewhat unfashionable to study the Yan'an area. The first challenges to Mark Selden's important but controversial book The Yenan Way were

vi Preface not counter-histories of Shaan-Gan-Ning but, rather, studies of the other wartime base areas that showed the Shaan-Gan-Ning example to be highly unrepresentative. By the time I began my doctoral research at the Australian National University in 1985, the trend away from a focus on Yan'an was well established; it was a trend supported by both the progressive opening of Chinese archives to foreign scholars and the publication of rich collections of previously unseen documentary materials held in Party and provincial archives. My reasons for defying the trend were pragmatic. For one thing, I had already done work on Shaan-Gan-Ning and wanted to build on it; that, and the fact that the newly opened archives contained a wealth of material from the northwest base area persuaded me to stay where I had started. I promised myself that if the new material produced nothing fresh, I could move on to a comparative study of two or three base areas. I ended up comparing just two subregions within the one base area, Shaan-Gan-Ning. I had been struck from the outset by the radical subregional differences within the Communists' northwest border region, and I was curious to know how those differences, ecological at base, might have been reflected in the Party's reform strategies and achievements. That question defined my project in its first phase. I made unconfident choices about geographical focus and themes-choices that now, with hindsight, I can confidently defend. The choice of base area, for example. One starts with a number of advantages when working over a terrain already plowed by a scholar of the caliber of Mark Selden. His history of Shaan-Gan-Ning not only provides the broader context, but also marks out the space for a tightly focused study such as mine. This, together with the steady stream of new information, seems to me justification enough for the choice of Shaan-Gan-Ning as a research subject. How do I defend the narrow geographical scope of my study? Selden's work had alerted me to differences between the two subregions around which I eventually built my project, but my decision to stick to those two subregions only firmed as the evidence of significant difference mounted. And interestingly, the wider significance of the differences emerged as the focus narrowed and the comparison was tightened. That might mean only that my choice of focus was fortuitous. I suggest, however, that no worthwhile local history study remains stuck in the rut of low-level generalizations. Even though the flourishing field of base area studies is demonstrating the immense variety and geographical specificity of the CCP's early revolution

Preface

vii

making, each local study is also making an important contribution to the debates about the broader character, meaning, and multiple meanings (paradoxes) of the Communist revolution in China. My aim has been to make such a contribution. One example here will suffice: the meanings of the class struggle strategy within the Chinese Communist movement. When I began a systematic study of "revolution" in the Shaan-Gan-Ning base area, I presumed that the class conflict theme would be central to the story. As it turned out, however, in places where old elite power had been quickly and thoroughly destroyed, it was not. In those areas, the Party's development strategies linked up with community building to radically extend the land revolution; and, potentially at least, they surpassed it in importance. Recognition of that sent me back to examine with new appreciation the material I had collected on Shaan-GanNing's cooperatives. Farmer cooperatives emerge from my study as the most radical innovation of the Party's village reconstruction program in the reformed districts. And, as grass-roots organizations, they had a meaning that contrasted sharply with the organs formed for class struggle in the unreformed districts. Exposed here is one of the major tensions within the Communists' rural revolution-the tension produced by the simultaneous promotion of class conflict and community. There is growing recognition among scholars of the destructiveness, the institutionalization of violence, and the social divisiveness that resulted from the fomenting of class struggle and, most particularly, from its routinization in the later Mao years. We learn a lot about why, how, and when the struggle strategy became "routine" by making a close study of an earlier period when conflict and cooperation were in dynamic tension, and when cooperation in some places prevailed. My small study of revolutions in two of Shaan-Gan-Ning's five subregions during the years of the resistance war addresses and throws light on that big subject. In so doing, it also offers a new perspective on the meaning and workings of the "Yan'an Way." A word about the conventions I have used in the text. I have made sparing use of metric equivalents for the mass of Chinese weights and measures given throughout. For convenience, they are listed here: tli = 1

mu

0.5

km

= 0.15 acre or o.o6 hectare

viii Preface 1 shang

= 3 mu (3.5 or 5 mu in some places)

1

jin = 0.5 kg

1

sheng

1 dou 1 dan

= 1.5 kg = 3 jin = 15 kg = 30 jin = 150 kg = 10 dou

I have also used a couple of abbreviations that probably need no explanation, to wit: CCP for the Chinese Communist Party; and GMD for the Guomindang or Nationalist Party. Two other, less familiar usages are Indusco, the short title used by the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (CIC) Movement; and UGAT, the Party's experiments with a Uniform and Graduated Agricultural Tax during the early 194o's. A full list of abbreviations cited in the footnotes and backnotes appears on p. 261. Finally, frequently used Chinese terms are italicized only on the first occurrence. The people who have advised and encouraged me over the years are too numerous to mention. I will name here just a few. To all the unnamed, my heartfelt thanks. I owe a special debt to the teachers at Monash University who steered me toward the study of Asia and Chinese history: Prescott (Pete) Clark, John Legge, Lincoln Li, Jerome Hu, and Gwendda Milston. And I thank my teachers and advisers at Nanjing University, especially Yang Zhenya, Cai Shaoqing, and Wu Yiye, for their wise guidance and indispensable practical help during my stays at Nanda. My thanks also to Zhang Zhuhong and the late Cheng Hanchang of Beijing University's History Department, and to Wei Hongyun of Nankai University, for their valuable advice about sources and new Chinese writings on the wartime base areas. Wang Gungwu and the late Sow-Theng Leong supervised my doctoral work in its early stages, and I am grateful for the substantial help they gave me. John Fincher saw it through to the end; his faith in the project played no small part in its completion. Jonathan Unger also supervised my work through its final stages; his very close reading and rigorous criticisms pushed me to clarify and refine my ideas and helped greatly to improve my writing. A number of people read and critiqued all or part of my manuscript while I revised it. I am particularly grateful for the advice and help I received from Lyman Van Slyke, Tony Saich, Colin Mackerras, Mark

Preface

ix

Selden, Joseph Esherick, Lucien Bianco, David Goodman, Chen Yungfa, and John Fitzgerald. My scholarly companions and friends who, in various ways, have pushed and stoked my thinking about my subject include Anne Gunn, Brian Martin, Terry Narramore, Helen Dunstan, Jennifer Holmgren, the late Jennifer Cushman, Judith Smart, Stephanie de Boer, and Duncan Campbell; my thanks to all of them. Lo Huimin, Tim Beaglehole, David Mackay, and Susan Grogan gave me strong backing and smoothed paths for me in their role as department heads. Marion Weeks, Oahn Collins, Dianne Stacey, Pennie Gapes, and Kristin Downey have all, at different times, contributed their expertise to the production of the manuscript and have dealt calmly and efficiently with the regular technical crises. I am grateful to Robin Mita for her skillful cartography. I thank the people at the Stanford University Press, especially Muriel Bell, Amy Klatzkin, and Nathan MacBrien, for the expert help they gave me in preparing the manuscript for publication. And I thank Barbara Mnookin for her superb copy-editing of an unruly manuscript. Financial support has been provided by an Australian Government Postgraduate Research Award, the Australia-China Student Exchange Scheme, an Australian National University Scholarship, and the Victoria University of Wellington's Internal Grants Committee. The project would not have been started, and certainly not completed, without this support. Finally I want to express appreciation to my family for their love and support during what was for them an inexplicably long and tortuous undertaking. To Madge, Jack, Gabrielle, Bernie, and Linellethank you. P.B.K.

Contents

Introduction

1

1.

Ecologies and Economies: Shaanbei in the 1930's

2.

Conflict and Cooperation: The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide in the 193o's 35

3·

Land Reform and Village Reconstruction, 1934-1941

4·

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties, 1937-1945

5·

Democratic Reconstruction: Elections and Taxes, 1937-1945 130

6.

Tenancy Reform in the Suide Subregion, 1940-1944

7·

Cooperative Societies, 1937-1945

8.

Farmwork Mutual Aid, 1943-1944 Conclusion

14

90

186

205

241

Appendixes A. The Mizhi Landlord Ma Weixin's Rental Arrangements, 1920-1941 257 B. Immigrant Experience of 157 Families, Fourth Township, Liulin District, 1943 259 Notes

261

Bibliography Character List Index

327

293 321

65

164

Maps

1.

Shifts in Shaan-Gan-Ning Territory, 1934-1943

16

2. Shaan-Gan-Ning Administrative Divisions After 1942

3· The Suide Subregion 4· The Yanshu Subregion

19 20

5· Land Revolution in Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1934-1937 6. Yan'an County 7· Suide County

115 119

67

18

Tables

TEXT TABLES 1.

2.

3· 4· 5· 6. 7· 8. 9·

Yanshu and Suide Settlements, 1944 24 Landownership in Two Administrative Villages in Zhangjia Township, Gulin County, 1934 31 Landownership in Zhangjia and Tongju Administrative Villages, 1934 and 1941 72 Landownership in Tongju Administrative Village After Land Reform, 1935 73 Farmland and Reclaimed Wasteland in Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1936-1945 77 The Results of Land Reform in the Third Township of Yanjiachuan District, Suide County, 1942 87 Migration into Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1937-1945 94 The Population of Yan'an County, 1937-1944 95 Grain Taxes in Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1937-1945 147

10. Grain Taxes in Chengguan District, Jia County, 1943

157

Cooperative Societies in Yanshu and Suide, 1944 199 12. Cooperative Societies in the Border Region by Type, 1944 11.

13. Cooperative Societies in Suide by Type, 1944

201

200

xvi

Contents

APPENDIX TABLES A.

B.

The Mizhi Landlord Ma Weixin's Rental Arrangements, 258 1920-1941 Immigrant Experience of 157 Families, Fourth Township, 260 Liulin District, 1943

TWO REVOLUT IONS

Introduction

to conference delegates at the end of 1943, Mao Zedong hailed the cooperative movement launched in the spring of that year as the northwest base area's "second revolution." 1 The first revolution was the land reform of 1934-36. Those two revolutions give this book its title and define the historical scope of my study. Because the tenancy reform movement of the early 1940's had essentially the same goals, it is included in the definition of land reform. So, too, is the economic and political reconstruction work that complemented and consolidated the assault on landlordism. The idea of "village reconstruction" is used to convey this broader meaning. The cooperative movement built on and went considerably further than land reform by forging and cementing new socioeconomic relationships made possible by the first revolution's leveling effect. The term "two revolutions" is particularly well suited for this study for other reasons. I use it to refer to the quite different styles and consequences of the Chinese Communist Party's revolutionary enterprise in two key subregions of northern Shaanxi (Shaanbei) during the 1934-45 period-Yanshu and Suide. My study is built around the contrast between those subregions and the dualities within the Communists' program exposed by that contrast. In northwest China during the Japanese war, the Communists' revolution was at one and the same time a restoration movement in the style of imperial restorations of China's past and a "modernization" movement centered on economic development. It was also, fundamentally, a state-making project with IN A REPORT

2

Introduction

totalitarian ambitions. In 194o's Shaanbei, however, Party state building was premised on strengthening village communities and cultivating a degree of popular democracy. And although the one served the other, the community building that was the peasants' revolution was potentially in conflict with the Party's state-strengthening revolution. The first methodological principle guiding this inquiry, therefore, is that the Chinese Communist revolution was a multifaceted phenomenon, rich with tensions and contradictions that were expressed differently according to place and time, and a movement with different meanings for the different classes of actors who participated in it? In the case of Shaanbei, the most important of the factors determining which meanings were expressed and whether tensions were resolved were the social ecologies and political cultures of the region, factors that long predated the Communist ascendancy. The comparison of the revolutions in the Yanshu and Suide subregions will demonstrate that argument. A concentration on northern Shaanxi, of course, necessarily involves the issue of the Yanshu experience-as-national-model. I contend that the celebrated Yan'an Way, that reading of history constructed by the Party to give, as Tony Saich puts it, a "coherent identity" to what might otherwise have been just an "amalgam of loosely related local protest movements," 3 was a product of quite special circumstances that were not replicable in most other parts of China. That is the fundamental lesson of the Yanshu-Suide comparison. In Yanshu we find some evidence of the popular democracy celebrated by the Yan'an Way model. In neighboring Suide we largely do not. STATE EXPANSION AND VILLAGE RECONSTRUCTION

The broad analytical focus of this study, then, is the evolving statevillage relationship and the reconstruction of village "community" in the context of CCP state building. I draw on a range of reflective writings on the state-local nexus in China and the meaning of community at the local level. G. William Skinner's work on marketing systems and the structure of rural society is fundamental to any understanding of village China. So, too, are the studies of scholars like Prasenjit Duara and Vivienne Shue who build on and extend Skinner's model in different directions.4 Of the literature on non-Chinese peasants, most relevant to my inquiry are James Scott's writings on the "moral economy"

Introduction

3

of peasant society and Samuel Popkin's "political economy" counterargument.5 My approach is deliberately eclectic and, as such, follows the trend away from "grand theory" in studies of the Chinese Communist revolution.6 There is no one theoretical model that accommodates the multiple meanings of, and both the potential and the actual direction taken by, the revolution in its formative stage and in different places. The standard model of state-society relations in premodern China argues a wide social distance between the state center and the localities; an important role for gentry (or nongentry elite) mediators, who at lower levels usually defended local interests; and a degree of sociocultural independence for rural communities. But state strengthening in the twentieth century, undertaken as it was at a time when the gentry's protection of local interests was being dissipated, withdrawn, or redirected, made local communities progressively more vulnerable to the predations of revenue-hungry state authorities. The process of deeper state penetration of the localities was begun with the imperial "new policy" reforms of the 1900's, was continued by the various Republican governments, especially the Guomindang, and by the Japanese, and culminated in the close-to-totalitarian control achieved by the Communist state after 1949· The deepening reach of the state, and the related erosion of local moral and political economies, had, of course, radical consequences for rural communities (both village communities and the local community defined by economic and political networks)? The withdrawal of elite patronage and protection greatly diminished the chances of effective village "closure" against danger and a predatory state. Prised open by an expansionist state and the collapse of traditional protection, villages lost the corporateness and cohesion that made them communities. This is not to say that an "open" village is not a community. And indeed, as Duara points out, though economic closure was a rational response to danger, political openness (that is, strong political linkages between villages) was a better defense against external threats.8 In the case of early modern China, however, a set of closely related trends combined to weaken local political networks, to fracture and atomize rural communities, and to expose people at the bottom of society not only to a tax-hungry state, but to a range of potential aggressors, and particularly to the "local bullies and evil gentry" who, in large part, had filled the vacuum left by the gentry protectors of old.9 This conventional state-society model identifies the basic themes on

4

Introduction

which my study is based. The first point to make is that, by Skinner's macroregion formula, northern Shaanxi was a peripheral area, and so we must expect to find it deviating substantially from the standard model, particularly in relation to gentry-class political brokerage and patronage. Furthermore, the unique terrains of the northwest loess tablelands produced settlement patterns and community structures that were specific to the region. Community was weak relative to other places, and so too was the state. Obviously, then, a model premised on community disintegration and state growth has only limited applicability to Republican Shaanbei. Recognizing this warns us to expect different patterns, including different consequences, of Communist state making and village reconstruction in the Shaan-Gan-Ning base area. Once the Long Marchers had established Yan'an as Party headquarters (in late 1936), an immediate task, and one that was fundamental to both state making and rural reconstruction, was to repopulate the vast wastelands surrounding the new state capital. This is why the first phase of Party state making in Yan'an was, in essence, a restorationist program. A reforming government sponsored migration, resettlement, and land reclamation just as, for example, the early Qing rulers had done in areas depopulated by civil strife during the Ming-Qing transition. And as Peter Perdue argues, this kind of development-oriented restoration is an instance in which the goals of the state "were in tune with what the people needed." 10 Even in land-scarce areas, the CCP's early reforms, because they restored to marginalized people the basic decencies of life (including the right to marry, bear children, and die with dignity), were restorationist in nature.U But in the Yanshu wastelands, where the new state could satisfy the peasants' deepest yearnings-as much land as they could manage to farm-a coincidence of state and peasant goals made the Communists' state-building project distinctively different in important respects from their state building in other places. The long struggle for state power between the GMD and the CCP was, in major part, a military struggle. As the Communists seized control of new territory, they tended to rely on the threat of, if not actual, physical violence. The strong coercive strain in the Communist movement and the blunt expression of that strain at Tiananmen in 1989 tend to direct analytical attention to the controlling, repressive, and exactive functions of Party state making, and away from the powerful nationalist sentiments that caused the Communists to see themselves as community-buildersP Community in this sense, of course, means

Introduction

5

"nation," and intrinsic to the Communists' state-making drive was the attempt to transform family and parochial loyalties into loyalty to the "national community." In the early years, however, the CCP was willing to settle for less. Initial reconstruction work typically entailed first reintegrating people as families and, then, reintegrating families as village communities; the training of loyalties upward and outward was slow work among rural people whose overwhelming preoccupation had long been self- and family survival. There were other reasons why grass-roots community building was an important part of reconstruction work; for example, since popular participation in Party projects relied heavily on local community structures and local leadership, it was important for the Party that those structures be strengthened. But if state making required, as Duara argues, "the subordinating, co-opting, or destroying of the relatively autonomous authority structures of local communities," 13 how should we understand the Party's rebuilding of local communities in the 1940's? The answer suggested by several scholars is that the new communities were not meant to be powerful, and that the policy of simultaneously strengthening village cells while progressively destroying the critically important intervillage networks that constituted the local community fatally weakened the capacity of villagers to bargain with or resist the state.14 But that answer will not do; the process of "cellularization" to which those scholars are referring pertains to collectivization in the 1950's, and not to the reforms of earlier periods. In fact for the early 1940's, the opposite is true. Village reconstruction during the resistance war entailed the strengthening of both village community and local community, and in this also the Party-state was following a restorationist precedent. Skinner, elaborating his "open-closed village" typology, makes the point that imperial state-led reconstruction work following a period in which "endemic disorder" brought village closures helped villages to open up again by restoring communications routes and reinvigorating trade.15 The CCP's rural reconstruction work before the mid-1950's had a similar effect, particularly when it rehabilitated rural markets and initiated "local self-sufficiency" drives. The Communists, of course, intended reconstruction to go well beyond merely restoring old community structures. State strengthening in the twentieth century required much greater local contributions to national projects than imperial regimes had typically been able to command. Yet for this purpose also the CCP drew on indigenous traditions of statecraft, and specifically the fengjian tradition, at least as

6 Introduction

much as on the imported Leninist model.* In other words-and here I am borrowing from Philip Kuhn's analysis of the late Qing local self-government movement-the Communists believed that allowing a degree of autonomy at local levels was the way to re-energize local government, that local autonomy served state interests (including state control of the localities) as long as local interests were compatible with the "general good," and that their task therefore was to harmonize "local" and "national" interests. As Kuhn argues, the new element injected into the old fengjian "autonomy-control" dynamic by modernizing nationalists was popular mobilization.16 As the Communist leaders saw it, popular mobilization was possible only after local administrations had been purged of "local bullies" and replaced with Party loyalists. Mobilizations after that could be premised on "democracy"that is, a degree of local self-management of, and broad participation in, local affairsP Critical to the success or otherwise of this mobilizational democracy were the caliber and loyalties of the new rural leaders, and of township (xiang) heads in particular. Guomindang reforms had made the township the critical point of intersection between state and village, and it became the focus therefore of the CCP's attempt to transform the very meaning of local office holding. The township head was to be both a state agent and a local community leader. On top of the usual responsibilities for tax, corvee, and police work, his office was now to incorporate services that had once been provided by the gentry-services in the areas of, for example, education, social welfare, religious and cultural observances, water control, and roadway maintenance. But the progress of local government reform was everywhere slow in the 1940's, hampered among other things by the difficulty of finding people who could juggle the roles of loyal state servant and community leadership, and the moderate reforms were ultimately overtaken by collectivization after the mid-195o's. The liberation of women was another area in which Communist ideals and goals were compromised early in the movement's history. The revolution was meant to motor a "family revolution" that would destroy patriarchy, unfetter women, and build "democratic families." * Fengjian is usually translated as "feudalism" and means, essentially, the feudal system of decentralized power. China's fengjian advocates deplored centrist absolutism and, in particular, the avoidance rule that put outsiders in charge of local governments. For a useful discussion of fengjian thinking in the early and late Qing, see Kuhn, "Local Self-Government," pp. 261-80.

Introduction

7

But even at the time of the CCP's founding, in the early 192o's, the meaning of "family revolution" was obfuscated by a deep-rooted ambivalence within the hierarchy about gender equality and the direction of "woman-work" (funu gongzuo).18 And then, as the Communist movement was ruralized and militarized, it encountered stiff popular resistance to radical change in family relations, particularly in places where reform required a preliminary phase of restoration and rehabilitation. Restoration did not necessarily mean a return to the "feudal past" for women; the CCP was willing to risk patriarchal ire as it eliminated some of the worst abuses inflicted on the female population (footbinding, infanticide, and child marriages, for example). Furthermore, by raising living standards, restorative reforms made things better for women as well as men. Overwhelmingly, however, the rehabilitation of family life in the wartime bases was on male terms and represented a significant retreat from the Communists' earlier promises to women.19 More successful than the Party's attempt to reform local government, and a reason why it reneged on "family revolution," was its drive to rebuild and refashion village communities; that drive is a central concern of this study. How is success measured in this area? What, in other words, constitutes "village community" and what distinguished the "new villages" fashioned by Communist reforms? Broadly speaking, farming settlements can be called communities when unrelated resident families are bonded in some or several ways and cooperate on some matters. Organizations, and particularly multiclass organizations, serve to solidify bondings and promote interfamily cooperation; both before and after Communist reforms, lineage and religious associations served this function. Though heterogeneity and hierarchy do not necessarily rule out community solidarity}0 a degree of homogeneity certainly increases cooperation and helps to minimalize conflict. But inequalities become less important over time. As Richard Madsen says, communities are "historically constructed" and are, as a consequence, "communities of memory." 21 Community solidarity is thus promoted by factors such as shared political and cultural traditions, a history of successful collective action, and neighborly customs of reciprocity.22 At the beginning of the 1940's, the Communists pretty much had to build community solidarity from scratch in both Yanshu and Suide. Many of the Yanshu villages were inhabited by recent migrants with "community histories" that stretched back no more than four or five years, and endemic conflict festered in villages throughout the Suide

8

Introduction

subregion. What was required and attempted were interventions that would, in Yanshu, quickly cement bondings and, in Suide, reduce conflict. The two most important of those interventions were the redistributive drive to reduce the economic difference between families and the organization of cooperative associations for the Party's "mass production campaign" of 1943-44. A measure of the success of the Communists' community building in Shaanbei is, accordingly, the degree of distributive equity and organizational vigor and the strength of cooperative relationships in Shaanbei villages. THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT

The initiative that most strikingly took reconstruction beyond restoration was the cooperative movement; as Mao Zedong said, that movement was, in fact, the Border Region's "second revolution." Some Western scholars contend that because the Communists imposed on farm families cooperative arrangements to which they were unaccustomed, even in the movement's earliest phase, the new cooperatives constituted the grass-roots base for the CCP's ever-deeper intrusion into village society.Z3 This is to go part way toward the moral economy argument, which insists on quite extensive cooperation between households in premodern villages, and predicts the fading of indigenous cooperative customs once modernizing "intruders" try to reorganize agricultural work.24 The more general view, however, is that farmwork cooperation in a premodern agrarian system will always be extremely limited; that it is constrained, most importantly, by technical backwardness; and that rational peasants will not seek to extend cooperation until farming technology is improved and until the development of rural industries and commerce provides alternative employment on overmanned farms.2 5 As Mao's 1943 comment indicates, the Chinese Communists knew very well that the cooperative movement, in full motion, would represent a radical break with the past. But they saw no violation of the "laws of history" in the development of cooperative farming among small freeholding farmers. And in land-abundant Yanshu, cooperation could in fact compensate for the lack of modern technology. Party strategists conceded that the peasants had misgivings about regular teamwork, but they were convinced that, by starting with the revival of traditional cooperative customs and then extending them, the partici-

Introduction

9

pants would progressively shed prejudices derived from "familism," "petty-bourgeois individualism," "localism," "conservatism," and general "backwardness." 26 They also had considerable confidence in the entrepreneurism and innovativeness of the village people they organized. How, then, do we judge the 1943-44 cooperative movement? Was it the Party's revolution or the peasants'? Was it an innovation imposed from above on an unwilling or, at best, compliant peasantry or an initiative that was significantly shaped and impelled by peasant activism and entrepreneurship? Because of important societal differences between Yanshu and Suide and, in particular, different village community structures and recent histories, reconstruction and cooperativization were significantly different in those two subregions, and in ways that impinge directly on the issues of village democracy and statist autocracy. I will argue that there was room for grass-roots democracy in Yanshu, and very little room in Suide. AUTHORITARIANISM AND POPULAR DEMOCRACY

Almost all studies of the Chinese Communist movement recognize that it was impelled by two forces-the Party and the peasants-and that each had its own agenda.27 Opinions differ, however, over the nature and consequences of Party-peasant interactions. Some scholars argue that the peasants' agenda was, to a significant extent, adopted by the Party; Ralph Thaxton and Kamal Sheel adapt the moral economy model to make this case.Z8 The more common view is that the CCP's agenda dominated and largely suffocated the peasants', that the authoritarianism and totalitarian ambitions of the Party-state in the 1930's and 1940's effectively silenced peasant voices; this view is argued strongly, for example, by Chen Yung-fa, Tetsuya Kataoka, and Lucien Bianco.29 Others take a middle position, arguing for a flexibility, fluidity, and volatility in the early Communist movement that allowed peasants a bigger role in shaping the movement before 1949 than they were allowed afterward. Joseph Esherick, using a case study from Shaanbei, demonstrates the "inter-penetration of the party-state and society" by showing that poor peasants recruited into the CCP in the 1930's, people whose "ideological remolding" was always less than thorough, were in positions of considerable influence by 1949?0 Mark Selden,

10 Introduction in his 1971 work, The Yenan Way, distinguished between "populist" and "elitist" phases of Party history. Epitomizing the contrast between the two for Selden was the "localist" style of partisan leaders like Liu Zhidan in Shaanbei and the centrist and bureaucratic style of the Long March "outsiders," who shunted aside the unorthodox partisans in Shaanbei after 1935 and strove to ensure that a "rationalized hierarchy and centralized organization" quelled spontaneity.31 In Selden's argument the populist impulse resurfaced during the 1940-41 crisis in Shaan-Gan-Ning and gave shape to the set of policies and mass campaigns that together constituted the "Yan'an Way." In his more recent writings, and most specifically in his essay "Yan'an Communism Reconsidered," Selden acknowledges that the Yan'an Way "encapsulated repressive and elitist tendencies that were insufficiently recognized in the original study," that the "centralist, authoritarian, and fundamentalist strains" so prominent after 1949 "were present in incipient form within the wartime movement." 32 And he agrees that the Border Region government's sortie into the opium trade, convincingly demonstrated by Chen Yung-fa in "The Blooming Poppy," does "call into question any universal claim that revolutionaries occupied the moral high ground." 33 He insists, however, that we must not let the Yan'an Way's dark side blind us to the democratic promise within the resistance movement.34 And he disagrees with scholars who argue that the northwest base was unrepresentative of the Communist movement as a whole or that the rear-area bases, much more than the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, provided the foundation for the Communist victory in 1949.35 For Selden today, the Yan'an Way still represents "the summation of the Party's experience in the resistance" and "offers hints applicable to the political economy of development." In particular, the "sprouts of democracy associated with the introduction of forms of electoral politics, the growth of an independent cultivator majority, and the emergence of a cooperative economy" had the potential to serve as "the foundations for a socialist transition that ultimately required expanded political roles and the empowerment of villagers." 36 The question at issue is not whether this potential was there in the 1940's, but "why the seeds of democracy sown in the resistance failed to germinate-or rather were decisively crushed-in the People's Republic." 37 My study is heavily indebted to Selden's pathbreaking research on the history of Shaan-Gan-Ning. And on several issues I agree with him. I agree, for example, that the totalitarianism and repressiveness of

Introduction

11

the consolidated Party-state should not blind us to a range of different potentials in the young Communist movement. I agree with him also on the importance of the Yan'an experience and on the need for a better understanding of the historical origins and construction of the Yan'an model. I strongly endorse the importance that Selden gives to the cooperative movement; it was a major plank of the Party's rural development program and, of all the Yan'an Way projects, it is the one that, in my argument, was most full of democratic promise (the experiments in "electoral politics" notwithstanding).38 And finally, to the extent that Selden's 1995 reassessment of the Yan'an Way accommodates dualities, particularly the tension between the Party's declared democratic ideals and authoritarian practice, it is close to my own assessment. My first difference with Selden relates to his implied explanation of CCP authoritarianism and, by corollary, the failure of popular democracy. The suggestion is that the authoritarian dark side of the Yan' an Way derives from a tenacious tradition; it is the product of the authoritarianism that is deeply rooted in both elite and folk culture. By inference, no further explanation than that is required. Novel phenomena and the construction of new traditions are what require explanation, not the existence of established traditions. In 1971 Selden argued for the emergence of a ' new society" in the Communist base areas; now he concedes that base-area society was not as "new" as he originally thought, that tenacious traditions stubbornly resisted the new.39 Selden is by no means alone in blaming tradition for limiting change; assumptions about the "tenacity of tradition" underlie most studies that emphasize the powerful authoritarian strain in the Communist movement (the contention or implication here is that Leninist vanguardism merely reinforced the indigenous tradition).40 My analysis of the origins and construction of the Yan'an Way, while acknowledging the salience and force of cultural continuities, also identifies the important ways in which objective structural factors impinged on mobilization practice and outcomes. Specifically, the unique ecology of the Yan'an area is a factor that, in significant respects, made possible the impressive achievements celebrated as the Yan'an Way. And if we acknowledge the important role of local ecologies and associated sociopolitical structures in the creation of the Yan'an model, then we must expect that the inflexible imposition of this model in localities different from land-abundant Yanshu would result in failure. A defining feature of Party practice in the resistance period was its flexibility and pragmatism. I aim to show that 1

12 Introduction the flexible adaptation of Yan'an Way strategies in land-scarce Suide allowed Party mobilizers to get the job done, but only by means of topdown heavy-handedness. In other words, the Suide case study shows that objective factors, at least as much as tradition, explain the authoritarian behavior of Party mobilizers. Just as historians tend to find the roots of Party authoritarianism in China's traditional political cultures, so also they locate the origins of its anti-traditionalism in the cultural sphere-in the May Fourth cultural revolution.* That movement also produced the Maoist populism that, in Selden's argument, was the defining ethos of the Yan'an Way.41 Intrinsic to Mao's populism was an unmarxian voluntarism, the belief that people can "remove mountains" as long as they are "resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory" ;42 this became a central tenet of the CCP's Yan'an Way myth. Still, much and all as the loud proclamations of faith in the power of the people were frequently vindicated throughout the Maoist era by astonishing feats of human endeavor, Maoist populism was very rarely translated into democratic practice. I aim to show that there was democratic content in the original Yan'an Way while it was being constructed in the Yanshu area in the early 1940's, but that democracy in this case derived much less from ideology, from a populist commitment among Party leaders to build a polity based on popular sovereignty, than from objective factors pressed on the Party from outside. An externally provoked fiscal crisis impelled the 1941-42 rectification (zhengfeng) movement out of which the characteristic Yan'an Way institutions developed. The urgent need for cost-cutting dictated, for example, the minban (run by the people) and zili gengsheng (local self-reliance) policies. The goal of the great production campaign (da shengchan yundong) was not only to strengthen the Party-state's revenue base, but to promote local economic self-sufficiency and reduce the rural areas' dependence on inputs from the center. The Yan'an government therefore weathered the midwar fiscal crisis by slackening statist reins and allowing, even fostering, a degree of local independence. In the special conditions that prevailed in the Yanshu area, *The May Fourth Movement of 1917-21 entailed, among other things, a radical assault on cultural traditions that were judged to be impeding China's modernization. The founders of the Chinese Communist Party had all, to varying degrees, participated in the movement, vigorously damning "Confucius and Sons" and extolling "Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science."

Introduction

13

local independence was expressed not as defiance or closure against the state, but as a pitching in, as cooperation, with the "people's government." In building a legend out of the Shaanbei peasants' heroic cooperative effort to transform their environment, the Communists of course chose to spotlight the harmony between the Party and the people. "Democracy," in the sense of a degree of local autonomy and self-determination, was not given the same prominence in that legend. It was a means to an end in the special conditions of central Shaanbei and, as such, dispensable in places where conditions were different. Very simply, in sum, the essential aim of this study is to demonstrate the importance of local factors in the development of the Shaan-Gan-Ning base, just as other scholars have demonstrated local difference in the histories of Communist base areas in other parts of China. Why make an issue of the importance of objective structures in the development of a Marxian-inspired revolutionary movement? Because China's Marxist revolutionaries became increasingly enthralled with the power of mind over matter. As a consequence-and here I am leaning on Philip Huang's argument-they stopped "seeking what is right and true from real facts." 43 When the Yan'an model of "heroic struggle against all odds" was elevated to the status of national model, it was lifted off its structural foundations. When flexibly imposed on societies that were structurally different from Yanshu society, it lost much, if not all, of its democratic content. When inflexibly imposed (as was the case increasingly after 1949) as an ideological construct with little basis in objective realities, it seeded the cynicism about ideology in general, and the Yan'an model in particular, that now pervades post-Mao China.44

CHAPTER

1

Ecologies and Economies: Shaanbei in the 1930's

coMMUNIST PARTISANs had been organizing peasant uprisings in various parts of Shaanbei since the late 1920's.1 Guerrilla forces gradually gained footholds in places where, because opposition was particularly weak, the Communists could work openly. Eventually, in late 1934 and early 1935, provisional soviet governments were set up to administer two parcels of consolidated territory: the Shaan-Gan and Shaanbei base areas. The Shaan-Gan Soviet in 1935 straddled the Shaanxi-Gansu border; it reached as far as the Great Wall to the north and Shaanxi province's Guanzhong region to the south. The Shaanbei Soviet was to the north of Yan'an and incorporated parts of what was to become the Suide subregion (jenqu). Red Army victories against Nationalist and warlord armies in the spring and summer of 1935 enabled the two soviets to merge by mid-year, and the arrival of the Long Marchers in Shaan-Gan a few months later, in October, further strengthened the Communist armies. The southern and western boundaries of the new base quickly expanded and the Yan'an county seat, lost to the Nationalists in 1935, was recaptured and secured by the Communists in December 1936 (see Map 1). From that date until February 1947, Yan'an served as the home of the CCP central committee? When the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region government was formally established in September 1937, the CCP was administering a territory that spanned at least 85,000 sq. km, incorporated all or part of 23 counties, and had a total population of fewer than 1.5 million.3 As much as 3o,ooo sq. km was ceded to GMD-backed forces over the next

Shaanbei in the 1930s

15

seven years, but the incorporation in 1940 of Shaanbei's heavily populated northern counties more than compensated for the loss of some soo,ooo people along the region's western and southern boundaries.4 Map 2 shows the shape of the Border Region in 1943; the external borders and administrative divisions remained relatively stable after the Suide area was absorbed in early 1940. In all of the Communist base areas, the depth and durability of Party reforms were contingent on military security. Reform was therefore relatively shallow along the Shaan-Gan-Ning boundaries patrolled by "friendly" Nationalist forces ("friendly" was a united-front euphemism for "unfriendly"). Compared with the rear-area bases, however, ShaanGan-Ning was on the whole exceptionally secure, and variations in reform achievements there were due much more to local conditions than to defense capabilities and security. An aim of this study is to demonstrate how ecological factors gave shape to, and limited or advanced, the CCP's reform projects in the northwest during the pivotal Yan'an period. We must begin, therefore, with an examination of the Shaanbei ecologies and political economies that predated Communist activities in that region. THE ECOLOGIES OF NORTH AND SOUTH SHAANBEI

Weather-whipped hills, aridity, and a savage and perfidious climate are general features of the area that became the Communist Party's northwest base in the mid-1930's. Natural disadvantages, combined with extreme technological backwardness, civil strife from the mid-nineteenth century on, and the caprices of warlord politics after 1911, made the region that had given birth to Chinese civilization one of the poorest and most depressed in all of China. Farmers struggled to eke out wretched livings in a hill country constantly threatened by drought, flooding, hailstorms, unseasonable frosts, pestilence, and plagues. That farming was an exceptionally hazardous business in this area is reflected in local folk sayings: some claimed that in Shaanbei there were "crop failures every three years, and a famine every ten," others that the area suffered "a minor drought every three years and a major drought every five." 5 It could be said that socioeconomic differences within the region were really a matter of varying depths of poverty. But physical conditions in Shaanbei are far from uniform. The topography varies markedly, ranging from the semidesert tablelands

SUIYUAN PROVINCE

11.

SHAANXI PROVINCE

MAP 1.

-··-··- Provincial Shaan-Gan "J"7'7'7'77 CCP base areas 2. Shaanbei ////// in 1934 3. Shenrnu ~ Shaan-Gan-Ning border in 1936

Shifts in Shaan-Gan-Ning territory, 1934-1943. Based on Shaanxisheng Yanlm diqu dilizhi (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1982), p. 3·

Shaanbei in the 1930s

17

of the west and northwest (most of the region's Gansu and Ningxia components) to the relatively fertile, but still dry, hill country of Shaanxi province's northeastern counties. Topography, together with soil quality, precipitation, proximity to rivers, frost seasons, forested areas, and mineral resources, determined the viability of farming, the potential for nonfarm industries, the cost of transport, the development of markets, and the growth of urban centers. These ecological factors, combined with the radical depopulation of some areas during the Han-Muslim civil war of the 186o's and 187o's, endemic natural disasters, and civil war in the twentieth century, produced quite different types of rural settlements and modes of living. The basic contrast is between the densely populated Suide area in the northeast and the thinly settled semi-wastelands almost everywhere else. The counties that, under the Communists, constituted the Suide subregion (Map 3), and especially Suide and Mizhi counties, more closely approximated the typical propaganda image of a rural China ripe for revolution (with land-starved peasants and exploitative landlords) than any other part of Shaan-Gan-Ning. The challenge for the Party in the depopulated Yanshu counties (Map 4)-and in the Guanzhong subregion to a smaller extent-was less the destruction of landlordism than repopulation and the rebuilding of an economic infrastructure through planned migrations and resettlements.* Thus the reformers confronted wholly different sets of problems and possibilities in what were also the Border Region's two most strategic areas. The Yan'an area was politically strategic as the central committee's headquarters during the resistance-war years, and the site of the training institutes for the Communists' civilian, military, and cultural cadres. Suide was strategically important not only because it was the commercial center of Shaanbei, but also because it linked ShaanGan-Ning with the Jinsui Base Area, providing a reasonably safe route to the North China bases. The fact that the two subregions were so different and, at the same time, the focus of special Party attention makes a comparison of developments in those two places particularly interesting. The topography, soils, and climate of both Yanshu and Suide are essentially similar. Human settlements followed the Wuding and Dali rivers and their tributaries in Suide, the Luo and Yan river systems *Though the Guanzhong region is Shaanxi's "wheat bowl," the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region embraced only its poorest and thinly populated northern section.

••

Regional boundary (1943) Subregional boundary County boundary Subregional capital County capital

~ YANSHU subregion

~

SUIDE subregion

MAP 2. Shaan-Gan-Ning administrative divisions after 1942. Based on Shaan-Gan-Ning bianqu kangri minzhu genjudi, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi ziliao chubanshe, 1990).

YANCHUAN

The Suide subregion Regional boundary (after1942) Subregional boundary County boundary Subregional capital

•• •

County seat Qu

Village

MAP 3· The Suide subregion. Based on Shaanxisheng dituce (Xi' an: Renmin chubanshe, 1981).

ZIZHOU

t',.

...,. .....

----~-

I ZHIDAN.

.. •

QINGJIAN

,--,I

\,l

Qingjian

(• ·• •· · :. •. . . . .

I

I

,/

• Yu)Iawan

.

-,

/..;, _ :-yo.

~'·::~r/_>st.~ '--t~.;J

ANSP{"

:

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)

HUACHI

I

I I

I I

·· ..

,-~

:····L .. QINGQUAN o { \ .. ········: ·: ·.... ····· I. I

\ \-

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HESHUI 1 .., I I

'

',

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The Yanshu subregion (after 1942) -----... . . .. ... . . .. ~

Regional boundary Subregional boundary County boundary Subregional capital

• • o

•

County seat Qu Xiang Village

MAP 4· The Yanshu subregion. Based on Shaanxisheng dituce (Xi'an: Renmin chubanshe, 1981).

Shaanbei in the 1930

s

21

in Yanshu. Both subregions have long strips along the Yellow River, with a slightly milder climate than other parts and the potential for cotton growing. Both regions are covered in loess to an average depth of about 45 m (and ranging from 20 m to 200 m).6 But potentially fertile as this land is, the difficult terrain and harsh climate worked against its full exploitation in imperial and Republican times; farming was done on hilltops and slopes prone to horrendous erosion. Rivers cut easily through the soft soil, creating exceptionally steep embankments, where irrigation with simple technologies is all but impossible. Nowhere in Shaanbei is there a genuine alluvial plain, and strips of irrigable river flats are rarely more than a kilometer wide? Most farmers can depend on only five frost-free months a year. With less than 20 inches of rainfall a year, unreliable in spring and heaviest in July and August, ripening crops are even today threatened with disastrous flooding. 8 The precariousness of farming in a region of fickle springs and treacherous summers is reflected in a Suide saying: "Of the young shoots you see, only half will be harvested." 9 In 1942 the Yanshu subregion consisted of nine counties, most with old boundaries intact, and Yan'an municipality.10 It covered an area of about 23,000 sq. km, more than twice the size of the Suide subregion. It had a population of less than 250,000 in the early 1930's, but a big influx of immigrants pushed the total up to about 36o,ooo by 1941.11 The Suide subregion incorporated five old counties with adjusted boundaries and the newly created Zizhou, composed of western Suide and parts of Yulin and Hengshan counties.* It was a territory of about 11,ooo sq. km with a population of approximately 545,000 in 1941P That dense population of 50 people per sq. km (compared with only about 16 in Yanshu) farmed an average of less than six mu per capita, compared with a regional average of 20 muY One obvious reason why Suide remained overpopulated when there was so much land available in Yanshu is that very little of Yanshu's land is arable. Even in 1981 (after four decades of Party-led development), only about 10 percent of the total land area was being farmed, compared with an average of 29 percent for the six Suide counties.14 Torrential summer rains over millennia have savagely eroded the en*Shenfu county, made up of sections of Shenmu and Fugu counties at Shaanxi's northernmost tip, and originally part of the Suide subregion, was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Jinsui Border Region in 1942. The Yulin county seat, the former prefectural capital and "cultural center" of the region, did not come under Communist control until March 1949.

22

Shaanbei in the 1930 s

tire northwest loess plateau, sculpting a landscape that is everywhere dissected by a maze of gullies and cavernous ravines. But the Suide area has more mao formations-rounded hilltops that can be easily farmed. 15 There is also evidence of higher levels of natural soil fertility in at least some parts of Suide. Mizhi ("rice grease") county takes its name from the couplet: "Wo rang yi li, mi zhi ru zhi" (Just right for millet this fine rich soil, the juice of the rice is as rich as grease).16 Suide's natural advantages are, on a national scale, meager, but they were enough to make it a "core region" in relation to "peripheral" Yanshu. And as Skinner predicts for core regions in general/ 7 Shaanbei's economic core attracted investment in farmland improvement, transport, and commerce, making it possible for the area to sustain yet larger populations and exacerbating the demographic and systemic differences between core and periphery. An additional factor is Suide's strategic location close to China's northwestern frontier. The Ming dynasty made Yulin, the region's administrative center, a Great Wall garrison town as well. Though funding for border defenses dried up after the 156o's/8 the Yulin-Suide area's early military importance helps to explain why a relatively vigorous commercial economy and culture developed in a place that even today has a China-wide reputation as an inhospitable backwater. The core-periphery model helps to explain why Suide became Shaanbei's economic center but not why the Yanshu area was so broken down and decrepit in the 1930's, with nothing like the population it had once supported. To be sure, the inhabitants had been decimated during the mid-nineteenth-century Muslim wars. But the more densely populated Suide area had also been devastated by those calamitous wars, yet was able to recover and more. Suide county, for example, had a population of 113,300 in 1824. The county capital was ransacked by invading Muslim armies in the late 186o's, and 8o percent of the residents are said to have been slaughtered. Yet the county's population had grown to 152,281 by 1930.19 Population data for several Yanshu counties provide a stark contrast: Yan'an county's population was 61,200 in 1823 and only 30,788 in 1930; Bao'an (now Zhidan) fell from 51,500 residents in 1823 to just 170 in 1868, and still had only 5,241 in 1896; Ansai had 36,goo inhabitants in 1823 and 9,985 in 1911; Yanchang, 66,100 in 1823, and 12,863 a century later.20 Clearly, the Han-Muslim conflict shredded and scattered rural communities in Yanshu more than it did in Suide, and 6o years later the population was still nowhere near the pre-186o level. Both environ-

Shaanbei in the 1930s

23

mental and political factors explain the failure to recover, but the pacification strategies of Zuo Zongtang were an obvious immediate cause. Zuo was one of the more vigorous and resourceful of the mandarin reformers who came to the aid of the beleaguered Qing dynasty during the mid-century rebellions. In the northwestern areas that he pacified, however, his rehabilitation initiatives focused on the relocation and resettlement in Gansu province of about 6o,ooo Shaanxi Muslims, the remnant of an original population of 700,000 to 8oo,ooo.21 There seems to have been little attempt in this period to redevelop the areas in Shaanxi from which Muslim communities fled or had been forced to migrate; the Tongzhi restoration, in other words, bypassed Shaanbei. The parts of Shaanxi laid waste by the rebellions and their suppression did attract successive waves of famine refugees in the late Qing period,22 but this movement had little lasting effect on Yanshu. After all, Shaanbei was hardly a safe haven from famine. A Foreign Relief Committee in Tianjin estimated that from g,ooo,ooo to 1},ooo,ooo people died during the northwestern famine of 1877-78, and there was a catastrophe of one kind or another (civil wars and drought famines) somewhere in Shaanxi almost every year after 1912?3 Dogged by recurring crop losses and famines, numerous settlers either starved to death or moved on. Restoring a peripheral area after so deadly a war as the one that had raged through Shaanbei required constructive interventions by government authorities. New settlers needed, at a minimum, easy access to loans of food, seed-grain, farm tools, and draft animals. They needed to be housed, clothed, and fed until they could fend for themselves, and they needed stocks of grain against Shaanbei's inevitable famine years. Destitute new immigrants could not on their own rehabilitate the land or rebuild village systems and communities. But there was no help from official sources. As we have noted, the Qing government invested only in the pacification of Shaanxi, not its reconstruction; and local administration in Yan'an prefecture, decrepit for centuries/4 was further debilitated by the nineteenth-century crises. In the absence of both an official resettlement strategy and a sustained program of infrastructural repair and development, local economic systems disintegrated. Whole villages were deserted, the distances between settlements became longer, transport routes fell into disrepair (a process made swifter by the rapid erosion of earthen constructions in loess country), and market centers and trading networks disappeared. Water wells, irrigation and drainage systems, cropland em-

24

Shaanbei in the 1930 5 TABLE 1

Yanshu and Suide Settlements, 1944 Hamlets (natural villages)

County

Average number of hamlets per 10 sq. kmb

Population

Households

Land area (sq. km)a

Total

Average number of households

64,165 15,922 52,383 32,694

18,726 3,715 10,990 5,897

3,556 2,287 2,984 3,781

785 275 1,143 481

23.9 13.5 9.6 12.2

2.2 1.2 3.8 1.2

112,808 95,510 147,250 38,605

22,290 18,494 30,396 8,475

2,043 1,212 1,878 428

1,059 1,040 662 215

21.0 17.8 45.9 39.4

5.2 8.5 3.5 5.0

YANSHU

Yan'an Ganquan Ansai Zhidan SUIDE

Zizhou Mizhi Suide Wubao

souRCES: CYHWX, pp. 378-79; Shaanxisheng dituce (for land area figures). NOTE: All averages are rounded up. a 1981 data. b Rough estimates; there were some adjustments in county boundaries between 1944 and 1981.

bankments, granaries, and pathways were not maintained. Hardly any visitor passed that way without commenting on the rack and ruin. Harrison Forman, traveling north from Yan'an in 1944, was struck by the "number of ghost towns, some of which must once have been of considerable importance. Ravaged by successive waves of invaders, these were now but crumbling ruins, with battered walls and heaps of rubble where once must have stood imposing buildings. A few families still lived in crude homes built from the rubble of the stone heaps." 25 If the Fu county seat, directly south of Yan'an, that the British diplomat Eric Teichman saw in 1919 was not quite a ghost town, it was close to becoming one. The city was "practically empty," he noted, "for it had been sacked four times by brigands during the previous year, and the inhabitants having given up residence there as hopeless, had emigrated to other parts or provinces." 26 J. C. Keyte found Yan'an city a depressing place in 1911. It was, "a city of pretentious Government Offices long fallen into decay.... Gazing down a vista of dim distant years one caught a glimpse of past splendour; but the living forces of which it had been the drapery and symbols had long since died out,

Shaanbei in the 1930S

25

leaving stagnation, corruption and decay to reign in its halls." It had none of "the stir and excitement, the promise of simple courage," he had found in Suide city.Z7 The travelers' impressions of desolateness are confirmed by the settlement data Communist investigators collected in 1944 (Table 1). They found that villages were much smaller and more distant from each other in Yanshu than in Suide. Zhidan county, for example, had only about one hamlet (natural village) per 10 sq. krn with about 12 households each. This contrasted with Suide county's average of more than three villages and 46 households. The communication problem in Yanshu was exacerbated by the treacherous nature of transport routes, which for the most part followed water courses through bandit-ridden canyons. When neither local government nor local elites invested in pathway maintenance, the isolation of tiny hamlet communities was compounded. It was ended only when the Communists made road building a priority of rural reconstruction work after 1936. THE ECONOMIES OF NORTH AND SOUTH SHAANBEI

Closely related to the contrasting demographies and settlement patterns of Yanshu and Suide were different patterns of landownership, economic activity, and social structures. Predictably Suide was much more developed commercially than Yanshu,linking as it did Xi' an and Yan'an with Yulin, the province's northern market, and positioned on the eastward route to Taiyuan and the westward route to Ningxia.28 Because of this strategic location, it was horne to many of the region's merchant families, and these families supported an education system that ranked among the best in the province. Three of the four secondary schools in all of Shaanbei were located in the northeast, in the Yulin, Mizhi, and Suide county seats (the fourth school was in Yan'an). Most of the early leaders of Shaanxi's Communist movement were educated in one of these three schools, and Shaanbei's first Communist Party branch was formed at the Suide high schooP9 The Suide region was also the heartland of some of the fiercest anti-Communist activity in the province after 1926; Yulin remained in GMD hands until 1949, and Suide and Mizhi did not come under uncontested Communist control until the Nationalists tacitly ceded the subregion in 1940. As was typical of politically ambitious families, the Yulin-Suide merchant elites invested in land. Landlordism almost everywhere in

26 Shaanbei in the 1930s China at this time was strongly linked to commerce, public office holding, and moneylending/0 but never more so than in places like Shaanbei's northeastern counties-commercially strategic areas in which crop growing was exceptionally hazardous. The existence of business opportunities in Suide's market centers enabled landowning elite families to ride out, even profit from, the 1930's rural depression. Though many of them owned big properties in the Yanshu wastelands as well as in Suide, they were much more likely to maintain rural residences and involve themselves in local affairs in villages closer to home. As a result, agriculture was especially well developed in and around the Suide and Mizhi county seats, supported and sustained by the landowners' investments in drainage and irrigation improvements. Shaanbei's landlords typically combined commercial activities, land speculation, and usury; 31 as often as not, the nonfarm businesses kept their farms afloat. Moneylending was the most profitable form of business in many of China's rural areas, and in Shaanbei, as elsewhere, moneylenders were a mainstay of the rural economy. Usurers might have ruined many an owner-cultivator, but most farming enterprises depended heavily on easy access to credit facilities. The availability of loans that forestalled the complete ruin of the poor, together with the investment by wealthy landowners in farmland improvement, helps to explain the scope and scale of intensive farming in the Suide countryside relative to places farther south. For an example of landlordism in the subregion, consider the famous Ma family of Yangjiagou, in Mizhi county.32 In the 183o's Ma Jiale, the lineage founder, established profitable commercial and moneylending businesses in the Suide and Mizhi county capitals. He invested his wealth in land near Yangjiagou, a village about 20 km southeast of Mizhi city; his sons moved their families there, fortressed the village against Muslim rebels in the 186o's, and quickly became gentrified. When the Communists surveyed Yangjiagou village in 1941-42, the Ma owned 90 percent of the village's land and a total of 42,000 mu in various parts of Mizhi and beyond.33 Ma Weixian, the wealthiest of the Ma in 1942, combined landlordism, from which he derived 6o percent of his income, with currency and grain speculation, usury, and land dealing (especially buying up and foreclosing on mortgages); he also held shares in several businesses in Suide city.34 The Ma landlords who prospered through the 1930's were by no means representative of the Suide subregion's landed elites; very few families could in any way match their wealth, educational achieve-

Shaanbei in the 1930's

27

ment, and political influence. It remains true to say, nevertheless, that a distinguishing feature of the Suide-Mizhi area was the strength of landlordism there. The tenancy rate was high by North China standards in general, and in comparison with Yanshu in particular.35 A GMD investigation in 1933 of four villages in Suide county revealed a sharp jump in tenancy since 1928, from 48.4 percent of farmers to 58.5 percent.36 (Both tenancy rates and landlessness increased generally throughout the region, trends that most commentators ascribed to the Great Northwest Famine of 1928-31.) The GMD survey also revealed that tenants in Suide were the poorest peasants (which was not necessarily the case elsewhere), that income differentials were higher there than in other parts of the province, and that the number of ownercultivators had declined by more than 15 percent over the five years before 1934. The amount of land owned locally had also declined, indicating a rise in absentee landlordism.37 The GMD team, using a four-class scale, identified 79 percent of the households in the four villages as "poor" in 1929, and 84 percent in 1933.38 A Communist survey team (led by Chai Shufan in 1941-42) described the poverty trap that was making the poor poorer. Underresourced families typically farmed the least fertile land and, not owning livestock, had to rely exclusively on nightsoil to manure their land. Both tenants and poor landowners often farmed several sma"Il plots and had to traipse distances of two or three kilometers between them.39 Like poor farmers all over China, they always had to look for supplementary employment, and their odd-jobbing during busy seasons was at the cost of their own crops. The 1942 survey team gave the example of a Suide county village in which 31 percent of all poor farmers hired themselves out at one time or another to other farmers each year, and another 31 percent hired out full-time.40 In Shaanbei's northeastern counties, a higher-than-average proportion of able-bodied males in rural areas did no farm work at all. The regional average was probably not much more than 10 percent, but in the Suide subregion, up to 20 percent of adult males were nonfarmers, either "itinerants" (youmin) or employed as merchants, coal miners, salt workers, or craftsmen.41 Peasant families whose heads worked at full-time outside jobs usually arranged to have a neighbor tend their crops.42 Long-established mutual-help traditions enabled family breadwinners to leave after New Year and travel south, where there was a labor shortage, returning home only in the winter. Many formed themselves into contract labor teams that traveled south to the Yan-

28

Shaanbei in the 1930 s

shu area every year to canvass for work. The Communist survey team estimated that farming in the Suide-Mizhi counties provided full-time employment for less than half of the available workforce in 1942.43 A 1944 Party report suggested that the migration of one-third of the subregion's laborers (that is, 40,000 men) to Yanshu would be of great benefit to both places.44 The picture that emerges from both GMD and CCP surveys of Suide villages evokes the image promoted by Communist propagandists of rural poverty and class exploitation. The surveyed villages featured fairly unambiguous class structures, significant redistributive inequities, and high levels of landlessness. For 1930's Suide, the Communist claim is plausible, but it cannot be sustained in the Yanshu case. The area in which the Yan'an Way was developed and tested was characterized by strikingly different economic and social relationships, and presented challenges to the Communist reformers quite different from the problems posed by landlord-strong and land-scarce Suide. Postbellum land grants to Qing loyalists during the 187o's had created huge estates in the sparsely populated areas of Shaanxi and Gansu. And the frequent swift loss of fortunes and very cheap land prices in this harsh and dangerous hill country resulted in further concentrations of land in the hands of a few wealthy families. The purchase by the prosperous and powerful of the properties of ruined landowners was a trend very evident during and after the Great Northwest Famine of 1928-31 in particular. There were, in the mid-1930's, Yanshu villages and whole townships where just one landowner held title to most local farmland. The Communist Party, not surprisingly, made a particular issue of the starkly inequitable distribution of land in the Yanshu area. A CCP report gave the examples of the landlord Feng Youfu, who owned fivesixths of the goo mu of cultivated land around Peizhuangcun, close to Yan'an city, and Li Hanhua, resident of Yandianzi, who owned more than g,ooo mu of the hill land (uncultivated) in the vicinity of the same village. Of the other 22 households in Peizhuangcun, 16 were tenants, and two were indigents (erliuzi); only four were owner-cultivators.45 Jan Myrdal, interviewing Liulin villagers in the early 196o's, was told that the area around Yan'an city had been "ruled" by just four landlords. One of them, Li Yuzi, owned several thousand mu, including "half the valley" in which the village was located.46 We also have an account of landlordism in Ansai county. Ninety percent of the peasants in Fujundian were tenants of Fen Qishun, who owned about 100 sq. km of land in the district. Similarly, the landlord Tang Huiguang

Shaanbei in the 19308

29

of Yanjiawan village owned 280 mu of riverbank land (chuandi), plus more than 3 sq. km of hill land, and the great majority of tenants rented land from him.47 In Party analyses, all of this was evidence that "class contradictions were abnormally severe in Shaan-Gan-Ning." 48 The serflike status of some tenants seemed to give further support to that argument. Newly arrived migrants who wanted to rent land in the wastelands almost always needed to negotiate share-cropping arrangements in which a landowner provided housing, seed, draft animals, and tools-resources more valuable than land in this area. The relatively large proportion of new settler-tenants explains the prevalence in Yanshu of "feudal" forms of tenancy; some landlords ruled at least part of their estates in the manner of feudal lords, tying tenants into a set of dependencies and "duties" that had long since disappeared from landlord-tenant relations in most parts of China.49 One of Myrdal's informants, Mao Geye, claimed that, in 1936, the landlord Ma Shuoyan was able to defend his property against seizure by Communist-led peasants with the help of 20 armed men. "These were his own tenants," Mao said, "and it was their duty to defend him." 5° An exclusive focus on Yanshu's "big landlords" and an "enslaved" tenantry, however, conceals an important feature of land and labor relations in Shaanbei's southern counties. To a significant extent, the abundance of land in this subregion gave tenants much more leverage than landless farmers in the Suide counties typically had. In parts of Yanshu and Guanzhong in the 193o's, the baoshanzu form of tenancy was still sometimes used. Under this arrangement an entire hill was rented out, and no attempt was made to measure the area.51 Seasonal migrants from overcrowded Suide teamed up to form itinerant labor gangs and could expect to be well paid in the labor-scarce districts. Farmers looking for land to rent could shop around for lower rents and could stake out areas of public wasteland for crop growing.* Moreover, the availability and cheapness of land precluded the development here of the kind of land speculation that existed in Suide. In an area where land earned income only if it was farmed, it was foolhardy for big estate-owners to alienate their tenants. As elsewhere in China, but more markedly so here, land rentals oppressed and fettered the Yanshu peasantry much less than did usurious loans and the multiple and multiplying taxes of the period. *Mao Geye, for example, paid an annual rent of one jin per mu on public land in as against 10 jin per mu on the privately owned land he farmed. Myrdal, Report from a Chinese Village, p. 66. 1930,

30

Shaanbei in the 1930s

Small landlords who lived in the villages, or so-called "rich peasant" families, did not own significantly more property than the villages' middle-peasant households in this land-abundant countryside. In other words, where landlords in Yanshu were not very "big," they were likely to be quite "small." A Party survey of two administrative villages in Zhangjia township, Gulin county, reveals two features typical of the social ecology of the wasteland districts (Table 2).52 The first is the tiny size of the communities scattered through the hill country; an average of only 10 families or so lived in these nine hamlets. The second is the relatively low level of class differentiation before land redistribution, certainly much lower than in the Suide region. The investigators identified just one landlord family among the households; though they did not single out tenants as such, the report implied that all or most of the landlord's tenants were recently arrived immigrants.53 Rich, middle, and poor peasants in Zhangjia village all owned irrigated land, if in unequal proportions, and the landlord had none. Curiously, rich peasants in Tongju village owned none of the more easily farmed flat land (pingdi), whereas the poor had patches of it. What made the poor "poor" here was not just a dearth of land. Affluence in this district was measured more by livestock ownership than by landholding, and a telling fact about the 49 poorest households ("poor peasants" plus "hired hands") in these two villages is that they owned only 40 sheep between them (as compared with 674 sheep for 24 middle peasants, 510 for five rich peasants, and 200 for one landlord). But it is interesting to note that, though these families owned relatively few sheep in an area where they were particularly valuable as a source of income, they were able to keep livestock to an extent that was impossible in the populous northeast. The 49 households in fact also owned 48 draft animals,54 practically one ox or donkey per family. In the Suide-Mizhi area, by contrast, at best the ownership rate among the poor was one draft animal for every two households, and it was normally far lower, ranging to as few as one animal for every eight households.55 The importance of livestock ownership points up the critical importance of farm-sideline work in general. Sidelines were intrinsic to the agricultural economy throughout China, but the exceptional precariousness of farming in Shaanbei made them crucial there. This applied to both Suide and Yanshu. It is likely that the so-called "rich" farmers in both places were prosperous only because they also ran nonfarm businesses. Poor farmers survived only when they had sup-

Shaanbei in the 1930 5 31 TABLE 2

Landownership in Two Administrative Villages in Zhangjia Township, Gulin County, 1934 (Land in mu) a Administrative village

Landlord

Rich peasant

Middle peasant

Poor peasant

Hired hand

Total

1 12 568 0 28 540 47.3

4 31 1,462 2 376.5 1,083.5 47.2

18 109 2,441 9 392 2,040 22.4

34 172 2,432.5 4.5 107.5 2,320.5 14.1

4 13 115 0 5 110 8.9

61 337 7,020.5 15.5 909 6,094 20.8

6 31 958.5 0 162.5 796 30.9

11 43 832 0 100.5 731.5 19.4

0

8 175 0 0 175 21.9

18 82 1,965.5 0 263 1,702.5 24

ZHANGJ!A

Households People Total Land Irrigated Flat Hilly Land per capita TONGJU

Households People Total Land Irrigated Flat Hilly Land per capita

0

souRCE: Northwest Bureau's Propaganda Dept., Gulin diaocha, pp. 17,25-30. NOTE: Data in the source are sometimes inconsistent. I have adjusted figures where the error was obvious or if data elsewhere in the source indicates an error. There were 9 hamlets (natural villages) in these two administrative units. Seven of the families in one of the villages, probably Tongju, were excluded from the survey for lack of complete data. a The land unit used in the source is dui (lit. "mound" or "hillock"). In this and all subsequent tables based on this survey, 1 mu; 2 dui.

plementary employment, and farmers with draft animals were always on the lookout for hauling jobs, preferably during the slack seasons. In the Yanshu wastelands, a place where dangerous distances separated hamlets from each other and from markets, road-hauling work had a special importance. In fact, after sheep raising, transport work was the main sideline occupation in this region, and it was the full-time profession of many families. Professional porters (changjiaohu) maintained and equipped fodder stops along the main market routes and undertook the long hauls to more distant trade depots in the northwest and south, where there were markets for the subregion's main products: sheep pelts, wool fleeces, donkey hides, felt blankets, animal oils, and opium. On return trips they carried commodities such as salt, medi-

32

Shaanbei in the 193o's

cines, edible oils, cotton cloth and wadding, farm tools, incense, paper, needles, and spindles-goods not generally produced in the Yanshu area. For the most part these changjiao families were commissioned to haul goods by urban merchants and government officials, and the more remote and inaccessible villages had to rely on the off-season transport work (duanjiao) of their menfolk to establish links with markets and a wider world. There was, of course, practically no pastoral land in the crowded districts of the northeastern subregion, and most hauling jobs were done with animals reared for farmwork. In western Suide, almost all peasants who owned or could borrow donkeys hauled and peddled salt in their spare time.* A broad belt of soft coal close to the same area provided fuel for processing the salt; and, again, most local peasants hauled and peddled coal to supplement their farm incomes.56 Peddling grain shipped up from the south was another way in which underemployed farmers bridged the gap between ruin and bare subsistence, and it was a practice so strongly established that Communist authorities found "illegal grain trafficking" across borders into GMD districts impossible to stop.57 Opium growing was also illegal, but GMD attempts at prohibition were next to futile, particularly because local officials were very often involved in the drug trade. In fact, it seems that even the cash-strapped Communist government in Yan'an could not resist tapping the trade for the handsome revenues it could earn.58 Opium was grown, smoked, and traded everywhere in Shaanxi; it had been, in Chen Yung-fa' s words, "a pillar of the local economy and finance" since the midnineteenth century.59 Chen Yan, the author of a 1936 survey of Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, reported that 70 percent of the men and 8o percent of the women in Shaanxi smoked opium. According to Chen, if you "go into a travellers' inn [anywhere in the Chang'an area], you'll see a forest of opium pipes; go into any village and you'll be hit with the smell of opium smoke." 60 There is not much evidence of any significant difference between Yanshu and Suide in this respect. Suide's wealthier farmers, possessing the resources to irrigate their land, could grow opium more easily than poor farmers in Yanshu could.61 But twothirds of all households in Yanchang county still managed to grow *Western Suide was one of Shaan-Gan-Ning's two salt-producing areas. The other, in the Sanbian subregion's Yanchi and Dingbian counties, was one of the most important in North China and became pivotal to the Border Region's economy.

Sluzanbei in the 1930S

33

opium in the 1930s.62 Perhaps the more risky the farming, the greater the incentive to grow opium for the certain profits a harvested crop could earn. Interestingly enough, only two of the 25large and mediumsized stores in Suide city traded in opium.63 This probably had less to do with the official prohibition against it than with the central role of the duanjiaohu and changjiaohu in the trade and the ties that linked the roadside-inn and transport businesses to secret society smuggling and crime networks. Given the pervasiveness of banditry in the Yanshu badlands, we can presume that the opium trade was at least as vigorous there as in Suide. Suide's most important and widespread sideline industry was cotton spinning and weaving. Cotton growing had once been well established in places east of the Wuding River, but under the warlords most farms were turned from cotton to opium poppies (a spinoff of which was the development of irrigation on those farms). 64 The radical reduction of cotton growing, combined with competition from foreign textiles and the collapse of trade during the civil war, all but destroyed the folk textile industry. Similarly, silk production, which had been common in parts of the Yulin-Suide region, had almost disappeared by the 1930's. Still, because a strong spinning and weaving tradition lived on in Suide peasant households, the Communists found it relatively easy to push forward a "mass movement" of spinning cooperatives here. Indeed the Party's 1942 survey team in Suide concluded that, because of the farmland scarcity, farm sidelines in general had moved farther ahead in the Suide-Mizhi counties than in most other parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning. In this respect, the subregion provided a foundation for both rural and urban industrial development that Yanshu was unable to match. As this brief overview of pre-Communist Shaanbei suggests, Yanshu and Suide presented quite different reform and development challenges to the Party reformers. In blunt and basic terms, Yanshu needed more people, and Suide's large population needed thinning. Theresettlement of Suide farm families in the Yanshu wasteland districts was a solution readily grasped by the Communist reformers. It was far from a simple solution, to be sure, and not least because the reformers were at the same time attempting to reknit the economic and sociopolitical fabric of Shaanbei society. The Party-state aimed ultimately to "unify," to homogenize, the Chinese peasantry, but the established differences between Yanshu and Suide in the 1930's strongly

34

Shaanbei in the 1930s

resisted any such homogenization. To understand the complexities of the Party-state's reconstruction project and how it produced different results in different places, we need to understand the significantly different political economies and cultures it was working with in the two Shaanbei subregions of Shaan-Gan-Ning.

CHAPTER

2

Conflict and Cooperation: The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide in the 1930's

in northern Shaanxi during the Yan'an period was, to an important extent, a community-building project, aspects of which were potentially in conflict with the Party's statebuilding project. In this chapter we examine the political economies that predated the Communists' activities in Shaanbei and significantly shaped the state-village relations that developed under their early rule. Intrinsic to Party state making was the process by which the Communists eliminated or subordinated rival claimants to local as well as national power and resources.1 And critical to community building, in the context of that broader enterprise, was the emergence of entrepreneurial local leaders who had the wit and connections to seize development opportunities offered by a restorationist and reform-minded state, opportunities that would benefit their village communities. The Party center regularly deplored parochialism among its cadres-evidence of the enduring strength of local loyalties. And the Party tolerated, or even cultivated, local loyalties when it served the center's purposes. Clearly, then, the changing role of local leadership is central to an understanding of China's rural revolution, a point made in almost all studies of the Communist movement.2 In the case of prerevolutionary Shaanbei, at issue is, first, the potential for effective elite resistance to the hegemonizing Party-state, and the difference between Yanshu and Suide in this respect. A related question concerns the patterns of power and authority that structured village life; we are seeking to establish the norms of political legitiRURAL RECONSTRUCTION

36 The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide macy and modes of brokerage as they pertained to relationships between local elites and state agents and between elites and commoners. Finally, there are the horizontal relationships between villagers and, specifically, the patterns of conflict and cooperation that fractured or enervated village society. To what extent did villages, or clusters of villages, constitute communities in 193o's Shaanbei? The differences here between Yanshu and Suide are quite marked and had important implications for the CCP's style of revolution making in both places. BRIGANDAGE AND BROTHERHOODS

Research into local histories has made us more and more aware of the great range of variation across China in the trends that marked the late imperial era: militarization, rural emiseration, the rise of "local bullies," the dissipation of "moral economies," the breakdown of community, and so on. Such trends had as their starting points, however, a "traditional China" consisting of moral communities protected by Confucian gentrymen- an ideal type that has its uses as a heuristic device, but much more for analyses of core regions and their hinterlands than for peripheral areas like Shaanbei (within which Suide is a "core" only in relation to its Yanshu periphery). Nationwide trends or no, we must expect to find "traditions" in this region deviating significantly from anything that can be called mainstream in early modern China. Shaanbei's tradition of banditry is a case in point. The northwest Muslim rebellion of 1861-73 ensured that an expansive local militia movement fueled by foreign aggression and internal rebellion would reach into Shaanbei. But it was really only in the landlord strongholds of the Suide-Mizhi area that villages were fortressed and defended by village militia (mintuan or tuanlian) after the pattern of eastern and central China. Elsewhere in Shaanbei the rush to arms in the nineteenth century merely blended with and intensified the centuries-long tradition of armed lawlessness for which the region was notorious. A forested belt in the Huanglong mountains, south of Yan'an, and an area along the Shaanxi-Gansu border to the west had long been bandit breeding-grounds.3 The Han-Muslim wars, by laying to waste entire counties in Yanshu, effected an extension of the territory infested by banditry and augmented bandit populations. Shaanbei's bandit populations were further expanded by each subsequent resurgence of civil conflict, followed by a demobilization of

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

37

provincial-army emergency forces that usually left stocks of weaponry in private hands.4 By the 191o's some bandit gangs were miniature armies. Esherick's research uncovers interesting information about the Huanglong mountain bandit belt. In addition to the other environmental hazards typical of Shaanbei, the mountain waters of this area are polluted by chemicals that cause "environmental illness" (difangbing)in this case birth defects and chronic illness, especially among women and children.5 Long devoid of regular settlements, the mountains increasingly, from the 192o's onward, became a haven for defeated or deserting soldiers. Esherick's informants are local people who had directly experienced the maraudings and kidnapping forays of the Huanglong "soldier-bandits." They told him that "the largest bands numbered over one thousand men, and many were later recruited into the Communist revolution." 6 In the populated areas of Shaanbei, the "civilian" administration of rural districts was, as often as not, a form of military rule. Again I cite Esherick's research. From his interviews in Gulin county (a new county created by the Shaan-Gan-Ning government out of sections of Yichuan and Ganquan counties) he learned that, before Communist rule, rural administration had been "left in the hands of district (qu) headmen known as gongzheng. The gongzheng commanded militia detachments and collected taxes-from which they skimmed a comfortable profit." 7 Mintuan in other parts of China were gentry-led and served gentry interests, but that often meant protecting village community interests as well. It would seem that, in the Shaanbei wastelands, the closest equivalent to mintuan were militia units attached to district or county governments. Property interests and power were better defended at district and county levels than in a sparsely populated hill country where big landowners did not live in the villages. Brigandage everywhere in China was usually rooted in secret society subcultures. In many places these groups had become respectable during the nineteenth century as they made their way into the lower-gentry class. In Shaanbei more than elsewhere, however, the line between heterodoxy and orthodoxy was very blurred, and this is illustrated by the history of the Gelaohui (Elder Brother Society), the most prominent and powerful secret society in Shaanxi province. The Gelaohui had probably gained a foothold in the northwest during the Muslim rebellion, when Zuo Zongtang led his army through the area; one account has it that Zuo's entire army was made up of Gelaohui members.8 At the time of the 1911 revolution, Gelaohui men filled the

38

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

ranks of the New Army and were key players in the revolutionary assault on the old regime in Xi'an. The society proved indispensable to the local branch of the Tongmenghui (Sun Yatsen's Republican organization) both because of the military muscle it provided and because it could win for the new regime the cooperation of "irregular militia" -brigands and bandit gangs such as the Swordsmen (Daoke) and the Hard Bellies (Yingdu).9 Early on, then, the Gelaohui had one foot in a militarized underworld and the other firmly in the new Republican establishment. By the time Communist partisans began trying to mobilize poor peasants against "local tyrants" in Shaanbei, the Gelaohui was more an organization of propertied and powerful people than an anti-establishment, heterodox secret society. It had permeated all levels of local government. Most elite families were connected to it, as were rich peasant village heads and ambitious villagers. Counterrevolution in the Shaanbei Soviet after Nationalist forces drove out the Communists in 1937 was solidly backed by local brotherhood branches.10 Liu Zhidan, a member of the Bao'an "gentry" and builder of the Shaan-Gan base area, joined the Gelaohui in order to build connections with the military establishment.11 He even served for a time as head of the Bao'an mintuan until his assaults on the local establishment ended in the dismissal of the magistrate and his own flight to the hillsY Liu's Gelaohui connections also gave him entree to the region's bandit subculture, and as Mao Zedong had done in the Jinggang mountains, he recruited heavily from among outlaw gangs and lumpen elementsP The easy mingling of regular army troops and outlaw militia, a feature typical of bandit badlands everywhere in China, was markedly characteristic of midwestern Shaanbei. The government soldiers that the British diplomat Teichman dealt with regularly during his 1917 expedition through the region were referred to locally as "gui hui bei shan" (returned from the northern hills)-a euphemism for ex-brigands. And the brigands, in turn, were likely to be ex-soldiers. Teichman deplored the fact that ex-soldiers and Gelaohui men constituted "in a way the reserves of a provincial army," an army that was maintained, therefore, "without cost to the provincial government." The Shaanxi soldier, he said, "serves either as a soldier or [as] a brigand according to his own tastes and the military requirements of the local government. In either character he is about equally obnoxious to the people." 14 So even at that stage seemingly, but certainly by the 1930's, the dis-

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

39

tinction that Elizabeth Perry makes between "protective" and "predatory" strategies of collective violence does not hold for Shaanbei.1 5 The rural elites' armed retainers and local government troops (often indistinguishable) were just as capable of launching predatory raids on other people's property as the bandit gangs formed by the renegade dispossessed and destitute were; and there was a good deal of membership movement between the two. In other words the militarization of society that was general throughout rural Shaanbei in the 192o's was part of a process of peripheralization specific to the northwest, and was not rooted in a tradition of "protective" village-based militia which fought solely to defend hearth and home. Only relatively well-governed parts of the Suide-Mizhi area deviated markedly from this pattern. In 1867 the Ma landlords had built around their lineage hamlet (Fufengzhai) in Yangjiagou a walled stockade against Muslim invaders, and this stockade was noticed by visitors as an unusual sight in Shaanbei.16 The Ma had long dominated both the formal and the informal leadership of the administrative village. They also filled official positions at township, district, county, and even provincial levels, and they tended to keep the areas they controlled secure against banditsP The proven capacity of this powerful family to maintain law and order would have been one of the reasons why the Communist Party tolerated Ma Weixin in the position of head of Mizhi county's Hecha district in 1942.18 At the outset, the Communist guerrillas operated as just another gang of Shaanxi brigands, shrewdly allying with and absorbing other outlaw gangs. But as they moved on to set up territorial bases and reforming governments (soviets), the Party's state-building project required the elimination of rivals, and once established in Yan'an, the new government labeled all uncooperative and disruptive activities, especially organized resistance to its authority, treachery. Having signed a united-front agreement with the GMD in 1937, it could not do much more than fulminate against the willingness of Nationalist army divisions stationed along Shaan-Gan-Ning's borders to absorb both bandit gangs and mintuan forces. Telegrams from Yan'an in 1937 to the commander of the Nationalists' 86th division offered military assistance in rounding up bandits and threatened retaliatory action if the Nationalists failed to subdue the lawless elements within their own ranks that continued to make forays across the borders, harassing and plundering Shaan-Gan-Ning villages.19 For dealing with bandits based within Shaan-Gan-Ning, the Yan'an

40 The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide leadership defined two strategies. A "political" struggle could be waged against those with local constituencies; the Party would try to "win them over," and it would "split up, reform, reorganize, and (thereby) dissolve" their gangs. The Communists' preference, however, was for a swift and thorough military strike against any organized and armed groups that threatened law and order and defied their authority.20 A military solution to banditry was, of course, entirely in keeping with the culture of violence that permeated Republican Shaanbei politics at all levels. Xiao Jingguang, commander of the Yellow River Defense, reported to the Border Region Assembly in November 1939 that bandit suppression work had reduced theregion's bandit population from more than 4,ooo men to about 2,500, and that 26 of the original 40 or so gangs had been wiped out. Xiao was reminding the assembly that bandit suppression remained an important reconstruction task.21 In all parts of China, the seizure and securing of territory by Communist armies usually consisted of two phases: the defeat of government, warlord, or Japanese forces, and then the disarming of mintuan, secret society, and other local militia. In Yanshu the second phase often involved warfare on a scale not much smaller than the first. Although eradication was far from complete in 1940, the fact that the region was even halfway governable by then is testimony to a strong, assertive Communist military presence. The situation in Suide was more complex. For one thing, Party building at the grass-roots level there was the initiative of student/intellectual organizers (just as it was in many parts of southeastern and central China) and lacked the military muscle that characterized the process in Yanshu.22 For another, although the united-front agreement of 1937 made the CCP the legal government of 23 counties, it denied Yan'an effective control of the five Suide counties; they were not incorporated as Shaan-Gan-Ning's fifth subregion until 1940. The CCP played a complex double game in Suide in the 1936-40 period. Having shed its outlaw status, it tried to court the area's elite establishment by claiming a political legitimacy based on moral, rather than military, criteria, and it worked relentlessly at exposing the immorality and, hence, illegitimacy of the GMD-backed Suide administration. The moralistic rhetoric served some purposes, but it did not ever conceal what was, first and last, a military conflict. The political power of Shaanbei's elite establishment, no less than its bandit underworld, rested on military force. The Communists maintained military-backed

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

41

district and township administrations in some Suide localities, which resolutely wrestled for local dominance with mintuan- and Gelaohuimobilized property-defense corps through the 1936-40 period. The struggle for control of the prefecture culminated in late 1939, when Wang Zhen's 359th brigade was called back from northern Shanxi to "chase away" the GMD administration. In February 1940 the CCP forces installed a Communist government in Suide city.23 PATRONS AND CLIENTS, CLASS AND CONFLICT

Political relationships in 1930's Shaanbei were based on a coerciveness that, as often as not, took the form of physical violence, especially in the Yanshu bandit country. When the coercion was not naked, it was implicit, and this applied to modes of leadership, brokerage, and "law enforcement" in Suide as well as Yanshu. Suide's privileged elite typically controlled both the military and the economic weapons of coercion. In the semi-anarchy of Yanshu's bandit badlands, brigandage provided the underclasses with an escape from victimization and a means of turning the tables against establishment elites. To some extent, however, the militarization of politics in Shaanbei concealed complex social and political patternings that had evolved over millennia and had roots in essentially nonmilitary cultures. After the Communists in Shaan-Gan-Ning had very carefully channeled and tamed violence, they still had to reckon with, and accommodate or change, established systems of political brokerage, status hierarchies, patterns of exchange and reciprocity, and hardened lines of social conflict. The substantial depopulation of Yanshu had radically weakened the structures of an "old society" there. In Suide, predictably, those structures were sturdier. Scholars now broadly agree that patron-client ties, rather than socioeconomic class relationships, structured politics at every level of Chinese society, and not only in the premodern period but in contemporary China as well.24 Class might define some lines of cooperation and conflict, but almost everywhere these lines are blurred by kinship, brotherhood, and local allegiances. In Republican Shaanbei class status was so entangled in criss-crossing rivalries and feuds that it has only limited uses as an analytic category. Yet the same can be said of the patron-client model. Significant downward mobility among Shaanbei elites in the 192o's and 1930's put severe strains on patronage

42 The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide constancy and reliability. And in a countryside in which competition within and between social strata brought a criss-crossing of dependencies, tenants may have had more clout than the dyadic patron-client model accommodates. Wherever the clout lay, it was wielded defensively and deviously. Appeals to "duty" or "good relations" (ganqing) could be made to kinsmen, but any patronage was offered grudgingly and received mistrustfully. In a place where agriculture was chronically insecure and treacherous, and in the absence of any formal insurance protection, rivalries and betrayals up and down the power hierarchy were endemic. Shaanxi province had long been low on the ladder of scholarly success/5 making gentry involvement in village governments less likely there than in provinces with proportionally larger numbers of degreeholders. There was still, in the 1930's, a gentry component within Suide's upper elite circles, but village populations in Suide, as well as Yanshu, were usually composed exclusively of commoners who had only irregular and constrained dealings with the surviving gentry families. Even the extraordinary Ma family, with its impressive array of imperial and foreign degree-holders and strong rural presence, did not significantly depart from this pattern.26 Of the 55 Ma households that lived on the lineage's Yangjiagou rural estate in 1942, all but three lived within the stockaded hamlet of Fufengzhai, well apart from the 216 households, most of them tenants of the Ma, in the other five hamlets. The relations between them were probably only marginally more intimate than in cases where landlord elites lived long distances from their tenanted properties.Z7 Village leadership in both Suide and Yanshu was usually the preserve of the most prosperous village residents who, because of good connections (usually family or brotherhood alliances) with officials at township, district, and county levels, had some political muscle. Their dealings with their village constituencies were transacted through complex networks of kinship, property, debts, duties, favors, and parochial bonds. The position of a village head (cunzhang) was, therefore, potentially very ambiguous; any protection he offered the community was contingent on where his loyalties lay. The loyalties of men who held formal or semiformal positions in county and subcounty offices were less ambiguous. County magistrates, in particular, were certainly not defenders of village interests, but neither were they, in Republican Shaanbei, loyal servants of the state. Teichman notes that many of the magistrates he met in south-

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

43

ern and western Shaanbei in 1917 "took little interest in their work, regarding their posts either as a necessary evil to be endured for a short time as a stepping-stone to something better, or as a means of getting rich quick." 28 There is no reason to expect that magistrates in the Suide area, even if more in the style of gentry officials of the old school, were much different. Shaanbei's warlord government commanded little loyalty at the local level}9 and magistrates, unable to depend on the loyalty or integrity of their underlings, fortressed their magistracies against predations from above and below. Township and district offices were riddled with men in the mold of the "local bullies and evil gentry" of Communist Party polemic. Well positioned to coordinate landlordism, land dealing, usury, commerce, grain speculation, police, and militia work/ 0 these local officials pulled all the important strings of a poor peasant's universe. Quite logically, in the circumstances, "local bullies" became the first targets of the Communists' class war. And because land reform (which took the form of tenancy reform during the 1937-46 united front) was central to that war, the principal class enemies were most conveniently identified as "landlords." As with the other class labels affixed to all rural dwellers, the term "landlord" required definition according to context. The Party's rural investigators in Shaan-Gan-Ning did spell out the meanings of the class categories they used, and their reports reflect some sensitivity to the complexities and ambiguities of social relationships in the villages. These reports, as a result, not only provide useful insights into the political economies of the region but more important, reveal the significant changes that were occurring in Shaanbei rural society in the 1930's.

Landlordism James Scott's moral economy model imputes the disintegration of village community to the corruption of a once morally based patronclient relationship between landlord and tenant, as evidenced by the replacement of sharecropping arrangements with fixed-rent tenancies and the rise of absentee landlordism. Probably nowhere in Ming-Qing China did there exist the premarket, morally cohesive village defined by Scott's model, and yet it is true that premodern landlords in most parts of China accepted some "moral obligations" toward their tenants. Furthermore, the changes in landlord-tenant relations in late Qing and Republican China-the increased commercialization of the relation-

44

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

ship and a deterioration in the condition of tenants-do broadly correspond with Scott's predictions. Again, however, Shaanbei, and particularly Yanshu, differed in important ways from China's core regions. To begin with, tenancy rates in Suide were, by North China standards, exceptionally high; almost 6o percent of farmers were tenants or part-tenants. And Yanshu was remarkable for the stark contrast it offered between the very heavy concentrations of land, mostly in the vicinity of county towns, in the hands of a small number of "big landlords" and exceptionally low tenancy rates in other places. In overcrowded Suide intense competition for rental land meant considerably higher rent prices and ungenerous contract terms. Fixed rents in the Suide-Mizhi area ranged from 35 percent to 50 percent of the crop in an average year, and more of course in the fairly regular bad years?1 This contrasts sharply with Yanshu, where rents amounted to as little as 5-6 percent in Zhidan (Bao'an) county, about 10 percent in Yan'an and Ansai, and 15-20 percent in Zichang (Anding), Yanchuan, and Yanchang counties.32 It was unusual in either subregion for tenancy contracts to grant permanent tenure (it randomly appears as a custom peculiar to a particular locality), but Yanshu tenants usually had more bargaining power in contract negotiations than their Suide neighbors. By the 1930's in Suide, competitive bidding for tenancies by rival poor peasants, the quagmire of unregulated land mortgages, and the looming Communist menace made many landlords unwilling to guarantee tenure for longer than one or two growing seasons. The local standard of fairness was merely that tenancy terms be fixed before the spring plowing and hold until after the autumn harvest.33 Terms were usually renegotiated at rent collection time, when the landlord or his agent would go to the tenant's home to "discuss rentals" (lunzu).* Disputes over user rights were endemic, especially when mortgaged land, rented out by the mortgage-holder, was redeemed by the original owner, and the tenant evicted. A plot of precious farmland might fall to waste as rival claimants tussled with each other before a mediator *In the Sui-Mi counties a written contract would probably specify the location and amount of land; the rent; the method of payment (usually half each of millet and beans, or equal proportions of sorghum, millet, and beans); the year and month of payment; and the name of the middleman. A final clause usually demanded honesty from the tenant. Chai Shufan et a!., Suide, Mizhi tudi wenti, p. 45· When the threat of Party interventions loomed, to this admonition was added the caveat that government regulations had no bearing on the contract.

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

4S

or magistrate.34 The brevity of most arrangements meant that tenants had little or no commitment to farmland improvement, and thus was the poverty trap tightened further in Suide. Though Party surveys indicate that fixed rents (dingzu) constituted by far the greater proportion of the arrangements in all parts of the Border Region/5 there is evidence that this was a relatively new form of land tenure in the Suide area; Ma Weixin's ledgers show that he began to negotiate fixed rentals with most of his sharecroppers after 191s.36 Tenants, however, did not necessarily prefer sharecropping or lament its passing. Landlords who collected fixed rents from afar might have rarely or never provided their tenants with patronage services, but they also interfered less in their tenants' business and were less likely to demand shares of sideline produce. It is significant that the Party's tenancy reforms did not envision a return to sharecropping but aimed, rather, to take the "iron" out of the fixed system by setting local rates after the year's grain harvest had been assessed and providing for discounts in below-average years. Fixed-rent tenancies in the Shaanbei counties were typically used by "big" and "middle" landlords on fairly large areas of farmland (6o mu or so) that were not easily supervised. Sharecroppers, as often as not, rented small parcels of relatively better quality land from nearby "middle" and "small" landlords, who could watch the harvesting. Investigators reported that fixed-rent tenancies were more likely than other rental forms to be formalized by contracts, tended to be longer term and more stable, and were usually standard within a given locale. Most of the surviving sharecropping tenancies in Shaanbei were loose arrangements between relatives, clansmen, friends, or sworn brothers; a few rested on the backing of a guarantor. The Communists clearly judged the depersonalized dingzu arrangement to be more amenable to regulation and state supervision than the less formal sharecropping practices. For this reason, and also because that was by far the most prevalent arrangement, it became the almost exclusive focus of the reformers. The Communist investigators took care to distinguish between the standard form of sharecropping known as huozu (lit., "flexible rents") and a form of "joint-farming" called huozhong. In huozu the landlord simply rented out the land and collected a proportion of the harvest.37 In huozhong farmers short of land cooperated with families short of workers for a so-so division of the harvest. Since this joint enterprise rarely involved more than 1S mu of land, and usually less, it was not an

46

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

arrangement that rich farmers had typically used.38 Consequently, the Party did not target joint-farming tenancies for overhaul, a loophole that did not escape numerous Suide landlords, who, bent on continuing to collect 50 percent and more of their tenants' crops, simply told Party inspectors that they and their tenants were "joint farmers." The ruse worked for a while.39 Such arrangements were comparatively rare in Yanshu; the great majority of landlords lived in county towns or more distant places and found fixed rents more convenient. On the other hand, the form of sharecropping known as "homestead farming" (anzhuangjia) was quite common there relative to other places. In the anzhuangjia arrangement, the landlord supplied his tenant (huozi) with housing and grain loans, as well as all production equipment, in return for a share of the crop. The rental land was usually of substantial size (from 6o to 120 mu), and 50-60 percent of the harvest was collected as rent. Though some landlords also collected interest on grain loans (in a few cases, as much as go percent), most seem to have settled for repayment of the amount borrowed. Whatever the loan arrangement, however, Yanshu's "homestead farmers" were expected to perform certain services for their landlords free of charge.* Predictably, the Communists roundly condemned this "exploitative" labor service (laoyi) as "feudal," but they were otherwise willing to tolerate, even encourage, a system that allowed newly arrived and destitute immigrants one or two years' start. Even exceptionally high rents were not challenged by the reformers when anzhuangjia landlords provided landless farmers with shelter and the wherewithal to cultivate the government grants of wasteland that allowed them to become freeholders within a few years. Thus anzhuangjia tenancies came to have formal government backing in the sparsely populated parts of Yanshu. Of 1,009 migrant families in Yan'an county in 1942, 466 were employed by anzhuangjia landlords.40 In Party analyses of the united-front period, therefore, the letting of land was not inherently evil, and an appropriately reformed and regulated tenancy system could result in a rational redistribution of farming expertise and resources that, at least in the short term, would *The unremunerated jobs that an anzhuangjia tenant was expected to perform for the landlord household were hauling water, cleaning the house and courtyard, digging for charcoal, lighting fires, planting melons and vegetables, receiving and seeing off guests, collecting grain rent, and delivering grain tax. All this, according to Jia Tuofu, p. 246, was the price of food and housing loans.

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

47

better serve rural reconstruction than the revolutional policy of equitable distribution had. One of the most pernicious by-products of land tenancy almost everywhere in China was that it doomed almost all tenants to chronic, probably lifelong indebtedness, and this is why the Communists' campaigns for tenancy reform in all of the base areas were inextricably linked to an overhaul of rural credit relationships. Rural Credit

On the basis of survey data from other parts of China, we can predict that 50 percent or more of Shaanbei farm families at any one time carried grain or cash debts, or both.41 There is no evidence of any significant difference between Yanshu and Suide in this respect. In both places frequent crop failures and special need forced farmers to borrow grain and cash. Indeed a Suide tenant with a lenient landlord might well have been a good deal better off in a bad harvest year than a poor owner-cultivator in Yanshu. Tenancy account books seized by the Communists during the rent reform campaigns revealed a significant underpayment of rents and, in the case of long-term tenants, over long periods.42 Evelyn Rawski suggests that in the case of the Ma landlords, the lower rents paid in bad years constituted free loans to tenants and were trade-offs in exchange for their prompt rent payments each year.43 But these "tolerant" landlords could and did use accrued rental debts as levers to pry higher rents out of their tenants in good harvest years. As Ma Weixin's 1884-1941 rental records show, from the 192o's until Communists became active in the area, there were at least two, and usually three, years of excess payment for every year that rents were underpaid (Appendix A). When a landlord had no good reason to foreclose on rental debts, it was sensible to leave the tenant on his land and to bleed him of all but the last straw. So bumper harvests for these tenants merely represented seasons in which their rental debts were reduced a little, a dilemma reflected in the lament: We borrow to eat, and repay the loan with what is reaped; the year is passed following the circle of the stone roller.44 Forcing tenants to pay "rent deposits" (xianzu or dingshou), a practice very common in the Suide area, made a bad situation worse.45 Since these down-payments were typically demanded in spring or early summer when tenants invariably did not have spare grain (or even

48

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Sui de

enough to feed their families), they had to borrow the money, usually from the landowner, and at high interest rates. From the landlords' point of view, deposits were a device for upping the stakes and getting the best bargain in the crowded tenant market. We have the example of Li Yaxiong, a rich peasant of Suide and a Party member. He rented out 18 mu of land to Hao Youliang in 1939 and then switched the next year to Feng Haichun because Feng offered a higher rent deposit. But a year later Li was just as quick to let Hao "wrest back the land" from Feng for a higher bid of three dou of wheat. Deposits were, of course, also a form of insurance; tenants who failed to pay full rents after the harvest lost their deposits. The deposit device was increasingly used as very short-term tenancies became the rule. In the spacious, underpopulated parts of the Border Region, where there was little or no competition for land, landlords gained nothing by foreclosing on destitute families. Usury, however, was no less profitable in Yanshu than it was in Suide, and many owner-cultivators lived under the constant threat of ruin at the hands of their creditors. A practice that was widespread in both subregions (and was still prevalent even in 1944) was the spring and early-summer sale of unripened crops, locally called tanmai or maiqing. Though hardly unique to Shaanbei, this form of usury seems to have been a particularly serious problem there. Special need (marriage, a funeral, or illness) but also just basic living expenses could drive a farmer to sell part or even all of his grain several months before it was harvested and at less than half the current market price. The severe currency depreciation and escalating grain prices in Shaan-Gan-Ning in the early 194o's made this practice particularly iniquitous. In the past a farmer who sold his crops cheaply in spring could at least anticipate lower grain prices in the autumn, when he would probably need to buy food for winter (and to borrow cash to do so). In 1943, however, the grain price in autumn, when the crop was handed over to the creditor, was 20 times what it had been at tanmai time just four or five months earlier.46 Reporters quoted peasants as saying, "If in one season you sell your grain before it's ripened, you can't make ends meet for the next three years." 47 Little wonder, then, that Party authorities were disconcerted to find their own grain shops and cooperatives buying tanmai grain from farmers. An investigation of an Ansai village in 1943 disclosed that 28 of the 29 residents had sold at least some of their crop early, and that those sales accounted for 19 percent of the village's total harvest and 300 of the 700 jin of grain bought by the grain shop.48

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

49

Before (and often after) Party intervention, village grain stores were controlled by the community's rich peasants, who were also typically the buyers of tanmai grain.49 Should these people refuse to tide a farmer over in an emergency, he might well have to fall back on a moneylender in a market town-and as a last resort, accede to a particularly usurious practice called wa beng zi zhang. In this system, which seems to have been common in the market towns around Yan'an, interest accrued at the rate of 10 percent over a fixed period of time called a ji (almost always five days).50 In those parts of Zhidan and Ansai counties where market centers were few and widely scattered, the tanmai method of borrowing from an on-the-spot middleman was generally the peasant's only chance of meeting an urgent need. 51 Loans, of course, required collateral. If a borrower could not put up land or other acceptable property (a building, a farm animal, fruit trees, even a cave dwelling),S2 then all he could offer was his labor, and men who became indentured laborers were often loan defaulters or borrowers paying off interest. In the Suide subregion, where lenders expected land as security-witness the local Mizhi saying, "Show me the land, and you'll get your money" 53 -unrepaid loans quickly turned into land mortgages. In contrast to tanmai, however, soaring inflation in blockaded Shaan-Gan-Ning potentially advantaged the mortgagor, and 1941-42 saw a rash of land redemptions in the Suide-Mizhi area. By then, for example, some impoverished landlords had been able to recover their estates.54 Both fabi (the national currency) and bianbi (the Border Region currency) were used for cash transactions in this area, both were inflated (the bianbi much more so) relative to 192o's values, and speculators were able both to juggle the currencies and to manipulate the mortgage market; some of them made considerable profits, but others played the market just to keep their heads above water. 55 The speculators were not the only beneficiaries. Poor and middle peasants were also managing to redeem old mortgages with devalued currency.56 What is more, unlike the prosperous and powerful, for whom the increasingly fickle market was now losing its appeal, these groups were quick to buy mortgages when they could (farming mortgaged land had advantages over renting land to farm). 57 Predictably, usurers responded to the spiraling inflation by switching from cash to grain for all mortgage and loan transactions. Shaanbei farmers told their sons that "a land mortgage can be kept going for a thousand years; sell land, and it's gone with a stroke of the pen." 58 The very high incidence of land redemptions by old owners in the Suide-Mizhi area during 1941-42 is evidence of some success-

50

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

ful avoidance in the past of that last resort of the struggling farmerthe sale of land. 59 Even so, investigators claimed that the pawning, then mortgaging, of land too frequently led to the eventual loss of land through foreclosures (maidi), and that farmer indebtedness was responsible for much of the land movement and fragmentation in this subregion.60 In 1941 Ma Weixin owned some 3,525 mu of land spread across 23 Mizhi villages and held mortgages on land in 31 villages.61 He had steadily added to his holdings by foreclosing on defaulters, buying up 26 percent of the mortgaged land (diandi) he held in 1911, close to 50 percent between 1922 and 1931, and a stunning 59 percent in just one year-1939. Of the 2,208 mu he had bought after 1884, 1,650 had been acquired through foreclosure. Most of those defaults can be traced to high-interest loans (for which the diandi had originally been pawned); the report on this one landlord's land dealings concludes that "high-interest rates were the principal means by which the Ma Weixin family built up its landholdings." 62 Rural usurers, however, do not fit neatly into the "landlord" category and were not necessarily, therefore, "class enemies" of the peasantry. Most landlords were indeed usurers, but so was any peasant who could get hold of grain or cash with which to deal. Furthermore, almost all villagers were strapped for money or winter food supplies at some time or another, and Communist reformers quickly discovered the hazards of chasing usurers across the borders before providing alternative sources of cash and grain loans. In fact finance officers in the Shaan-Gan-Ning government noted with approval a resurgence in the early 1940's of "rural credit relations" as a result of the economic recovery and development that followed the civil war. 63 An active folk credit market was an indicator of economic health and vigor. The challenge for the Communist reformers was to rationalize and expand credit facilities in a way that would free peasant farmers from their crippling indebtedness. COOPERATION IN PRE-COMMUNIST SHAANBEI

Traditionally, the more or less "cooperative" lending exchanges within kinship and neighborhood groups had occupied a vital corner of the credit market. As with many other forms of cooperation, however, these customs had been suffocated by the rivalries, mistrust, and violence that characterized rural life in Republican Shaanbei. The Shaanbei villager belonged to a brutalized world inhabited by a host of ene-

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

51

mies and importuning kinfolk and very few reliable, generous friends. Mutual-aid practices that might once have helped make villages cohesive and safe were now, in large part, defensive strategies, weapons in a desperate struggle for survival. Traditions of elite "benevolence" were all but dead as well; there is no evidence of elite-sponsored insurance protection or welfare services for poor villagers, not even for poor kinfolk. We learn most about what, in centuries past, might have been traditional welfare institutions and benevolent customs in Shaanbei by observing the Communists' restorationist reforms of the 1940's, and particularly the building and stocking of public granaries (yicang). Again we can turn to the Mas of Yangjiagou, concentrating now on their business operations as an illustration of the corruption and commercialization of a gentry-class charitable tradition. We know that the Ma family had set aside money for famine relief (huangbenqian) because in 1917, when some of its members pooled funds from several sources to establish an umbrella organization for their various zihao (moneylending) businesses, 8,756 strings of cash in relief money were thrown into the pot. The new institution, based in Yangjiagou after 1926, was called Zongdehou, or "Ancestral Virtue" -a name reminiscent of lineage cohesion and gentry charity, and now given to a business enterprise that was decidedly cutthroat. The Yan'an investigators described the Ma family's Ancestral Virtue as follows: [Its] capital was in the form of grain, mortgages, foreclosed properties, banking, and loan capital. It was in the business of collecting rents on mortgaged and foreclosed land, and rent grain was exchanged for cash. Cash interest was also earned on banked capital, so cash could be loaned out for cash interest or could be used for mortgaging and buying land on which rents could then be collected.64

The Ma name, of course, carried a good deal of clout within Ancestral Virtue, but lineage membership was by no means the controlling principle for wealthy Ma managers. No-interest loans played an important part in the cash movement and turnover that enabled Ancestral Virtue to prosper, and fully 979 of the 1,205 short-term no-interest grain or cash loans over 22 years went to non-Ma families. As the survey team pointed out, this waiving of interest always had a mercenary, not a benevolent, intent: at least half of these interest-free loans were issued to moneylenders who formed part of the Ma empire. Even close relatives could not expect benevolent treatment from the family patriarchs. Ma Weixin lent generously to his opium-addicted cousin Ma Weicheng, only to foreclose on one landholding after another, a total

52 The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide of 555 mu between 1924 and 1941. When Weicheng had no more collateral to offer, Weixin announced that there would be no further "help." In most parts of China, farmwork cooperation traditionally occurred only within kinship circles or among the very poor, families that lacked the equipment or draft animals to farm independently.65 In peripheral areas like Shaanbei, however, mutual-aid practices were probably not exclusive to the poorest families. The pressure to cooperate must have been considerable in a place where crises created by massive soil erosion every year, the drying-up of wells or water pits, frequent crop failures, and regular bandit raids could only be met with some kind of collective effort. In Yanshu getting to and from markets across long and dangerous distances was best done cooperatively. In congested Suide the frequent, perhaps year-long absences of breadwinners called for cooperation between those left to work the farms. Yet there were also powerful factors prejudicial to cooperation in broken-down Shaanbei. Population mobility, the extreme scarcity of valued resources, and the culture of violence and rip-off within which negotiations were conducted at every level could not but inhibit the extension of cooperation much beyond two-family exchanges. When the Party decided in the early 1940's to make the building of rural cooperatives a mass movement, it comprehensively investigated the local mutual-aid customs among farm families in the rural areas it governed. The report on the Shaan-Gan-Ning area was collated and published by the Party's Northwest Bureau in 1943 and republished the next year as a major first section of a booklet on mutual aid in farmwork in the Border Region.66 The investigators noted that many practices were dead or dormant by the mid-1930's but that, with civil peace and the beginnings of an economic recovery, old cooperative practices were reemerging in some places.67 They identified an impressive variety of mutual-aid and team-farming methods. Their findings help to fill out further the contrast between the political economies of Yanshu and Suide and provide useful insights into the Communists' assessment of the peasantry's potential for cooperation.

Labor Exchanges Between Farmers Party investigators divided the region's labor mutual-aid traditions into two broad categories: exchange-labor or mutual-aid teams (biangongdui), and contract-labor teams (zhagongdui). The latter (called tangjiangbanzi in the Guanzhong subregion), were viable only in the land-

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

53

abundant districts where labor was scarce, so they were rarely found in the Suide counties. A wide variety of biangong arrangements, however, occurred in all but the most isolated, semidesert, parts of the Border Region. The most basic of these were ad hoc exchanges in which a piece of work was repaid with equal time and effort-a practice known as penggong in the Yan'an area and as huobian in the Suide counties.68 There could be more complex arrangements when, for example, a job required more than two farmers or lasted longer than a day or two. But farmers could not afford to spend days away from their own farms in a region where a short growing season required that all chores be carried out on time. Consequently, teamwork tended to be confined to the time of greatest need -during spring planting.69 When draft animals were not needed (such as at hoeing time) and a job did not require the combined effort of two or more men, then peasants saw no advantage in "collective labour," we are told?0 In Yanshu, with its relatively large farms and isolated hamlets, the incentive to cooperate on a bigger scale was greater. Here four or five farmers, and as many as ten, might have teamed together not only for plowing and sowing, but even for weeding and harvesting?1 Staggered plantings, of course, partly solved the problem of all crops ripening at once and, in any case, the hilly terrain dictated sequential plantings. Even so, the Communist reformers acknowledged that there were obstacles to the development of larger teams. It was difficult, for example, to get an owner whose farm was last in line to be worked by a six-man team to see any significant benefit in the cooperative arrangement.72 In the Suide subregion, where farms were typically fragmented and scattered, there were no big teams at all. Work cooperation there almost always took the form of short-term and informal huobian exchanges confined to just two or three households, but often for a variety of tasks. Of special interest to the reformers were the exchanges in which farmers traded their labor for the use of livestock and equipment. Poor families in Suide typically did not own draft animals, and immigrants resettling in Yanshu might have owned a tin pot or two, little else. For these families, some form of cooperation with better-equipped families was critical. Customarily one donkey workday in Suide was exchanged for three or four days of human labor; in Yanshu, an oxday was equivalent to three man-days, and a donkey-day to two or three man-days?3 Many such exchanges, to be sure, hardly qualified as mutual aid. As often as not, the animal's owner demanded repayment

54

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

at harvest time, just when the borrower could least afford to be away from his own farm. But some arrangements were reasonably fair. For example, an owner would work with his animal on a poor neighbor's farm for two days, the neighbor would repay with eight days' work, and in both cases it was two men working with a donkey-a more efficient alternative for both. There was no question in peasant eyes that farmers without draft animals "ate bitterness," and the exchange just described was judged to be more than equitable if some of the eightday work debt could be paid off in the slow seasons. Brothers, after setting up separate households, often jointly raised and shared their livestock (a custom known as huoweiniu) and worked as a team at plowing time. Sometimes two ox-owners would pair their oxen (huogeniu) and do their plowing and sowing together. The investigators even found instances of a few families pooling several draft animals and team-plowing their cropland (niujude biangong or binggeng). This practice was far from common, however; there was very little farmland in the region that could be plowed by more than two animals abreast, teaming animals of unequal strength was counterproductive, and people prosperous enough to own more than one draft animal were unlikely to want to enter into such an arrangement74 We can presume that the reason this practice is mentioned at all is that the Communists saw it as a useful model, both in scale and in composition, for the forms of cooperative farming that might eventually be developed in the land-abundant counties of Shaan-Gan-Ning, and for the cultivation of newly opened wasteland in particular. Some forms of cooperation between poor peasant households in Suide resulted from attempts to solve the problems created by the serious land shortage in overcrowded areas. The practice of bingdizhong allowed able-bodied males of one or more families to look for shortor long-term wage work while their own farms were maintained by neighbors. The wages were shared in agreed proportions between the cooperating families, or odd-jobbing was done to balance things off. In choushengkou arrangements one or two men would team up donkeys belonging to a few families and go off to haul charcoal. The menfolk who stayed at home took joint responsibility for tending the charcoal haulers' land, and the haulers' earnings were shared equally by the cooperating families. The CCP report makes the point that since the viability of both bingdizhong and choushengkou depended on high levels of trust between the families involved, these arrangements were always based on family and kinship connections75 Investigators had to distinguish "joint farming" (huozhong) based

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

55

on mutual aid from tenancy arrangements that bore the same name. In principle the distinction was clear: huozhong mutual-aid partners pooled more or less equal plots of land and jointly tilled them, whereas a huozhong "landlord" provided land to someone in return for his labor or a share of his crop, and perhaps the grain stalks for fodder or compost. In practice the only difference was often that two unequal patches of land were pooled, but the Communists were still reluctant to describe a huozhong tenancy as "mutual aid." At best, as they saw it, that arrangement, being typically based like the other on kinship, may have meant that inequalities were not exploited as much as they would otherwise have been. The distinction was not hard to make, of course, for huozhong in which only labor, draft animals, seed, and fertilizer were shared, and each party kept the crops grown on its own plot of land. This was clearly not tenancy in any way, shape, or form. A huozhong of the mutual-aid type was also called penghuo zhang zhuangjia (joint farming by friends). It had its origins, we are told, in four different sets of circumstances. Most often it developed when two related families of more or less equal means were pressed to pool their resources because, separately, their farms were too small to be viable; such arrangements were to be found in villages right across ShaanGan-Ning?6 A second circumstance was that in which two brothers or close relatives moved away from a Suide village because of the land scarcity there and worked as joint farmers on land in the Yanshu or Guanzhong subregions; they might have jointly rented in an area of cultivated land, or else reclaimed wasteland together-a custom called huokaihuang. Third was the frequent instance in Suide of two tenants renting one plot; since the huozi shared the land and all production equipment, this arrangement qualified as a huozhong mutual-aid practice and was sometimes known as huo'anzhuangjia (joint homestead farming). Finally, there were instances of a few families using the huozhong form on land set aside for vegetables, melons, and cotton; these were higher-risk crops requiring some skilled farming and a higher level of investment than most cereal and fiber crops. Produce from the huozhong land was distributed according to investment and labor time?7

Contract-Labor Teams The zhagongdui and tangjiangbanzi that were common in the Yanshu and Guanzhong counties were not, strictly speaking, mutual-aid teams, least of all those made up of landless laborers?8 Still, the Party

56

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

investigators saw in them something worth developing. For one thing, poor peasants with some land had often joined these teams in order to get their own farming done and to earn supplementary income. Also, rich peasants frequently invested in these teams, and they were regulated and disciplined in ways that biangongdui were not. Because of these features, this traditional practice was judged well worth investigating. Zhagongdui were peculiar to sparsely populated districts where farms were large (and might have straddled several hill slopes) and always in need of labor. They were to be found throughout the Yanshu and Sanbian subregions and in some parts of Longdong. Average team size seems to have been about ten men, but teams could range from as many as 20 men to a~ few as five or six. By custom the team boss (the gondezhu or gongzhu) got a cut of the workers' pay. Each worker in a ten-man team, for example, would receive one-eleventh of the team's income as wages, and the same amount (the konggongqian, or "unearned money") would be paid to the non-laboring boss?9 Sometimes, however, it was so difficult to find laborers to form a team that the boss, as a way of attracting recruits, contributed some of his cut to the wages pool. Zhagong teams were usually employed to hoe summer and autumn crops, but they sometimes also harvested wheat crops that ripened between the two hoeing seasons. Though they had not, as a rule, been employed to open up wastelands (perhaps because they seemingly never worked with draft animals), the Communists were to encourage an extension of zhagong activities into the important reclamation business. The Party investigators distinguished three distinctive types of zhagongdui. One was merely a gang of landless men organized by a rich peasant to work his own farm and then the farms of others. Another consisted of small landowners who joined together to work, first, on each other's cropland in the penggong mode (exchanges between farmers of equal means) and then hired themselves out as a team to other farmers. The third and most common type found a few small landholders teaming up with landless men to fulfill a boss's commitment, moving on to farm the team members' land, and then contracting for outside work. Having a good proportion of landless workers in the team meant that members' farms were tended promptly without incurring damaging delays, and there was still time left for hiring out. At the same time the participation of owner-cultivators provided itinerant laborers

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

57

with a "home base" of sorts, and some guarantee of regular work. The investigators believed that many zhagong teams originated with two or three farmers helping one another out with hoeing work and then deciding to offer themselves as a weeding team to other farmers. The incorporation of landless workers was the next logical step if there was to be any expansion of the team enterprise. Sometimes a farmer with a small plot of land left that land uncultivated in order to earn a better, more reliable income as a hired team worker. And a larger household would put an adult son or two into zhagong teams so that it could call on the teams for help in busy seasons. The Communist investigators liked some aspects of the contractlabor teams, but they also emphasized their limitations and the features that would have to be reformed. For all their strict codes of work and personal conduct,80 for example, jobs were frequently disrupted by quarrels and unruly behavior. This, in turn, provoked high-handed, abusive, and cruel retaliation by bosses. It was inevitable, said the investigators, that zhagong team members should have had a "hired laborers' mentality" and not work as conscientiously as mutual-aid team participants. As a result, important as these teams were in a labor-short area, any farmer with permanent hired help considered himself lucky not to have to hire a zhagongdui. The teams were also tainted with "feudal backwardness"; the Communists disliked the "meaningless, superstitious taboos" in the work rules that retarded the political consciousness of people who might otherwise qualify as rural "proletarians." The Communist reformers were ambivalent about the boss's konggong fund. They disapproved of "part of the profit produced by collective labor" going to a nonworker. On the other hand, the fund was compatible with the goal of inducing peasants to invest at least some of the profits from cooperative work in equipment and business expansion. In reformed zhagongdui, therefore, nonworkers would not be allowed to claim any part of the team's earnings, and hierarchies that demeaned the status of ordinary laborers would be abolished. But the principle of worker teams contributing their "surplus income" to a "collective accumulation fund" was one the CCP would work hard to implant when it began to organize rural cooperatives. Zhagongdui were, in the Party's view, superior to the most common forms of traditional biangongdui because they were larger and could therefore "more effectively bring into play the latent strength of human collective labor." Also, there was a potential leadership base in the rich

58

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

peasants who had organized and supported many of these teams, if only they could be persuaded to play a similar role in a more equitable, less authoritarian system. Furthermore, by teaming together landless laborers with a few smallholding farmers, zhagongdui were able to overcome the problem that beleaguered any mutual-aid team of more than two or three families-that of damage through delayed work on the farm last in line. These were features that the CCP would try, in the later Yan'an period, to build into its "modernized" biangongdui. Zhagong was not really a form of teamwork that the Communists wanted to preserve even in the short term. It had served admirably as a way of organizing the farmers from Suide seeking seasonal work in the south, of providing work to refugees from the war and famine zones, of gainfully employing vagrants, and of opening up uncultivated land in the Yanshu and Guanzhong counties. But central to the rehabilitation and reform of Shaanbei society was the reincorporation into society of marginalized people, the resettlement of migrants, and the restitution of economic and political rights to the dispossessed. In the period of "new democracy," this first meant land to the tiller. There was plenty of land in Yanshu with which to reward zhagong members, and in the Yan'an period numerous hired laborers, migrants, and refugees became freeholding farmers, the bedrock of reconstructed villages in that subregion. Thus, in exchange-labor terms, upward mobility took the form of a move from zhagong to biangong methods of labor coordination. Biangongdui were to serve as the backbone of cooperative farming in the 1940's and were the organizations that most fully expressed CCP ideals of social revolution in the villages. Making larger, longer-term, non-kin-based teams workable and popular, however, was the task ahead of the Communists in 1942, and one that was fraught with hazards.

Land Exchanges For the Northwest Bureau investigators, mutual aid embraced the customs that regulated exchanges of land (duidi or huandi) between freeholding peasants. Land swapping, they reported, occurred most often in the Suide area, where family farms generally consisted of a few separate plots of land scattered over inconvenient distances and where an exchange, therefore, was probably a means of consolidating them into a single unit (or at least of reducing the travel time between them). Transactions that saw a full transfer of ownership rights were known

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

59

as sidui (fixed exchanges); if land areas were unequal, the farmer who gained the larger plot made up the difference in cash. Swaps that did not entail a change of ownership were called huodui; here if a farmer got the best of a bargain, he paid some rent to the other for the duration of the exchange arrangement. The Party was especially interested in these land exchanges because they were a means of making farming more efficient and, in principle, were not part of the busy land speculation business in the Suide-Mizhi area. More important, they were seen as a way to remove a major obstacle to forming large-scale and durable mutual-aid teams in places where peasant holdings were severely fragmented. The investigators conceded that peasants did not engage in land swaps for purposes of mutual aid. In essence this was "a method of land adjustment, the main aim of which was the economizing and regulation of labor power." But the fact that "in objective terms it made collective labor more possible" was reason enough for including the practice in a study of traditional labor mutual aid. Clearly the Communists hoped to encourage land swapping on a much larger scale in the Suide counties as a way to push forward the cooperative movement there.

Other Forms of Cooperation Apart from some cooperative transport work (called pengbang in Shaanbei) and the joint raising of pigs and sheep, there is little evidence that sideline occupations were ever organized cooperatively in pre-Communist Shaanbei. Spinning and weaving were done by homebound women, as were silk making and other kinds of handicrafts. When the CCP tried to cooperativize sideline production, it relied above all on the skills and expertise of individual families and their eagerness to expand their businesses if they possibly could. When the CCP set about organizing marketing and supply cooperatives (and the consumer cooperatives within which they were often incorporated), it drew on the experience of merchant businesses; it certainly could not tap any cooperative marketing customs among villagers. Indeed, the methods Party county governments used during the late 1930's in their attempts to set up consumer cooperatives were not dissimilar to those the Ma landlords used to attract share-buyers into their Suide businesses.81 The Nationalist government's rural reconstruction movement had fitfully and unevenly sponsored the development of rural coopera-

6o

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

tives, mainly credit cooperatives, during the 1930's, but the movement barely touched Shaanbei.82 The Communists, recognizing the peasants' urgent need for cheap credit, looked for precedents within popular traditions on which to build. Party investigators reported the custom of "loan clubs" to show evidence of financial self-help traditions at the village level. Such clubs, a phenomenon that was to be found in rural areas all over China,83 were called qinghui in Shaanbei. Party officials noted with approval the revival of this custom in some parts of rural Shaan-Gan-Ning as the agricultural economy began to pick up, and observed the role that rich peasants played as creditors to poor relatives. There is no evidence to suggest, however, that the Yan'an government ever attempted to popularize the "loan club" practice or to coax its extension beyond tight kinship circles. It was investigated as part of a general inquiry into rural credit relations that sought to determine which peasants sought loans and why. The investigation revealed that qinghui helped out rich peasants more than anyone else, and that they were sometimes used as a vehicle for usury and speculation.84 But insofar as they facilitated a flow of rural credit and helped crop growers overcome financial crises, they were judged to be useful. They were found to be common in the relatively prosperous villages of Yan'an's Taodian district, where a local coal mine provided subsidiary incomes to most families: 28 of the 40 households in that district's Baijiaya village had received loans from their local qinghui.85 Though Party surveys of village traditions rarely refer to customs of cooperation in spheres such as crop watching, water conservation, and pathway maintenance, we must presume that they existed. Take well-digging, for example. Where underground water could not be reached with the available equipment, pits had to be dug to catch rainwater.86 Digging these pits, as well as some regulation and supervision of water use, required cooperation between users. Similarly, it was in the interests of everyone to ensure that public facilities like pathways and animal routes out of the village were usable. Many of the rich peasants who had a stake in efficient marketing probably conscripted labor gangs to do this work. But where elites did not sponsor these undertakings in the name of good village government, the onus for them undoubtedly fell on the common folk. Inevitably poor peasants could afford to do only what was absolutely necessary. Building an entire irrigation system, for example, was a task far beyond the capacity of the poor, and it occurred only in the Suide area where farms were managed by elites of some substance. We can be sure that crop

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

61

watching and heavy farm maintenance-tasks such as digging drainage ditches, building dikes to prevent flooding, and filling in crevices gouged by torrential downpours-were jointly undertaken wherever mutual-aid exchanges existed. The mutual-aid teams sponsored and developed by the Communists were certainly expected to do this work and much more as well-in the name of good village government. COOPERATION AND COMMUNITY IN SHAANBEI

Party research findings on traditions of cooperation in Shaanbei villages were interpreted as proof of a peasant potential for cooperation and as evidence of a residual communitarianism in at least some parts of the region. The Party's village reconstruction project entailed, among other things, reducing the conflicts that divided villagers and cultivating village cohesiveness by strengthening cooperative structures. Reconstruction inevitably confronted different challenges in Yanshu and Suide. Many of the isolated mountain hamlets scattered through the Yanshu wastelands consisted of just two or three kin-connected households. Hamlets may have been loosely integrated into marketing networks, but hazardous terrains, banditry, and distance inhibited movement between them. The abundance of land enticed lone men to chance their luck from place to place; desperation drove families to uproot and make their homes in strange places. Settlement size, the isolation of hamlets, the marginality of livelihoods, and the transience of a sizable section of a small population all worked powerfully against the development of community structures both within and between hamlets. The Party's community building in Yanshu entailed, at base, three things: filling out hamlet populations with permanent settlers, organizing resettlement on the principle of "self-help mutualaid," and a road-building project that substantially improved links between settlements and to local markets. The pre-Communist Suide countryside, with its very different social structures, posed its own challenges. Villages there were highly stratified and much larger and closer to each other than in Yanshu. They functioned as cells within well-developed, long-standing gridlike marketing and political networks and, despite a good deal of migratory movement within and beyond the subregion, they retained a core of old, established families. One indication of the strength of gentry traditions was the prevalence of village winter schools (dongxue). The

62

The Political Economies of Yarzshu and Suide

consequence was a much higher level of popular literacy than in Yanshu;87 and literacy, of course, oiled the wheels of commerce between villages. These features all suggest the possibility of much higher levels of community than prevailed in the Yanshu wastelands, both at the settlement level and within marketing and cultural networks. On the other hand, community structures in the densely populated northeast had been progressively dissipated by what was probably a long process of social differentiation and polarization, but a process significantly accelerated by the northwest famine of 1928-31. The polarizing of classes and the new insecurities experienced by all strata in the 1930's destroyed or severely damaged many of the interclass cooperative arrangements on which community had once been predicated. It had also produced a class of elites who were well practiced at defending their privileges and more solid in their opposition to the Communists than the old elites in Yanshu. Village reconstruction in Suide, once the Communists had secured the area in 1940, required, first, a showdown with die-hard opponents of reform, then a reversal of the process of differentiation by redistributing land to thinned-out populations. After 1942 the restoration of traditional forms of cooperation and the development of more inclusive and regular forms of teamwork became central to the Party's rural reconstruction and communitybuilding enterprise in both subregions. The survey of mutual-aid customs had uncovered a rich variety of cooperative customs among rural folk, but it also revealed that most arrangements were impermanent, constrained, and fragile, that they were used by only a minority of peasant families, and that the upwardly mobile discarded them as soon as they could manage without them. The investigators had made a point of seeking out examples of "communalism" that could serve as precedents for the eventual collectivization of farming. They quickly conceded, however, that any folk collectivist traditions were confined to a tiny minority of tightly knit groups of related families and were, in fact, a throwback to "primitive communalism" rather than representing a "progressive" form of cooperation.88 The inescapable conclusion: It was the various biangong exchanges that properly belonged to the present stage of historical evolution-that of a small-farm agricultural economy. The simple, small-scale, and very temporary peasant exchanges were the foundation on which revolution could be built, a revolution that would move peasants into the postfeudal and postcapitalist stages of history.

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

63

Nevertheless, the wider (if "primitive") forms of cooperation most certainly could serve as models, in broad outline at least, for a new type of "comprehensive" (zonghexing) cooperation-the cooperative village. Before the Chinese Communist Party could establish itself as "the state" in Shaanbei, it had to deal with an array of competitors: warlordand Guomindang-backed armies, district and county militia, local mintuan and bandit gangs. Until 1936 Communist guerrillas in the Shaan-Gan base area were just one more element in the militarization of Shaanxi society, contenders for power whose "legitimacy" derived mainly from their gun barrels. Whether peasants supported the Communists or not in any one area had little to do with political or class alignments; peasants had to judge which was the safest side to back. Military protection for farmers had become one of the necessary conditions for harvesting any grain in summer and autumn. Only when that protection was guaranteed, when rival bandits were eliminated and some confidence and cooperation had been won from local residents, could the Communists set about minimizing for farmers the ecological threats that had so significantly shaped the political cultures of this region. And only then could there be any reshaping of those cultures.89 Outside the core Suide-Mizhi area, and certainly in the Yanshu wastelands, the rural elites had only marginal influence at best, as constrained and weak in their dealings with villagers as they were in their dealings with higher authorities. The extreme frailty of agriculture limited the economic strings that a power-broker could pull, and frequent famine years were great equalizers in this part of the world. Communist forces in the early and mid-1930's moved relatively easily through the wasteland districts and quickly dismantled the old power structures. Once what military backing Yanshu's old elites had was destroyed or neutralized, they had few political resources with which to counter the Communists' reform initiatives. In the Suide counties, and particularly in the Suide-Mizhi landlord strongholds, the CCP's assertion of political hegemony required more than a simple demonstration of military superiority. For years after the Communists had won uncontested military control of this area, local elites still had enough political muscle to obstruct and resist the Party's reform initiatives. The challenge for the Communists there was to expose the old elites' claims to authority as fraudulent, to prove their own moral right to govern, while assiduously undermining the economic foundations of old elite power.

64

The Political Economies of Yanshu and Suide

Their task was made easier by the fruit of many years of political and social instability: an elite whose numbers had been much reduced by the economic ups-and-downs of the 192o's and 193o's, and whose authority as patrons had been weakened by the comings-and-goings of people between villages, districts, and counties and in and out of the region. Nowhere there-or anywhere else in Shaanbei-do we find the moral economists' stable village communities structured by patronclient relationships and the politics of consensus; nor do we find, for the most part, all-powerful elites who, in Samuel Popkin's argument, could manipulate village tensions in ways that made them indispensable as patrons and gave them secure power bases in the countryside?0 Despite, however, the weaknesses and ambiguities of patron-client networks, relationships of domination and dependency structured social life much more than did horizontal relationships based on cooperation and communitarianism. The Communists' village revolutions aimed to reverse this situation. An economic leveling that entailed at the same time a restructuring of power relationships gave power unambiguously to the Communist Party. But political reconstruction was also meant to leave room for a "people's democracy" in spheres for which, in the CCP's judgment, it was practicable and as long as it was compatible with state strengthening. In the early 1940's, the Yan'an leadership was anticipating that grass-roots democracy would be most safely and usefully expressed through new cooperative work relationships and village self-management of jointly run enterprises. That kind of village-based democracy, however, required a "second revolution," and one that was more radical than the first, land reform. Because it involved far more radical changes in peasant behavior and attitudes than the "class struggles" against landlords and village "tyrants" had, the "second revolution" would require more painstaking and arduous work than the first. The attempt to bring it about would prove to be a more tortuous, complex, and uncertain process than destroying old elite power in the countryside; and it would produce different results in places as different as Yanshu and Suide.

CHAPnR

3

Land Reform and Village Reconstruction, 1934-1941

and reform followed roughly the same pattern in Yanshu and Suide before 1937. Guerrilla raids on grain stores were coordinated from hill-cave hideouts, and grain was distributed to villagers with the aim of developing "a reliable mass base" for the guerrilla movement.1 Typically a small rebel band would capture weapons from, for example, a mintuan unit and gather in defectors, remove "local bullies," expand its operations, and stake out a base. Small bases merged to form larger units, and revolutionary committees were established to run the flourishing bases. The committees took on the responsibilities of civil administration, set up mass associations, and initiated land reform programs. The guerrillas only rarely attempted to unseat county officials; not until1935, when the Nationalists launched their second suppression campaign in the northwest, did Communist forces capture and hold county seats. None of the six county seats captured in 1935 was located in what was to become the Suide subregion (see Maps 1 and 2).* We need not be surprised that the government defended this wealthier region more vigorously than it did the wastelands to the south. But it also seems that the Communist forces in at least parts of Shaanbei's northeast RURAL INSURGENCY

*The Anding county seat was the first to fall. Guerrilla forces had launched at least two earlier assaults on the town but had not occupied it. It was successfully attacked and held by the Red Army on May g, 1935. The other five county seats fell in quick succession: Yanchang and Yanchuan (May 28), Ansai (June 27), Jingbian (June 28), and Bao'an (June 30). Wang Zhiyuan, Xibei genjudide lishi diwei, pp. 67-68.

66 Land Reform and Reconstruction were relatively feeble. Joseph Esherick points to the catastrophic defeat of the Communists' Shenmu base in early 1935, thanks to a revolutionary strategy that put more emphasis on grass-roots Party building than on building an army, and notes the sharp contrast with the strategy of the Shaan-Gan partisans, who "relied more on subverting local military forces and recruiting bandits." 2 Two important points are being made here. First, the different environments of the ShaanGan and northeast areas produced different approaches to revolution making. Second, the strategy that made a revolutionary movement viable and durable in both western and northeastern Shaanbei was a military strategy? Guerrilla districts along the Shaanxi and Gansu border were consolidated as the Shaan-Gan base area in late 1933, and a soviet government was proclaimed there in January 1935. The Shaanbei base area to the northeast, constituted as a soviet at about the same time, was never completely consolidated as a single territorial unit, and substantial sections were lost to the Nationalists during the 1935 civil war. Consolidation was usually a prerequisite of land reform; if land and property were seized in places where the owners had the resources to mount effective counterattacks, the revolutionaries ran the danger of seriously alienating the peasantry. In the northeastern counties most of the secure guerrilla bases were located in eastern Suide, Qingjian, Wubao, and the far north (places distant from the Suide-Mizhi "big landlord" strongholds), but even in these places land revolution was often overturned by Nationalist forces after 1934· Big landlords in the wasteland districts were much more easily isolated than in the crowded northeast, and when the Communists brought confiscations to a halt in 1936-37, the land reform movement had penetrated the Yanshu counties much more deeply and permanently than it had the Suide area (see Map 5). By the early 1940's, therefore, the already significant sociopolitical contrasts between Yanshu and Suide had been substantially broadened. This chapter will trace the history of land revolution in each of the two subregions before the enforcement of the united-front agreement. Consideration will also be given to the progress of economic construction work up to about 1941. An aim is to assess how effective the CCP was in its attempt to institute an economic leveling that would at once destroy or significantly weaken the political authority of old elites and provide the basis for economic recuperation and growth in this severely depressed region. Thus, the focus is on discernible changes

"Thorough" reform "Partial" reform Unreformed

MAP 5· Land revolution in Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1934-1937. Based on Jiefang ribao, Nov. 15, 1942; Chai Shufan et al., Suide, Mizhi tudi chubu yanjiu (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1979); and Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 102.

68

Land Reform and Reconstruction

to rural class structures and their impact on village economies. Of importance, also, are the lessons learned from clumsy, careless, or heavyhanded policy implementation in the early years. Because counterrevolution in the Suide prefecture after 1936 interrupted and, often, reversed land reform, the story of economic reconstruction is necessarily confined to the Yanshu subregion. In 1940, when the Party-state was able to include five Suide counties in its regionwide planning,* the leaders had to devise significantly different economic and political reform strategies for that subregion. This, perhaps, gave further impetus to the CCP's general policy overhaul as the united front broke down and the Nationalist blockade tightened around Shaan-Gan-Ning. LAND REVOLUTION IN YANSHU,

1934-1937

It was not until the Party central committee long-marched its way to Wuqizhen (now Wuqi) in October 1935 that the Shaan-Gan Soviet

began to stretch eastward into the Yanshu counties. Party headquarters moved to Wayaobao (now Zichang) that December and then to Bao'an (now Zhidan) six months later. The Shaan-Gan and Shaanbei soviets were merged, and the CCP Northwest Office was constituted as the supreme governing authority in the new Shaan-Gan-Ning base. Once recuperated from the Long March and reinforced by local units, the Red Army made rapid territorial gains. Party sources claim that, by the end of 1936, Communist forces had pacified all or part of 37 counties and controlled a territory as large as 130,000 sq. km.4 Land confiscations were now protected by a much stronger military force than most local elites could muster for counterrevolution, and redistributions proceeded easily and swiftly in places through which Communist armies moved. Mao Zedong and his supporters (that is, people who sided with Mao against Wang Ming) subsequently deplored the "leftist excesses" of land reform in this period and criticized the reformers' "anti-rich peasant line" in particular.5 The accuracy and motives of this criticism aside, it is clear that wherever the Red Army came out on top, land revolution was implemented on whatever terms the local Communists chose. Land redistributions at the point of a gun did not require collective action on the part of poor peasants, and any •small areas of Yulin and Hengshan counties also formed part of the Suide subregion. Together with western Suide county (Suixi), they subsequently became the subregion's sixth county, Zizhou (with Shuangyuhu as the county seat).

Land Reform and Reconstruction

69

peasant associations that continued to function played only a symbolic role in the political life of Yanshu's reformed villages. Resistance to the Red Army's eastward thrust was strongest in places closest to the prefectural seat, Yan'an city. For the three years before the Xi' an Incident,* all of Yan'an county was a "guerrilla zone," its various districts passing in and out of Communist control several times during that period.6 By the time the Communists captured Yan'an city in December 1936, the Party's united-front land policy was more or less in place? Peasants could keep any land they had already received, but confiscations were to cease, and landlords were promised political safety and economic security if they chose to return home. But new policy or no, land grants probably continued to be made to the poor in 1937 in places where the civil war had prevented the efficient execution and enforcement of land revolution. The CCP made it plain that returning landlords could not expect to recover their properties, still less their old privileges; whatever restitution was made would provide them with only what constituted a middle peasant livelihood by local standards. The determined (if temporary) conciliation of old elites by unitedfront purists provided openings for their reassertion of power in some districts. Perhaps it was because counterrevolution was so blatant at times that the Communists occasionally abandoned united-front caution and moved forcefully against a resurgent "despotic gentry." 8 And then, as cooperation between the Communists and the Nationalists broke down after 1938, and as the Communists consolidated their authority in Yanshu, their tolerance of rivals became palpably thinner. Local governments easily enough found pretexts for confiscating land owned by the many "spies," "traitors," or "smugglers" who had fled and let their land fall waste. There was thus plenty of "public" land (gongdi) to give to the landless poor. Party sources usually claim that, by 1940, land revolution was "thorough and complete" in all but one county (Fuxian) in the Yanshu subregion. The Yan'an city area was only partly reformed at the time it was secured in late 1936, and by then the Party's united-front policy forbade an open attack on the surviving landlords-people who had *On December 12, 1936, during a visit to Xi' an, Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by senior officers of the Northeastern army. Released unharmed on December 25, he returned to Nanjing persuaded that a GMD-CCP united front against the Japanese was both necessary and possible.

70

Land Reform and Reconstruction

property in the city's ten wards, and who had held their ground during the 12-month siege of the city. Throughout the resistance-war period some landowners continued to take in tenants, but they were almost certainly monitored and closely supervised by CCP cadres. Indeed the survival of landlordism in the immediate Yan'an city area served several purposes. First, it allowed the Party to display its united-front goodwill and leniency. Second, the arrangements that were approved served as demonstration models for tenancy reform. Third, landlords who broke the new tenancy regulations gave the Party the opportunity to show how struggle against "bad landlords" was to be organized and staged.* Finally, and perhaps most important, the established farmers with land to let could be pressed into taking on immigrants as anzhuangjia tenants, thus meeting the immediate needs of newly arrived families. For these various reasons, then, the Communists were more than willing to allow a tenancy system not only to persist but to expand in the countryside close to the regional capital. What difference did land reform make in the great majority of places in Yanshu where it had been implemented? Of first importance to the CCP in the early stages of base-area consolidation was the economic damage the reform did to its political enemies and the debts of gratitude it was owed (peasants who protested against the big 1941 tax levies were told to "remember the revolution").9 The point was frequently made in Party reports that revolution reversed the early 1930's trend toward heavy concentrations of land in the hands of a few big estate owners. Typical was one from 1940, comparing the situation before 1934, when less than 10 percent of the population in Yanshu as a whole had owned 70 percent of the land, with the accomplishments in Yanchuan and Ganquan counties, where the poor and middle peasants who had constituted 80-85 percent of the population in 1938 now owned about 8o percent of the land. 10 In a depopulated countryside, the flight of just a few big estate owners resulted in substantial land grants to the poor; families often received more than they could farm without hired help. For example, Wu Manyou (labor hero extraor*Yan'an landlords were still being used for this purpose after the May 4, 1946, directive announced the winding down of rent reform and the beginning of a new period of land reform. The American Sid Rittenberg, just after he arrived in Yan'an in late October 1946, was taken along to a struggle meeting against the landlord Zhang Yongtai. Zhang had been quick to respond to the Party's 1946 call to landlords to hand over their land in exchange for government bonds, only to be exposed by his village's Party branch as a tyrant. Rittenberg and Bennett, Man Who Stayed Behind, pp. 96-98.

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71

dinaire in 1943 and alleged Guomindang collaborator in 1947) was allotted about 200 mu of hill land in Liulin district, and Chang Shiming of Liulin village got 100 mu.n Moreover, with plenty of land to go around, the CCP could provide former landlords with decent-sized farms without outraging its poor peasant friends too much. "Land to the tiller" was meant, in the first place, to give the poor a means of making a living and to free them from all dependence on old elite patronage. It was also intended to effect a leveling of social classes, a goal clearly evident in the way redistributions were calculated and doled out; equity was always a land reform ideal, even if it was rarely achieved. The Communists in Shaan-Gan-Ning did not pretend that their reforms had "eliminated classes" in the Yanshu villages, but they did claim that land revolution resulted in a significant degree of economic leveling in places where landlordism had been strong. Land reform should in principle push poor and hired peasants up into the middle peasant category and pull landlords who stayed on down into the rich peasant or middle peasant category. Thus for the reformers, the growth in the proportion of middle peasant families in most places was the best evidence of their successP Table 3 shows a typical presentation of this evidence. By 1941 the two surveyed villages (Zhangjia and Tongju) had twice as many middle peasant families as they had in 1934, the number of poor peasants had been almost halved, and landlords had been eliminated altogether. But interestingly enough, as we see in Table 4, the situation in the smaller of the two villages in 1935, just after land reform had been carried out, was very little changed; harsh treatment of the one rich peasant family is the possible exception.* With no landlord property to confiscate, only 20 mu to be got from the rich peasant, and a mere 13.5 mu confiscated from the six middle peasants, there was only 38.5 mu of confiscated land to be divided up between 11 poor householdsP In short, it was only in those parts of Yanshu where a small number of landlords and rich peasants held a disproportionate share of the land that land reform was able to deliver significant economic bonuses to poor families. Where landlordism was weak, or where landlord estates were divided up among large populations of very poor farm families (the case in Suide and in most parts of the other Comrnu*The rich peasant family seems to have been penalized for mortgaging out, presumably just before land reform, some 40 mu of land. By confiscating 20 mu of its remaining land, the reformers left it with the use of only 14.4 mu per capita, a good deal less than the average rich peasant holding, 23.1 mu, for the two surveyed villages in 1941.

72

Land Reform and Reconstruction TABLE

3

Landownership in Zhangjia and Tongju Administrative Villages, 1934 and 1941 (landinmu)

People Class

1934

Landlord Rich peasant Middle peasant Poor peasant Hired hand Other•

12 39 140 215 13

Total land 1941

18 280 122 13 5

1934

568 1,637 3,399.5 3,264.5 115

Land per capita 1941

415 6,278.5 2,238 4 58.5

1934

47.3 42 24.3 15.2 8.9

1941

23.1 22.4 18.3 0.3 11.7

souRCE: Northwest Bureau Propaganda Dept., Gulin diaocha, pp. 17, 25-30. • There were two nonfarming households in 1941, one headed by a primary schoolteacher, the other by a carpenter.

nist bases), distributions of confiscated property produced very small, sometimes meaningless gains for poor peasants. The CCP tried to make propaganda capital of returning landlords who stoically accepted the radical reduction of their fortunes and status under its rule. In Zhang Pingyi it found a perfect model for the destitute poor and ruined rich alike. Zhang lost his 4,500-mu holding in central Yan'an county in 1934, when the Communists took the area and he fled to Yan'an city. He ran a mixed business there until the city, too, fell to the Communists. Back home in 1937, he received a government grant of 39 mu of land and bought livestock, tools, and seed with funds from the sale of his shop. Even so, he still had to ask for nine dan in "relief grain" to make ends meet that year. By 1940, however, he owned 90 mu and was able to pay six dan in grain tax in the autumn. In 1941 he could afford to add two donkeys to his livestock, he was earning 300 yuan a month peddling coal, and he needed to hire a full-time laborer to help him on the farm. 14 After just four or five years of hard work, Zhang Piyi was approaching rich peasant status. This is just one of a myriad tales used to explain to the citizenry how upward mobility was possible for everyone in Shaan-Gan-Ning's "new democracy." Whether or not it was a true or typical story, it made the point that there were a number of legitimate ways to build fortunes under a Communist government, that to "get rich" was a worthy aim, and that the "rich peasant mode of farm management" was to be aspired to by all farmers.

Land Reform and Reconstruction TABLE

73

4

Landownership in Tongju Administrative Village After Land Reform, 1935 (landinmu) Category

Households People Total land 1934 1935 Land per capita 1934 1935

Rich

Middle

Poor

8

6 31

11 43

958.5 945

832 865.5

30.9 30.5

19.4 20.1

175 115 21.9 14.4

souRcE: Northwest Bureau Propaganda Dept., Gulin diaocha, pp. 7, 17,25-30. NoTE: There is a difference of some 40 mu between the 1934 and 1935 land area figures because the rich peasant family, presumably to put some of its land out of reach during the Tongju reform, mortgaged it to a family in another village.

Despite the explicit rejection in the united-front period of an "antirich peasant line," the rich peasant issue remained a vexed one for CCP strategists. The "new rich" peasants, farmers who were prospering under Party rule, were unambiguously a "progressive" class and, in fact, the heroes of China's "new democracy"; a "rich peasant economy" was, after all, intrinsic to the revolution's "new democracy" stage of development.15 But the "old rich" belonged to a bygone era (whether "feudal" or "bourgeois") and, in accord with Marxist theory, must now take a back seat both economically and politically. Local cadres were sensible if they did not align themselves too closely with people classified as "rich" during land reform. That classification might have meant only that those people were not "local despots and evil tyrants" and therefore did not deserve the treatment meted out to the landlord class. Sometimes they were wealthier, in fact, than those who were ostracized as landlords in the same area and like landlords they earned income from land rentals.16 We also know that they had often not been treated leniently by the land reformers in the soviet period, and that they almost certainly regarded the Communists warily, if not with resentment and hostility. The fact that they were usually the only families taxed by the Border Region government before 1939 could not have improved their attitudes to Shaanbei's new state authority. So when Party leaders spoke of rich peasant "heroes" and heaped praise on rich peasant farming methods, it was the "new rich" they

74

Land Reform and Reconstruction

were talking about. The most prominent of the Border Region's labor heroes, Tian Erhong, Shen Changlin, Ma Pi'en, and, most notably, Wu Manyou, had been destitute and, more often than not, landless immigrants before land reform. In late 1943, when their portraits appeared under banner headlines across the front pages of Liberation Daily, they were rich peasants with big landholdings, they had hired laborers on their payrolls, and they managed flourishing mixed-farming businesses. The logical outcome of land revolution, we are told, was an expansion of capitalism in the countrysideP And because Shaan-GanNing's new rural capitalists owed their good fortune to the Party (they were regularly reminded of their indebtedness), the Party presumed or, if necessary, demanded their loyalty. CCP analysts defined the Border Region's agricultural economy in 1940 as a "peasant small-commodity economy" -an economy, in other words, of poor and middle peasants.18 The new government could claim to have repaired the damage done by civil war and to have rehabilitated agricultural production in Shaanbei if the majority of farmers had achieved, or were on the way to achieving, middle peasant livelihoods. Rich peasants remained a small minority of farmers throughout the resistance-war years, and they were far from typical in their farming practices, combining as they did grain growing with transport and commerce, handicraft, and livestock-raising sidelines. Nevertheless, they were important to the Party as a practical demonstration of peasant progress and of the possibilities open to even the poorest folk if they were willing to run with the Communists and chance their luck in new ventures. More important, as employers of resettling laborers, rich peasants in the Yanshu counties, both old and new rich, were critical to the government's cherished goal of rapidly populating the subregion's abundant wastelands. Because new immigrants began with nothing and because their employment by prosperous farmers could eliminate the need for government handouts, rich peasants were allowed to "exploit" (if only "a little") their hired laborers.19 We are told, however, that in contrast to most other parts of China, the "rich peasant economy" in Shaan-Gan-Ning was not supported by exploitative land rents and usury. It was sustained, in large part, by profits from trade and commerce and was therefore much more "capitalist" than "feudal." Another difference, said Party theorists, was that it was a flourishing economy, relatively free of batterings from Western imperialism and Japanese invaders.20 Moreover, because hired hands could quickly be-

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75

come owner-cultivators in the wasteland districts, the exploitation of laborers would always be somewhat constrained. The reformers did not delude themselves that it was only the "old rich" and "local bullies" who were capable of rapacious and ruthless behavior, and cadres were warned to watch out for and tether the "increase in capitalist exploitation" that would accompany the growth of a rich peasant economy.21 The Communists seemed to believe, however, that in a milieu of rising expectations and widening opportunities, they were in a strong position to influence and bargain with prospering farmers. New-democratic Shaanbei was not an egalitarian society, and the Communists did not claim it was. But it did promise social justice, improved standards of living, and the chance of advancement for a large proportion of the people who lived there. RURAL RECONSTRUCTION IN YANSHU,

1937-1941

Land revolution always resulted in serious dislocations of local economies. And the slaughtering by Shaanbei landlords and rich peasants of their livestock in anticipation of confiscations had particularly serious consequences in a region where livestock raising was a basic component of the rural economy. On top of this was the severe infrastructural damage caused by a three-year civil war-damage in the form of looted and burned granaries, dwellings, and animal sheds, the destruction of ponds, wells, dikes, and bridges, and the neglect of farmlands by fighting or fleeing peasants. Civil peace at the end of 1936 and, thanks to the united-front agreement, some financial help from the national government allowed the Communists to begin the work of rural reconstruction. That program involved certain immediate and urgent tasks: restoring transport routes and facilities to rehabilitate produce markets and trade, rebuilding granaries, reviving some basic industries essential to farm families and agriculture (especially textiles and agricultural toolmaking) and promoting cotton growing. But the CCP's pivotally important longer-term aim was to radically increase farmland acreage and livestock herds-to reverse, in other words, the mintao tianhuang (people flee and leave the land to waste) trend that had characterized the region since the nineteenth-century Muslim wars. From the very beginning the regional government urged farmers in Yanshu to increase their landholdings by reclaiming local wasteland. And families with more land than they could properly look after were urged to hire laborers to help them maintain big cropland acreages.

76 Land Reform and Reconstruction (Both ideas, it seems, appealed to Wu Manyou. In 1938 he was farming just go of the 200 mu of hill land he got in 1935; but he had 120 mu under cultivation by 1939 and went on to expand to 230 in 1942, 330 in 1943, and 450 in 1944.22 ) There may have been some early attempts to charge for wasteland acquisitions; prices were no more than one yuan per mu for hill land and about 1.5 yuan for riverflat in 1940a little less than the cost of about five kg of millet at the time.23 But "wasteland to the clearer" very quickly became an essential element of the migrant program and was formalized in various land and resettlement regulations in 1941.24 Moreover, legal sanction was given to the de facto confiscation of privately owned land that was allowed to fall waste. Though farmers who worked such land were classified as tenants, they were exempted from paying rent for three years (just as people who farmed public wasteland were exempt from taxes) and were granted permanent tenancy rights.25 The principle of "land to the tiller" was thus very literally interpreted and broadly applied in places where there was plenty of land. Communist sources generally claim that there was a 30 percent increase in Shaan-Gan-Ning farmland between 1937 and 1940 (an addition of 3,ooo,ooo or so mu), and that this was the major factor in the more or less equivalent increase in grain production (from 1,1oo,ooo dan to 1A30,ooo dan) over that period.26 Another 3,ooo,ooo mu were put into cultivation between then and the end of the war, with increases in grain yields ranging from 10o,ooo to 150,000 dan each year, and a spectacular growth in the cotton harvest (from 6o,ooo jin in 1939 to 3,ooo,ooo in 1945)_2? It is not always clear how and by whom the reclamation work was done. We know that 8th Route Army units undertook major land reclamation projects where they were stationed but, for reasons that are not clear, army farmland was often not included in the new cropland data. The exclusion of army data might help explain the discrepancy between the reclamation figures each year and annual increases in farmland acreage (see Table 5). Also obscured in the figures available to us are the territorial gains and losses resulting from the border clashes with the Nationalists.* And then there is the *The addition of more than 3,ooo,ooo mu of Suide farmland in 1940 (when five Suide counties were absorbed into Shaan-Gan-Ning) is not reflected in the figures in Table 5· A reason for this could be that the acquisition of Suide did little more than compensate for the loss to the GMD, during the 1937-43 period, of territory along the Border Region's south and southwest borders (see Map 1). Also, the data we have are clearly imprecise and incomplete; a good deal of guesswork was entailed in compiling land survey figures in a hill country where transport and communications were, at best, primitive.

Land Reform and Reconstruction TABLE

77

5

Farmland and Reclaimed Wasteland in Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1936-1945 (landinmu) Year

Land under cultivation

1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

8,431,006 8,626,006 8,994,483 10,076,000 11,743,082 11,778,385 13,387,213

Reclaimed land

Total

195,000 358,480 1,002,744 689,989 481,262 354,768

8,821,006 9,352,963 11,078,744 12,433,071

970,152a

12,124,153 14,357,365

1,054,720 15,205,553

souRCES: Land under cultivation: 1936-39, Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu gongzuo baogao, 1939-1941 nian," p. 26; 1940, 1943, Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu yinian gongzuo zongjie"; 1942, Northwest Bureau Reconstruction Dept., "Shaanganning bianqu yijiusiernian gexian"; 1945, CYHWX, p. 283. Reclaimed land: 1937-38, CYHWX, p. 21; 1939-44, Bianqu [13], pp. 573-74. a 206,877 mu of this total were cleared by army units; this is the only instance in which data are given for land reclaimed by the army.

problem of whether the new farmland was productive or not; it was not unusual for newly opened land to fall waste again quickly through lack of tools, animals, or manpower to maintain it.28 For all this, it must be said that the Communists' wasteland reclamation program made a major contribution to the development of the region's agriculture. Lin Boqu, head of the Shaan-Gan-Ning government, claimed that 15,206,ooo mu were under cultivation by 1945.29 We can concede some exaggeration in that figure, and in the 6,ooo,ooo mu for the eight war years, and still acknowledge the enormous success of a program that started from a base of 8A31,ooo mu in 1936.30 Statistically, land reclamation work peaked in 1939 and 1944, each of which saw 1,ooo,ooo mu opened up (see Table 5). There was a significant difference, however, in the ways these peaks were reached. Where the 1944 record was achieved by and large by immigrant settlers and mutual-aid teams, the one for 1939 was due to the drive for self-sufficiency in government offices, schools, and army units that lay at the heart of that year's production campaign. Soldiers had customarily done their own clearing, pick, and plowing work, but we can be certain that most county and district officials in 1939 "mobilized" local farmers to clear and dig the fields that were to serve as stateowned (jiguan) cropland. The idea was that public servants would

78

Land Reform and Reconstruction

work this land and produce enough grain to make them economically "self-reliant" (ziji), enabling the government to reduce substantially its expenditure on salaries and stipends. But, besides having the clearing work done for them, many officials were able to avoid cultivating their "ziji" plots by contracting, at rock-bottom rates, immigrant laborers to do most of the farmwork. In other ways as well, the achievements of the 1939 production campaign are less than the CCP reports made them out to be. We have a Party report of a wholesale organization of 249,163 men, women, and children across 19 counties (the five Suide counties were not yet under Border Region government in 1939). The figures offered in that report are almost certainly exaggerated. We are told, for example, that 89,982 men joined mutual-aid teams in 1939, more than in 1944 when the cooperative movement was at its peak and when the large Suide population was included in the count.31 There is evidence, also, that the women's production groups and children's odd-job teams (zawudui), with a claimed membership of 84t334, did not, if they existed at all, achieve very much, and that the "public welfare farming teams" (yiwu gengtiandui) were corvee gangs by another name. 32 But even if the claim that about one-third of the region's population worked in cooperative labor teams in 1939 was more wishful thinking than fact, that year clearly saw a big mobilization of farmers, albeit a mobilization achieved through some bullying and coercion by local officials. Most of the new farmland opened up in 1939 was the work of the reclamation teams (kaihuangdui) formed in response to the government's call for a special effort. Organized by township at the direction of county governments, these teams did not pretend to be other than corvee brigades. Targets were set for each county, and ten out of 19 counties, including five in Yanshu, reported that their targets had been exceeded. Both Yan'an county and Yanchuan county claimed to have exceeded their targets by well over 200 percent.33 Most analysts accept the million-plus record for that year,34 but there has been little examination of just how it was achieved. That it was the result of militarytype operations that made heavy demands on rural people is reflected in a growing and publicly expressed concern among Party strategists about the damage done to government authority and prestige when large numbers of farmers were press-ganged into labor brigades to open land that was not to be theirs. Open criticism of coercive practices was expressed during the rectification (zhengfeng) movement of 1941-42 and appears with increasing frequency in discussions about strategies to be used in the 1943 production movement.

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79

The trend after 1939 was toward allowing tillers to keep any land they cleared and away from the policy of organizing "shock troops" to build farmland for other people's use. There was from henceforth a concern strictly to limit unremunerated labor contributions (corvee duty) from ordinary farmers. The result was a drastic fall-off in reclaimed land (of more than 50 percent between 1939-40 and 1941-42 by one report) }5 a fact Mao noted in his report to senior cadres at the end of 1942. Mao urged a renewed effort to expand cropland acreage/6 but it is significant that, after this, most land-clearing work of any great scale was assigned to the army. Mao argued that teams formed by peasants for reclamation work should, ideally, be combinations of immigrant and established farmers,37 and when the mutual-aid team campaign moved into full stride in 1943-44, we do see some cooperation between new and old village families for this purpose. Party histories of "economic construction" in Shaan-Gan-Ning have designated the 1937-39 period as a "recuperation phase." 38 The point being made is that economic progress made in this early phase does not compare with the more spectacular achievements of the big 194344 production drive, that this was a period in which the region's broken-down economic infrastructure was repaired and rehabilitated in preparation for the great leaps forward that followed. It was also a period, I might add, in which resource needs and shortfalls were more likely to be met with redistributive than with development strategies. Reconstruction began in the 1934-36 years with property confiscations and redistributions. Then, after 1936, the Nationalist government subsidy helped fill welfare grain stores, and when the Shaan-Gan-Ning government did not have the resources to bail out families in serious economic trouble, their fellow villagers were "mobilized" to make "mutual adjustments" (huxiang tiaoji).39 This usually meant that grain, livestock, and tools were forcibly "borrowed" from better-off families and doled out to the needy. As we have seen, the heavy-handed mobilization of community resources was a feature of the big production drive of 1939. The opening up of land for officials, schoolteachers, and soldiers to farm for self-sufficiency certainly looked innovative, but the peasants who did the hard work were really corvee conscripts. And the corvee teams cannot, by any count, be considered a new form of social organization, their new names notwithstanding. Chen Yung-fa has made an issue of the inadequacies of reconstruction work in the early Yan'an period, but his focus is on fiscal problems, not on the efforts in agriculture. He imputes the Yan'an government's resort to opium growing and trading in 1942, plain and

So Land Reform and Reconstruction simple, to its failure "to establish a sound financial base" in the 193741 period. The main sources of government revenue in the late 1930's, he notes, were confiscations of property and Nationalist subsidies: "it was this heavy dependence and lack of independent revenue base that accounted for the severity of the economic problems during the three difficult years" (1941-43).40 Chen's essential point, that the government budget was in deficit and the deficit was soaring in the early 1940's, is irrefutable. In making that point, however, he does not take adequate account of the northwest region's very great natural disadvantages and of its extremely decrepit economic infrastructure in the mid-1930's. Certainly the Communists' reconstruction work from 1937 to 1941 did not go much beyond the mending of a broken-down economy, and they certainly did not, in those five years, build an economic foundation that could support a big influx of refugees, a quickly expanding bureaucracy, and an army fighting a broad-fronted war. Given the size of the task and the difficulties, just reversing rural emiseration was, in my argument, a significant achievement. Furthermore, the Yan'an government achieved more than that. This was a region in which pestilence raged through animal populations every spring and summer and mortality rates were extraordinarily high.41 Yet there seem to have been dramatic increases in livestock numbers during the first few years after 1936, and steady growth after that.42 A serious effort was made to reestablish and expand cotton growing, and although it took the GMD's blockade of the region in 1939 to stimulate a major development in cotton production and textile manufacturing, by 1941 32,990 mu had been planted in cotton.43 The same applied to other commercial crops and to industrial development in general: progress was modest, but important groundwork was done.44 One spectacular failure seems to have been the reforestation program. Woodlands covered less than 10 percent of Shaan-Gan-Ning in 1936, and every annual"economic construction plan" set tree-planting targets for certain districts and, eventually, every household. Yet by all evidence, forested areas steadily contracted during the resistance-war period (with corresponding drops in annual rainfall between 1936 and 1945).45 Water management was another domain in which the Communists were less than successful. Despite numerous plans for the development of irrigation systems, the more urgent work of dike building and post-flood repair work always took precedence and left little time for water conservation initiatives.46

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But, to reiterate, the obstacles facing the rebuilders of this region were enormous. The achievement of big annual increases in grain production must therefore be accounted a major one. For Party planners, bigger grain harvests for farmers in successive years, whether by the extension of cropland acreages or increased land productivity, were the crucial index of economic health and vigor, and the indications are that many Yanshu farmers were gradually increasing their incomes during the late 193o's. If only a handful of former poor peasants, like Wu Manyou and Tian Erhong, were making spectacular progress, a host of others were now able to buy oxen, donkeys, and sheep with their profits.47 Their counterparts in the still strife-torn Suide lagged a long way behind. REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION IN SUIDE,

1934-1940

Secondary schools in the Suide and Yulin county towns produced some of the Shaanxi Communist Party's most important recruits, and activists had been agitating and organizing in the Suide countryside since the late 1920's.48 But just as some of the towns in this prefecture were revolutionary breeding-grounds, so were they also the province's major centers of counterrevolution. Yulin remained a Nationalist stronghold throughout the resistance-war period, and the CCP rarely worked aboveground in Suide city before 1940. Moreover, the fierce and long resistance to revolution in the overcrowded rural areas here left landownership and user rights in a hopelessly muddled state. The lines of political authority, especially at lower levels, were inextricably tangled after six years of oscillating revolutions and counterrevolutions, and we can only imagine what deep mistrust and suspicion there must have been in many rural communities. Party analysts identified "five different stages of land relations" in the Suide subregion between 1934 and 1942.49 In the first, from the winter of 1934 to late 1935, land reform was begun and often consolidated in the areas that fell within the Shaanbei Soviet-that is, southern and eastern Suide county, eastern Qingjian, the northern districts of Jiaxian, and all of Wubao county (see Maps 1 and 5). Those areas therefore featured both "red villages" and "reddish villages" (hongguole cunzi); reddish villages were ones where revolutionary committees and poor peasant associations had been formed and there had been some redis-

82

Land Reform and Reconstruction

tributions of grain but not of land. 50 Where reform was "thorough," land reform resulted in average holdings of about nine mu per person in Suide county (and slightly more in less crowded areas).* Landlords and rich peasants qualified for land grants in the same way as everyone else but were allotted the poorest and most distant plots. "Reactionary" landlords did not receive any land at all. Since alarmed landlords in neighboring districts often fled to the towns, there were "some changes in class relations" even in the unreformed areas. A Nationalist encirclement and suppression campaign, begun in late 1935, resulted in the reoccupation of the whole Suide area and the official annulment of land confiscations. Reinstituted baojia organs and "societies for eliminating counterrevolutionaries" (sufanhui) actively encouraged landlords and rich peasants to retrieve their properties. Nevertheless, some landlords allowed the erstwhile peasant-owners to stay on as tenants, and a few, "fearing a return of the Red Army," did not collect rents. Others, for the same reason, mortgaged out their recovered land, often to the peasants who had seized it. The political uncertainty of the period resulted in a rash of such mortgages (accelerating a trend stoked by the 1928-31 famine). Soviet administrations survived in some villages and even whole townships, and peasants there kept the land they had won in the revolution. Even so, Party investigators calculated that between mid-1936 and late 1937, Suide landlords recovered three-quarters of their original landholdings. The third stage began with the establishment of an 8th Route Army garrison in the subregion in November 1937, a united-front concession to the Communists that the Nationalists more or less honored. The Communists also claimed the five Suide counties as part of Shaan-GanNing, but the Nationalists' ambivalent understanding of the precise terms of the territorial "concessions" made to the Communists left that area in a political limbo for the next two years. He Shaonan, sent by the GMD as "special commissioner" (zhuanyuan) to oversee the counties in the northeast (both inside and outside Shaan-Gan-Ning), based his prefectural administration in Suide county.51 He Shaonan is described in Party histories as a notorious "friction specialist" (maca zhuanjia) who, during his two-year reign in *All farmland owned by villagers was added up and divided by the total population in order to determine the value of land "portions" (fen). In Suide one portion equaled 7·5 mu. An adult laborer received 1.5 of a fen (i.e., 11.25 mu), a youth 1.25 of a fen (9+ mu), and women, children, and the aged 1 fen. Chai Shufan et al., Suide, Mizhi tudi wenti, p. 24-

Land Reform and Reconstruction

83

Suide, deliberately incited mintuan and Gelaohui militia to launch assaults on the Communist forces stationed in the area.52 He began by presenting himself as a sincere reformer, declaring that his was a joint Guomindang-Communist government, that the CCP had "equal rights" in the Suide counties, and that he would cooperate with the 8th Route Army in supervising land redistributions.53 The return of that army to what the Party now called the "garrison district" (jingqu) was marked by a joint Communist-He Shaonan announcement that landholdings were to remain as they were, and that rents were not to exceed one-third of the annual crop.54 Within months, however, He and the garrison command were at odds, and all pretense of cooperation in a "joint administration" was soon discarded. Commissioner He, according to one Party account, had urged the "rich peasant league" (junong tongmenghui) and Gelaohui branches to mobilize victims of land reform for a "recovery of lost lands" movement.* As a consequence, some land had passed back into the landlords' hands, and rent and debt collectors had resumed their harrying of the peasants. This, in the Party's analysis, represented the fourth shift in landownership and user-rights patterns. Communist agitators in many villages organized resistance against all such "Guomindang reactionaries." The CCP's increasingly militant stance in Suide throughout 1939 encouraged peasants in some places to challenge their landlords again and wrest back the land they had lost in 1938. There had been so many shifts in political winds, however, and so much to-ing and fro-ing of land occupancy that most peasants and landlords alike considered a "wait-and-see" stance the only safe option. Some landlords and tenants, it is said, came to a "tacit understanding." They told He Shaonan's agents that the land had been restored to the landlord, and 8th Route Army authorities that it was in peasant hands.55 Many landlords, fed up with the whole business, quickly sold or mortgaged off any land they had retrieved since 1936 before a political change of wind could embolden their tenants again. Finally, in February 1940, while the Party leaders in Yan'an fired off a petition to Chiang Kai-shek and senior provincial officials demanding that Commissioner He be arrested and replaced by Wang Zhen, Wang's 359th Brigade backed it up by forcibly driving the com*The commissioner is said to have issued the following order in 1938: "Execute any peasant who does not hand back the land he took. Execute any landlord who does not demand that his land be returned. Imprison any people who delay the return of land or who delay recovering their land." Chai Shufan et al., Suide, Mizhi tudi wenti, p. 27.

84

Land Reform and Reconstruction

missioner from office.* The GMD authorities ignored the petition and refused to recognize the de facto Party government of Suide but did not make any attempt to contest the Communists' claim with military action. Later, in October, the Nationalists formally conceded most of five Suide counties to the Border Region, to put a major section of northeastern Shaanbei once and for all under Communist rule.56 This mission accomplished, the Communists immediately set a "restore land" (guidi) movement in train. Although the 1937 ruling ("preserve the existing situation") was affirmed as valid, the new government expected any land that had been subsequently seized by landlords to be restored to peasant cultivators. In July 1940 the Suide Provisional Assembly passed a set of detailed regulations for rent reduction. They explicitly affirmed "the principle of private ownership of land" and declared that all land claims recognized by the "restore land" movement as valid now had legal standing. The tumultuous history of the previous half-decade, however, had left people with little confidence in government authorities, whether Communist or Nationalist. The following passage from a Party report makes it clear that the "restoration" of land to peasants was a confused business, and that it was impossible to identify any clear winners at this stage: If peasants asked for land, they were given land. If they did not ask, they did not get any. Some peasants felt that, because land had passed back and forth in a seesawing struggle as many as three or four times, any land they got was not secure, and so they did not ask for any. Or else they were worried that He Shaonan would come back and, fearing for their lives, they did not dare ask for land. Therefore, the extent to which "land restorations" were implemented, and the amounts of land that were restored, varied greatly from place to place. Some landlords did not dare to refuse to hand over their land, and some peasants did not dare openly to ask for land. The two sides might have privately reached a compromise, or a tacit understanding, with the result that it was not at all clear whether or not the land had actually been "restored" or who, in fact, owned it. In some places land fell waste because neither side dared to lay claim to it.57

Party investigators argued that new political stability in the subregion after early 1940, and the formulation of regulations guaranteeing human, civil, property, and political rights (by the regional as *The CCP had long been demanding that He Shaonan be removed, presenting the GMD authorities in Xi' an with a list of his "criminal activities," which included "bribery, embezzlement of relief funds, opium smuggling, banditry, [and] assassination." Hsii, Survey, part 1, p. 7· See also Wang Zhiyuan, Xibei genjudi lishi diwei, pp. 234-35.

Land Reform and Reconstruction

85

well as the subregional assembly), caused both peasants and landlords to become "very enthusiastic about land rights." This enthusiasm explained, they said, the growing incidence of quarrels over fendi (land distributed during land reform), shoudi (land reclaimed by landlords), guidi (land restored to peasants), and pindi (land that had been "donated" to the peasant associations during the land revolution).58 "Quarrels" is too mild a word for it. When Communist cadres in the early 1940's presented themselves as mediators of land disputes and promised social justice, the Suide countryside began to seethe with litigiousness; the frenzy of land claims and counterclaims quite clearly dismayed the scholarly investigators from Yan'an. Furthermore, though the ousting of He Shaonan was a blow to old elite authority in Suide, it did not irrevocably break it. And so, at a time when the rest of Shaan-Gan-Ning had been "recuperating" for four years (and, moreover, with Nationalist financial aid), the CCP in 1940 turned to the formidable task of reconstructing Suide' s villages, many of which had been in upheaval for five or six years, in a countryside that was still full of unfriendly rivals. CLASS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN SUIDE,

1941-1942

Not only did the Communists get a considerably later start in the northeastern subregion; they faced problems there that several years' experience in administering the other four subregions, all sparsely populated, did not necessarily illuminate. The big challenge in the five newly secured counties was to find a solution to the problem of land scarcity, a problem that underlay most of the disputation over land. Furthermore, the much bigger populations of desperately poor farm families here made it inevitable that any economic recovery would be a good deal slower than in other parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning. The Party's assessment was that, after the successive "counterrevolutionary" tides in the garrison district, land reform could be said to be effective in only a minority of places, and that as much as 70 percent of the rural population in the unreformed area lived below the subsistence level (i.e., were poor peasants in the Party's definition). A Party survey in 1942 found that most of Mizhi county and western Suide county had been left completely untouched by the sovietperiod land reform. We are given the example of the ninth bao of Mizhi

86 Land Reform and Reconstruction county's Yindou district.* Poor peasant households here still made up 67 percent of the population and owned just 9.6 percent of the land (with an average of 8-4 mu per household). Six landlord households, 2 percent of the population, owned 64 percent of the land.59 The situation in the six hamlets of Yangjiagou village was similar. Ninety percent of all village land was owned by members of the Ma family, and of the 220 non-Ma households (81 percent of the village population), only 47 families owned any land at all.60 Even in places where landownership was less concentrated, the holdings of poor families were hopelessly small. In the ninth township of Shuangyuhu city (now the Zizhou county seat), though poor peasants constituted about 50 percent of the population and owned 21 percent of the land, their average landholding was still only 15 mu. The Party survey team judged that, for a subsistence livelihood, a household needed 30 mu of cropland at the very least, and 90 mu, if a small household's labor (i.e., 1.5 laborers) was to be efficiently deployed.61 In Yindou district's ninth bao, 86 percent of all peasant households owned less than 30 mu. Most poor peasants got by only by hiring themselves out to other farmers and putting inadequate time into their own farms as a consequence. A string of bad harvests in the late 1930's and the growing Communist menace had persuaded some landlords in these unreformed districts to sell off land and put their money into opium, usury, or textile manufacturing. A "decline in the landlord economy" was discernible, we are told, in the fact that many big landlords now ate "poor man's food" (qieqiefan) as one of their three daily meals.62 Nevertheless, only rarely had these families sold all their land and moved out of the villages; they had usually relinquished only the poorest of their holdings and, after an initial "wait-and-see" attitude in early 1940, they had begun to reassert themselves in ways that often obstructed Party reconstruction work. "Within the rural economy, they still played a large, even a definitive role," said the investigators; they retained their old social and political positions in the countryside, and they "maintained broad linkages with elites outside the Border Region." The Communists also expected the rich peasant class to be unfriendly and uncooperative, particularly in their capacity as "small landlords." A depressed agricultural economy had caused many rich peasants to let their laborers go (wages in the Suide-Mizhi area were not high, but * Baojia terms continued to be used, if erratically, in the Sui de subregion until late 1941. In Shaanbei a baa was a township and a lianbao was a district (qu).

Land Reform and Reconstruction TABLE

87

6

The Results of Land Reform in the Third Township of Yanjiachuan District, Suide County, 1942 Before land reform

Class Landlords Rich peasants Middle peasants Poor peasants Hired workers Other TOTAL

1942

Households

Landlords

Rich peasants

3 8 85 178 44 3 321

3

5

Middle peasants

7 6 75 120 26 234

Poor peasants

Hired workers

Other

8" lOb

1 25 68 31 125

Total households

lOF

189d

sse

3 3

3 369

souRCE; Chai Shufan et al., pp. 103-4. a Brothers in two of the original landlord households had set up independently as 7 households

by 1942, and were classified as middle peasants. The other landlord owned some land close to the GMD border and so avoided having it confiscated; the confiscation of other property reduced him to "small landlord" status. b One of the originalS rich peasant households split into 3 with the division of property among brothers; they dropped to middle peasant status. Three households stayed in the rich peasant category because adult sons had not left home and the families had some money stashed away. The other 4 households were reduced to middle and poor peasant status by land confiscations. c The original85 middle peasant households had increased to 101 by 1942 as a result of household division. That process caused 25 to drop to poor peasant status. Land confiscations had little impact on this category. d All the growth in this category was due to household division. e The original 44 hired worker households had increased to 58 as a result of adult sons leaving home.

employers also had to feed their hired hands) and to rent out their land rather than try to run big farms. They were investing their surplus capital in nonagricultural businesses, a trend exacerbated by the Party's land tenancy and taxation policies. As always, Party analysts wanted to demonstrate that where land redistributions had been consolidated, there had been a big increase in middle peasant numbers. They offer as an example the third township of Yanjiachuan district (in central Suide county), where by 1942, as we see in Table 6, land reform had pushed (or pulled) more than two-thirds of the households into the middle peasant bracket. The reason why so many households remained "poor," the investigators explained, was that in the bulk of cases, landlords had dispossessed them in 1937-38 of the land that had earlier been distributed to them. And though they got it back in 1940, those households were still severely

88 Land Reform and Reconstruction short of fertilizer, animal fodder, seed, and food. Additionally, all but one of the hired peasants had been able to move up, and some middle peasants, because of divisions of family property among brothers, had slipped down. The survey team also noted that though the distribution of land to hired peasants had more or less eliminated that class, it had certainly not done away with the need for supplementary employment among a large number of village families; hiring-out remained a basic survival strategy for the majority of poor farmers. 63 The middle peasant families of Yanjiachuan owned, on average, 24.6 mu after land reform. The poor peasant average was 21.9 mu.64 So poorer classes here were better off than their counterparts in the unreformed districts. But their circumstances were still very inferior to those of their class brothers in Yanshu. Remember that Wu Manyou, a landless migrant from Yulin in 1935, got 200 mu during land reform and was probably farming more than that by now.* There was little scope for that kind of improvement in the Sui-Mi area. Land revolution might have achieved some leveling of classes, but there was just not enough land to go around, and most middle peasants-the revolution's biggest winners-still heavily depended on income from sidelines. The investigators were not deluded by the increasing trend in the land-reform districts toward middle peasant involvement in enterprises such as sheep raising and salt peddling; 65 these activities were subsistence strategies much more than entrepreneurial initiatives. The Party conceded that very few middle peasants in Suide-Mizhi in 1942 were on their way to becoming rich peasants, and that a "lack of rapid development" characterized the agriculture economy as a whole.66 Mao Zedong, in his report to the Senior Cadres Conference at the end of 1942, referred to the Suide subregion as "the area that has not developed." 67 Mao was making the point that land scarcity, the strength of landlordism, and the extreme poverty of the great majority of the subregion's farmers made it a particularly difficult place to reform. But it was also the case that during a period when Yanshu was enjoying unprecedented peace and stability, the Suide countryside was wracked with political conflict and confusion. There were, in the pre-1940 period, pockets of "red territory" in which the 8th Route Army was the de facto government of a township, even a district. The *Wu Manyou had 90 mu under cultivation in 1938, 120 mu in 1939, and 230 mu in 1942. The figure jumped to 330 in 1943 and to 450 in 1944. "Wu Manyou he Wujiazaoyuan."

Land Reform and Reconstruction

8g

administrative organ in these areas was usually a kangjiuhui (national salvation association).68 If landlords still tried to collect rents from their tenants here, the army enforced reduced rent rates, and we can presume that landlords sold off their properties in the "red" districts if they could find buyers. But apart from some "protection for poor peasant interests," no durable reconstruction work could be undertaken in the "red" villages, and certainly not in any coherent and systematic manner across the subregion. The survey team sent out to investigate the Suide-Mizhi area in 1941-42 identified land scarcity and the resulting unruly competition for land between all classes of people as one of the first problems the regional and new Suide subregional administrations needed to address.69 But even as local authorities were still pondering and planning what to do, the Yan'an leaders were devising a radically revised approach to economic construction in the Border Region as a whole. The Party's pivotal rectification movement (zhengfeng yundong) of 1941-42 was to include an overhaul of work methods in all enterprises and undertakings. The slowing of wasteland reclamation work in Yanshu during 1941 and 1942 can be explained, in part, by a growing official distaste for the "commandist" mobilization methods that stirred a dangerous level of popular resentment and by the fact that, given the available workforce, it was extremely difficult to keep all of the new cropland under cultivation. Shifting people out of the crowded Suide counties into the Yanshu wastelands presented itself as an obvious solution to this problem and, of course, to the problem of land scarcity in Suide. So potentially, at least, a migration program from the northern to the southern counties could bring great benefits to the people of both subregions. So it was that internal migration came to be pivotal to rural reconstruction in both Suide and Yanshu in the early 194o's. Migrant resettlement had most certainly been an aspect of the planning for economic recovery in rural Yanshu before 1940, but the incorporation of the populous Suide counties, in combination with radically new approaches to reconstruction in general, now gave migrant work a new importance. Moreover, the "recuperate and multiply" policy was given a more human face after 1941. Much more than the drives to reclaim wasteland (the success of which was invariably measured in mu), migrant resettlement put the spotlight on things human and social. It created the possibility of a quite radical rebuilding and reshaping of village communities in the wasteland districts.

CHAPTER

4

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties, 1937-1945

GRANARIES WERE EMPTY in strategic parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning in March 1941, and there was "a panic over grain everywhere that spring." 1 The immediate causes of the crisis were the complete drying up of the GMD subsidy to the Border Region after January/ the economic blockade that had been tightening since Nationalist armies had reoccupied parts of southern Yanshu and Guanzhong in 1939, and, beginning in 1940, an escalation of Japanese assaults on the Party's rear-area bases (see Map 1).* The trauma jolted the Communists into an urgent search for ways to make the Border Region economically self-sufficient, and that search instigated a "rectification" of all policy arenas. An important result of the reassessments of economic policy was a more rigorous, systematic, and innovative approach to economic development than had prevailed during the united front's heyday. In both Chinese Communist and Western analyses, the 1941-42 crisis was what gave rise to the distinctive "Yan'an-period" style of Chinese communism.3 Still, there were important continuities in the Party's economic policy throughout the resistance-war period. The novelties and muchpublicized achievements of 1943-44 were more the result of an accelerated, broader, and more disciplined effort than of a shift in direction. In fact, as Peter Schran points out, the economic policies affirmed at

*The blockade took the form of 400,000 Nationalist troops around the southern and western boundaries of Shaan-Gan-Ning and further constriction of CCP activity in Suide.

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

91

the first Border Region Assembly in January 1939 were, in essence, a continuation of policies that had been developed in the CCP soviets during the 1927-34 period, and that would form the basis of the Communists' reconstruction program right up to the late 1940's.4 All the same, we can concede a consistency and tenacity of Party purpose and still recognize important "breakthroughs" in village reconstruction after 1942, especially given that much of the progress before that was largely "recuperative," not "developmental." That the fiscal crisis came as a jolt to the Communists is evidenced in taxation patterns. The CCP may not have been caught completely unawares by the collapse of the united front, but its failure to plan and prepare for that is very clearly demonstrated in the rapid upward spiraling of rural taxation after 1938, a development that did significant damage to the morale of the Communists' most important constituents, the peasants. Gains made by peasants since 1936 helped soften some of the blow. By 1941 villages under Party administration were rarely harassed by bandit gangs, and "relief grain" handouts or loans were available to farmers when their crops failed. Five years of civil peace in most parts of Yanshu, substantial tax relief for all but a better-off minority between 1936 and 1939, and firm guarantees of free farm help to army households (kangshuhu) enabled most peasant families to get on with their farmwork in peace and some security. Communist reforms had made Shaan-Gan-Ning a safer place in which to live and raise families. Even so, progress in community building had been, at best, slow in most places and not yet begun in newly secured districts. In Yanshu numerous hamlets still consisted of only a handful of households. If those settlements constituted "communities" in any sense, it was only because the few resident families were connected by kinship ties. Most Suide villages were of quite a different character. In terms of size, social differentiation, occupational diversity, and external linkages, farmer settlements in the densely populated areas of Shaanbei's northeast did at least look like village communities. As we have seen, however, sustained economic recession and civil strife in that subregion had resulted in severe communal friction and atomization, a condition that land reform more often exacerbated than cured. Any instances of strong village corporateness in the Suide-Mizhi area (the Ma family's Fufengzhai is probably an example) are the exceptions that prove the rule. The CCP's community-building project in both Yanshu and Suide entailed, most importantly, developing community loyalties and co-

92 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties operation among villagers. There were also the beginnings, in the 1940's, of the process that Western scholars have described as the "cellularization" or "parcelization" of rural society-the process by which intervillage linkages were progressively weakened as village cells became more cohesive and self-sufficient. In both Yanshu and Suide, Party reforms were certainly designed to reduce itineracy and, once the wastelands were repopulated, to discourage further migrations. But since the success of rural reconstruction rested on the revival and expansion of rural markets, this period did not see the kind of community contraction that accompanied collectivization in the 195o's. Village reconstruction began, then, with migrations that either padded out settlements or purged them; after that the challenge was to make the refashioned villages cohesive and cooperative. In the depopulated wastelands of Yanshu and Guanzhong, the reformers' task was to fill out village populations with new settlers and develop local markets in a way that made marketing communities self-sufficient. In overcrowded Suide the dispatch of surplus manpower to the southern wastelands, coupled with land reform, would serve two purposes. A more rational distribution of land would reduce travel times between plots and allow farmers to engage in new pursuits. And a redistribution that gave families enough land to keep the menfolk busy would alleviate the problem of migrancy. Thus a major consequence of successful immigration work in both Yanshu and Suide should have been stronger bonds between village residents, more villager interest in community projects, and greater numbers of settled-down families, if not in the villages of their ancestors, at least in places that could be made home. The Communists were building on a well-established tradition when they launched the "go south" campaigns in 1943· The wastelands and undermanned farms of the Yanshu counties had always served as a safety valve for ruined Suide farmers, and particularly so after the 1928 famine. Thousands more Suide people made the trek after 1935, lured by the prospect of tax relief across the border in Shaan-Gan-Ning or to escape from the continuing civil unrest at home, or both. The big difference once the CCP governed Suide, and especially after 1942, was the new government's attempt to channel this southward flow side by side with a concerted effort to persuade migrant workers and refugees to stay and "set up households" (jianli jiawu) in the wasteland districts. Mustering seasonal migrants into work gangs for wasteland clearance

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

93

was an easy enough task. It was quite a different matter, however, to arrange and provide for the permanent resettlement of migrant families. The CCP experiments with community building in the Yanshu countryside, and the planned migrations out of the Suide counties that served those experiments, are the central focus of this chapter. Data from the Guanzhong subregion is used where it helps fill out the story and to point up the special features of resettlement work in Yanshu.* PATTERNS OF MIGRATION

Party investigators calculated that in 1944 there was still a total of 1,58o,ooo mu of unused arable land in Yanshu, and at least the same amount in each of the Guanzhong, Longdong, and Sanbian subregions. This calculation was used to support the proposal that between 25,000 and 5o,ooo immigrants be resettled in Yanshu that year,5 an extraordinarily ambitious goal, considering that fewer than 1o,ooo had moved there the year before. As it turned out, the total achieved for the four subregions in 1944 was little more than 22,000. The immigrant resettlement program is characterized by a yawning gulf between planned targets and actual results, more so than other Party experiments of the period. This is a reflection of both the great complexity of a project that aimed to adjust the imbalances between the land-scarce and landabundant districts, and of the naivete of planners who perceived the task at hand as mainly a statistical problem with a logistical solution. By the Party's 1946 count, 266,619 people (63,850 households) moved to Shaan-Gan-Ning's four underpopulated subregions between 1937 and 1945; the overcrowded fifth subregion, Suide, provided one source of immigrants.t We have annual totals only for the five years after 1940 (Table 7), and these add up to 92,015 persons (or 28A75 households). This would mean that as many as 174,604 people moved *In the early 1940's, when the Shaan-Gan-Ning government began to push the "go south" movement, Yanshu was advertised as the most practical and hospitable destination for Suide folk. Because most were urged to and did go there, I habitually speak only of Yanshu in this book. But it should be borne in mind that the government in fact encouraged migration to all four of the underpopulated subregions from 1939 onward. tThe report identified three main locales from which people migrated into the Border Region. The first was the GMD-controlled territory along the northern, western, and southern borders of Shaan-Gan-Ning; from there came people fleeing "natural disasters, feudal oppression, and the unbearable dark control [of the GMD]." The second was Japanese-occupied Shanxi and Hebei provinces. And the third was the Suide subregion. SGN [n], p. 400.

94 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties TABLE

7

Migration into Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1937-1945 Immigrants a Period

1937-45 1941-45 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1937-40

Contingent from Suide

People

Households

People

266,619 92,015 20,740 12,431 30,447 26,692 6,200 (174,604)'

63,850 28,475 7,855 5,056 8,570 7,823 811 (33,375)'

>40,000?

1,483 4,971 4,500b 3,426 27,240

Households

471 1,836

8,527

souRcEs: 1937-45 immigrant figures: SGN [11]. Suide figures: 1937-40, "Huading yiminqu," citing Gao Zili, head of the Reconstruction Dept.; 1942-43, Bianqu [13]; 1944, NBIR [4], pp. 5-6; 1945, SGN [11]. a The immigrant totals include not only people from outside the Border Region, but emigrants from Suide to the 4 underpopulated subregions. Suide did attract refugees from GMD-controlled Hengshan and Yulin, but we can assume that these refugees, once discovered, were quickly sent on down to the southern wastelands. b Year's target. ' Inferred from reported 1937-45 total.

into (or within) Shaan-Gan-Ning in the four years between 1937 and 1941, an astonishing figure given that migration was not explicitly encouraged, planned, and subsidized by the Border Region government until 1940. But it is quite a plausible figure, particularly when we consider the early influx into Yan'an city of young intellectuals and political refugees from the eastern seaboard cities, and the resettling of as many as 1o,ooo veteran soldiers and their families in the Border Region once it was secured.6 Those additions are reflected in the population figures for Yan'an county presented in Table 8. The acceptance by commentators of the Party's very large "rough estimates" of immigration is often an endorsement of the view, purposefully fostered by the Party, that the Border Region was regarded and sought as a refuge by numerous people outside its borders? It possibly was, but we have almost no information about who the majority of immigrants were before 1940 or where they settled in the region. Especially tantalizing are the data in Table 7 indicating that close to 28,ooo people emigrated from Suide to Shaan-Gan-Ning in the years 1937-40 and the claim in a Liberation Daily editorial in early 1943 that most of the 30,000 or so emigrants who had come to Yan'an county alone up to that date were from Suide.8 Elsewhere we have more mod-

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

95

TABLE 8 The Population of Yan lm County, 1937-1944

Immigrants

Total population Year

People

Households

1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944

33,705

7,703

55,198a 64,292 74,575 76,536b

13,091 16,446

People

Households

1,200 1,976 6,090 14,207 6,231 3,045

249 533 1,137 5,040 1,050 982

18,726

souRcEs: 1937, 1942 total population, 1937-42 immigrants: Wu Yongli. 1941 total population: JFRB, Dec. 5, 1941. 1943 total population and all immigrant data: NBIR [4], pp. 5-6. 1944 total population and the two city figures: CYHWX, p. 378. a Including 7,223 in Yan'an city. b Including 12,371 in Yan'an city.

est estimates of Suide migrant numbers. A 1946 report stated that a total of 2o,ooo people moved from Suide to the region's wasteland districts during the war years,9 a figure that better accords with the detailed and credible data we have for the 1942-45 period. When planned migration out of the Suide subregion was initiated after 1941, the mobilizers had difficulty meeting the target quotas of 5,000 people a year.* In fact, the once steady flow of northeasterners into Yanshu may well have slowed down after 1940, despite the vigorous "move south" campaigns. The defusing of civil strife after He Shaonan was deposed in early 1940 and the new administration's tax and tenancy reform almost certainly made the Suide poor less inclined to move away.10 For this reason the large figure of 27,740 Suide migrants for the earlier years (1937-40) cannot be too quickly dismissed. And even half that number would have represented significant population growth in the parts of Yanshu that became resettlement districts. As we will see, the activities of Suide emigrants before 1942 were to have an important effect on the shape of the big post-1942 production drive in many places. *The possibility that the 1942-45 figures are gross underestimates should be considered. Since potential migrants were very unwilling to register for resettlement with government agencies, despite the offer of help with travel costs (Mao [2] p. 82), many people probably just moved on their own.

96

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

The evidence is that the numbers of people moving into ShaanGan-Ning from territories to the south and east of the region were always larger than the numbers from the north,U but because the Suide migrants settled in strategic parts of Yanshu, and the others mostly did not, the northerners received the lion's share of the publicity limelight. One obvious reason why the CCP played the Suide emigrants up was that they had much more resettlement success with them. The extreme poverty of the Henan and southern Shaanxi beggar bands who trudged across the southern and southeastern borders into Guanzhong and southern Yanshu put a strain on local economies and severely stretched the tolerance of local communities. People forced to desert their farms after failed harvests tended to turn up in the Border Region just when Shaan-Gan-Ning farmers were also battling spring hunger. And if there was propaganda mileage to be got from people who said they were fleeing Guomindang "oppression," there was also the worry that some might be active "Guomindang agents." We can guess that, in reality, very few were, but spying was a charge that easily stuck in Guanzhong, where Nationalist troops were always pressing against the borders. The infiltration of saboteurs was a suspicion deliberately stoked by local cadres and residents in a resistance against newcomers.U Furthermore, as the Communists became progressively more committed to a policy of planned migration, they had little enthusiasm for a group whose numbers, timing, routes, and destinations were unpredictable. Added to that was the consideration that a sizable population movement from Suide to Yanshu, if it could be made to work, had very important implications for the rural reconstruction of both subregions, an importance that resettlement projects elsewhere in ShaanGan-Ning did not have. In the early days the encouragement of migrations into Shaan-Gan-Ning was motivated by a concern to expand the whole region's population rapidly. By 1944, however, government strategists were arguing that internal migration (that is, southward from Suide) should be the central focus of all future resettlement programs.13 Communal harmony and properly coordinated economies now took precedence over handsome statistics. IMMIGRANT RESETTLEMENT

Shifting people to places where there was arable wasteland required, at a minimum, the immediate provision of housing, food, and seed,

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pots and pans, and farm tools. Apart from the resettling of army veterans, there had been little formal government planning or supervision of migration before 1940. Destitute newcomers might sometimes have qualified for a welfare handout r loan, just as farmers whose crops had failed did, but anything that could be called a migrant program in the early period was premised almost exclusively on the assumption that kin and hometown connections would see settlers through. It is paradoxical, then, that the Shaan-Gan-Ning government began to commit precious resources to immigrants at a time when a fiscal crisis loomed and it could not even feed troops and government workers adequately.14 There quickly appeared a large discrepancy between projected in-migration and available resettlement resources. In districts in which significant numbers of new settlers did not have "social connections" among local residents, the established families were plainly pressed very hard to help out, and this over the three years when land taxes were soaring. If, in the early period, what direct government aid there was came mostly out of welfare relief funds, the preferred method of subsidy after 1940 was in the form of agricultural loans. Most of the data we have are for Yan'an county. According to a 1939 report, 4,ooo yuan in relief was handed out to the poor in Yan'an's South District that year; 40 immigrant families received 45 yuan each, and 85 poor peasants were given up to 35 yuan apiece toward the purchase of an ox (which probably cost about 150 yuan at the time).15 This county government, it seems, continued to find some funds for migrants during the lean years. Another report noted that 25,000 yuan had been spent on buying farm tools for new settlers in 1940, and that in 1941 and 1942, the Border Region Bank had provided Boo,ooo yuan in loans for the same purpose.16 Food, however, was the immediate and urgent problem. Much publicity was given in 1943 to the generosity of the Yan'an city government workers who had donated ten dan of grain they had saved out of their own food rations for the support of refugees (through an economy drive that probably left them half-starved)P It was left to the writer's audience to get the message: this hopelessly inadequate amount was all that could be reasonably expected from government sources. In the three years from 1940 to 1942, 1,628.38 dan of grain was collected from farm families in Yan'an county to be issued as food loans to new settlers. That this collection was resented and resisted is evidenced in the 1942 ruling that borrowers must pay 30 percent interest

98 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

on these loans each autumn, and that the government would guarantee repayments.18 In December of the same year, an analysis of the damage caused by the high 1941 and 1942 tax quotas recommended that government after-tax "borrowings" or cheap purchases of grain from peasants should stop.19 Mao Zedong, in his major report on the regional economy to senior cadres that same month, tabled a Yan'an county document that discussed the problem of preharvest food supplies for new settlers and made much of the fact that landlords and employers had almost fully met the subsistence needs of 1,009 of the county's immigrant families, issuing a total of 115-45 dan of food grain over the year.20 By 1942 the rectification of work styles required that the people be allowed to "run things for themselves"; that minban principle was applied in both the public and the private sphere and underpinned all of the mass campaigns in the later Yan'an period. Applied to the migration program, it promised to replace the coercive exacting of aid for immigrants with community assistance arrangements that were palatable, even advantageous, to the established residents. When Mao publicly recommended that rich peasants be encouraged to take in the poorest immigrants as sharecropping tenants, he was defining the direction of future resettlement work: the government would put much greater reliance on private employers.Z1

Employment: Immigrant Tenants The CCP's very explicit endorsement of landlordism (even if a benevolent and tightly regulated landlordism) required some explaining. The "new democracy" thesis provided a theoretical justification for "a bit of exploitation" by rentiers, but the Party's public defense of the strategy was usually expressed in pragmatic terms. Sharecropping and especially anzhuangjia tenancies were a means of meeting the basic subsistence needs of destitute new settlers, and at minimum or no cost to the government. The likelihood that some landlords and employers would exploit immigrant farmers was justified on the grounds that the alternative for the propertyless newcomer was starvation.22 Moreover, two measures were expected to protect immigrant tenants and expedite their independence: having government cadres act as middlemen for landlords and tenants (or bosses and hired hands) and making all immigrant tenants and laborers eligible for free grants of arable wasteland. In the various government rulings and directives about immigrant

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resettlement, and in the 1940 and 1943 regulations in particular/3 there are clear instructions about employment procedures for immigrants. Clause 7 of the 1940 regulations required all immigrants looking for employment to apply for work through the government; the government, in turn, would ensure that they were not "tyrannized" by employers.24 The more comprehensive 1943 regulations required immigrants who did not have the means to farm independently to support themselves as anzhuangjia tenants or as hired laborers; the government would provide introductions to employers for people who requested this help.25 The government was willing to give direct assistance to potential landlords or employers in the form of bank loans and would stand as guarantor of employee reliability. By the same token, should newcomers find themselves in a position to establish an independent farm enterprise immediately, they could apply for a government loan to pay for hired help.26 Though few immigrant farmers were likely to harvest a subsistence crop on newly reclaimed land in the first or even the second year of settlement, it sometimes happened that an enterprising newcomer accepted a wasteland grant, found profitable employment for all members of his family, and used hired laborers to clear, dig, and sow his land while he himself worked elsewhere as a tenant or odd-jobber. Such an arrangement was unusual, but that it was even possible reflects an official willingness to countenance any form of labor deployment that worked and was not grossly unfair. It reflects also the Shaan-Gan-Ning government's determination to extend cropland acreage by whatever means possible, as well as its concern that new settlers should put down roots in their adopted villages by owning their own farmland there. The Communists were usually prepared to turn a blind eye to the employment deals struck between newcomers and their kin or hometown connections. The dilemma was living up to their promise to prevent those who moved south as strangers in a strange land from being exploited. It was soon obvious that local farmers would not take on immigrants at the cost of increased government scrutiny of their operations. For this reason local cadres were repeatedly told that "a bit of exploitation is inevitable," and that crop shares or wages were to be negotiated by the contracting parties, not the government?7 The special immigrant reclamation areas (yiminde kenqu) had abundant wasteland, either publicly or privately owned, and in the places where land had not been redistributed (in Yanshu, only Fu county and Yan'an city), the Communists made a show of "respecting landlord prop-

100 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties erty rights."* Wasteland belonging to absentee owners was said to be "rented" by the new settlers who farmed it, but the three-year exemption from rent payments and "permanent tenancy rights" put these so-called tenants in exactly the same position as people who had been given grants of public wasteland. Even so, if all a newcomer had was the free and unrestricted use of developed land owned by an absentee landlord, he was a good deal worse off than immigrant tenants who worked for a resident landlord under an anzhuangjia or huozhong arrangement and had no worries about housing and equipment. It is difficult to determine the extent to which anzhuangjia tenancies were used as a means of employing new settlers. There are the much-quoted Yan'an county data reproduced in Mao's 1942 report indicating that 466 of the 1,009 immigrant households surveyed were accommodated by anzhuangjia landlords?8 But the households investigated probably represented just 14 percent of all new arrivals to Yan'an county between 1940 and 1942}9 and we can guess that they were clustered around Yan'an city, where many were employed as sharecroppers on state and army farms. Data for 157 immigrant families in Yan'an's Liulin district also show a sizable proportion of new arrivals between 1940 and 1943 contracting anzhuangjia tenancies in their first year of residence (Appendix B). Here, again, it is possible that proximity to Yan'an city and the preferential treatment that Liulin, as a "model" district, always received made for a wider adoption of the anzhuangjia form there than elsewhere. That could explain why a good number of migrants were farming independently, as ownercultivators, by their second or third year in Liulin district. In 1940, 23 families spending their first year in Liulin district owned a total of 11 oxen and donkeys; by 1943 they had 30 (Appendix B), and their stock of mules, sheep, and pigs had substantially increased as well. No family in this area was self-sufficient without a draft animal, and we can assume that enterprising new settlers in Liulin had fairly easy access to low-interest loans for the purchase of their livestock. The indications are that most of the immigrants who settled in the Yan'an area in the late 1930's and early 1940's received bank loans, usually in *Four Yanshu counties were designated as immigrant reclamation areas: Yan'an, Zhidan, Fuxian, and Ganquan. Each county government then specified which districts or townships within the county were to take in migrants. "Huading yiminqu." Yan'an county had three immigrant reclamation districts in 1942: Chuankou, LiuJin, and Jinpen. Taodian district was subsequently added. Wu Yongli, "Yizhi shengchan laodongjun."

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the second year of residence, for the purchase of oxen or farm tools. 30 The Communists may have been careful not to interfere in the relationship between employers and their huozi or hired hands, but interventions that helped break the relationship were open and deliberate. Anzhuangjia tenancies had customarily been used as a way to help immigrant kinsmen from the northeast to find their feet just for a year or two. What the Communist government was urging on landowners was to offer free bed, board, tools, oxen, and a 50 percent share of the crop to nonkin settlers, and with no "feudal" strings attached. There were few willing takers, with the result that most voluntary anzhuangjia arrangements between nankin partners were contracted by government organs and, to a lesser extent, the army. The influx of immigrants and the ready supply of indigent laborers were something of a godsend to government personnel who had been told to grow their own food and to achieve "self-reliance." Mao Zedong himself recommended that schools and government offices contract "partnerships" (huozhong) with immigrants for that purpose. He cited the example of the general office of the Party school in Yan'an, which employed four immigrants to help farm its 300 mu and so freed all but one staff member from that work. Under this arrangement, the huozi got all the food and equipment they needed, plus 8o percent of the spiked millet crop, 70 percent of the coarse millet, and 6o percent of miscellaneous grains (beans, hemp-seed, sesame, etc.); the school took all of the hay? 1 As a second example, he pointed to the Border Region government secretariat's arrangement with 12 immigrant families to run an agricultural station, a partnership that earned income for the secretariat as well as "providing a livelihood for the twelve new households." 32 Ma Pi'en, the man picked out by the Party and cultivated as the Yanshu subregion's "immigrant hero," got his start as an anzhuangjia tenant on a government farm near Yan' an city/3 and we can guess that so did many other newcomers who settled in places close to the new state's administrative center. A call went out from Yan'an to local government cadres in all resettlement districts to set an example by taking in immigrants as tenants, and it is likely that county and district cadres very often used newcomers to work the farms from which their official duties forced them to be too long absent. The army's need for additional hands was not as pressing as that of government offices and schools; its ranks were full of young farmers and, in the relatively peaceful northwest, they had time for farmwork. Nevertheless, troops stationed in wasteland areas did sometimes offer

102 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties anzhuangjia contracts to new settlers. Even the legendary 359th Brigade, the region's most celebrated model of self-sufficiency, took in anzhuangjia tenants to help work the Nanniwan military farm.34 The Party press praised the public spirit of an 8th Route Army regiment stationed in Gulin county's Linzhen district, one of the county's main reception centers for refugees from Henan. In the winter of 1942-43, when the local government was groping for ways to cope with 83 refugee families, the regiment had stepped in to work out anzhuangjia arrangements with 19 of them. It had housed those families through the year, provided all their seed and other production needs, and forwent all interest on the loans of food that tided them through the harvest-all this for only 20 percent of the crop. Only four private families followed the regiment's lead, and all had required 30 percent of the harvest. The local government had to twist arms for the other 6o refugee families. It provided 15 dan in relief grain and collected "grain loans" from nearby farmers on which the refugees were to pay 20 percent interest.35 Clearly the CCP did not expect local residents to be as generous as the army and government. Even so, 30 percent crop shares and 20 percent interest were probably unrealistically low rates and unlikely to induce many farmers to offer anzhuangjia tenancies to unrelated newcomers. Even if private farmers were rarely willing to provide the full facilities of an anzhuangjia tenancy to destitute families, it was not so difficult to persuade them to rent out small plots of cultivated land to immigrants. For the immigrant, the use of land that could sustain his family through the first year of settlement was as important as the generous grants of wasteland available to him. For the established farmer, the renting or sharecropping by new settlers of some of his farmland gave him time to reclaim wasteland and extend his own holdings. If it could be made work, this was an arrangement that, in the long run, suited everyone. It did not meet the housing, food, and equipment needs of new arrivals, but if the result was an expansion of farmland acreage, the government was willing to compromise. While continuing to press for private contributions, it made sure that immigrant families had privileged access to the Border Region Bank's farm loans. Failing an anzhuangjia tenancy, the next best option for a new settler was to secure both a wasteland grant and the use of an area of cultivated land on which, in his first year of settlement, he could harvest crops other than coarse millet. According to a 1943 Party report, a total of 86,766 mu of cultivated land was "made available" (tiaoji)

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to newcomers to the Border Region in 1942 and 1943.36 Each of the 1,009 immigrant families in the Yan'an county survey had received an average of about 20 mu of cultivated land (their wasteland grants were usually at least twice as large as their farmland allotments).37 The term tiaoji (lit., "adjust" or "regulate") in this context is invariably a euphemism for commandeering by the state. In the Yan'an city area, a good proportion of the farmland worked by newcomers was the state-owned grain and vegetable land issued to offices and schools. Elsewhere, however, private farmers had to be persuaded to let new settlers sharecrop parts of their property. The promise of extra help with wasteland reclamation no doubt oiled these arrangements, and families short of manpower were glad enough to have a tenant who would help keep their land cultivated. A first interesting feature of the immigration program, therefore, is that it was responsible for a sizable increase in land tenancies in the resettlement areas. Furthermore, despite the putatively fixed rates in the 1942 land tenancy regulations/8 we know that there was official sanction for rents above the prescribed amounts, and that government personnel were as likely as private landlords to strike hard bargains with immigrants. Even more anomalous, perhaps, is the Yan'an government's vigorous promotion of a form of land tenure that, in the Communists' understanding of historical ;'progress," was judged to be more "backward" and less appropriate to the development of "capitalist farming" than a fixed-rent system. The 1942-43 tenancy reform movement in Suide was therefore "progressive," since it aimed to phase out sharecropping and establish a fixed-rent system as the norm. Conveniently, in that subregion, ideology served the Party's pragmatic needs: a fixed-rent system was also more easily supervised and regulated than sharecropping. In Yanshu the urgent need to reduce government expenditure on migrant resettlement dictated an entirely pragmatic solution: the revival of sharecropping. As it turned out, the government-promoted tenancies were slow to catch on in Yanshu and did not ever become a mainstay of the migrant resettlement program. In Suide landlords were able to exploit and profit from the competition between land-hungry tenants. By contrast, the Party-state's investment in wasteland reclamation in Yanshu, even though parsimonious, stacked the cards in the tenants' favor. With the leg up provided by sharecropping landlords during just one or two growing seasons, a tenant farmer was well on his way to establishing himself as an independent cultivator. The advantages for the landlord

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were, by comparison, minor, and he was probably better off hiring casual help when and how it suited him. The migrant resettlement program, in sum, did not by any measure reinvigorate, or even prop up, landlordism in the resistance-war years. It tried, with very limited success, to make landlordism serve what was essentially a "land to the tiller" movement.

Employment: Immigrant Hired Hands Hiring out was an obvious employment option for new immigrants. It was not, however, forcefully promoted by immigration authorities largely because it lacked some of the practical advantages of the anzhuangjia method, and also because the itineracy forced on casual laborers was not something the government wanted to foster. The majority of hired hands in the Yanshu counties were engaged as diaofenzi. This meant, in the first place, that the worker received a share of the crop rather than a wage. In at least some places, it also meant he got housing and what he needed in farm tools. There was debate within the Party over the precise status of the diaofenzi laborer and whether his situation was, in fact, any different from that of sharecropper?9 Variations in local customs and terminology sometimes confused the Yan'an investigators; a report on tenancies in the Suide subregion, for example, applied the term diaofenzi to the practice described as anzhuangjia throughout the Yanshu counties.40 The main issue, however, was the "rich peasant question," and the extent to which the government should encourage the "buying of labor" by prosperous farmers in the age of "new democracy." It is interesting to note the concerns of Party strategists in relation to diaofenzi and the problem of migrant resettlement. Diaofenzi was judged to be inferior to anzhuangjia tenancies on both theoretical and economic grounds. It entailed a buying of poor peasant labor in a way that anzhuangjia did not. The more servile position of the hired hand was, we are told, reflected in his receiving daily meals from his employer; huozi received only repayable grain loans. A diaofenzi laborer did not make independent production decisions, but farmed under the direction of a boss; a huozi was an independent small producer on rented land, a person who organized his own work schedules.41 Of most concern was the predicament of the hired hand's dependents; an employer issued meals to him but not to his family. Under the langong form of contracting farmworkers, it seems, all dependents did get a

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daily food ration,42 but the diaofenzi method was the more standard practice throughout Yanshu. The Yan'an county data for 1940-42 show that the breadwinners in 359 of the 1,009 immigrant families worked as diaofenzi (in 1942), compared with just 184 langong farmhands (the other 466 families as we have noted, were anzhuangjia tenants).43 And because diaofenzi was the most common form of employment for migrant men almost everywhere in Yanshu (anzhuangjia was mainly confined to districts close to Yan'an city), CCP planners had to make the best of it. Seasonal fluctuations in labor demand meant that diaofenzi work never provided year-round employment. The expansion of sideline occupations did not keep pace with the rapidly growing labor force; nor did the development of urban industries. The major area of employment opportunity in Yanshu was wasteland reclamation, and that did not provide indigent migrants with an immediate income. The government became resigned to the fact that it needed to provide safety nets for farmers threatened with starvation but began to recommend more insistently that Suide migrants leave their families behind until they had established a "production foundation" in the south.44 As with immigrant tenants, Party propagandists gave loud publicity to hired hands who quickly established themselves as ownercultivators. Wu Yongli, a writer for Liberation Daily, made a particular issue of the opportunities in the southern wastelands for people who were willing to tough out the early first year or two of settlement. He offered as one example forty-five-year-old Yang Hefu of Mizhi, who found diaofenzi employment in Yan'an county in 1939 and received 10 dan of grain and more than 100 jin of potatoes as his share of the harvest; this made it possible for his wife and son to join him at the end of the year. Yang had enough spare grain to buy an ox in 1940 and, having given up his laboring job, was able to open up 36 mu of wasteland that year. In 1942, his fourth year of residence, he made his first grain and salt tax payments and invested 375 yuan in the township cooperative. Another success story was Liu Haixiu, who was twenty-three when he migrated from Yulin to Yan'an in January 1941. He found diaofenzi employment that year, collected 10.5 dan as his share of the harvest, and was joined by 11 family members in November. In 1942 Liu again hired himself out while his two brothers farmed a wasteland grant of 18 mu and another 18 mu of cultivated land; a government loan of 110 yuan helped to buy tools. In 1943 two of the brothers were work-

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ing the family farm, and the third worked in the local cooperative (in which the family had invested 120 yuan). The data we have for the 157 immigrant families in Liulin district's fourth township also argue quite speedy independence for diaofenzi workers (Appendix B), although the proportion of such workers was relatively small-only 22 in the first year of residence, ten in the second, and one in the third. Liulin, as a model district, received relatively generous government subsidies and could provide tenancy or employment opportunities in government enterprises. This probably explains why diaofenzi, the government's less-preferred option, was not so common there as in other places.

Community Cooperation with Immigrants Significant numbers of newcomers did not find paid work, even in the special resettlement districts, and were forced to fend for themselves. Li Jiguan and his family, refugees from Henan, were given press publicity in 1943 for toughing out a difficult first year of self-employment and for their entrepreneurship. Li collected and sold firewood, his wife and daughters made shoes, and his son-in-law bred chickens. After only two months Li was able to set up a stall in Zhidan town to market the family's handicraft products. The womenfolk, moreover, had gone on to become pioneers of the women's spinning movement in the county town by providing the local cooperative with a cotton fluffer.45 Even people as resourceful as the Li family, however, still needed some assistance at the start by way of housing, grain, and cooking pots. Where newcomers did not have kin or hometown contacts to turn to, the Party tried to appeal to the "Border Region big family" idea and, if local residents did not buy that, to community compassion and pity. The press went to great lengths to emphasize the desperate poverty of the famine and war-zone refugees in particular, and to effusively praise the "heroes" who offered any kind of help. Significantly, almost all the publicity examples we have of community generosity toward migrants come from Guanzhong. To the villagers of that subregion fell the responsibility of integrating the poorest, least adaptable, and most transient of the immigrants who entered the Shaan-Gan-Ning region-the famine refugees from the south. Their arrival inevitably provoked local resentment and hostility. A vigorous media campaign was mounted to exhort tolerance, generosity, and personal sacrifice. Predictably, pressure was put on govern-

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ment cadres, and on township heads in particular, to act as models, and newspaper stories pointedly illustrated the varieties of ways in which people from all walks of life could pitch in and give a bit of help to newcomers.46 The aim of the "labor heroes movement," which moved into full gear in January 1943, was to seek out model examples of new-democracy virtues and achievements. The migration movement produced resettlement-work heroes, as well as immigrant heroes, and the most lauded of these was Feng Yunpeng of Chishui county, Guanzhong. In November 1942 a chance meeting with nine refugee families began for Feng a career in resettlement work, which eventually resulted in the creation of three administrative villages exclusively for immigrants and the accommodation of a total of 170 new families.47 Feng had once worked for herbalists in Xi'an and had owned his own medicine shop before moving from Yanlian across the border into Chishui county in 1939 (a son in the Red Army made things awkward for him in a GMDadministered area). He engaged the refugee families to work for him as herb collectors and persuaded them to stay in the area; he found broken-down cave-dwellings for them to live in and arranged for the issue of wasteland grants.48 Lincoln Li has suggested that Feng Yunpeng's motives were entirely mercenary, that he was developing for himself a large landholding worked by impoverished people over whom he had "absolute power," and that a shrewd control and manipulation of the welfare grants or loans available to the immigrants served his empire building.49 But whatever Feng's motives and the extent of his personal gain from resettlement work, he very quickly came under close official scrutiny once he was spotted as a "hero," and this scrutiny must have curtailed at least the overt exploitation of the new settlers. Feng was invited to join the Communist Party in 1943, and as early as February of that year was appointed to the district government's Immigrant Resettlement Committee.50 This was the standard method of grooming and coopting local heroes. The regional authorities, by pulling entrepreneurs into the Party and semiofficial organs, were providing them with the means of getting even further ahead while still remaining one of the common folk, the laobaixing. The heroes were not supposed to become cadres or to receive government stipends. They were allowed, indeed encouraged, to "build fortunes" through legitimate means (Wu Manyou is the prime example), but promotion to hero status almost always put an end to the racketeering and fund fiddling in which Feng Yun-

108 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties peng might have engaged. The honor, glory, fanfare, and official protection given to labor heroes had to serve as compensation for any loss of income. On the other hand, privileged access to official resources and services also enabled these people to perform "heroic deeds" far beyond the capabilities of ordinary citizens. Feng Yunpeng's greatest achievements dated from the time he received government backing and help.51 Widespread crop failures in Henan province in the autumn of 1942 brought streams of people into Shaan-Gan-Ning that winter. The refugees turned up in Guanzhong as door-to-door beggars, and government authorities warned that if they were not quickly housed, fed, and put to work, they would soon pose a threat to law and order.52 Each of the Guanzhong counties sent in detailed reports of big house-building projects for refugees during 1943. Cave-dwellings uninhabited since the Muslim troubles were first of all repaired, then new caves and cattle sheds were constructed. In two districts of Xinning county, the local people built a total of 174 cave-dwellings for refugees, and 184 cooking pots were distributed. In Chunyao, Tongyiyao, and Chishui counties, the residents are said to have constructed or provided almost 500 caves and rooms for immigrants.53 Elsewhere a figure of 3,097 caves and rooms is given as the total issued to new settlers in Guanzhong in 1943.54 The press also made much of the generosity of Lubaoliang villagers (Xinning county), who built grass huts along the refugees' routes of travel as temporary stopping places.55 But temporary sojourners were not the burden on local communities that settlers were in their first year or two. It is a reasonable guess that the Lubaoliang hut builders were making the point that the stopover should be brief, and we can assume that people responded less grudgingly when the settlements they were asked to build were well away from their own villages. Forced mobilizations often counted toward corvee duty, and residents whose property was confiscated for refugee use were on the whole fairly compensated. But that the government had to resort to such measures is clear evidence that it could not count on the ready cooperation and generosity of long-term residents. By mid-1943 the regional government was openly admitting that relations between established village families and newcomers were frequently tense, even dangerously hostile. Immigrants were regularly cheated by local people, were allocated the unpopular corvee tasks (despite being legally exempt from corvee duty), and were treated

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as pariahs.56 Little wonder, then, that it was rare to find spontaneous mutual-aid exchanges between new and old families that were not connected by kin or hometown ties. A 1944 report conceded that, before 1943, the biangong and zhagong forms had hardly been used at all as methods for helping out new settlers, a tacit admission that the work so frequently done by immigrants as payment for the "donations" asked of old families (and often called biangong) did not qualify as equal or fair exchanges.* Immigrants who, by 1943 and 1944, were established farmers were quite likely to be members of the mutual-aid teams (biangongdui) that burgeoned in those years. Even when the cooperative movement was at full throttle, however, it was quite rare for the special efficiency and collective strength of those teams to be used in immigrant resettlement work. This underlines a significant feature of the cooperative movement: appeals to compassion and charity or to "savethe-nation" patriotism notwithstanding, the general run of mutual-aid teams could not be forced into undertaking unremunerated or unreciprocated work. And the semi-outcast poorest people, recent arrivals who might still have been reliant on handouts and whose only croplands were newly opened, low-yielding hill slopes, were not welcomed into prospering teams. The case of Wu Manyou' s home village of Wujiazaoyuan is instructive, particularly because, in 1944, it was acclaimed as "the fastest developing model village in the Border Region." Membership in the three mutual-aid groups formed there at the beginning of 1943 was determined by place of origin. The largest group, with ten men, was formed by the original households; another was composed of seven men whose families had come from northern Shaanxi after 1937; and the third group consisted of five unmarried men who were refugees from Henan. Wu Manyou served as overall head, coordinating the work and resources of the three groups. There was a good deal of intergroup cooperation, but Wu made it quite clear that the most rational approach to teamwork was to group families by the quality of the midday meals they could provide during labor exchanges. Since the Henan bachelor team had to release a man from late-morning work

*NBIR [10]. Immigrant families frequently offered biangong to pay off loans of oxen and farm tools in particular but sometimes also to buy or borrow cave-dwellings or grain. See "Guanzhong gedi ganbu"; and "Tian Erhong yu yi-nanmin."

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each day to go back home to cook for the other four, it was taken for granted that these five should form a separate group. 57 Although poor immigrant laborers were not welcomed into the mainstream mutual-aid teams, they had a good chance of hooking up with a contract-labor team (zhagongdui). We know that zhagong teams played a significant role in opening up 8o,ooo mu of wasteland in Yan'an county in 1942. According to the survey cited in Mao's yearend report, 487 zhagong teams (of eight to ten men) and biangong teams with a total membership of 4,936 farmers had been formed for wasteland reclamation that year, and 63.5 percent of the work had been completed by immigrants.58 We can assume that immigrant farmers were more often members of the zhagong than of the biangong teams. The 1942 reclamation project in Yan'an was an exceptional event, and one about which senior government strategists had doubts even as it was in process. Mao Zedong commended its achievements, but that was in the face of open criticism of the methods used. 59 Subsequent team-farming initiatives were more careful not to make excessive demands on farmers or to press-gang laborers into "shock troops" for grandiose projects. A report from Majiagou village, home of the labor hero Shen Changlin, explicitly noted that there were no immigrant farmers in the village's zhagong team, which, apart from one hired hand, was composed of owner-cultivators. There were three biangong teams in the village, and immigrants did participate in at least one of them. We can suppose, however, that this was either the team that was based exclusively on kinship or the one formed by landlords and their huozi.60 The fact that immigrants were, it seems, quite pointedly excluded from the Majiagou zhagong team suggests that it had become the preserve of established villagers, a decided change from old zhagong practices. The Wujiazaoyuan strategy of putting immigrants into a separate labor-exchange group, whose work was then coordinated for a total team effort, was probably the best possible solution to the problem of integrating poor immigrant families and winning their participation in the cooperative movement. It would have occurred, however, only in villages with histories and structures similar to those of Wujiazaoyuan. The next best option was to cultivate mutual-aid exchanges between immigrant farmers only, without their participating in more broadly based mutual-aid teams. There is evidence of a high incidence of labor exchanges between newly arrived laborers, and especially

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111

among poor peasants who traveled south in groups from the SuideMizhi area. As we have seen, moving south to Yanshu and setting up "joint farms" was an established subsistence strategy used by poor peasants in the overcrowded northeast of the province and was now, in the 1940's, one that the Communists tried to adopt and promote as a means for the Suide poor to "make their fortunes." Most of the organized migrant teams that set out from the northern subregion in 1943 were said to have used the biangong method for reclaiming the areas of wasteland issued to their members. Such organized cooperation was possible because both the Suide and the Yanshu government directed resettlement funds to these groups and ensured that they were well supervised; it was important that the "move south" program be seen by potential emigrants out of Suide to be successful. Another deliberate strategy for fostering cooperation between immigrants was to issue agricultural loans to groups rather than individuals. In Yan'an's South District in April 1943, for instance, an 8o,ooo-yuan loan fund was distributed among nine "farm loan groups" (nongdaizu) made up of 76 households. Probably the most efficacious practice here was to make the loans so small that the only sensible option for the recipients was to band together and jointly invest the money. A three-family immigrant group led by Lei Buqi in a village just west of Yan'an city, for example, was awarded a loan of 2,200 yuan, but this fell far short of the amount needed to buy an ox.61 So the village head, Tian Erhong, arranged for the three men to work as a team on six mu of a neighbor's farmland in exchange for the use of the man's ox. Then the three worked together for the ten days it took to plow their own cropland.62 We are not told how they used the 2,200yuan loan, but it had achieved what was probably its main purposefarmwork cooperation among immigrant households. From all indications, new settlers in Yanshu took part in cooperative farming initiatives more than their counterparts in Guanzhong did. An obvious reason for the difference is the preponderance of Suide emigrants among Yanshu's new settlers, and of desperately poor famine victims among Guanzhong's. Most of the family and neighborhood groups traveling south from Suide had no reason to go farther than the Yanshu wastelands. By the same token, famine refugees from Henan were disinclined to keep moving northward if refuge could be found in the Guanzhong counties. The social composition of Yanshu's new settlers was such that cooperation among them was easily enough

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fostered. The task for Party organizers was often just to solder the pre-existing cooperative links among new settlers, and between new settlers and established residents, based on kinship or neighborly connections. The Yan'an government's increasing insistence on making "family reunions" the foundation of the immigration program underscores the importance of, and the successes achieved by, using the "social connections" trump card. The urgency with which the CCP's drive to open up new farmland was pushed in Yanshu also helps explain the higher incidence of teamwork among the subregion's immigrant families, for cooperation came naturally in the demanding task of clearing wasteland.63 And it was a task in which resident farmers often joined immigrants; the three small groups in Wujiazaoyuan, for example, formed a big team for this purpose. But the most common mode of farmwork cooperation wherever newcomers settled was the kind Tian Erhong set up for Lei Buqi and his partners. Small teams worked on local farms in exchange for loans of basic equipment and provisions, and then worked together on their own farms. Only when these people were self-sufficient and prospering were they welcomed into the larger and thriving labor-exchange teams that became the backbone of the big production drive in ShaanGan-Ning's villages.

Immigrant Villages The unwillingness of the original families to give help to immigrants, local resentment of the special concessions allowed new settlers, and open hostility to "alien" newcomers were problems judged serious enough at times to warrant official intervention. Authorities considered the attitudes of local cadres to be a large part of the problem and argued that if village and township leaders were seen to be helpful to newcomers, public opinion would shift away from the "exclusivism" (paiwaizhuyi) that prevailed.64 Cadres were told to show the way by demonstrating personal generosity toward recent settlers and staging public welcomes for new arrivals (hosting welcome banquets to which all villagers were invited was a shrewd way of softening up the locals). They were advised of ways to convince the old families that new blood in the village was good for everyone (by saying, for example, that the newcomers "do nothing for us if they don't come here; by leaving their homes thay can be of use to us").65 Another measure was to make sure that a pledge about fair treatment for new settlers was included in the

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"village pact" (cunmin gongyue) that was drawn up and solemnized in each community.* The chance of improved livelihoods for all would have relieved some of the tension, but the continuing severe scarcities of the early 1940's and the fragility of development thus far, combined with still spiraling taxes, ensured that troubled relations between old families and the tax-exempt new settlers would not be quickly smoothed. Obviously the problem was much less severe when the newcomers were joining relatives or townsmen who were established residents, and this was another reason for urging local people to persuade their "social connections" in the northern counties to move south into their own hamlets and villages. We know that at least some of the villages close to Yan'an city were built up in this way. In 1935 there were only four families in Wujiazaoyuan (Wu Manyou's village). By 1943, 14 others had joined them, trickling in a few at a time. All but one came from either northern Shaanbei (7) or Henan (6). 66 Tian Erhong and the family of an impoverished landlord, Wang Gunhua, were the only residents of Yaoxianwan village in 1938; by 1943 the population had grown to 15 households, several of which were kin-connected.67 Liulin administrative village had "about ten families" in 1934; at the time of Jan Myrdal's visit in 1962, it had 50, most dating back to the resistance-war years.68 Whatever the relationships were between old and new families, new arrivals were unlikely to have been total outcasts when the few old-timers were themselves recent immigrants (both Wu Manyou and Tian Erhong moved to Yan'an in 1935). From the government's point of view, one good way to solve the "rejection" problem was to settle newcomers in special "immigrant villages." In the late 1930's Shaan-Gan-Ning still had broad stretches of uninhabited hill country quite close to the county towns and market centers. Feng Yunpeng and his 170 refugee families are said to *The "village pacts" promoted by the CCP at this time had strong echoes of the old xiangyue (village covenants) through which imperial rulers, since the nth century (albeit spasmodically), had aimed to cultivate both self-help resourcefulness and filial obedience to the father-emperor within village communities. For a useful discussion of the "local autonomy" and "central control" functions of the xiangyue, see Kuhn, "Local Self-Government," pp. 260-61. The Communists used xiangyue-type rituals and pacts to give moral meaning to Party-sponsored village or group projects. Predictably, however, they expanded the traditional xiangyue by adding educational and economic development goals to the covenants sworn by villagers.

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have built about ten new hamlets, which were then constituted as three new administrative villages in Chishui county's Township No.4, a township that was regularly described in press headlines as "Feng Yunpeng's township for immigrants." Since the great majority of those families were relatives and friends of the original band of nine refugees with whom Feng had begun his career as a "resettlement hero" in late 1942, the residents of Chishui's "immigrant township" were, we are told, "very united, and there did not occur among them the rejection of some families by others." 69 In the Guanzhong area, where the problem of hostility to newcomers was particularly serious, it was important that Feng's experiment, even if costly for the government, be made to work. In Yanshu the authorities chose desolate parts of southern Yan'an and eastern Ganquan counties as resettlement zones in which immigrants built completely new villages and townships. Qingquan township, close to Ganquan's eastern border with Yan'an, which had been a completely uninhabited area before 1939, contained 6o families, mostly from Yulin and Mizhi, by 1943. Thanks to government subsidies and loans, these settlers had been able to clear 1,200 mu of wasteland and to buy farm tools, oxen, and sheep, and by the account of the journalist who visited the area that year, these new villages were "prosperous." The township had recently been awarded a further agricultural loan of 30,000 yuan, and another 150 mu of wasteland had been cleared that summer?0 Yanshu's most publicized experiment with immigrant resettlement was Xinmin (New People's) township. It was located on the Yan river in Chuankou district, little more than 10 km from Yan'an city (see Map 6). When the area was declared a reclamation zone in 1939, just 71 families (240 people) lived in 11 hamlets dotted across desolate hill country, "through which wild animals roamed." 71 By September 1942 another 37 hamlets had been built; the township now had six administrative villages and a population of 668 households (2,194 people). More than 6oo of the township families (including the 71 families living there before 1939) had come from Shaanxi province's heavily populated northern counties; only 61 were from other provinces or from southern Shaanxi.72 A breakdown by family size suggests that the northerners who emigrated from places within Shaan-Gan-Ning (i.e., from Suide) were less inclined to bring their families with them than the immigrants from outside the Border Region (i.e., from GMDcontrolled Hengshan and Yulin counties), and that fewer dependents

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116 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties traveled with the men in 1942 than in 1941 (the two years in which the township was effectively repopulated)?3 Several issues related to migration from Suide are involved here and will be considered in more detail below. Pertinent to the history of the Xinmin villages is the fact that each laborer who arrived there in 1941 had about three dependents with him, and that the number of dependents fell off sharply in 1942?4 Government inspections in Xinmin township in the spring of 1941 found widespread hardship, even starvation, among the settlers/5 and new arrivals in 1942 had probably been encouraged to leave their families behind until food could be grown for them. Vigorous government intervention was needed to prop up the experiment, and the Party fell in behind by publicizing resettlement succeses. It described Xinmin township in late 1941 as a place "famous for its bumper harvests," and reported impressive production achievements in 1942?6 But those claims conceal a number of problems, particularly in the areas of leadership and local government. Local cadres, knowing what was expected of models, delivered to the government an above-quota grain tax collection in 1942, and they were subsequently criticized for collecting taxes from farmers who had been resident in the subregion for fewer than three years. It must have been extremely difficult for district and township officials in any of the reclamation zones to resist squeezing the relatively defenseless newcomers in order to fill the radically increased collection quotas of 1941 and 1942, especially with strong old-settler pressure on them to do so. There is evidence of quite widespread violations of the tax-exemption provisions for immigrants in the early 1940's.77 The resulting disaffection among new settlers and re-migrations out of Yanshu were serious enough to prompt upperlevel criticisms of tax collectors and fanfared repayments of illegally collected grain. Xinmin township was here again made an example of. An inspection of its ledgers by county officials revealed that more than 200 families new to the district since 1939 had been taxed; about 37 dan of grain was, with ceremony, returned to them. 78 The Party-state invested heavily in models when it did not have the resources for a broader development of new initiatives; the naive hope was that other places would pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make do without state aid. Model building based on this flawed argument characterized the Communists' reform work in all places before and after 1949?9 In the case of Xinmin township, however, the state subsidies it had a right to expect as a model project began to dry

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up almost as soon as the experiment was launched in 1939. The fiscal crisis that peaked in 1941 was already pinching the migrant resettlement program in 1940, when we see the beginnings of the shift to a "community-aid" (as opposed to state aid) approach to resettlement work. The Yan'an leadership must surely have known that initiatives such as Xinmin could not be left to rely on local resources in the way that the famed minban and "local self-reliance" policies dictated; with the heavy costs involved in building a new settlement from scratch in a region where farming was always hazardous, the experiment could not do without substantial state subsidies and the investment of skilled personnel in its early years. But the regional government's failure to plan for the 1939-41 crisis damaged the Xinmin experiment as much as it did other reconstruction projects. During the years of Xinmin' s huge expansion, the township government was hard put to meet the relief-grain needs of people who had had bad luck each year, much less the pressing, basic needs of immigrants who had yet to clear and plow their wasteland grants. In spite of this, the local authorities were expected to fit 1,200 new settlers into a population of 437 people in 1941, and to resettle another 561 people the following year. In the spring of 1942 the county government had to step in with aid because people were eating "rough chaff and the leaves from trees." 80 The Xinmin resettlement experiment was hardly a resounding success, and its failure significantly undermined the "immigrant township" idea. Clearly a more practical and economic approach was to establish just a few new settlers each year in a prospering community of accommodating villagers. Such communities were most often those made up of people who had themselves emigrated from the Suide area in the early or mid-1930's and had prospered as a result of land distribution and complete freedom from tax payments between 1935 and 1939. These people, with their fast-growing landholdings, were glad to employ poor relatives and fellow townsmen from the north. Comrades Wu Manyou, Tian Erhong, and Shen Changlin were lauded as men who had made their villages as well as their own families prosperous, and all three had done this by easing the way for emigrants from the Suide-Mizhi area (and, to a much lesser extent, refugees from Henan). Their villages were promoted during the great production drive as models of resourcefulness and cooperation, and not as resettlement models. Resettlement was always just a means to the end of creating independent and prosperous peasant proprietors.

118

Repopulating the Yanshu Counties MIGRATION FROM SUIDE

Quite a lot of government funding, planning, propaganda, and organizing energy was invested in the "move south" campaign after 1940, yet it seems the target (set in 1942) of 5,ooo migrants from the Suide area a year was not once achieved in the four years between 1942 and 1945. Hsii Yung-ying estimates that in 1930 the area that later, under the Communists, became the Suide subregion had a population of 649,807 people.81 CCP figures for the 1940's indicate a small growth in the population over the 1941-46 period: from 538,036 to 557,453.82 An apparent loss of more than 1oo,ooo people between 1930 and 1941 gives further credibility to Gao Zili's claim that 27,740 moved south from the Suide area between 1938 and 1941 (because they were attracted to the "liberated areas" under the CCP's administration). And though the great Shaanbei famine of 1928-31 must have been the major cause of that population loss, the fact that the Communists failed to reduce the Suide population significantly after 1941 (if at all) does seem to indicate that people preferred to stay in the subregion once it came under Party government. Of concern to us here, however, are not the causes and magnitude of migrations out of Suide in the 1930's, but rather the very modest successes and significant failures of the southward migration campaign in the 1940's. If it is true that migrations to the south did not even compensate for natural population growth after 1941, then the aim of reducing the fractious competition between Suide farmers for cropland was not furthered by the migration program. The Communists learned, if nothing else, that other strategies were needed if there was to be any reform and economic development in that complex and strife-torn countryside. The Suide subregional government allocated 500,000 yuan to the migration program in 1943 and budgeted for the expenditure of eight times that amount in 1944.83 Initially the money was intended to pick up the migrants' travel costs, but the offer of substantial agricultural loans in 1944 was probably aimed at reducing anxieties about resettlement costs as well. The Northwest Bureau's 1944 report on migration identified such anxieties as one of the main factors discouraging Suide peasants from migrating south, and it recommended an improvement in the liaison work between the administrators of reclamation zones in the south and local governments in Suide so that people could be assured of accommodation, food, and employment before they began

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120 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties their journeys.84 Likewise cadres in Yanshu's resettlement districts were to be given advance warning of the numbers and arrival times of migrant bands. The idea was to have prospective migrants register at special migrant depots (yimindian), where arrangements would be made for them; they would probably qualify for a travel subsidy, and they could even borrow donkeys and travel provisions.85 At the end of 1942, Mao Zedong noted that "very few refugees who came to us had refugee certificates issued by the Suide subregion," and he attributed this to the immigrants' not unreasonable fear of becoming "public property" if they registered themselves at government offices.86 Mao urged that more effort be made to use "social connections" as migration channels. But the encouragement of informal migration based on family reunions was to supplement, not replace, the planned, highly organized, and very public migrant mobilizations designed for Suide in 1943· The subregional target of 5,000 migrants, like the grain tax targets everywhere, was broken down into county and then district, township, and village quotas. In at least some instances, the district official appointed to migration work was head of the district's grain tax team; in Sishilipu district (Suide county) the conscripting of migrants was done at the same time as tax collection in 1943.87 Mizhi, the most densely populated county, and Jiaxian, the poorest, were usually allocated the biggest quotas. In May 1943 Jiaxian officials boasted that the county had already exceeded its 750 quota for the first half of the year, and that in districts where propaganda work was effective, up to half the people who traveled south did so voluntarily.88 In Mizhi, which was supposed to mobilize 1,ooo people to go south in the spring of 1944, county officials were complaining of sluggish and indifferent work by district and township cadres as late as March. A township head in Minfeng district protested: "I've talked myself blue in the face, but people won't go. My feeling is that there's no point in all this." When the head of Yindou district announced its quota of 180 migrants, a local cadre retorted: "No way!" Others said: "You can mobilize all you like, but if people won't go, that's all there is to it." 89 There was no attempt to hide the fact that local officials had enormous difficulty meeting their quotas, and that when they did meet them, it was only by dragooning the most defenseless people into migrant bands. In some places officials even sanctioned rounding up vagrants for deportation to the south,90 a practice that, needless to say, did not please resettlement officials in Yanshu. In a migrant team of

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25 men from Mizhi city in early 1943, only 12 were poor peasants; the rest were town peddlers, water carriers, sedan-chair coolies, textile workshop employees, and "former vagrants." 91 After heavy pressure was put on township cadres in mid-February 1944 to fill their quotas quickly, they "rushed about day and night" persuading people. Within four days 221 recruits were found in Minfeng district and, in just 20 days, 90 percent of the county's target had been achieved.92 In these circumstances it was inevitable that undesirables would be made to migrate. There was criticism in 1944 of cadres who were concerned only "to get the job done," who behaved in a bullying and domineering fashion, and who, by mustering riffraff into the groups traveling south, were giving the migration program a bad name?3 Faced with solid popular resistance to migration, and in an attempt to find willing and suitable recruits for cropland reclamation in the other subregions, the authorities resorted to an intensified propaganda campaign and some more refined mobilization strategies. For example, the instruction went out to deny travel passes to people in Yindou district who had customarily traveled across the subregion's northern and western borders for seasonal work, and to persuade them to go south instead. Authorities in the same district ordered each administrative village to set up a "migrant persuasion group" (yimin quandao xiaozu), which was to single out and put pressure on likely candidates for migration; in Yinchengshi the carrot of a grain loan was offered to any family that had "someone who could be sure of a good harvest in the autumn" (that is, a laborer who would spend the farming season in a southern county).94 Most migrant bands passed through Suide city on their way south; the fanfare and ceremony with which they were greeted and farewelled there rivaled the feting of 8th Route Army recruits. Local communities were mobilized to provide food and gifts to migrants en route; senior government officials and labor heroes traveled short distances with them and gave them letters of introduction to senior officials in Yan'an.95 But Party loyalty went only so far. Despite a suggestion that members set an example by volunteering to migrate, only 18 of the 1,173 people who traveled south from Suide county in early 1944 belonged to the CCP.96 The years 1943-44 were marked, in particular, by the "Ma Pi'en Movement," a vigorous campaign to publicize the prosperity achieved by the poor Mizhi peasant who had migrated to Yan'an city in 1941. Ma had done extraordinarily well in just one year and was a prospering owner-cultivator, driving a yoke of oxen, when he came back

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to his home Hecha district for a New Year's visit in 1943· A picture booklet telling how he rose from humble beginnings to a glorious new life in Yan'an was produced by the Suide government for distribution throughout the subregion. Ma's published appeals to his countrymen to "move south," and reports that he was fat, healthy, and wearing new clothes, were read to villagers everywhere, but particularly to those in his home district, where it was expected that his story would make a powerful impression. People who were inspired to migrate after learning about Ma' s success also got their names in the papers. And the press gave an airing to migrant fears about having "no friends and relatives and no place to stay" in the south. The stock answer to that was, "Your friends and relatives are not there, but you'll have the government. It will give you land and cave-dwellings." 97 Another propaganda piece was Haojiaqiao, in Shatanping district, the Suide subregion's foremost "model village," whose residents had achieved a level of prosperity that was far beyond the reach of most other communities in the overcrowded Suide countryside. Word was put out throughout the district that such prosperity was available to all farmers who moved to the Yan'an area, a place where any number of Haojiaqiao villages could be created.98 This idea was adopted by other districts. Yindou officials proposed the slogan: "Go south and create a new Yindou," 99 an assurance to local people that they could find a home away from home in the Yanshu counties. Nevertheless the authorities do not seem to have been surprised by the skepticism with which these arguments were received, and they promoted at the same time the example of the farmer Zhu Deming who, having made his fortune in Yan'an, reestablished himself in Suide. Zhu had been destitute when he left home during the Great Northwest Famine. Ten years later he traveled back to his home district (Xuejiaping in Suide county) driving a donkey loaded with sacks of grain. He was able to buy back his family's cave-dwellings and purchased the mortgages on about 20 mu of farmland. 100 He was quoted as saying, "People who go south make their fortunes and then come back," and his own success in doing just that, it was said, persuaded more than 500 people to migrate to the southern counties.101 In the spring of 1943, then, the official "go south" movement, while continuing to encourage permanent resettlement in the southern wastelands, allowed the possibility of migrants bringing their fortunes home. The press portrayed the road from the south at New Year time as cluttered with homecomers laden with grain, driving donkeys, oxen,

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and sheep.102 Yindou district made people who had returned home from the 1943 season in the south the centerpiece of the next year's migration campaign.103 Emphasis was now given to assuring farmers that if they moved to Yanshu, their families at home would be looked after, and that any farmland they owned or rented would be properly sown and tended.104 For despite the welfare problem for villages that these families represented, there was clearly a growing preference among Party planners for preliminary migrations by laborers only. One source claims, for example, that whereas laborers had accounted for only 46 percent of all migrants leaving Suide in 1942, the figure jumped to 6o percent in 1943,105 a trend that we also saw in our Xinmin township data. The group of 221 migrants who left Minfeng district (Mizhi) in March 1944 included just 14 women and 15 children. Similarly, there were only 14 women in the 188-member migrant brigade recruited by Yindou district cadres that same month.106 As we have noted, fewer immigrant dependents made things easier for officials and local people in Yanshu. It also broadened the migrants' options by giving people a chance to try their luck in the south before committing their families to the move. Migrants could retain their property and tenancy rights in their home villages. But in contentious Suide that probably required strict supervision, and publicity was given to the kind of protection absentees could expect from the peasants' or tenants' associations.107 Township and village cadres made a show of visiting the homes of men who had gone south; they chopped firewood, hauled water and charcoal for the women, and helped them write letters to their husbands assuring them that all was well on the home front. The women's spinning was a crucial source of income for these families in the period before the men brought back grain, and again the local cadres made a public display of ensuring that the women were promptly supplied with cotton, especially when there were shortages. And while doing all this, the cadres were to persuade the women to prepare to join their husbands in the south after the autumn harvest.108 The migration program was premised on permanent settlement in the southern counties. People's reluctance to move from Suide was attributed to a "conservatism" born of the wish to be buried among their ancestors and the dread of insecurity in places distant from family and kinsmen.109 These fears, which Mao himself had allowed to be reasonable, gave further force to the argument that, as far as possible, the migration program should be based on family reunions. For northern-

124 Repopulating the Yanshu Counties ers who did not have family and friends in the south, a likely way to reduce these concerns, the planners came to think, was to move the migrants in bands formed largely of familiar people. Hence a year or so into the program, the kin-based mobilization methods of Wang Piying began to be loudly praised. Wang had started by persuading four of his relatives to move south with him. The five men had then returned home to spend the winter of 1943-44 moving through the villages of Sishilipu district in which they had kinsmen to collect recruits for their "migrant groups" (yimin xiaozu), all of which were composed exclusively of people connected by family or kin tiesY 0 The regional government expected that when farmers did well out of wasteland reclamations, they would choose to call their families to join them and settle in the south. The strategy recommended to the Suide authorities, therefore, was to target the landless poor for migration.111 The next step was to give these poorest of the poor title to all the land they cleared. "If peasants own their own land," went the argument, "it is not easy for them to move; this is a characteristic of the individual small peasant." 112 It is difficult to gauge just how many of the Suide people who worked in the Yanshu counties in the early 1940's did stay on as permanent settlers; returnees may not have been subtracted from the migration figures we are offered. We can be fairly certain, though, that the Hengshan and Yulin people did stay; they had more or less burned their bridges by moving from a Guomindang area into the Communists' Border Region. Indeed there is evidence that Suide officials actively recruited in those counties to meet their migrant quotas.113 We can assume as well that single, propertyless men who had found the wherewithal to marry in the south had some incentive to stay on. Even so, it is obvious that large numbers of Suide laborers were, in the 1940's, continuing the time-honored tradition of moving south for seasonal work only, and that their departures did not, any more than previously, facilitate a redistribution of land or a rationalization of land use in the northeastern subregion. At least some of the reluctance to join migrant teams derived from a well-founded distrust of an intrusive state power. But the consequences for Suide stay-at-homes, as we will see in the following chapters, was more, not less, state control. If the CCP could not reduce village populations enough to reconstruct Suide society, then different but equally tough measures would have to be devised. For this reason resettled migrant families in Yanshu-people who, in keeping with the minban principle, were expected to rely on community, not state,

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resources-had more management autonomy and more freedom from intrusive state control than their countrymen in Suide's reformed villages were allowed. IMMIGRATION AND REVOLUTION IN YANSHU

Inconsistencies in the available data make it difficult to quantify the impact that migrations from northeastern Shaanbei had on the rehabilitation of the Yanshu counties. Even if we use the most conservative estimates of migrant numbers, however, we must judge that Suide farmers played a very important role in Yanshu's reconstruction and development. Among the 11,ooo or so Suide people who migrated south during 1942-44, about 5,000 were able-bodied laborers.114 Party planners calculated that immigrant laborers cleared with draft animals, on average, at least 20 mu of wasteland each year (and a minimum of ten mu otherwise), and a new mu could yield two dou of coarse grain.115 On this basis, the Suide migrants would have opened up at most 100,000 mu, from which 20,000 dan (1 dan = 10 dou = 150 kg) could be harvested after a first planting. These figures are very small when placed next to, for example, the claims that 1943 alone saw 3,578 new immigrant laborers in Yanshu and a total of 341,645 mu reclaimed.U 6 The actual migration numbers are bound to have been higher than the official records show, for the simple reason that a lot of the migratory movements occurred outside the official mobilizations. Nevertheless even the conservative Suide figures, together with, let us say, double the number of immigrants in the six years before 1942, represented a big change for the Yanshu villages in which these people settled. The areas of wasteland that could be got ready for planting almost doubled when the laborers had draft animals to work with. The initial clearing was always done with hand-held mattocks, and newcomers in their first year probably made do without ox and plow. But good workers who showed a willingness to settle down often quite quickly got government loans for the purchase (or the joint purchase) of an ox or donkey. The initial huge growth in Shaan-Gan-Ning's livestock numbers after 1936 had been almost halted by the GMD blockade, but a steady if slowed rate of increase after 1939 meant that more animals were working the Border Region's cropland each year.117 This trend is borne out in reports from villages that make a point of noting livestock purchases by both new and established families.

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Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

The established farmers, of course, were able to speed up their own cropland expansion with the help of hired laborers, and this was another important way in which the flow of migrant workers from the north contributed to the government's drive to reconstruct the Yanshu countryside. Similarly immigrant farmers were probably indispensable, even central, to the drive for self-sufficiency in government bureaus and schools-a drive in which the Party-government had a big economic and ideological stake. It was, in the first place, a drive for survival, but it was also meant to produce revolutionary new officials and intellectuals, people who worked with their hands as well as their minds and who had renounced the elitist values that typified old-style teachers and bureaucrats. The fact that the manual work was often done by poor newcomers still scrambling for a living was either concealed or mostly left unremarked. This prompts the question of the degree to which old exploitative habits and hierarchical structures were allowed to reemerge in rural Yanshu. We can be sure that immigrant workers were among the poorest people in a desperately poor countryside, and the most discriminated against- both economically and socially. In a context in which the "rich peasant form of farm management" was vigorously encouraged, newcomers replaced at the bottom of the social ladder the now upwardly mobile former hired hands-people who, thanks to land reform, had probably established their own farms or become cadres. The indigent new arrivals were the people most likely to be mustered into big land-clearing teams and forced to undertake the most menial jobs. And we can guess that the urban riffraff and nonfarmers who were conscripted and sent south by the Suide mobilizers made little progress in Yanshu if they did not quickly learn to farm. 118 Social status, now as much as before Party reforms, derived from economic muscle in rural Shaan-Gan-Ning, and land revolution in 1935 had effected just a very brief blurring of classes. Rich peasants were village heads in almost all the villages for which we have data, and they were explicitly allowed by the government to rent land to immigrant laborers on "slightly exploitative" terms. The mitigating factors here, however, were the reluctance of farmers to contract huozi who were not· kinsmen, the opportunities for upward mobility that the government deliberately kept as wide open as possible, and the annual flow of new immigrants who could fill the lowly positions vacated by last year's successful immigrants. This degree of social fluidity was a big change for the peasants who came to Yanshu. Whether or not the new

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landlords and managerial farmers were benevolent in the way CCP reporters said they were, the evidence is that the new settlers were quickly free of rich peasant patronage. That the authorities were serious about fostering this freedom is convincingly demonstrated in the wide broadcasting of the "progress" achieved by immigrant heroes like Ma Pi' en and Zhu Deming. The Party very clearly had a strong claim on the loyalties of people whose livelihoods had radically improved as a result of land revolution or resettlement aid. Such people were expected to respond readily and generously to its various mobilization drives, to declare their tax liabilities honestly, and to shoulder the burdens of administrative office when asked to. And on the whole this class of loyal followers lived up to expectations, providing the cadre force that allowed the Communists to penetrate rural society deeply, to assert the state's authority in Yanshu villages to an extent unprecedented in Chinese history. At the same time there were important factors limiting the depth and permanence of that penetration in a significant number of places. For a variety of reasons, but most particularly the 1939-41 crisis, the Shaan-Gan-Ning government was forcefully to promote the ideal of local "self-reliance" and "self-sufficiency" in matters economic during the 1940's. Because the Xinmin township migrant resettlement project could not get on its feet without heavy subsidization from Yan'an, official enthusiasm for building new migrant villages waned and family reunions became the preferred resettlement strategy. The change was to have important consequences. By appealing to family and kin loyalties, the Communists were restoking traditions that had always, in rural China, functioned to restrain (if not block) state intrusions into peasant communities. In the process of planning and supervising the repopulation of Yanshu hamlets, the Communist state did gain unprecedented access to the communities it was building and developing. That access, however, was not as direct, nor the political control as total, as many observers have presumed it was. To the extent that corporateness and cohesion of newly formed communities was based on kinship connections, Party authority in those villages was somewhat mitigated. The immigrant resettlement program in Yanshu offers some interesting insights into traditional patterns of cooperation between villagers and into the possibilities for developing new patterns. A first observation is that, in the larger villages in which recent migrants

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Repopulating the Yanshu Counties

constituted a very small minority of households, the established families were usually stridently unhelpful toward nankin settlers. Where there was this hostility and resentment of special treatment for immigrants, a wise village or township leader would not attempt to direct a mutual-aid team to include them. On the other hand, in villages in which almost all households, old and new, had at one time or another come from the same locality in Suide and were connected by·family and hometown ties, the likelihood that customary forms of farmwork cooperation between households would be used during the migrants' settling-in period was very strong. And so the Party had something to build on here. But such bonds could also be an impediment to more broad-based cooperation. In some hamlets in Yanshu in which the majority of residents were related, Party cadres were to find it easy enough to encourage mutual-aid teamwork, but very difficult to direct and expand the teams. The least nettlesome type of village was the one that had had only two or three families in 1935 when land was distributed and been progressively built up by the arrival of just a few new families each year. Whether or not the new settlers were related to the original families does not seem to have been a salient factor determining the quality of cooperation between the new and the old. Newcomers typically worked as hired hands or as tenants for the older residents for a year or two and then provided employment for their successors. By 1943, when the Party's cooperative movement was launched, the majority of residents in these hamlets of 20 or so families owned enough land to support themselves in all but poor harvest years. All residents owed some loyalty to the Communist government. They were also well bonded to one another as former employees and co-founders of a prospering community. In scope and style of cooperation, the mutualaid teams in these villages represented a radical break from traditional practices. The 1937 Yanshu landscape of scattered, lonely hamlets, each with a mere handful of resident families, had already changed significantly by the end of 1942. Even if the number of permanent settlers from Suide was far less than the Party claimed, they made a huge difference in hundreds of two- or three-family hamlets. On the other hand, their departure from Suide made almost no difference at all to rural areas there. Cooperativization was determinedly pushed in the Suide subregion after 1942, but it ran into serious obstacles in places where landlordism persisted and was strong. At a time when our Yanshu

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hamlets, built by immigrants over six or so years, were forming model mutual-aid teams and functioning as the heart of the Communists' big production drive, the CCP was still struggling to effect rent reform in much of the Suide countryside. As a result, the cooperative movement of 1943 was complicated-sometimes advanced but often impeded-by the rent reduction struggles through the summer and autumn of that year. Considerable official energy and material investment went into the creation of "model villages" to serve as examples of rent reduction rectitude, cooperative creativity, and prosperity. But still Suide peasants were told that the better option for most of them was to move south to Yan'an.

CHAPTeR

5

Democratic Reconstruction: Elections and Taxes,

1937-1945

various base-area initiatives, the mounting of general elections and the overhaul of tax and land tenure systems were fundamental to the Communists' assault on old elite power during the Japanese war years. But more than just playing a critical role in the Party's state-making and hegemonizing progress, these reforms also effected liberating changes for village society's majority poor. The elections gave a political voice to ordinary people. Taxation, rent, and interest-rate reform achieved a gradual, nonviolent redistribution of wealth, which, by undermining the economic power of old elites, enfranchised the poor. And economic leveling provided a foundation for economic development based on cooperation among farm families. The redistributive effect of the Party's tax and rent reforms in the early 1940's has been aptly described by Mark Selden and his coresearchers as a "silent revolution." 1 It achieved the essential goals of land revolution without the violent class struggle and consequent social disruption and disharmony that accompanied forcible seizures of property and the swift leveling of classes. A number of scholars emphasize the importance of the united-front compromises, namely those that admitted non-Party elites into base area governments and gave priority to interclass cooperation over class struggle. In Selden's argument, "one strength of the resistance was its ability to employ a gamut of strategies to win support from diverse social classes, including the rural elite." 2 Oderic Wou, too, highlights the Communists' "policy of patriotism, moderation and constant consultation," arguing that local gentry, along with Party members and AMONG THE PARTY's

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peasants, "formed the tripartite leadership of the local power structure" in the Suwan base area.3 Chen Yung-fa's analysis of relations between local elites and the new state in the central and east China base areas shows the Party's skillful balancing of "unity" and "struggle" tactics. The overall strategy described by Chen, however, was a process of "controlled polarization," which contrived, in the end, to irreversibly sever the bond between peasants and traditional rural elites.4 In other words, even when compromising and wooing, the CCP's unequivocal aim was always to undermine and destroy the power of the old elite. In the case of Shaan-Gan-Ning, there is little evidence of a Party willingness to share power, even temporarily and conditionally, with Shaanbei's local elites. Selden gives importance to the Communist movement's absorption early in the war of elite youths fleeing the occupied cities. In Yan'an, however, young elites without roots in Shaanbei power structures posed little threat to Party authority; their ideology might have been unsound, but that could be rectified, and the skills they brought to the "backward" northwest were desperately needed by the new state. There was certainly some well-publicized wooing by the Yan'an leadership of Suide grandees in 1941. But that was after the Communists' military coup against He Shaonan ended a three-year attempt at a Nationalist-Communist coalition government in Suide. The Suide elites who did not flee the subregion with Commissioner He must have known, or would quickly learn, that lying low under Communist rule was the best way to survive. And so the pattern of Party policy toward elites in northeastern Shaanbei after the 1939-40 coup suggests the "controlled polarization" process posited by Chen Yung-fa, rather than anything that could be called coalition building. At the grass-roots level the Party did value interclass coalitions as a foundation of community building and collective endeavor. As Kuhn has argued, a mobilizational approach to nation building required solid and cooperative communities.5 And because a measure of local autonomy could make communities more solid and more productive, the growth of local self-management capabilities was a means to what was an unflinching CCP goal- state strengthening. Herein lay the essential meaning of rural democratization in the Communists' base areas. The critical difference between the CCP and other local selfgovernment practitioners was its approach to the issue of community leadership. The Party's rivals either ducked this issue or were content to leave local leadership in the hands of a renovated gentry class. The

132 Elections and Taxes CCP, however, judged the destruction of the old gentry class a necessary condition for local autonomy and popular mobilization. Furthermore, in the process of destroying old elite power, the Party was able to make a show of giving ordinary folk power over their former masters. That, too, helped strengthen the loyalty of the community to the new state, and thus were the Party's hegemonizing goals further advanced. While the assault on old elite power was intrinsic to "democratic reconstruction" in both Yanshu and Suide, there were, as we should expect, significant differences in both the path and progress of gradualist reform in the two subregions. The differences derive largely from historio-structural factors. For one thing land revolution had achieved a radical economic leveling in almost all parts of Yanshu before land seizures were halted in 1936. In Suide, by contrast, landlordism was still strong and virulent in the early 194o's. Consequently, the 1942-43 rent reduction campaign was critically important for reconstruction work in Suide, and almost irrelevant in Yanshu. For another thing, the Party's late securing of Suide stalled tax reform, and the extreme poverty of the great majority of people living there made it difficult to offer much tax relief in any case. The Communists did not begin formally collecting taxes in the Suide counties until the autumn of 1940, a time when impending fiscal crisis was pressing the Party-state into a radical broadening of its tax base, but well before it had firmly established its authority over all township and district offices in the subregion. Thus the attempt to effect redistributive justice by means of tax reform had a slow and rocky start in Suide. And so did "popular democracy." A CCP goal in both Yanshu and Suide was grassroots participation in reconstruction and development projects. The resilience of old elite power in Suide, however, meant that the regionwide general election movements of 1941 and 1942 were distinctively different there in some important ways. Rural elections, tax reform, and rent reform in Shaan-Gan-Ning were reconstruction strategies that laid the political and economic foundations of the big development effort of 1943-the great production drive. Obviously, then, the Yanshu-Suide differences in reconstruction achievements before 1943 had consequences for development progress in the subsequent period. In Chapters Seven and Eight we will examine the Communists' attempt to make community cooperation the basis of a development surge forward. In this and the following chapter, the focus is on the state-strengthening and redistributive initiatives that preceded the big production drive. The style

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of these initiatives and their effects expose some of the tensions between, and the potential for reconciling, state power and community power in the two subregions. RURAL ELECTIONS IN SHAAN-GAN-NING,

1941

AND

1942

The 1941 general election movement in Shaan-Gan-Ning was a relatively straightforward state-strengthening exercise. The 1942 movement was, in many respects, more complex; it serves as an interesting example of the Party's attempt to incorporate a process of grass-roots democratization and community building within a state-strengthening program. The structure of the electoral system was basically the same for the two movements (and for elections in all the base areas). General voters directly elected township assemblies (canyihui); those assemblies appointed township governments and sent representatives to the county assembly, and so on through a three-tiered hierarchy of assemblies and government committees at township, county, and regional levels, as shown in the accompanying figure. The 1941 movement culminated in the convening of the Border Region's first assembly in November. This assembly decreed that elections for township assemblies were to be held annually, elections for county assemblies every two years, and elections for the regional assembly every three years.6 Since township assemblies were directly elected by popular vote, there ought by rights to have been a general election every year. After 1942, however, there was not to be another general election until1945. The 1942 movement, following hard on the heels of the previous year's nine-month campaign, was mounted because the Party could not easily disregard the electoral system rulings passed by the November assembly and formally promulgated in April1942. As we shall see, however, there were other reasons for holding a second regionwide election so soon after the first. In 1937 the Yan'an government had mounted an ambitious fourtiered election movement (the extra tier was at the district level), but it got no further than the election of township assemblies in ten counties before it was halted in mid-year by urgent military mobilization for the Japanese war? "Democratic elections" in 1937 were designed as a display of united-front rectitude, aimed at both a national and an

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Regional assembly

Regional government committee

t County assembly

County government committee

t Xiang assembly

Xiang head and government committee

GENERAL ELECTIONS

The Shaan-Gan-Ning electoral system, 1941-1942. There was one representative per 50 voters in the xiang assemblies in 1941, one per "residents group" (2o-6o voters) in 1942.

international audience, in a period when the CCP, holed up in Yan'an, was striving to establish itself as the more credible and broad-minded partner in the alliance. The rationale for the 1941 movement was similar, but the target audience this time was China's provincial elites. In the aftermath of the New Fourth Army Incident,* and with the recent incorporation of the Suide area, the CCP was bidding for the active support of people whose patriotism, in its argument, should cause them to see that only the Communists were capable of uniting all Chinese classes to form an effective resistance against the Japanese. Chen Yung-fa very effectively demonstrates how the election movements in the central and east China bases (in 1942 and 1943) functioned as a two-pronged assault on the Party's old-elite rivals in the countryside. As an elaborate display of democracy-at-work and the Party's declared commitment to power sharing, the elections helped to coopt and neutralize the city-based gentry, and this made it easier to *In january 1941 about 3,ooo Communist soldiers were killed when Nationalist forces attacked the rear guard of the New Fourth Army in Anhui province. Both sides had been guilty of violating the united-front agreement, but this incident publicly exposed the GMD side as dishonorable.

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purge lower-level elites from county and subcounty offices-the practical task of the election movement. And by destroying the power of the lower elites, the Party undermined the traditional power base of the upper-level elites as well.8 The Shaan-Gan-Ning general election in 1941 was similarly two-pronged, especially in Suide (and in the Longdong subregion to a lesser extent), where old elites had been holding their ground against the Communists for more than half a decade. A March 1940 directive to all base areas had defined the Party's famous "three-thirds system" (sansan zhidu), and the official announcement of Shaan-Gan-Ning's 1941 elections called for an "election movement that would implement the 'three-thirds system' " at every level, from villages upward.9 That system required that Communist representation on political bodies be no more than one-third of the total, and that the other two-thirds be made up of "non-Party leftist progressives" and "middle-of-the-roaders" (in practice the non-Communist two-thirds were usually identified as "Guomindang" and "non-Party," respectively).10 When making appointments in 1940 to the Suide provisional assemblies and committees at subregional and county levels, the Party ostentatiously conformed to the three-thirds formula, and a delegation of powerful Suide gentrymen were publicly feted and feasted in Yan'an in the middle of the 1941 election campaign.U In the Party's published reports of election results, success was measured by the extent to which non-Party candidates gained places on the elected assemblies and government committees. By the threethirds criteria, the Communists failed badly in their purpose in the Yanshu subregion (and in most parts of the "old Border Region") and did relatively well in the Suide subregion. Xie Juezai, a vice-president of the second Border Region assembly, reported in early 1942 that only in the township assemblies in Yanshu did Communists make up just one-third or less of all membersY Communists were almost always overrepresented on township government committees. In fact the Yan'an county magistrate considered his elections had gone well when the proportion of Party members elected to the township committees "did not exceed 58 percent." 13 At the county level the composition of both assemblies and government committees fell far short of the three-thirds requirement; and with similar results in three other subregions, more than half the delegates elected to the second Border Region assembly were Communists.14 The widespread failure to draw non-Party personnel into office was an ostensible reason for a second purging of local administrations in 1942.

136 Elections and Taxes Suide was the lone exception. There the elections reportedly resulted in "three-thirds coalition governments" at every level in many places. In the commercial centers, Communist representation on elected bodies was markedly low. Of the 88 people who sat on the Suide city assembly, for example, only 12 were Communists; 15 were said to be GMD members, and the remaining "non-Party" component consisted of "32 merchants, 5 landlord-gentrymen, 13 workers and peasants, and 10 women." 15 At the township level in Suide county, only 26 percent of the electees were Communists; 5 percent belonged to the GMD, and the rest were "landlords, merchants, rich peasants, poor peasants, workers, and intellectuals." 16 In Mizhi county there were only 73 Communists in the 276-member county assemblyP And so on. This pattern did not hold through the whole subregion. The Communists often exceeded the one-third quota on county government committees in particular.18 But the point being made so loudly in Party reports is fairly clear: in an area where elite resistance to the Communists had been particularly strong, the Party was showing its willingness to "share power" with non-Party patriots. Of course, these election-result data tell us almost nothing about the voters' motives and the degree to which they were signaling the effectiveness of the Party's reconstruction work in wartime Shaanbei. The best three-thirds figures are for the assemblies at all levels in Suide, and at the township level in Yanshu. The assemblies, however, were feeble and fleeting institutions. Executive authority at the local level rested with the government committees and, in particular, with the magistrate and township heads who chaired them, and the three-thirds system tended to lose its balance close to those sources of real power. Some GMD county magistrates in Suide, for example, held onto their posts. But as with much three-thirdism, this was a charade. Joseph Esherick's sources indicate that, in Mizhi county, "everyone went around the [Guomindang] county magistrate and dealt directly with the newly-appointed department heads." 19 The elaborate campaign to persuade voters to elect "coalition governments" in what were essentially rigged elections bears out Chen Yung-fa's point-that disarming the still-powerful elites with demonstrations of democracy was intrinsic to the Communists' bigger project: the radical overhaul of local administrations. In Suide, as in the bases that Chen studied, prominent gentry accepted sinecures and sat on consultative committees while their natural allies at lower levels were being "voted out of office" (luoxuan). Indeed, the Party made it

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clear that, in addition to serving as a united-front promotion exercise, the 1941 elections were meant to reform local government; and to demonstrate success in this area, it pointed to the large numbers of "old cadres" (lao ganbu) who were voted out of office. One report claims that, in the whole of Shaan-Gan-Ning, fully 70 percent of township heads were replaced.20 In Suide county a total of 1,001 "old cadres" were said to have been ousted from township office; in a county of 95 townships, this represents more than ten cadres per township. 21 Since the Party's public position was that the purgings were mostly for the sake of broadening non-Party participation in government, it is difficult to identify precisely what kinds of people were removed from local office in 1941. If, as Tetsuka Kataoka argues, the 1941 election movement in Shaan-Gan-Ning was an occasion for "stepping up the land revolution to the higher stage," 22 we would expect to see a renewed targeting of Yanshu's old-rich peasants and surviving landlords. Where old elite power still smoldered in Yanshu, the Communists almost certainly used the election movements to hose it down. But leadership competence and accountability, much more than class relations, were the main issues in the land-reformed areas in 1941. Class was clearly an issue in Suide, but in 1941 the CCP made strenuous efforts to subdue or conceal class conflict while pursuing its aim of maneuvering Communists into township governments. The amount of muscle used to prise rivals out of office was contingent on a number of strategic factors, particularly the strength of old patronage loyalties and the depth of Party organization in any one place. The landlord Ma Weixin was "elected" as Yangjiagou township head (baozhang) in 1941, and the Party was just a small, barely aboveground organization in Ma territory during the early 194o's?3 The 1942 township elections continued the movement to install loyal and honest people in local office. The region's fiscal crisis had peaked in 1941, bringing taxes to an all-time high; and it had fallen to the newly elected township governments to determine each household's tax liability and to see that the township's assigned quota was collected in full and safely delivered to government granaries. Both the size of the burden and official malfeasance stoked popular resentment and dangerous levels of discontent. This was an important factor behind the Party's decision to give village folk the chance in 1942 to vote out of office the cadres who had been manifestly unfair and corrupt at tax collection time the previous autumn. The Party said that the 1942 elections were like a second plowing

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of cropland; "with just one plowing, the crops do not grow quickly." 24 The metaphor suggests unfinished business and the need for deeper digging. In Suide, where the CCP was strengthening its hold, this meant less fussing about three-thirds power sharing and the building of township governments that were unambiguously loyal to the new state. As a Liberation Daily columnist put it in mid-1942: Correct implementation of the "three-thirds system" is not only a matter of numbers ... but is essentially a matter of the one-third Chinese Communist Party component and, more particularly, the two-third non-Party component consisting of representatives who are truly able to further the people's interests, who will genuinely represent the people, will sincerely support the resistance effort and national construction, and will work hard for the establishment of "new democracy" politics.25

In Yanshu, where Party governments had been in place at the local level since 1936 or earlier, the main task was to "rectify" a seasoned cadre force and to infuse it with new blood when necessary. Official criticisms of local cadres, in typical rectification fashion, accused them of "formalism," "commandism," "closed-doorism," "officiousness," and so on. More serious were the specific charges made against tax-collection officers. Quite evident in many places during the 1941 tax collection were the age-old practices of yaosiqing, the levying of light quotas on family and friends, and choumubiao, the dumping of disproportionately heavy burdens on rivals. In Yanshu's resettlement zones choumubiao often manifested itself as an attempt to collect taxes, and heavy taxes at that, from tax-exempt newcomers?6 There was, however, more to the 1942 election movement than the issue of fair taxation under the watchful eye of Party loyalists. The 1941 crisis had forced on the central committee a radical reappraisal of, among other things, mobilization strategies, and 1942 was the year in which a "rectification of work styles" resulted in a new emphasis on the "mass line" method of leadership. The 1941-42 rectification movement produced initiatives that are generally recognized, in both Chinese Marxist and Western scholarship, as constituting the distinctive "Yan'an model." It entailed a rejection of elitism, bureaucratism, and excessive centrism; it was in essence a devolutionary, minban (managed by the people) approach that required broad, yet voluntary, popular participation in collective undertakings. The new approach was most fully expressed in the big production movement launched in the spring of 1943. The 1942 township election movement, however,

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was flavored by and, in fact, part of the build-up to 1943, and this makes it different in interesting ways from the 1941 elections. The rectification of cadre work styles according to "mass line" criteria, in combination with the drive for "simple administrations" (jianzheng), implied a new function and character for local government, and for township governments in particular. The township, following both GMD and CCP reforms, had become the critical point of intersection between state and locality, but neither the Communists nor the Nationalists had succeeded in extending the function of the township head (xiangzhang) much beyond that of tax collecter, corvee mobilizer, and law enforcer.Z7 Now, in 1942, the beleaguered Yan'an government, seeking to economize by whatever means possible, was trying to radically reduce its upper-level cadre force, and was calling on township heads to help out by taking over some of the burdens that the state had been shouldering. In other words the localities were being asked to become self-reliant and economically self-sufficient, even to the point of funding and managing their own social welfare and educational enterprises. The void left by the partial withdrawal of the state was to be filled by resourceful local communities sustained by self-help and interhousehold cooperation and led by entrepreneurial heroesusually the region's new-rich farmers. The wide implications of the devolutionary policy were not fully evident until the big production drive was under way in 1943· The 1942 elections, however, served that policy in three important ways. First, by continuing the overhaul of township governments, it could put local government into the hands of people capable of wisely exercising the expanded responsibilities of the township office. Second, community involvement in nomination and selection of candidates before the elections and making the elected assemblies serve as community forums could contribute to the building of cohesive and politically active village communities. And third, the election campaign itself tested a number of the populist mobilization strategies (based on mass line and minban principles) that were to characterize the Party's mass campaigns in subsequent years. We will begin with the election campaign. The innovative features were in the areas of preparation and supervision work. Cadre training, recruitment, and deployment were now the responsibility of county government; the young urban intellectuals who, in 1941, had been sent down to the villages (xiaxiang) to help run the local elections were this year to serve only as aides.28 The 1942 work-teams were to be com-

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posed entirely of local county people; and although heavy with Party and army personnel, they were also to include "local activists." Election cadres were, at first, put into classrooms, but there was growing criticism of both the delays to mass work this caused and the impractical nature of the courses taught.29 Trial elections were staged in selected townships, and this soon became the preferred method for training work-team personneP0 Squads of about so people were recruited for election work in counties with more than 8o townships, and 30 for less populous counties.31 After the trials the squads broke into district teams and began to tour the townships. A more important innovation was organizing voters into "residents groups" (minju xiaozu). In 1941 voters had had to assemble en masse in the townships on voting day and post their votes in ballot boxes; scribes (bangxiepiao de ren) worked at a furious rate to mark ballot papers for the mostly illiterate voters. The wide scope here for intimidation and chicanery was publicly admitted/2 and the CCP now felt a more informal and personalized approach was better suited to the "backwardness" of the region. Residents groups, consisting of 20 to 6o voters (the size varied according to population density), were to elect one representative each. These groups were not to split families or straddle natural villages, and their size in any one village could vary as much as 30 percent.33 Now that voting could be done in home villages, the reasoning went, even small hamlets would be guaranteed representation by a person known to all residents, the electors would be anxious to find a worthy representative (in contrast to last year), bad choices could easily be replaced, and representatives would be able to speak directly to their constituents' interests. This, in Xie Juezai's view, promised the advent of a people in charge of their own affairs.34 Some villages continued to use ballot boxes and "secret ballot" methods. In most places, however, the anonymous voting charades were dropped, and candidates were elected by popular acclaim or, more colorfully, by the "beans in the bowl" or "holes burned with incense sticks" method.35 In terms of pure mechanics, the process of voter registration, candidate nomination, and residents group voting required more time and concern for detail, and more sensitivity to social relationships, than the mass voting methods of the previous year. And if those elections had been wide open to manipulation and fraud by local organizers, there was still in 1942 considerable scope for election rigging by dominant village families within a residents group. Indeed the chances of such

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families getting their own people elected were probably increased by the reform. Local governments were warned of this danger and advised to divide residents groups up in ways that avoided "the oppression of small households by. the big ones." 36 Social divisions were much sharper in the villages of the Suide subregion than elsewhere, and because these villages also had larger populations, it was probably possible to design groups that gave the poor peasants an electoral voice. We have little information on the makeup of residents groups anywhere in the Border Region, but there is evidence that organization was often based on class criteria in Mizhi county. Election cadres were advised at one point to guard against the "left excesses" of that county's large poor peasant population and to ensure that "enlightened gentry" also got elected to township assemblies.37 For the 1942 election the authorities specified five distinct stages: the delivery of township government work reports, the registration of voters, the nomination and scrutiny of candidates, the actual voting, and then the collection of proposals to be put to the new assemblies. Warnings against too many villager meetings and other "mobilizations" that interfered with farming schedules were delivered in company with demands that preparation and propaganda work be "thorough" (local Party mobilizers have always been caught in this dilemma and have rarely resolved it). After trial elections in Mizhi, the authorities recommended limiting the campaign process to just three formal meetings, all to be scheduled for times when farmers were not busy.38 The delivery of the government report was to be the only occasion at which all township citizens were to be gathered. After that, by means of just one meeting with all household heads in the township, election cadres were to compile an electoral roll and divide voters into residents groups. Finally, each residents group would meet to make its choice and produce a list of proposals for the successful candidate to take to the new assembly. The township meetings provided villagers with the opportunity to air their grievances. Though the government reports were offered to the people as evidence of their 1941 votes "at work," once the time came for those people to have their say, there was a good deal of grumbling about inequities in last year's tax assessments, the nuisance of maintaining farmland for absent soldiers or cadres (daigeng work) and the inequitable spread of that burden, privileged access to scarce commodities (raw cotton, for example) by some families, and injustices in the mediation of disputes.39 To all this there was one official response:

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the new elections gave the common folk a means of fixing things by throwing the "rotten eggs" out of office and by electing assemblies that would truly represent and defend their interests at higher levels. The lapse between these meetings and the "nomination and scrutiny" meetings gave the small residents groups plenty of time to prepare for their examination of the candidates who had been persuaded (usually by the work-team cadres) to stand for election. It often served the Party's purpose to have these meetings erupt into scoldings and virulent attacks on people presenting themselves as candidates. But in the face of widespread resentment over the 1941 tax take, the Party was also intent on defusing discontent and preventing social divisions that could, among other things, disrupt economic production and diminish a community's ability to manage its own affairs. One of the work teams' major assignments, therefore, was to mediate disputes after they had been aired and thrashed out at election meetings. Indeed before the 1942 elections got under way, a Liberation Daily editorial argued that "the two biggest demands of the Border Region people are fair taxes and the impartial adjudication of disputes," and that the inequities of the 1941 tax collection, together with the unabated stream of lawsuits still being brought to township mediators, were evidence that "there is not enough democracy in the villages." 40 The compiling of lists of citizen proposals was the climax and culmination of the 1942 campaign. Villagers were now asked to stop grumbling and to put forward positive suggestions for the reform of local government and public welfare initiatives; the number of proposals produced at village meetings was often used as a measure of an election campaign's success. Citizens' proposals mainly had to do with very practical bread-and-butter issues but also often addressed matters of community law and order and sometimes even treaded into the domain of central government programs. Most of the published lists have the ring of pious village covenants drawn up by state cadres.* Given, however, that the state's agenda included social welfare and develop-

*Consider, for example, this product of a township mass meeting in Wubao county: "Set up winter schools, ensure that the youth-both male and female-take part in the building of irrigation works, repair the roads, put more effort into autumn harvesting and plow the land before winter, harvest first the crops of soldiers' families, organize sentry work, guard against spies, strictly forbid gambling, mobilize vagrants to join in production work, resolutely promote the use of Border Region currency." "Wubao Suide Mizhi."

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14 3

ment initiatives, most villagers were probably well enough satisfied with the proposals submitted, in their name, to township governments. In a number of important ways, then, the 1942 elections contributed to a process of community healing and strengthening in gras~-roots Shaanbei. The airing and resolving of grievances, the enfranchising of resident groups, and the debates over the lists of proposals that elected representatives were commissioned to deliver to governments were all, in essence, community-building devices. The proposals sent to the assemblies as often as not required community action as much as government initiative, and that is precisely what the Yan'an authorities intended. In the name of "simple administration," township governments were being asked to take over several higher-level government responsibilities and to rely on community resources rather than state funding to meet those responsibilities. But the goal of self-reliance and self-sufficiency was really beyond the means of the election movement. An election campaign might have provided villagers with glimpses of democracy, but a self-governing township erected on minban principles could not be pulled out of the voters' hats. The Party's own assessments of the 1942 township election movement reveal that one of the greatest difficulties was finding worthy people to stand for office. Work-team cadres who organized elections in the 13 townships under Yan'an city administration were quoted as saying: "Things are truly terrible here. People are as afraid of being elected township head as a rat is scared of bumping into a cat." 41 The reason given for the problem in this particular case was that farmers were unwilling to spend time away from their sideline businesses and swallow a significant loss of income.42 Presumably the scope for squeezing the township office for perks and kickbacks was considerably narrowed in villages so close to Party headquarters. It seems that the food and cash allowances that went with office, plus community help in maintaining the family farm, were not enough to make honest public service worthwhile.* For the township headship to be attractive to "good people," the authorities had to make the job both profitable for the incumbent and less odious in his constituent's eyes. It is clear that, in 1942, the legitimate perks of office were still far from what could be earned through *By the central government's ruling, a township head was to receive a locally funded daily allowance of 1.3 jin of millet and 30 cash as "vegetable and water" money; the state paid a stipend of 2 yuan a month. "Wancheng xiangxuan."

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squeeze and graft, and that the Communists had little better success than the Nationalists in pushing township heads to do much more than collect taxes, mobilize corvee, and police their communities. To this point township heads had discharged their new responsibilities for collective undertakings like wasteland reclamation, infrastructural repair work, and relief aid for army, cadre, and immigrant families by forcing compulsory "contributions" from farmers whose rising taxes were eating away whatever gains they were making from economic reconstruction. Moreover, inequitable distributions of tax, corvee, and daigeng burdens meant that nothing much was new at township headquarters. It would not be until township leaders were seen to play positive, active roles in initiatives from which economic benefits accrued to everyone that there would be significant change in community attitudes. The patent anomalies and inequities in the agricultural taxes levied at the end of 1941 and the consequent disturbing levels of rural discontent put the township officials elected that year squarely under the regional government's rectification spotlight in 1942. As the regionwide campaign to toss ne'er-do-wells out of township administrations got under way, the spotlight was focused specifically on tax dodging and fraud among local tax officers. In those parts of the Suide subregion where old elites still held sway, tax evasion was widespread among the more prosperous families, putting an even tighter squeeze on the poor. In Yanshu a township tax collector was probably a Party member, someone of middle or rich peasant status for whom things had greatly improved since 1936. Party discipline notwithstanding, however, the logic of tax collection in the conditions that prevailed in 1941 demanded that assessments be based on political rather than economic criteria. So though "revolutionary" cadres tended to target "class enemies" for heavy tax payments, cadres for whom local loyalties were more salient than notions of class struggle continued the tradition of levying taxes in ways that served their own interests. This often manifested itself as prejudice against immigrant families and illegal attempts to tax them. A critique of the 1941 elections discusses at some length the discrimination against and disenfranchising of both new settlers and "former landlords" in the "old Border Region." 43 Peasants were asked to pour out their tax grievances at villager meetings across the region in the summer of 1942. These grievances were deliberately fanned into anger against tax collectors, and audiences were told that they could change things if they elected decent

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people this time. Misunderstandings and wrong attitudes toward elected office were frequently blamed for the bad choices made in 1941. Because the township head had typically been a despised functionary, some people deliberately used their vote to send someone they disliked to their township assembly.44 Others picked someone from whom they could expect favors at tax time.45 Citizens were so keen to avoid being nominated themselves that they were willing to vote for anyone else, and in this way "blockheads" (zhuodaizi) were put up as candidates.46 Old assumptions about the nature of township office were so deep-rooted that electors were prepared to see former baojia functionaries resume official positions.47 And if having a fellow villager serve as one's elected representative meant being obliged to tend his farm while he was away at meetings, then it was sensible to elect someone from another village.48 (The "residents group" method in 1942 foiled this ploy.) Work-team cadres defended their 1941 failure to persuade worthy "non-Party" people to stand for election with the argument that the peasants were politically passive and refused to take on public responsibilities. Xie Juezai conceded that peasants who had been "outside politics" for so long would be slow to use their new political rights and argued that the best form of political tutelage was their participation, compulsory if necessary, in organs that represented "the will of the people." 49 The appeal to peasants to elect honest tax collectors probably persuaded them to take the 1942 elections more seriously than they might otherwise have done. But the 1942 elections did not do a much better job of cleaning up local government than the 1941 elections had done. And they did not by any stretch of the imagination establish a "democratic system" in rural Shaan-Gan-Ning. In some respects, however, they did further the Party's community-building effort, particularly in Yanshu. In hamlets only recently settled, the bondings that grew with shared experiences and memories were still thin in the early 1940's. The 1941 and 1942 election campaigns, as novel and empowering experiences, undoubtedly helped strengthen relationships between old and new settlers and tighten community bonds. Cooperating with neighbors in tasks that would advance both family and village development would substantially deepen those bonds over subsequent years. In Suide minban and jianzheng were secondary to the Party's need to establish its authority over the subregion's villages and to manage the ever-simmering conflict among a land-hungry people. There both

146 Elections and Taxes of the election movements were used as a means of removing local government obstacles to the new state's hegemony. And, in contrast to Yanshu, where the success of mobilizations rested on eliminating or at least minimalizing conflict, the main task in Suide was to manage and channel conflict so that it was manifest as class conflict. TAXATION POLICIES AND TAX COLLECTIONS,

1939-43

The organic connection between the general elections and the Partystate's financial crisis is evidenced in the fact that the Communists were prepared to mount expensive and time-consuming rural election campaigns in the two years of exceptionally heavy taxes (Table 9). A major purpose of those elections was to groom local governments and constituencies for more efficient tax collections, and the communitystrengthening emphasis of the 1942 election was intrinsic to that purpose. In this respect the Communist state was following the imperial tradition of, as Duara puts it, linking "tax responsibility to a stable and accountable community structure," 50 and the Party's tax mobilization methods were premised on, and tried to foster, community cohesion. When placed in the broader context of village reconstruction, therefore, the grain tax campaigns of the 1939-43 period had a much wider significance than revenue raising.51 And when taxation was used as an economic weapon against the old elites, there was the possibility of a more radical restructuring of rural politics than anything that had been achieved by township elections. Thus, although tax collecting is, of its essence, a state-making activity, in at least some parts of Shaanbei it contributed positively to community building as well.

The Evolution of Tax Policies, 1937-43 Grain levies in Shaan-Gan-Ning began in 1937 as ad hoc requisitionings of "National Salvation Grain" from the very few relatively welloff families, and often only in places close to garrisoned troops. When, in 1939, the tightening GMD blockade forced a substantial broadening of the tax base, there was some attempt to apply the proportional taxon-income rates specified in the 1937 National Salvation Grain regulations.52 The authorities preached the need for standardized levying procedures but were satisfied as long as collections conformed to the principle of "those with more grain pay more tax." National Salvation

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1 47

TABLE 9

Grain Taxes in Shaan-Gan-Ning, 1937-1945 Grain tax (dan)

Year

Target

Collected

Percent of total crop

1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

10,000 10,000 50,000 90,000 200,000 160,000 180,000 160,000 124,000

14,197 15,955 52,251 97,354 201,617 165,369 184,123 160,000 124,000

1.27% 1.32 2.98 6.38 13.85 11.14 10.16a 8.83 7.75

SOURCE:

Bianqu [5], p.

Average tax per mu (sheng)

0.16 0.18 0.52 0.83 1.66 1.33 1.38 1.20 0.87

152.

a This is the only significant difference from the figures Li Zhengrui gives in Jingji yanjiu [Eco-

nomics research], p. 108. He puts the share of the crop at

11.25%.

Grain collections were now to be known as the "equitable tax" (heli fudan) in all the base areas. Throughout the war years the CCP doggedly pursued the idea of a "rational" tax system based on objective assessment criteria. So the progressive refinements of the "equitable tax" after 1939 were largely in the direction of regional standardization, accurate income assessments, and foolproof (and rogue-proof) collection methods. The proposed "Uniform and Graduated Agricultural Tax" (nongye tongyi leijinshui), first mooted at the Border Region Assembly of November 1941 and publicly endorsed by Mao a year later,S3 was an experimental step in this direction. It was given trial runs in five Shaan-Gan-Ning counties over three years (1943-45), but its complexity made its widespread adoption unfeasible during the war years. The regional government continued to set an annual National Salvation Grain target for each county, and local authorities continued to rely, at least in part, on "mobilization" (as opposed to "scientific") methods to extract "equitable tax" payments from farmers. While lamenting the lack of fixity, uneven application, and hit-and-miss nature of this tax system, the Communists defended it as a wartime expedient whose vagaries the people would forgive and tolerate for the sake of "national salvation." Popular tolerance was severely stretched in 1941. New regulations published in November that year lowered the tax exemption point to five dou and raised all brackets, beginning with a base rate of 5 per-

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cent and increasing a percentage point per dou up to a ceiling of 30 percent on incomes exceeding 29 dou. 54 The Border Region Assembly ruled that grain tax should be collected from So percent of the population, an order that by one report was carried to a high of S6.1 percent.55 Special provision was made for reaching the So percent target in Suide, a place where the great majority of farmers were extremely poor: the exemption point was dropped to three dou ("with regrettable results," it was later said), and the number of steps in the tax progression was reduced, so that incomes of 1S.5 dou were taxed 30 percent.56 As shown in Table 9, the take for the whole of Shaan-GanNing that year amounted to almost 14 percent of the total grain crop. In both Suide and Yan'an counties, the proportion was considerably higher: 1S.6 percent in Suide county and a huge 35 percent in Yan'an. 57 If the majority poor were cruelly squeezed everywhere in Suide, it was the upwardly mobile middle and rich peasants and newly arrived immigrants who were hardest hit in Yanshu. Later surveys showed that had the 1941 tax exemption regulations been applied in places where immigrants had settled, less than 6o percent of the households there would have been liable for taxes.58 As it was, S3.15 percent of the population in Yan'an county was taxed in 1941, and at an average of 44 dou per person.59 The average payment in Suide county was o.S1 dou per person. Prospering farmers in Yanshu were also hard hit by a new sheep tax, an impost that had little effect on the peasants of Suide, where there was scarcely any grazing space. The trouble of delivering grain tax to government granaries was an accepted part of the burden, but there was the extra bother in 1941 of hauling a new hay tax. Farmers did not resent paying their 20 jin share of hay so much as having to cart huge, cumbersome loads along perilous mountain pathways.60 Another new burden in 1941 was the "salt transport" duty, a demand for corvee labor that committed men in Yan'an county to an extra 19 days/1 and those in other places to a varying number according to the distance from the salt fields and transport routes.* By the Border Region Assembly's ruling (November *Increased salt production and exports helped to alleviate the region's balance of payments problem. In 1941 garrisoned soldiers were put to work in the Sanbian subregion to produce 6oo,ooo loads (150 jin per load) of salt for the government, and all able-bodied men in the vicinity of the salt transport routes were to help with the hauling work. (Only the Suide subregion did not make a significant contribution to this effort.) Transport costs (food, hostelry fees, and fodder) were paid by the government. After 1942 families could fulfill their "salt transport" obligation with a cash payment. Nan Hanchen, "Bianqu caizheng gongzuo," p. 373·

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1941), all able-bodied males were to provide 36 days of corvee labor (not including salt-hauling work) a year.62 However, the commandeering of man- (and animal-) power was mainly done by local governments, and the time demanded in 1941 greatly exceeded 36 days. A survey undertaken in July calculated that the region's laborers would each do an average of 115 to 130 days of corvee work that year; the breakdown was as follows: 63 salt transport

15 days

driving draft animals (additional to salt-transport work) for hauling jobs self-defense militia training, meetings, and sentry duty stretcher-bearing, transport, and construction work for the army

40 days

30-35 days 15-20 days

substitute farming (daigeng), plus carrying water and chopping firewood for army and cadre families

15-20 days

A cash or grain payment could often buy exemption from relief-aid work (and probably from other corvee obligations as well). Additional grain or cash levies were imposed by lower-level governments to fund schools, cadre training, construction projects, and the 1941 township elections. The womenfolk were mobilized to make cotton shoes for soldiers (4o,ooo pairs in 1941). Donations to the army of winter clothing (or the cost thereof) were also demanded in some places.64 And where there were cooperatives, local governments usually made investment in them compulsory for all but the poorest people. In November 1941 the second Border Region Assembly approved measures aimed at stopping the multiplying "unauthorized" taxes being levied by local governments. It ruled that no "tax increases or temporary mobilizations of materials and property" could be made in the future without the approval of the assembly or its standing committee.65 To ensure compliance with this ruling, 12,000 dan of the 1942 National Salvation Grain tax collection was earmarked for distribution as supplementary grants to county governments.66 A reason for the very steep rise in the 1941 grain tax quota (it was later said) was the previous year's inadequate target of 90,000 dan and the subsequent need to "borrow" and make compulsory purchases

150 Elections and Taxes of grain to a total of 67,}60 dan before the 1941 harvests were in.67 GMD administrations commonly resorted to this device, and the Border Region government broadly publicized the fact (or claim) that it had repaid the 1941 grain loans in 1942, thus "establishing its trustworthiness in the eyes of the people." 68 All the same, Party higher-ups were keenly aware of the damage done by the repeated claims on the people's grain savings and admitted as much some years after the fact. One report faulted the government for taxing farmers to the "saturation point" in 1941 and noted that any further increases would have "killed the goose that lays the golden egg" (jie ze er yu).69 Another, from the same year (1948), declared that the compulsory grain purchases and borrowings before the autumn, the less-than-voluntary subscriptions to a s,ooo,ooo-yuan government bond issue, the 200,000-dan National Salvation Grain target, the hay and sheep taxes, and a "new grain tax" of 13,200 dan in December 1941, together with all the "miscellaneous levies" and frequent calls to "labor duty" by lower-level governments, represented "a cumulative harassment of the people." 70 Peasants responded to this harassment by falsifying their incomes, concealing grain, delivering inferior or spoiled grain, migrating out of the region, selling or slaughtering taxable livestock (especially sheep), letting farmland fall waste, and, of course, corrupting tax collectors by whatever means possible.71 1941 was an exceptional year, in which the Party-state fell back on long-established taxing strategies of impecunious governments, and one that served thereafter as the "bad year" against which improvements could be measured. The CCP's consciousness of its waning prestige in the villages in 1941, and the resurfacing of old habits of tax resistance, prompted a strenuous damage-control effort, a search for less painful means of resource extraction, and, as Chen Yung-fa has shown, the resort in 1942 to opium growing and trafficking. 72 Chen insists, correctly, that the big production drive launched in the spring of 1943 did not bring in enough revenue to balance the Border Region's budget (nor did the opium trade, for that matter)?3 But productivity gains did reduce pressure on tax-paying farmers. In fact, the state was able to take a bit more from many farm families in 1943-44 and still hurt them less. The repair work begun in 1942 constituted part of the careful preparatory work for the production mass movement planned for the following year. Among numerous other things (including the rectification

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of work styles and the township elections), that repair work entailed more careful attention to tax assessment and collection methods. 1941 was certainly a turning point, but it also serves to illustrate the tenacious historical continuities that shaped both Party state building and peasant politics. The choices were to swim with the tides or against them, or a bit of both. The trauma of 1941 caused revolutionaries to reach for and to value the safety of things familiar and traditional, but it also forged a new determination among them to do things differently.

Income Assessment and Tax Collections: Democracy vs. Science Before 1940 tax collections in Shaan-Gan-Ning tended to conform to the logic of land reform. Collectors "targeted the bigwigs" (zhuadatou) and were later criticized for their "guerrilla-style" methods?4 Even after the introduction of the relatively simple five-tiered income tax scale in 1939, tax officials continued to rely on "heavy persuasion" (yundong quanmu) and "approximations" of tax liability-an approach euphemistically called the "welcome" (huanying) method of tax collection?5 An equitable application of the progressive tax rates required accurate income assessments; and, lacking any systematic survey material, tax collectors could either make their own estimates or ask for income declarations from taxpayers. The declaration method was to be refined and made more workable in subsequent years, but it was certainly not the standard practice in 1940. In the main collectors continued to "apportion" (tanpai) tax liabilities more or less as they saw fit; if they had a scaling method at all, it was defined by the standard class categories of "rich," "middle," "poor," and "hired" (a method called cengceng tanpai, "apportioning by strata").76 But the broadening of the tax base now required that more careful attention be given to tax justice and democracy. Democracy in 1940 meant allowing the majority to determine what was a "reasonable" distribution of the tax burden, and in practice that meant dividing up the burden in a way that aroused the least public anger. The government assured its taxation officials that the people had a very strong sense of what was equitable and did not mind paying taxes as long as the system was seen to be fair. To that end officials must give the tax-paying public a strong voice in tax assessment decisions77 Rather than barge into the villages to arbitrarily "announce estimates that are fixed" (xuanchuan guding), cadres must take account

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of local opinion. The state, in other words, would turn a blind eye to the eccentricities of local justice if that helped collections run smoothly. In 1941 work teams from Yan'an and the other subregional capitals linked up with county teams and went down to the villages to organize, in conjunction with the newly elected township assemblies and cadres, a thoroughgoing "political mobilization" for grain tax collection. To forestall what promised to be a serious problem of tax evasion in this year of steep rises, the government commissioned these teams to compile income registers for each village. Their "investigation," it turned out, put considerable trust in the amounts reported by household heads at public meetings; the work teams seemed to think that they could reasonably expect "mass democracy" to discourage false declarations. We know, however, that entire villages colluded in underreporting harvested grain; village and township officials who were guilty of "conspiring to cover up" (huxiang baobi) were put on struggle platforms during the 1942 elections.* The Party-state's other counterstrategies, such as cultivating loyalists inside the villages and making full and accurate income surveys, were also set in train but were not really effective until after 1941. For now, the government's standard procedure was "democratic apportioning" (minzhu tanpai), a procedure it deemed flawed, but that brought in the tax grain nevertheless. It usually consisted of three steps: "democratic" pressure was applied to elicit more factual income declarations than could be expected through private interview; a village's tax assessment committee (pingyihui) joined township officials in allocating household tax quotas; and those quotas were then put up for "democratic" consideration at a village mass meeting, to be accepted or adjusted. The newly elected township assemblies were meant to be in charge of this procedure, but few were ready to supervise the year's grain tax collection?8 The task consequently fell largely to the work teams from the subregional capitals. In the Suide counties work teams trained in Suide city, seconded schoolteachers, and local Party branches seemed to have played a particularly important role, more so than in Yanshu. This was possibly a consequence of the Com*Nan Hanchen told Gunther Stein in 1944: "Yes, it did happen in the beginning that whole villages tried to deceive us; but practically every locality now has 'active elements' who have been educating the people successfully on matters of civic consciousness so that such cases are extremely rare. And we know from sample investigations that we are getting correct returns, practically without a bureaucratic machinery." Stein, Challenge of Red China, p. 163. See also "Caiting Nan."

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153

munists' essential mistrust of the people who won office in the Suide township elections that year. The people appointed to tax collection work in the Suide subregion attended training classes in Suide. city before dividing into four county work teams.79 The Suide county team, subdivided into 12 brigades (dadui), fanned out to district stations in mid-November. County authorities ruled that "mobilization and investigations" should be completed by December, and that the second stage, grain collection and storage, should be completed by the end of January 1942.80 More than 30 army cadres with mass mobilization (minyun) experience joined the training classes in Suide city and went down to the villages with the work teams; 81 their presence undoubtedly helped to give authority to the teams when dealing with local gentrymen. The Qingjian county work team, the first to graduate from training, sent the Suide county team a "letter of challenge" (tiaozhanshu), to which the Suide team, we are told, responded enthusiastically. The terms of the competition provide useful insights into the function of these work teams at tax time: 1. Mobilize the people by means of penetrating propaganda; do accurate statistical surveys; ensure that the taxes that are paid are equitable and assessed democratically. Do not "apportion" tax liabilities. There is to be no coercing of people, no blackmail. 2. Cooperate with the army; be obedient to government rulings; do not let commands replace methods of persuasion. 3· Become "as one" with cadres in local administrations. Through a spirit of energetic hard work, improve the masses' trust in the government. 4· In addition to meeting the tax quotas, ensure that taxes are paid promptly, and that the quality of the grain collected is good.82

The 1941 grain tax was still being collected in April 1942 and, as we have noted, it is likely that many families were taxed a second time in order to meet the 2oo,ooo-dan target.83 With the new tax year coming on, the government was at pains to demonstrate benevolence and fairness in the area of tax policy. A new ruling in mid-1942 sanctioning a summer tax collection in wheatgrowing districts (where farmers, as a result, either paid their annual taxes in summer and autumn installments or paid no autumn taxes at all) was promoted with the promise that the government would not again compulsorily borrow or purchase grain in the "spring hunger" months.84 The exemption point in the tax scale was raised to six dou,85 and county governments could now apply for permission to make minor adjustments to suit local circumstances. In the Suide sub-

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region more of the burden was shifted to wealthy families by raising the maximum rate to 35 percent and making the exemption point five dou (a cut-off point that was still lower than the regional standard but less draconian for the poor than the three dou set in 1941).86 Preparation for the 1942 tax collection included a stepped-up effort to compile accurate information about family incomes. Beginning in late 1941, teams of trained rural investigators were commissioned to make comprehensive village surveys, and the results of these surveys were fed into the reappraisals of policy being conducted at the highest levels throughout 1942. Side by side with this top-down survey work was a more concerted effort at the grass-roots level. Township governments were now to assign a "work group" (gongzuozu) to each administrative village; that group was to investigate every household thoroughly and submit a register of incomes to a village "assessment committee" (pingyi weiyuanhui)-a popularly elected group of about five or six "upright and esteemed" villagers. The committee was to verify the estimates by discussing them with household heads and then pass them back to the work group for submission to the township government committee, and then the township assembly. Ratification by the assembly would supposedly set the assessments in concrete.87 Not surprisingly, things rarely worked like this in practice, and the authorities became resigned to the fact that, until the UGAT (based on land valuations and average, not actual, incomes) could be broadly implemented, they would have to rely on the technique of "mass mobilization" and stomach the inevitable assessment irregularities and inaccuracies. By the time of the 1942 collection, authorities were arguing that a mechanistic application of the rules and slavish reliance on surveys were counterproductive. The masses, collectively, had to be allowed to scrutinize income estimates and publicly expose tax dodgers. 88 The same "mass democracy," in the form of semi-contrived "struggles" against corrupt officials, had been used to purge local governments in the township elections that year, and it was a tactic that the Communists were learning to wield with consummate skill. The village gatherings and crowd excitement, while clearly serving Party purposes, also politicized village folk and taught them strategies that could be used to defend community interests. The CCP believed that politicization would result in peasants paying taxes less grudgingly; through political education they would learn that they paid taxes in order "to drive back the Japanese, to defend the Border Region, and to safeguard their own livelihoods." 89 Tax increases in three successive

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years, however, hardly helped to win farmers over to the state's way of seeing things. Party leaders openly conceded in 1942 that the 1939-41 tax hikes had caused the peasants' "production morale" to plummet. The Yan'an government blamed "enemy agents" for spreading the "rumor" that the 1942 grain tax quota would be more than 2oo,ooo dan and for the peasantry's conviction that "the more you produce the more tax you'll pay" (dadeduo shoudeduo).90 A big counteroffensive began with the announcement at spring plowing time that the 1942 tax target would be 16o,ooo dan; in other words almost all taxpayers would be asked to pay less tax, even if their harvests were larger than the previous year's. Additionally farmers were assured that there would be no supplemental grain collections in the spring and summer, that the sheep tax was being abolished, and that grain loans would be issued to those who had been hit too hard in December-January.91 Spring plowing, more than before, took the form of a mass movement this year. A huge inspirational effort was needed to persuade peasants to keep all farmland in production, especially the newly opened wastelands in Yanshu, and heavy reliance was put on the emerging labor heroes to back this effort. Wu Manyou is said to have "redoubled his efforts at opening up new land" in April 1942, and by June he and his fellow Wujiazaoyuan villagers had readied 225 new mu for planting.92 The year before, Wu's grain tax had amounted to more than 30 percent of his crop/3 and when the villagers said to him, "Old Wu, you pay too much, cut down a bit!," he spoke of his indebtedness to the revolution and the 8th Route Army's selflessness. After this, it was said, "everyone respected his opinion and enthusiastically gave grain to the state." 94 When Shen Changlin's generous tax payments were marveled at, Shen remonstrated: "Hey! the state's having difficulties! Come on everyone, pay your taxes!" And when other people were selling their oxen and donkeys and letting their farms run down in the winter of 1941, Shen had ostentatiously bought livestock, hired laborers, and set about expanding his farming business.95 These "models" had an effect only after demonstrated state trustworthiness and a production upturn in which the tardy and dull were penalized and patriotic (taxpaying) entrepreneurs reaped tangible profits. The CCP's task was very much uphill in 1942, for it was not until that November's grain tax collection that the peasants could be convinced that they might keep the profits from the bigger production effort asked of them. In the light of the damage done to their morale by rising taxes since 1938, we can see the special importance and urgency

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of the rectification of cadre work styles and the township elections in 1942. Both movements demanded a new approach from cadres who,

in Mao's words, knew only how "to do one kind of work, asking the people for this and that, for grain, for hay, for taxes, and for mobilization for various kinds of work." Instead of demanding things of the people, cadres were "to organize, lead, and help [them] to develop production and increase their material wealth." 96 Local officials, that is to say, were to be much more than mere tax collectors. They were also to be the agents through which loans and other agricultural inputs were to be passed on to farmers. And they were to be the key organizers, through direct farmwork participation, of a greatly intensified production effort. The big production drive of 1943 would not have been possible without improved farmer morale, new production incentives, different behavior from township officials, and the 1942 tax reductions. National Salvation Grain tax collections in the following years were largely based on the methods refined in 1941 and 1942. Some changes to the tax scale the next year, although minor, reflect a reassertion of class-based politics in Shaan-Gan-Ning after 1942. The base rate was dropped to 3 percent in Suide and to 4 percent elsewhere, bringing further tax relief to the poorest families, and the 35 percent maximum rate now applied in all places (not just Suide).97 "Leaps" were also inserted into the tax ladder that worked to ease pressure on lower income earners and increase taxes at the top end of the scale. For example, incomes of eight dou per capita were now taxed 6 percent (down from 8 percent), and the rate for an income of 27 dou increased from 27 percent to 30 percent.98 A survey of household taxes in three townships in the Chengguan district of Jia county was used to demonstrate that an application of the 1943 tax scale resulted in "appropriate distances between strata." But the Jia county data in Table 10 not only show the "leaps" between classes; they also reveal a much lower rate of taxation in all classes than the official schedule called for. The disparity in what was on the whole an exceptionally poor county reflects the persistence of the old habit among local officials of ignoring the government's tax tables at assessment time. In the hope of repairing some of these flaws, the Communists gave the UGAT system a trial run in three counties in 1943- Yan'an, Suide, and Qingyan. Under this system a household's tax liability was determined by property holdings and annual average incomes, and not by an annual regional target decreed from Yan'an. This should have meant that as soon as the very complex task of measuring land, cal-

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TABLE 10

Grain Taxes in Chengguan District, Jia County, 1943 Class

Landlord Rich peasant Middle peasant Poor peasant Hired laborer Other

Number of families

16

40 244 2,498 64

37

Income per capita (dou)

50.8 19.0 10.9 5.5 2.5 5.2

Tax rate (percent)

22.7%

13.5 8.1 2.1 2.6

SOURCE: Bianqu [14], pp. 146-47.

culating averages, and registering the "taxable capital" (shuiben) of each household was done, assessments could at last be a simple matter of consulting a tax table.99 A farmer would know in the spring how much tax he would pay at the end of the year and could expand his production in the knowledge that he could keep all the extra profits. By the same token a farmer whose registered average income was not subject to revision for several years would be challenged to exceed that mark each autumn. Another important feature of this tax was that production costs could be taken as deductions from taxable income. This was to serve as an incentive for farmers to invest capital in their enterprises. It was also aimed at penalizing property owners who did not themselves work on and improve their farms.* Predictably, the tasks of collating detailed registers and making accurate and equitable calculations of "taxable capital" were this tax system's Achilles' heel. By the end of 1943 the requisite survey work had been completed in only five townships of Yan'an county, and it is more than likely that progress was also slow in Suide and Qingyan. The practical difficulties of accurately measuring and evaluating land in the rugged Shaanbei hill country were enormous. In Suide county officials relied primarily on the familiar "public declarations" to compile draft registers. In Yan'an county village committees actually trav*The examples of the rich peasant Wu Manyou and the landlord Chang Youwen were used to illustrate the support that this tax system gave to practicing farmers. Chang's income from rents (54 dan) was the same as Wu's income from farming, and both families had therefore paid the same National Salvation Grain Tax. In 1944 Wu's production costs offset his property tax (experiments with the UGAT did not begin in Wu's home district until1944). But Chang now paid tax on land as well as income. Nan Hanchen, "Bianqu caizheng gongzuo," pp. 150-51.

158 Elections and Taxes eled out to the farms to verify their owners' declarations and to make spot checks with measuring rods. Whatever the methods used, however, the resulting assessments were invariably contested by taxpayers. There is evidence of some serious discontent with the new tax in Yan'an county, and a worrying number of migrations out of UGAT districts. Of 30 households in Nianzhuang village (Chuankou district) in 1944, nine were planning to move because, among other things, they thought the land grades and average incomes registered against their names were too high. Among several other examples of dispirited farmers was one Wang Buyin, himself a tax worker, who decided to move half of his family to a UGAT-free zone. One of the main problems, it seems, was the arbitrariness of surveys and the uniform classification of land by features such as aspect (north or south) and position (e.g., hillslope, gully, river flats) without on-site inspections. Moreover, farmers complained that the mu measure used in 1943 was smaller than past standards, and that the land areas recorded in the tax registers were therefore inflated.100 It was inevitable that similar problems occurred in Suide and Qingyan. Years later finance authorities admitted that the scale and complexity of the survey work required for the compilation of UGAT registers were beyond the capacity of Shaan-Gan-Ning's rural cadre force. 101 Whether or not good surveys made tax collections easy was probably rarely tested. UGAT regulations were revised in 1944, and the trials were repeated in Suide and Qingyan counties, extended to all districts of Yan'an county, and then installed in Jingbian and Chishui counties. Revisions and new trials continued through 1946, but the system never became regionwide. Nevertheless, for all the surveying difficulties and protests, the UGAT did work some important reforms in the areas where it was tested. The tax-exemption privilege for immigrants in Yan'an county, for example, was now strictly enforced, and only 59·4 percent of families in three surveyed townships paid the UGAT tax in 1943. Similarly the "taxable capital" of more than 40 percent of the population in Suide county's Xindian district fell below the UGAT exemption point that year. And this contraction of the tax base notwithstanding, the authorities claimed that both counties were easily able to meet their centrally fixed targets under the overhauled rates.102 This was done, of course, by squeezing upper-income earners more tightly to make good the loss. Particularly important is the way in which tax reform served the tenancy reforms in the Suide subregion. In the autumn of 1943, the rent reduction campaign was being taken very seriously in places

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where land reform had not been implemented (or had not worked properly), and a tax assault on landlords was an important part of a broader movement to undermine the regime's enemies, to make farming viable for the masses of poor peasants in the land-scarce areas, and to give impetus to a "rich peasant economy." The work of land registration and scrutiny of account books undertaken by UGAT teams provided rent reformers with valuable evidence against landlord "exploiters." Indeed it is obvious from the reports we have that a major spin-off from the land surveys was the clarification of landownership and land-use patterns. In Yan'an county they resulted in another "land distribution" to people who were still landless and led to the resolution of quarrels growing out of the muddled distributions of the mid-1930's.103 In Suide county registrations were said to have settled "numerous unresolved and long-standing disputes over land" and to have added some 175,000 mu of undeclared land to the county's tax rolls.104 With landlords finding it progressively more difficult to arrange privileged tax exemptions and dodges for their families, it is not surprising that UGAT collections and the rent reduction struggle were tightly coordinated in Suide county at the end of 1943·

Taxes, Rural Development, and Class Struggle Tax collections in Shaan-Gan-Ning's early period were poorly planned and organized, and the pre-1941 bias against the prosperous was more tacit than deliberate. The 1940-42 crisis, however, the consequent tax hikes, the increasingly complex collection task, and growing peasant protest against soaring taxes made it essential that the leadership examine more carefully the socioeconomic impact of tax policy and practice. The vigorous propaganda campaigns that accompanied and followed the 1941 collection combined appeals to patriotism with arguments about the improved capacity of the region's farmers to pay National Salvation Grain taxes.105 Another argument, that taxpayers were treated relatively leniently, compared with the demands of past regimes and the burdens still being borne by people in neighboring GMD counties,106 is somewhat compromised by the Party leaders' admission that farm families were overtaxed in 1941. Even so there is enough substance in Party reports to demonstrate some of the important differences between Yanshu and Suide in the area of taxation policy and impact. They also reveal the early ambiguities and growing clarity after 1941 of the Party's "class policy" in this domain. Particularly interesting is the contrast between reformed and unre-

160 Elections and Taxes formed districts both within the Suide subregion and across the Border Region as a whole. There is evidence to suggest that landlords were specially targeted for big tax payouts in the unreformed parts of Suide in 1941, and that village quotas were spread more evenly across classes in the reformed areas. Let us look first at the unreformed areas, beginning with the most notable example, the second administrative village of Suide county's Sishilipu district, where just three families paid more than half the village's 45-dan quota. Not far behind was the ninth township of Mizhi county's Yindou district, where only 32 percent of the families paid tax. In Shuangyuhu (later Zizhou city) "democratic assessment" methods resulted in landlords paying 30 percent more than the obligatory amounts (although it was also the case that poor peasants here were overtaxed by as much as 15 percent).107 When gentry were asked by the Suide-Mizhi survey team about their attitude to "democracy," a Mr. Chang replied: "What's the use of democracy! When it comes to tax collection, one person is told to pay up, and the majority pay nothing. You can be sure that the majority will agree to this." 108 But the majority were not in fact getting off so lightly in the landreformed parts of eastern Suide in 1941. Even extremely poor peasants there were paying taxes. Party investigators reported that 95 percent of the households in Yanjiachuan district were taxed in 1941, the highest proportion in the county; the figure was 85.5 percent in Yihe district. And in districts like Zaolinping, which were sovietized before 1936 and typically had large numbers of army families, the investigators determined that more than 6o percent of army dependents (360 households) had been illegally taxed.109 The pattern across the two counties for which we have data was not consistent. For example, successful tax evasion on a substantial scale by nine landlord families in the Sishilipu district was not exposed until 1942. It is fair to say, however, that well-off families in unreformed areas were hit harder by the 1941 tax take than their counterparts in the old soviet areas were. Still, certain Yanshu data suggest a degree of ambiguity or equivocation in the Communists' class policy. For example, though the 1941 grain tax collection claimed more than 35 percent of the crop in three Yanshu counties (including Yan'an),110 the burden was spread more evenly than was general in the Suide subregion. Where tax payments ranged from 0.1 dou to 598.5 dou in Mizhi county, and from 0.1 dou to 340 dou in Suide county, the Yan'an county high was only 184 dou and the low 0.5 dou. 111 At first glance so narrow a range seems to support

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the Communists' claims that land revolution had effected a leveling of economic classes. It could be, however, that the Communists, somewhat mendaciously, used the leveling argument to justify taxing the Yanshu poor more heavily in 1941 and easing up on those who had been disproportionately squeezed in the previous two years. The taxation patterns in the Suide subregion indicate the same kind of reasoning at work-that the lower strata in the land-reformed districts had more capacity to pay taxes than their counterparts in the unreformed districts. Land distribution usually did result in some economic improvements for many of the poorest but, given the large populations of very poor people, not much. It is more likely that the Communists presumed the gratitude and loyalty of the lower strata in reformed villages and, given the dissipation of old elite influence there, could demand onerous payments without too much danger of provoking divisive and damaging conflict. A few other conclusions are suggested by the data. First, the ability of a large proportion of Yanshu farmers to meet their heavy tax bills in 1940 and 1941 is indicative of considerable economic improvement in this subregion since 1936. The 1941 taxes severely tested loyalties and prompted protests, passive and active, but the rates were not, in the main, ruinous. The government's spring grain loans were needed to stave off food crises just for a small minority. With the rest of the population, the problem was a serious but not irreversible drop in "production morale." Second, the very need to lower the exemption point in order to collect taxes from the masses of poor peasants in the Suide subregion points to the general state of impoverishment there and to the formidable tasks still confronting the Communist reformers. But the Party also, as we have seen, demanded very big payments at the top end of the income scale. The tax teams that went into the Suide landlord strongholds in 1941 and managed to enforce this policy must have been aggressive and well protected. And they might or might not have used populist "class struggle" techniques to get disproportionately large tax payments from the local "moneybags." Panic over grain supplies in 1941 caused the authorities to collect grain by whatever means worked and from whoever had surpluses. The consequent serious loss of popular goodwill, however, led to a renewed concern within the Party to cultivate friends and neutralize enemies. There were, of course, other factors contributing to a less ambivalent, more focused "class policy" after 1941. The Suide and southern Longdong subregions were now secure and, with the united front

162 Elections and Taxes effectively finished, there was less concern to conciliate old landed elites in those places. Where such people impeded attempts to develop agriculture and make things even marginally better for Suide's masses of poor peasants, the CCP once again called for class struggle. Then there was the "rich peasant question." Internal Party anxieties about the policy of tolerating rich peasant "exploiters," if not put to rest, were eased by the fact that prospering farmers were clearly serving a crucial function as employers of immigrant farmers in sparsely populated districts. Moreover, many (if not most) rich peasants in the Yanshu counties were former poor peasant heroes of the mid-193o's land revolution, people who had made good over the last seven or eight years. There was no need to be embarrassed about supporting these revolutionary farmer capitalists, and their loyalty to the Party (which was often real) was used as a propaganda weapon against their less cooperative counterparts in the unreformed parts of the region. The UGAT system was explicitly designed to encourage rich peasant forms of farm management,112 to ease the tax pressure imposed on the poor over the last few years, and to force landlords to work their own land or to sell it to those who would. National Salvation Grain tax policy had, over several years, floundered its way in this direction, and the revised tax rates of 1943 continued the 1942 trend toward a heavier taxing of the most prosperous families and leniency toward the poor. As a tax on income only, with no property tax component, this system was always deemed flawed by the authorities. It is clear, however, that there was wide scope within the "democratic apportioning" method for including a family's property when determining taxable "income." Indeed the National Salvation Grain tax regulations recommended that income estimates should take account of a taxpayer's land and livestock holdings, as well as farm produce.113 "Mass democracy" instinctively knew this to be fair, and although a tendency to "target the bigwigs" was now seen as a danger to rich peasant friends in the Yanshu counties, it was, with official sanction, let off the leash in most parts of Suide after 1941. Once the official tide turned against Suide landlords, both the "democratic" method of fixing National Salvation Grain tax liabilities and the UGAT method resulted in demands for heavy payments from big landowners. To what extent, then, did tax collections in Shaan-Gan-Ning contribute to a restructuring of rural society? In Party analyses the process of economic leveling always began with land reform, and small "leaps" in graduated tax scales were meant to reflect that leveling, rather than

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cause it. After the capriciousness of pre-1942 collections, however, and especially because of the damage done by indiscriminate levying, the Communists were, from now on, to use tax strategy more deliberately as a means of engineering socioeconomic changes, and by positive or punitive means. In Yanshu the emphasis after 1941 was on damage repair in the form of genuine tax relief for poor and immigrant families, the guarantee of stable, lower quotas in future, and, by means of a multifaceted production drive, the promise of annual increases in after-tax profits to farmer entrepreneurs. In land-reformed areas, therefore, taxes should have been punitive only for laggards and lawbreakers, and were meant to discriminate in favor of the upwardly mobile. In the reformed districts of the Suide subregion, land distributions had given only scraps of land and little else to poor peasants. Tax relief for the poorest farmers after 1941, together with government inputs in the form of low-interest loans, infrastructural improvements, support for handicraft or trade initiatives, and strong organizing leadership enabled many poor families to begin, over the next few years, to produce small grain surpluses. In these places the basic orientation of tax policy was one of supporting and encouraging the middle and rich peasant economies, but with a more deliberate focus on middle peasants than in Yanshu; the majority of Suide's rich peasants were not old "friends" of the Communists. Rural elections, graduated taxes, and rent reform were, in combination, the essential Communist strategy for ridding the countryside of obstructive landlords in all the CCP's wartime bases. More than that, it freed up land for poor and middle peasant friends, an important consideration in land-scarce Suide, where the Party was balked in its efforts to get large numbers of people to move south into the wasteland areas. Shaan-Gan-Ning investigators provided evidence to show that, before the end of the resistance war, the strategy had begun to work. But they typically found their proof in rent reduction data; high taxes were more likely to be the nails in landlord coffins. 114 The connection between the two will become clear as we move on, in the next chapter, to the campaign for tenancy reform in Suide.

CHAPTER

6

Tenancy Reform in the Suide Subregion, 1940-1944

in Suide in 1942 combined with that year's townreform to deliver a strong Party challenge to the tax and elections ship subregion's traditional elites. The next year saw a stepped-up movement "to reduce rents and interest rates" (jianzu jianxi) that turned what had been an implicit class struggle into an openly aggressive assault on landlordism. By the end of 1943, the CCP had substantially strengthened its influence at all levels of the Suide administration. The overhaul of tenancies was also a part of the state's communitybuilding enterprise. By giving economic relief to poor farmers and reducing inequities between village households, it expected to lay a foundation for the community cooperation on which the big production drive depended. At a certain point, therefore, the class struggle strategy began to lose its usefulness. Once struggle had served its purpose of subduing or removing the Party's rivals, the reformers needed to hose down fractiousness and work at forging "unity" between classes. This also meant that organizations that had represented tenant solidarity in the struggle phase of the movement needed to broaden their memberships and expand their functions if they were to spearhead community development initiatives. Redirecting the subregion's festering social conflicts into class channels was only one of the formidable difficulties the Communist reformers ran up against when they started seriously addressing the problems of landlordism and tenant poverty in northeastern Shaanbei. They were confounded in 1942 by very effective shielding devices

TENANCY REFORM

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165

wielded by both landlords and tenants. The landlords' swift response to the threat of rent reductions was deliberately to fan tenant competition for land, thereby compounding the seething quarrels deriving from the on-and-off, patchy land revolution in the areas that had been part of the Shaanbei Soviet. Class relations were further complicated by the fact that many tenants were also landlords, renting out their far-flung properties in order to work plots closer to home. This was a problem the Communists confronted in most places, but it was a particularly thorny one in an area where farm property was so highly fragmented. The ambiguities in class relations made it very difficult for the Communists to forge class solidarity among the subregion's tenants, and landlords were more than a match for the rent reformers in 1942. Clearly rent reform's gradualist path was much more tortuous and complex than the sudden-death tactics of the 1934-36 land revolution, which had purged the countryside of old elites by killing them or chasing them out of the villages. The history of the rent reform movement in Suide strikingly exposes the northeastern subregion's developmental disadvantages relative to its Yanshu neighbor. EARLY PHASES OF THE RENT REDUCTION MOVEMENT,

1937-42

In late 1937 He Shaonan's office and the 8th Route Army garrison command in Suide issued a joint communique specifying that rents were not to exceed 30 percent of the harvest.1 But on one side at least, this announcement was intended as an assurance to landholders that confiscations were now prohibited, not as a promise of genuine relief to tenants. In fact, according to the Communists, by the end of 1938 He Shaonan was actively resisting any tenancy reform. In mid-1940, shortly after Commissioner He was deposed, the new Party administration announced a set of detailed tenancy reform regulations} but united-front considerations still inhibited forceful action against defiant landlords at the time and, in fact, until late 1942. Party analysts later criticized the "capitulationism" and "empty sloganeering" that "threw cold water on the masses' struggle" in the early united-front period.3 The Politburo's January 1942 "Decision on Land Policy" was presented (and is read by most analysts) as the CCP's definitive statement of its united-front compromise position on landlordism.4 It reiterated the 25 percent reduction the Nationalist government had enacted in

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its 1930 Land Law (but never enforced),S ruled that adjustments were to be made for good, average, and poor harvests, and fixed a rentexemption point. The policy is certainly moderate, compared with the soviet-period land reform policy. With hindsight, however, we can also read the January document as a signal that united-front "unity" was wearing thin. By rent payment time in late autumn, these "definitive" regulations had been expanded and tightened in a series of more practicable directives, the most important of which were the "Supplementary Methods for Implementing Rent Reduction" (October 1942) and "Land Tenancy Draft Regulations" (December 1942).* In keeping with the devolutionary principles that increasingly characterized mass campaign work in 1942, the new directives made a point of leaving to local administrations the responsibility for filling in the details and for making rulings appropriate to local conditions. But they also provided detailed instructions about ways to counter landlord strategies for dodging and subverting the government's land-rent regulations. In Party assessments, the autumn 1942 drive against "stubborn landlords" marks the beginning of the "mass movement" phase of tenancy reform.6 The job of teaching the new rent rules to tenants and their landlords often fell to tax officials in that busy autumn of 1942. So not only did tax collectors now take less grain tax from Suide's poor peasants than in the previous year; they also offered the prospect of rent cuts and refunds. The tax collectors who delivered these important bonuses were people whose authority derived from a popular election and who, the Party said, could be dismissed by village folk if they were not honest and fair. Suide tenants, however, had been buffeted and made profoundly pessimistic and ·cynical by changes in the political winds for too long to be quickly convinced of the new government's goodwill. And their caution in the autumn of 1942 was well justified. Despite the strong cadre presence in the villages, there was a wholesale hoaxing of tax officials and widespread evasions of the reduced rents by landlords that year. The failure of tenancy reform in late 1942 was *"Guanyu jianzu shishide buchong banfa," Oct. 10, 1942, in CZJJSL, 2: 265-70; SGN [15]. The regulations were further revised, refined, and extended over the next few years in directives on land registrations (Sept. 1943), on handling quarrels over mortgages and accrued debts (Sept. 1945), on "dealing with problems related to rent reduction" (Feb. 1944), on rent inspections (July 1946), and in supplementary tenancy and land rights regulations (Dec. 1943, Dec. 1944, July 1946). SGN [29], 1: 339-41, 360-64, 425-31; 3: 145-47, 289-99·

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later attributed to the reformers' attempt to enforce rent reductions by means of "administrative decrees" and in the manner of "bestowing gifts" (enci) on the masses? There had been, it was said, little investigative work, and the 25 percent formula had been inflexibly applied to all land rents. Moreover, by trumpeting the campaign's slogans without taking measures to prevent retaliation, cadres had given landlords the chance to develop strategies for dodging the new laws and stifling tenant support for reform.8 Every report on tenancy reform from the various base areas made an issue of the "tricks" landlords used to cheat their tenants of rent cuts (exposing the tricks was a way to justify the subsequent radicalization of the assault on landlords). A common practice everywhere was to wait until the government rent inspectors had moved on and, under threat of eviction, demand that tenants make supplementary payments. If government officials happened to notice the extra payments, tenants had been instructed to say that they were offering gifts or delivering loans to their landlords.9 The threat to withdraw a tenancy was a particularly effective weapon in the fiercely competitive climate of Suide. Indeed numerous Suide tenants who paid discounted rents in the 1942 autumn were not given the chance to make supplementary payments, but were swiftly turned off the land. This was to serve as a lesson to others who might have been thinking of cooperating with the Communists. All government regulations to date had forbidden the "withdrawal of rental land without good reason"; the termination of a tenancy was legal only when the owner wanted to mortgage or sell his land or farm it himself. Nevertheless the complex land arrangements in Suide made it easy to concoct "good reasons" and to conceal the vengeful punishment of rebel tenants. New tenants were introduced to government inspectors as the land's new owners or mortgage purchasers or hired laborers, a charade that seemed very often to work. So-called "fake mortgages and sales" (jiadian jiamai) were a widely employed technique.* Tenancy transfers and the demand for rent reimbursement were tac*Some of the Ma landlords punished tenants who showed too much enthusiasm for the CCP's rent reduction initiatives by putting a piece of land up for mortgage in the spring (after the tenant had plowed it) and forcing the tenant into a choice between a year without land to farm and somehow finding the cash to exercise his first right of purchase-and the prospect, in a time of galloping inflation, of paying a lot more when the landlord redeemed the mortgage after the harvest. "Mizhixian Yindou ba xiang jianzu diaocha."

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tics used by landlords who had been caught relatively unprepared for the Communists' rent reform offensive in 1942. Numerous others had taken earlier precautions. Aware that the Communists were targeting fixed-rent tenancies (dingzu), the great majority of all rental arrangements in the Suide subregion, they simply passed their tenancies off as "partnerships" (huozhong).10 Because this arrangement demanded some investment in equipment on the landlord's part, he was allowed to collect from 40 to 55 percent of the crop (depending on the level of investment). (The reclassification had other advantages beyond circumventing the 30 percent crop-share limit imposed on dingzu; it also allowed landlords to claim a proportion of the side-produce [hay and stalks] and demand labor service from their huozi.) Fear of losing their tenancies stopped tenants from admitting to rent inspectors that their landlords made no "investments" at all in their farm enterprises. The switch from dingzu to huozhong tenancies occurred right across the subregion. In some instances landlords would find a pretext for turning a dingzu tenant off his land and then issue a huozhong contract to a rival tenant. In other cases the switch merely involved a change of name in that year. That was enough to dissuade the inspectors from carefully examining the rent accounts. Ma Weixin admitted to investigators in 1942 that he had been progressively switching to the huozhong form of tenancy since 1939 in order to minimize the losses threatened by rent reduction (but he also told them that most of his 121 tenants were still paying fixed rents and, therefore, reduced rents, because his freedom to do what he liked with his own land was now, under the People's Government, limited).11 Another Mizhi landlord had, since 1937, sold 1,500 mu he had owned in different parts of the county and bought 780 mu close to his own village, all of which he rented out as huozhong farmland.12 In 1939 only 66 mu of Haojiaqiao village land had been farmed by huozhong tenants; the amount jumped to 316.5 mu in 1941 and to 531 mu in 1942.13 There were even cases of dingzu tenants renting out their land on a huozhong basis to make a profit.14 Huozhong arrangements really only worked properly when landowners lived close by and could keep an eye on both the farmwork and the division of grain harvests at collection time. Big landlords could maintain some direct supervision of faraway huozi by employing overseers, but this was not as reliable as personal direction and surveillance. It is likely that in cases where huozi were not under the direct gaze of landlords, the gains from switching to huozhong were

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considerably diminished by the slackened effort and cheating of their tenants. Party reporters lamented the "drop in production morale" of tenant farmers whose tenure had been rendered much more insecure by the loss of dingzu status and who now had to share any increased yields with their landlords. A tenant of Xindian district told reporters that since both of his landlords insisted that he switch to huozhong, he weeded his crops only once in the summer and used his spare time to earn some money as a casuallaborer.15 One consequence, then, of the landlords' attempts to resist reform and prevent tenant farmers from siding with the Communists was a downward slide of a large number of semi-independent (albeit rentpaying) farmers to a near "lumpen" status, people who were little better off than itinerant laborers. The switch to huozhong must have been a profound nuisance for big landlords and only marginally, if at all, profitable. It smacks of a last-ditch stand by an embattled rentier class, an attempt to pull back a tenantry into feudal dependencies and to pit it against the new government. Tenants undoubtedly saw the Communists' reforms as dangerous, but tenants damaged by those reforms also deeply resented the landlords with whom, because they had no alternative, they colluded. Once assured of Party protection, the dispossessed tenants who roamed the countryside looking for scraps of land to rent were the people most easily trained as activists for the forthcoming class struggles. The struggle strategy had sometimes been used at rent collection time in 1942, but for staged performances only and with very few attempts afterward to achieve a durable tenant solidarity. The ease with which landlords silenced their tenants and the now almost phobic fear among tenant farmers of provoking evictions made the Party realize that ensuring security of tenure (baodian) was the key to successful rent reform.16 The legislators got to work. Article 20 of the December 1942 draft regulations specified just six circumstances in which landlords could legally withdraw tenancies. This was followed by eight articles designed to protect tenants who had been legally evicted and to thwart landlord subterfuge or sabotage in this area.17 The same document also made a point of emphasizing the difference between huozu (sharecropping) and huozhong (partnerships), and directed that rentiers who provided only land to their tenants but called them "partners" must, in future, refer to them as sharecroppers.18 The new regulations were widely publicized, and violators were threatened with legal action. The task in 1943, however, was not only to get

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land rentals reduced but also to repair the quite serious damage done by embattled landlords over the previous several years. Cadres were told that they had to agitate and get tenants organized to a level where they would enforce both rent reduction and the terms of their rewritten tenancy contracts themselves. THE RENT REFORM MASS MOVEMENT IN SUIDE,

1943

Work teams went into the villages in the spring of 1943 to flush out tenants who had secretly made supplementary rent payments after the autumn collection and to force landlords to reinstate dispossessed tenants. But the season's urgent plowing and planting work left little time for mass mobilization, and it was not until the end of the year that the movement reached high tide. By then the struggle for reform involved much more than making landlords accept smaller rent payments. The full program now included calculations of excess rents (suanzhang) paid over the three years since the Suide assembly's July 1946 announcement and the retrieval of those amounts from landlords (tuizu); the tearing up of landlord account books in which rental debts were recorded (gouzhang); the replacement of old contracts (choujiuyue) with new ones (lixinyue or huanyue) obliging landlords to commit to a fixed length of tenure;* the restoration to farmers of rental land illegally repossessed by landlords (fandi); and the establishment of tenant associations. The last (variously called dianhuhui, jianzuhui, baodianhui, baodihui, etc.) were meant, among other things, to serve as rent-collection, contract-enforcement, and dispute-mediation agencies. Tenant associations were usually formed after the first struggles and rarely preceded them. The initial organizing body was most often an "inspection committee" (jianchahui) or "rent reduction committee" (jianzu weiyuanhui) appointed by a district or township government. These quasi-official *The recommended term was just three to five years. If, when a lease expired, the landlord did not have "good reason" to withdraw it, the current tenant was to have the first right of renewal. Formal provision for permanent leases had not been customary in Shaanbei, but codes of fair dealing had once guaranteed most tenants security of tenure. The Communists did not want to insist on permanent tenancies because, among other things, they wanted to give landlords every encouragement to sell their rental lands. "Baozhang dianquan shi guanche jianzu jiaozude guanjian"; Chai Shufan, "Jianzuzhongde dianquan wenti."

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organs were responsible for planning strategy, cadre training, investigations of current rent charges, and convening the first tenant meetings.19 It was often impossible to get tenants to talk about their tenancy conditions and payments, especially at formal meetings, and it fell to the government cadres to sound out the situation by watching, listening, and cultivating informants. If just one tenant showed "activist" potential by cooperating with the inspectors, then it was not so difficult to get other tenants talking. The activists were taught the new rent rules and told to stir up an "ideological ferment" that would expose and then counter tenant misgivings.2° It was useful at this point for reformers to demonstrate their authority by humbling a landlord or two, so the next step was to fix a date for a struggle meeting. The people selected as struggle targets were likely to be local despots whose crimes extended well beyond onerous and illegal rent charges. Tenants with the least to lose (that is, men who had already lost their rented land) were easily enough persuaded to throw the first stones. But in case there were doubts about which side had the numbers, the local self-defense militiamen were asked to come in combat dress.21 Tenants and nontenants alike from all villages in the township flocked to these meetings in anticipation of some good sport. Struggle could take a number of forms. Sometimes cadres were able to persuade influential landlords to come to mass meetings to demonstrate their acceptance of the new regulations and lead the way for other rentiers. Where tenants were only small minorities of village populations, or where absentee landlords could not be made to attend rural meetings, officials would muster a group of tenants and march them off to the homes of their landlords to demand rent cuts and refunds. Stubborn landlords were sometimes pulled out of their homes, labeled as lawbreakers, and paraded through the town streets.22 Where tenant populations were large, big township-level mass meetings were staged much along the lines vividly described for us by firsthand accounts of village struggle meetings in the late 1940's?3 Selected landlords were hauled in and subjected to accusations delivered by a lineup of well-rehearsed tenants until they were thoroughly humiliated and the previously silent villagers dared to vent their grievances.24 The essential aim of these gatherings was to enthrall the tenants, convince them that the government was determined to enforce rent reductions, and persuade them to move with the Party against their own landlords. One of the mass mobilizers' jobs was to emphasize the "legal" side of things. The idea was that if tenants could wield "the

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law" (the "Draft Regulations," etc.) against landlords, there would be no need for stones, staves, or nooses; argument and arbitration were the preferred weapons.25 Nevertheless it was made clear that mass struggle should be stoked by whatever means worked best, and we can assume that official blind eyes were turned on tenant lawlessness during the process. Outbreaks of peasant "leftism," it was later said, were inevitable, and excesses were easily enough corrected after the event_26 A defining feature of the CCP's mass mobilization work after 1942 was the flexible accommodation of local differences and the center's acknowledgment that policy should not be uniformly applied, or, at least in the short term, that it should not get uniform results. Landlordism and the condition of tenants varied considerably across the Suide subregion. And when rent reduction became a mass movement in 1943, that variation was deliberately displayed in a series of specially programmed and staged struggles in selected districts. The prominence given to these struggles in the regional and subregional Party press was undoubtedly designed to serve as a warning to landlords, but their first purpose was to make the point that different places required different reform methods. Among the examples we have, three in particular illustrate the varied contexts in which the Suide rent reformers worked. One important example, predictably, is from a "big landlord" strongholdGaomiaoshan village in Yindou district, Mizhi county; this was the home of the Chang landlords, a family whose wealth and landholdings were second only to those of the Yangjiagou Ma clan.27 For our second, we turn to Dianzhen district in Jia county, a particularly poor place with which the powerful Suide-Mizhi families had no connection, but where there were patches of heavy concentrations of land and widespread landlessness. In Duniugou administrative village, the district's rent reform model, 12 landlords rented out 2,400 mu of village land to 37 sharecroppers.Z8 Our final example is a theatrically staged rally in Suide city, home of many absentee landlords, in late 1943· The organizers got tenants from Xindian and Shatanping districts to come into town for the spectacle, and three city-based landlords with properties in those districts were put on the struggle platform. The particular problem that reformers had to solve in Gaomiaoshan village was "passivity and negativity"; the tenants there lacked enthusiasm for the reforms, the Party said, because of rumors about a return of the GMD army, landlord reprisals against people who had paid discounted rates in 1942, and a misguided attachment to the idea

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of landlord "benevolence" (ende). Heavy off-stage persuasion work was followed by a mass meeting at which the tenant Li Zhanxiu, a local representative on the township assembly, publicly confessed that he had withheld information from government inspectors the previous autumn. After Li's confession, 13 other tenants came forward and made similar admissions; the repentant tenants were rewarded with repayments of the grain refunds owed to them over three years, and all was now ready for the showdown with the township's most powerful landlord, Chang Guowei. His admission that he had cheated his tenants emboldened another 18 peasants to take the stage and confess that they too had paid too much rent in 1942?9 The Duniugou case put the spotlight on three problems. The first was the traditional relationship between landlordism and local government. The elections of 1941 and 1942 had failed to dislodge the landlord Liu Zhengxian from his position in the Dianzhen district government, where he had long wielded power as a "local tyrant"; and he had proved to be a particularly ingenious rent reform evader in 1942. The second was the potential for class treachery within the poor peasant class. A few tenants who had connived with their landlords to break the law in 1942 were brought forward as partners in crime and not treated leniently. The third problem was peasant "leftism." The Jia county government's overall assessment of the Dianzhen movement identified four categories of "mistakes" and, in particular, criticized the over-harsh punishment of landlords and of people who had been "duped" by them. We are assured, however, that no serious harm was done, because punishments could not be carried out until ratified by the county government.30 The big Suide city meeting, on December 18, 1943, attended by a crowd of 3,500 people, was really a media event, and that in itself was significant. Where the Party press had to this point talked up Suide's "enlightened gentry," it was Suide's criminal landlords and their "dog's legs" who now made it onto the front pages of the Liberation Daily.31 The December 18 meeting marks what was probably the closing phase of the rent reduction campaign-the pursuit of absentee landlords and their rural agents. Villages with a high proportion of absentee landlords were, in most respects, easier to reform. Nevertheless a diligent overseer could be as troublesome as a resident owner and, in parading absentee landlords and their henchmen across a struggle platform, the reformers were signaling that they were wise to the weaponry in the absentee owners' arsenals.

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The struggle meetings of all varieties were, of course, high drama. But the real test of their success was the extent to which tenants now dared to extend the struggle. They were often not given much choice. The tenants at the meetings were almost always formally organized into tenant associations, and the extension of tenancy reform across the township was now the responsibility of these groups. They were charged with the arduous business of renegotiating all tenant contracts and collecting rent refunds for past overcharges. And though in principle the tenant activists who headed them were to take the lead in this, they clearly could not accomplish these complicated tasks without the help of district and sometimes county cadres. In any event the visible presence of uncompromising state officials was needed to convince landlords that they were beaten and to stiffen tenant resolve. There was the problem, moreover, of ensuring that the reforms did not fall apart once the government agents had gone away. It was hoped that the participation of all tenant association members at each member's "settling of accounts" session with his landlord would forestall any future collusion with landlords and forge tenant solidarity. But was the active participation of tenant members in class struggle enough to make the associations effective guardians of rent reform? Probably not. Party reformers recognized the futility of expecting tenants to act in concert in villages and township where they were small minorities. In these places it was probably a district-level struggle meeting that first taught the new rules to tenants, persuaded them to trust the new government, and instructed them to report violations to local authorities. A complaint to the township or district government should have resulted in a cadre accompanying the tenant to the landlord's home and getting things sorted out.32 This kind of government followup was relied on everywhere, even when there was a strong township or village tenant association. The fact is, these bodies through which, as the Party would have it, tenants took charge of their own "fate," 33 were never autonomous and, for the most part, were just not up to the tasks they were commissioned to do. The supervision of reduced rent payments and of new tenant contracts became government work, and enforcement fell to official mediators and law courts. In 1942 the Party began to make a point of reporting land disputes in the Suide subregion. We are told that a large number of disputes brought to district and township mediators were over tenancies, that local courts were hearing more than 50 tenancy cases a day, and that the great majority of these were tenants' suits against landlords.34 This

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was just at the time when the authorities, in the name of "simple administration" and community self-sufficiency, were trying to limit the number of local disputes submitted for formal adjudication. Tenants, nevertheless, were now explicitly encouraged to use the law courts?5 And it seems that they also now had a better chance than in the united front's heyday of winning favorable judgments. In fact some cases to do with rental land repossessions and lost by tenants before 1942 were reconsidered and decided in the tenants' favor.36 It was hoped that tenant (or peasant) associations could at least solve the smaller squabbles (particularly those between tenants), and they were sometimes called on to submit to township and district courts any evidence pertaining to the more serious disputes. 37 They could take measures to prevent rental land repossessions, by raising a loan, for example, so a member could meet his landlord's mortgage price.38 The government committee of Guayuan district in Suixi (now Zizhou county) ruled that any decisions on land quarrels made by the township head had to be submitted to the township tenants association for approvaP9 Nevertheless most of the burden of forestalling landlord sabotage and protecting tenant gains fell to township and district governments; it was expecting far too much of tenant associations to be effective here. The big change was that, in places where landlords and their allies had been edged out of local governments, landless tenants were at last being protected by the law courts. And so, where the 1941 and 1942 elections had not broken old elite power, it was crucial that the 1943 rent reduction struggles do so. RENT REDUCTION AND VILLAGE RECONSTRUCTION

The regional government had wanted the bulk of rent reduction work to be over and done with by the end of 1942. In 1943, therefore, the rectification of the reform program and the job of making the reduced rates stick were pushed with special urgency. The authorities were sufficiently satisfied with the results by February 1944 to let the campaigns run down, urging that all farmers and cadres throw their energies into the big production drive (in progress since the previous spring). Numerous Suide peasants were in a much better position to do this now than they had been a year earlier. Beginning the agricultural year with stored grain was a wondrous change for poor peasants. More important for the long term, the CCP had made headway in undermining the power and authority of the well-to-do minority. The

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weakening of landlordism, a land-to-the-tiller trend, and the narrowing of economic differences within village communities greatly improved the chances of the Party's farmwork cooperation drive being successful in the Suide countryside. Before we turn to an analysis of the cooperative movement, therefore, we need first to assess the progress of those trends in Suide at the beginning of 1944. Lower rent charges and refunds of rent payments over three years often meant that tenants paid no rent at all at the end of 1943 and, instead, collected grain from their landlords. Not surprisingly many tenants used their windfalls to redeem land they had mortgaged. Mortgagees tried to insist on being repaid in the same currency (fabi or silver) they had originally been paid in, but the government encouraged and forcefully backed peasants who redeemed their land with Border Region currency (bianbi). The authorities openly acknowledged, and with satisfaction, that, with that currency's sharp depreciation, this was a "cheap method" for peasants to get their land back.40 There were a number of other ways in which the tenants' rush to redeem, buy, or mortgage land was encouraged by the government. Rent reform cadres suggested to landlords who said they could not pay the refunds that they might hand over some land to tenants in lieu of grain payments.41 As we have seen, law courts now usually ruled in favor of the landless in land-claim disputes. Tenants associations were urged to help their members to buy farmland or to secure their leaseholds with ironclad contracts. Credit cooperatives were to make funds available to poor peasants who wanted to buy land.42 Some properties were confiscated from particularly "stubborn" landlords, and these, together with properties abandoned by hard-pressed rentiers who chose to flee the region, provided the government with farmland for redistribution to, for example, landless army families.43 Party investigators claimed that the acquisition of land by large numbers of tenants at the expense of landlords was a general trend across the Suide subregion.44 Some reports said that, in those parts of the subregion where rent reform work was thorough, from 50 percent to So percent of landlord holdings passed into peasant hands.45 It is not possible to demonstrate such a trend with the isolated and scrappy examples we are offered. In fact most of the data I have show only small acreage gains for poor families. For example, in one village of Yindou district, redemptions of mortgages over the 1942-44 period netted tenant farmers a mere 210 mu, with rental land reduced from 1,110 to goo mu.46 Similarly a flurry of mortgage and land sales in Jia

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county's Gaojiazhai village in 1943 and 1944 resulted in a total gain of just 375 mu for poor families.47 When spread across the poor peasant populations in any one village, these gains were tiny. But from the perspective of a landless family, they were hardly insignificant. The acquisition of 210 mu of freehold land in the Yindou village example represented a 200 percent increase in landownership by poor peasants (32 families had originally owned 111 mu between them).48 Equally important in the Party's view (and, probably, that of poor peasants) was the fact that the trend over several decades of progressive land concentration in the hands of the few was seen to be reversing.49 Big landowners were on the decline, both economically and politically, in rural Suide, and new opportunities were opening up for people on the bottom rung of the social ladder. Commentators frequently made the point that the government's intention was not to bankrupt landlords as such, only to break up the big estates and get land into the hands of producers.50 "Middle" and "small" landlords were welcome to stay on in the villages if they were willing to manage their farms in the rich peasant mode (that is, by employing laborers rather than leasing out land).51 The Party's pointed message was that "it's no good relying on land [rentals] for a living," 52 and that capital was better invested in rural cooperatives, manufacturing and mining industries, commerce, and transport. Again, most of the examples we are offered of landlord decline do not indicate radical changes, but they do reflect the trend claimed by the Communists. A detailed investigation of seven landlords in Yinchengshi, Mizhi county, showed that none of them increased his landholdings in 1943, and five sold or mortgaged off some small areas of land.53 The more significant figures are those for tax payments. All but one of the seven paid much heavier taxes in 1943 than in 1942 (the 1943 increases ranged from 25 dou to 120 dou; one family paid two dou less tax). Another group of 23 landlord households in that district lost 1,518 mu over two years (1943 and 1944) as their taxes climbed 100 percent in 1943· By that time household expenditures were exceeding incomes by an average of 76 dou. We also have data for three Mizhi city landlords. Zhou Zhitang lost 708 mu (30 percent of his total holdings) between 1940 and 1944 and was paying 42.9 percent of his income in taxes in 1944; this was a 300 percent tax increase since 1940. Both Shen Riming and Gao Xiahong suffered only small losses of land over the same period but were very harshly taxed. Shen's to-dan (roo-dou) tax levy in 1943 was

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no percent of his income, and Gao's 16-dan levy was 123 percent of his. These levies are exceptionally high and bear no relationship to the official tax scale. Gao was accused of concealing some of his income,54 and so a fine would have been added to his tax levy; presumably that is what happened to Shen also. Inquiries into landlord fortunes in other parts of the subregion revealed much the same picture as in Yinchengshi.55 Jia Tuofu reported with approval that some former landlords had given up their land rental businesses and now combined farm management with industrial initiatives. He cited the example of a certain Mizhi landlord who had gone into paper manufacturing, and singled out, as another, Du Liangbao, who had opened up a textile factory and was calling on other landlords to invest in it.56 In a conversation with foreign reporters in 1944, senior government personnel in Yan'an claimed that rent reduction had persuaded many landlords to take up other occupations, and they offered to introduce to their guests a former "big landlord" who had put his money into and was managing a cooperative.57 It is difficult to judge how general such occupational change among landlords might have been across the subregion. We know, however, that at the same time as the Communist government was deliberately making land rental businesses unprofitable, it was providing positive (including tax) incentives to people prepared to invest and work in essential industries and services.58 The Liberation Daily reported in January 1944 that landlords could make five times as much profit from industrial and commercial enterprises as they could from renting out land.59 Economic recovery in Shaan-Gan-Ning under Party government, combined with the region's urgent need (largely created by the GMD blockade) for a reliable supply of industrial and manufactured goods, was a situation of considerable promise for rentiers willing to pull out of Suide' s villages. Lower rents and high taxes might not have completely bankrupted most landlord families, but when combined with other blows delivered by the rent reform campaign, the families under siege must have felt very threatened. Despite the official insistence that punishments for troublemaking landlords be moderate, Party people with positions in local government did not easily resist the chance to humiliate their rivals among the old elite. Disobedience brought not only grain fines and "forced loans" but, often enough, labor service as well. We have examples of landlords sentenced to periods of road construction work, hauling firewood for army families, and doing farmwork for widows

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and childless old people.60 The grain fines and loans collected from offenders could go into a village's welfare relief fund and obviate the need (at least for the time being) to collect welfare grain from other village families. 61 And even if the "hard labor" penalties for landlords did not significantly reduce the corvee obligations of most villagers, it must have amazed poor peasants to see their former overlords dirtying their hands and doing the jobs that had traditionally been palmed off on them. The concomitant severe loss of face for landlords, their growing realization that the Communists had the better of them politically, and the lure of better incomes elsewhere would have hastened the drift of the well-off into the towns and cities. This is not to suggest, by any means, that all landlords were humiliatingly punished. And the smaller ones, in particular, would not have had the resources to move off and establish viable enterprises away from their home villages. Even so, in any places in which rent reductions were enforced in 1943, all rentiers had to find grain with which to pay the refunds the government said they owed. In this desperately poor part of northern Shaanxi, the difference between small-landlord and tenant incomes was often minuscule. So, on top of reduced rental incomes, even a small refund of, say, one or two dan would have been enough to leave some landlords facing bankruptcy or, at the very least, a very anxious spring season. In numerous instances those refunds very much tipped the economic balance in the tenants' favor. Where rent reforms were effective, therefore, many landlords faced the 1944 agricultural season with depleted grain jars, the promise of permanently reduced incomes, and, if new tenancy contracts held fast, a considerable loss of business autonomy. Their tenants, on the other hand, began spring plowing that year more or less free of debt/2 with stored food and seed-grain, the resources to buy land or livestock or farm tools, incentives to improve their cropland, security of tenure, and, if local officials kept landlords in check, more farm-management autonomy than most of them had ever known. Under these circumstances the CCP's claim that numerous landlords were pushed to the wall, sold out, and left the villages is entirely plausible. It can be said, then, that rent reform in important parts of the Suide subregion had quite dramatic consequences. To begin with, it achieved a degree of economic leveling in the villages that, if less radical than the leveling achieved by land revolution, was more functional for having been negotiated rather than swiftly executed. Tenants after rent reductions were often in a better position to rebuild their farm enterprises

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than were farmers who, in the soviet period, had been haphazardly allocated plots of confiscated land they did not have the resources to farm. Second, there can be little doubt that, in places where rent reforms were made secure, landlordism was significantly weakened, and that the Communists had won the cooperation of poor peasants in ways that had not been possible before. This was the result of a progressive Party push into rural Suide, which was extended during two election movements but was not consolidated until the rent reform campaign began to be effective in 1943. Third, although the incidence of land tenancy had probably not been radically reduced, the slow but real land-to-the-tiller trend paved the way for the Communists' subsequent attempts to reorganize and regulate the agricultural economy. And if rent reform was not able to eliminate landlordism, it could overhaul the system so that tenants had the autonomy and production incentives of freehold farmers. The reforms instituted a system in which fixed rents, adjusted for harvest quality each year, became the standard form of tenancy, and there was a determined effort to enforce security of tenure (three- to five-year terms, with the tenant's right to renew). Enforcing the fixed-rent system and the new rent contracts became easier as landlords gave up the struggle to beat the Communists' reforms and left their tenants well alone. Tenants with absentee landlords and Party protection were de facto owner-cultivators. This, and the chance of harvesting grain surpluses in 1944, was a huge change for landless families. RENT REDUCTION AND VILLAGE COMMUNITY

The Communists put great store on the consciousness-raising effect on peasants of class struggle and the new political organizations that would result from it. There is little evidence, however, that the tenants associations formed across Suide in 1943 had much internal cohesion or natural vigor. And we hear very little about them in 1944. The first problem for the Party workers who, in 1943, were sent down to Suide villages to organize tenants, had been to forge durable class solidarity among them. The traditional bitter competition for rental land, a competitiveness that had always been expressed more openly and vociferously than resentment against landlords, was not easily muted while farmland remained desperately scarce. It is clear that one of the central functions of the tenants associations formed after the early struggle meetings was punishing anyone who "wrested"

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rental land from another tenant (duodian). The Communists could not presume a willingness to "play fair" among people who, for decades, had been scrambling over each other to scratch the most pitiful livings out of exhausted scraps of farmland-could not presume, in short, class solidarity in any sense of the term. Driving a wedge between tenant and landlord, therefore, required that tenants associations do more than constrain landlords; they had to police and discipline wayward tenants as well. The one task, no less than the other, meant the active involvement of authoritative administrators and arbitrators. That the tenants associations commonly, as a result, became quasiofficial organs directly supervised by township government committees is evidenced in the repeated admonitions against this relationship. The authorities insisted that the "work modes" (gongzuo fangshi) of popular organizations be distinguished from those of government organs, and that the "mass association nature" of the former be preserved. Conversely the administrative organs of government were not "to usurp the work of the peasant associations." 63 Party direction and control of the associations, however, effectively denied them the political and functional autonomy promised them. By upper-level instructions, local Party branch members were to serve as the backbone of functioning associations,64 but still the leadership often fell to the township head, a government official. The Party center made much of the potential of "local activists" and said that, if properly trained, they could both reduce the mobilization workloads of government officials and give the state easy access to the hearts and minds of villagers. But reliable, competent, and biddable local leaders did not, to any significant extent, emerge from the rent reduction struggles. A povertystricken farmer who had been cowed and subservient for a whole lifetime was not likely to change into an assertive spokesman in a matter of months. Because much rent reform enforcement work was in the end police work, tenants associations merged with self-defense militia units in some villages.65 In fact a Party directive in late 1943 recommended that, at a certain point, the rent reduction movement should link up with self-defense mobilization and the anti-traitor movement (another prong of the Communists' assault on old elite power).66 The associations would also, of course, cooperate with the investigators who now regularly turned up to collect data for land tenancy records and tax registers, and to inspect production work. Policy makers sometimes expressed the hope that tenants associations would grow into

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multipurpose community-wide organizations, capable of mobilizing villagers for such tasks as well digging, road repair, crop watching, the upkeep of soldiers' farms, the farming of common land, and managing village granaries. But though reports from a few model districts and townships show some broadening out into a range of responsibilities/7 there is no indication that the general run of tenants associations ever made the transition from class to community organizations. Tenants associations, as I have said, fall entirely from view in 1944· Some reports tell us that the 1943 peasant organizations for rent reduction turned into mutual-aid teams the next year,68 but I doubt whether that often happened. Certainly a Party motive for urgently promoting rent reform in 1943 was to ensure that tenant farmers would contribute to the big production effort, and numerous reports made a point of emphasizing the rise in "production morale" among tenants who had been liberated (janshen) as a consequence of the rent reduction movement. By the same token it was also said that the 1944 preoccupation with the production campaign resulted in slackened tenancy inspections and unrelenting landlord assaults on the new laws.69 This was a criticism of local governments for failing to maintain strict surveillance, and was not aimed at tenants associations. It was more or less taken for granted by the authorities that those groups were no longer functioning. As in the days of land revolution, they had served as a battering ram during the struggle against landlords, but they were never embraced by poor peasants as a means of further improving their livelihoods and of building better villages. In 1944 any surveillance of the surviving landlords and their tenant collaborators was being done by township law-enforcement officials, and any collective action by farmers to make farmi~g prosperous was within mutual-aid teams. The two enterprises were, by this stage, organizationally separate. Rent reduction work was judged to have made more headway in the Suide subregion than in the other two subregions in which it was also pushed with urgency in 1943?0 Within Suide the districts that were credited with particularly good results were Yihe and Shatanping in Suide county, Dianzhen in Jia county, Hecha (home of the Ma landlords), and parts of Yindou in Mizhi county.71 Success was often measured by the amount of rent refunds collected and of rental debts wiped from landlord account books.72 These were displayed as the concrete manifestations of a wounded landlordism and a liberated tenantry, goals that were central to the movement. It is indisputable that many landlord families were badly damaged by rent reforms in

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1943, and that the morale of countless tenant families was enormously boosted by the collection of big autumn grain bonuses (in the form of 1940-42 rent refunds), new government constraints on landlords, and a dawning conviction that their luck, and the fate of poor people in general, was at last changing. There was a real narrowing of the economic differences between village families in places where tenancy reform worked. And although less radical than the acclaimed effect of land revolution, a leveling process, in the villages where it occurred, improved the chances of an extension of farmwork cooperation beyond family groups. The Communists seem not to have anticipated the strength of landlord resistance to rent reduction, and the campaign mounted against landlordism in 1943, provoked in some measure by that resistance, was probably more intense and punitive than had originally been intended. The shackling and silencing of tenants had to be stopped, and the Communists now openly sought to destroy landlord authority in the villages. In the process of defying their landlords, tenants were meant to discover and find protection among class "allies," but such alliances did not occur spontaneously, nor did contrived alliances endure very long. Farmers competing against one another for extremely scarce cropland were not natural allies. All previous political experience had taught the tenant that he had to find powerful patronage outside his own class if his family was to survive; other landless farmers threatened his livelihood more than a landlord did. To some extent Communist cadres presented themselves as alternative patrons. As such they had often been able to persuade a tenant to make the break with his landlord (or landlords). It is not sensible, however, to regard this as a mere change of patrons. For one thing the Party's intention was to eliminate any rivals who threatened to impede its quest for the loyalty and allegiance of all peasants. Previously a village family might have had, at any one time, several short- or long-term patrons and, depending on the nature of the reciprocities involved, several patrons to choose from. That family may consequently have had more bargaining power than if the relationships had been purely dyadic. Party hegemony promised safety for the struggling farmer by eliminating the need to make hazardous choices and by offering strong, reliable government instead. In 1940's Suide choices for tenant farmers had so narrowed and patronage had become so unreliable that most of them embraced with gratitude the safety that the Communists seemed to offer. Of course, as an organizational entity, the CCP could not dupli-

184 Tenancy Reform in Suide cate the individualized, face-to-face relationships between patrons and clients in the villages, nor could it presume the unambiguous loyalty and obedience of Party representatives who, at the grass-roots level, offered patronage services to villagers. Indeed a significant feature of the history of Party-peasant relations right up to the present has been the local "protectionism" of grass-roots officials-a habit often described as "feudal" by the Party, but one with which, for a variety of reasons, it has usually been forced to live.73 Nevertheless a central goal of the Communists' rural power building was to develop horizontal relationships among villagers that would obviate the need for old-style patronage. The various village organizations that had been experimented with over the years were designed for this purpose. For the most part, however, the mass organizations that were instituted in the Suide subregion after 1939 had been used to deliver new political and social messages from the Party to the peasants in a countryside where, despite some personnel changes in local governments, there had been little change in political and social structures. This was the case with the mass associations (qunzhong tuanti) formed for unitedfront purposes, with the "residents groups" formed for rural elections, and with the tenants associations formed for rent reform. The rent reform movement in Suide, in sum, did not to any significant extent reorder rural society in a way that devolved power to the villages and strengthened local community structures. The subregion's tenantry had had little say in the staging, timing, and targeting of the struggles against their landlords, and the poor peasants' unions formed to administer and police the reforms were more a Party attempt to build consensus and solidarity among rival tenants than an application of the minban principle. At the end of 1943, most tenant farmers in Suide were relying on government officials, not tenants associations, to keep them safe from their landlords. People at the bottom of the economic ladder remained distrustful of families that were seeking to expand their landholdings. And because of the new opportunities for poor people to buy or mortgage land, mutual distrust and feuding sometimes became endemic74 Furthermore, tenants accepted their rent reduction winnings as a means by which they might build a family fortune, not their village's prosperity. Class struggle had not welded a strong bond between tenants or changed old attitudes enough to diminish "familism" and broaden the peasants' horizon to the community. The movement did nevertheless work big change, effecting a rise

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in economic expectations and a forward-looking approach to farming that had been impossible when tenants were wholly under the thumbs of their landlords (many of whom. were themselves fighting for a subsistence against declining odds). It was just the result the Party had been aiming for, and a basis on which to build an ambitious production program that would reward farming entrepreneurs. Moreover, the rising morale of poor farmers, rooted as it was in a trust that the Communists would stick to their word about keeping rent prices down and their landlords at bay, was expressed as more confidence in the government. A major test of the Party's new influence was to be the degree to which tenant farmers could be persuaded to cooperate in new economic organizations. As a result of the rent reduction campaigns, tenant farmers in the Suide subregion started the 1944 farming season unusually well off and, in the case of those who had been sharecroppers, with much more incentive to develop their farm businesses than before. Also, the significant reduction of landlord authority and interference in the villages provided more scope for a development of agriculture along the cooperative lines planned by the Party. There remained, however, enormous difficulties for the Communists in this part of Shaan-GanNing. Farmland was still extremely scarce. The jostling for land was still causing a fragmentation of farmer holdings, making it very difficult to plan and rationalize agricultural production or to achieve an extension of farmwork cooperation beyond two or three families. The continuing rivalries among tenants seriously impeded their voluntary participation in mutual-aid teams, and the smooth functioning of the teams in which they did participate. Rent reform had given tenants a new enthusiasm for farming but not for farming together. Still, in trying to persuade them to team up for production work in 1944, the Communists did at least have a degree of trust and indebtedness on which to lean, and a surge of new expectations on which to build.

CHAPTER

7

Cooperative Societies, 1937-1945

of the CCP's organizational work in its drive for power has long been recognized. But most studies of China's rural revolution in the 193o's and 194o's put emphasis on the poor peasants associations organized for land or tenancy reform and treat village cooperatives as just one of several forms of mass associations that mushroomed in Communist villages before 1949. A conclusion of my analysis of village reconstruction in Shaanbei is that before 1943 the Communists, in large part, failed to build durable, self-managing associations of villagers, for the basic reason that peasants resisted being forced into groups they judged to be a nuisance and a waste of time. The united-front mass associations might have had active memberships· in Shaan-Gan-Ning's larger towns, but they made little headway in the villages.* When election work teams went down into the countryside in 1941 and 1942, they did not find functioning associations through which they could mobilize villagers to nominate and vote for candidates. The "residents groups" organized in 1942 disbanded after the elections. The elected assemblies were township bodies and did not function as community associations; many of them did not function at all unless cranked up by the Party-government for special occasions. The soviet-period peasants associations organized

THE CRITICAL ROLE

*Women's associations are a possible exception, but even then the women's movement probably only touched villages close to the urban centers. As the Party itself acknowledged in a Sept. 1942 report, most village mass associations existed on paper only. They had "many people registered as members, but those [associations) that genuinely do anything are very few." "Qunzhong tuantide xingzhi renwu."

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for land reform no longer existed in the early 194o's. And, as we have seen, the organizing of Suide's tenantry in 1943 did not result in selfsustaining or internally cohesive unions of peasant farmers. The CCP's "village cooperatives" idea, particularly as it was defined in the rectification policies of 1942, is full of communitarian promise. It was, at the same time, fundamental to the Communists' state-building program, and this is what makes the 1943-44 cooperative movement so interesting. Village cooperatives served as the grassroots base through which the Party delivered its directives to rural people, but they were also promoted in the early 1940's as a means of developing community self-help and economic self-sufficiency, village democracy, and entrepreneurial initiative. At its high tide in 1944, the Shaan-Gan-Ning cooperative movement featured an impressive variety of arrangements, and that in itself is evidence of a degree of grass-roots initiative and creativity. And even if the Communists tried to correct trends toward "laissez-faire localism," they worked in this period at reconciling centrist goals with peasant preferences more than they typically did in subsequent decades. The attempt to accommodate grass-roots democracy within a system of "democratic centralism" often did not work, and many of Shaan-Gan-Ning's cooperatives were either state organs or private businesses over which the Party had little control. But some did become what they were supposed to be, self-governing organizations that served the state, advanced the welfare of local communities, and enabled family enterprises to prosper. The contrast between Yanshu and Suide in the area of cooperative development is, as we might expect, particularly instructive. In 1943, as the movement gathered pace in Yanshu, rent reform work teams were being sent down to Suide villages to repair the damage done by the previous autumn's botched reform and to stir up class struggle in order to make tenancy reform effective and durable this time. But the deliberate stoking of social conflict within farming communities failed to produce the broad-based peasant coalitions on which cooperativization was to be built. Yanshu, on the other hand, whose wastelands at this point had been substantially developed by means of heavy state investment of both personnel and resources in infrastructural repair and reconstruction, was well positioned to achieve an organizational leap forward in 1943. The most striking examples of cooperatives that served both state and village are to be found in that area, a place where the Party-state's de-

188 Cooperative Societies velopmental interventions at the local level were vigorous but where, paradoxically, the "local autonomy" principle was allowed to define community building. RURAL COOPERATIVES AND VILLAGE RECONSTRUCTION

For peasants in the Jiangxi Soviet, the ever-present menace of GMD extermination campaigns had made it eminently sensible to form "crash production teams" (shengchan tujidui) for busy-season farmwork. Moreover, after distributions to poor peasants of confiscated landlord property, it was rare for any one family to have all the necessary resources for efficient, independent farming. Thus the shared use of draft animals and tools was a logical means of solving the production problems created by land revolution.1 The Communist mobilizers might sometimes have made a show of using customary names for the labor teams they organized, but the very tense military situation usually dulled Party sensitivity to the peasantry's traditional habits and preferences. The township was the recommended mobilization unit, and it is likely that teams were often very large? In Xingguo, for example, the average enrollment in the county's 318 "labor mutual-aid societies" (laodong huzhushe) in 1934 was 50? The consumer, credit, and handicraft cooperative societies (hezuoshe) set up in the Jiangxi period were almost always state-run shops and businesses in which local residents were obliged to purchase shares. Before 1943, what cooperativization there was in Shaan-Gan-Ning took the same form: farmers were mustered into large labor teams, and cooperative societies were government enterprises funded, in the main, by a local tax. Party strategists subsequently admitted that the "labor mutual-aid societies" of the late 1930's had been created by "administrative decree," that they were "mere skeletons," had no popular appeal, and had lost official support after 1940.4 Even so, by 1942, when planning for the big production drive was under way, the Communists had accumulated a good deal of experience in developing rural cooperatives. Beginning in late 1942, a series of high-level announcements on rural cooperation, while laced with Marxian idealism, also reveal the earthy pragmatism that was to motor the 1943-44 movement. When the Communists in this period theorized about their cooper a-

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tives, they always put them "on the road to collectivization." They also argued, however, the need to tolerate a great variety of cooperative forms in an enterprise based on a foundation of "backwardness" and household farming. 5 As had often happened in the past, zealotry during mass mobilizations would sometimes result in radical collectivist practices, but the Party leadership later distanced itself from these initiatives, saying that they were premature and damaging to popular morale. In practice the Communists' experiments in the 194o's drew as much on the experience of non-Marxist reformers in China as they did on the Soviet Union's socialist model. Many of Shaan-Gan-Ning's cooperatives were modeled on the supply and marketing, credit, health, and handicraft cooperatives sponsored by Western missionaries and philanthropists, Nationalist and warlord reformers, and even the Japanese invaders. The key to success after 1942, however, turned out to be, not any of the foreign models, but the Shaanbei peasantry's own practices. When the CCP began a push to make rural cooperatives and teamwork the backbone of its big production drive, it decided to build on and nurture indigenous traditions of economic cooperation. The Communists, of course, were never reconciled to "backwardness," and local customs could only serve as starting points. Cooperative arrangements that moved quickly and ambitiously beyond traditional practices were soon identified as models and given wide publicity. Ideally cooperatives were to be multifunctional, even "comprehensive" (zonghexing). The model of comprehensive cooperation was the "cooperative village," where the local co-op was supported by every member of the community and coordinated the village's "all-round economic and cultural reconstruction." 6 The South District Cooperative (Nanqu hezuoshe), based in Liulin village just south of Yan'an city, came closest to this ideal. Mao Zedong, in his report to the 1942 Senior Cadres Conference, declared that "the road of the South District Cooperative is the road for all cooperatives of the Border Region," and, in 1943, the Shaan-Gan-Ning Reconstruction Department was assessing the success of cooperative work in terms of the prevalence across the Border Region of co-ops patterned on the comprehensive model? In a report to a regional conference of co-op directors in mid-1944, Gao Zili (head of the Reconstruction Department) repeated the call to push cooperatives down the South District road; in a large territory with a small population, long distances to travel, and a poor communications system, he declared, it was only sensible to have one organization overseeing both production work, transport,

190 Cooperative Societies

supply, and marketing and the community's health, education, social welfare, and cultural needs.8 The directors were also told about the recent achievements of the South District Co-op. It now combined more than 20 activities, adding to its sponsorship of enterprises like handicraft workshops, retail shops, porterage, and team farming such duties as collecting grain and salt taxes, mediating quarrels, brokering marriages, and managing welfare granaries.9 The comprehensive cooperatives, in short, were to assume what had once been the responsibilities of the old gentry class, but much more as well. The organization and supervision of team farming and, in fact, the coordination of a whole range of development initiatives that could make farming more profitable for everyone took village leadership into a radically new area. More important still, an expansion of economic and social cooperation was supposed to happen at the same time as a democratization of rural politics. The policy reassessments forced on the Party by military and economic crises after 1938, and the consequent wide-ranging "rectification" in 1941-42, resulted in measures aimed at reducing formal government involvement in local economies. Cost-cutting measures such as down-sizing the cadre force (in the "simple administrations" campaigns) and privatizing various government enterprises were premised on the assumption that sturdy local self-help traditions, together with self-reliant cooperation, would quickly fill the gaps left by the government's retreat. Party analyses of the cooperative movement consistently deplore the top-down, bureaucratic management style (baoban daiti) that prevailed in the 1937-41 period and applaud the reorientation toward "popular management" (minban) after 1941. Government involvement in popular co-ops, they· say, was supposed to be limited to training and appointing co-op cadres, helping co-ops that were in difficulties, and determining just the "general direction" of cooperative development.10 Cooperatives were to be village-based, not concentrated in towns.U They were to facilitate the economic cooperation of all classes of people, to draw on the wealth of talents and skills that existed within communities, and to function as a "big family," providing services that were beyond the capacities of small families.12 If co-ops met these criteria, then the people would regard them as "their very own," and not as "state shops." 13 Not surprisingly, Shaan-Gan-Ning's cooperatives fell well short of this vision. For one thing only a relatively small number developed

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into comprehensive co-ops, and most of those operated at the district or county level; 14 what few village cooperatives there were rarely ran more than one or two enterprises. More significantly, even those that pretended to comprehensiveness, including the showpiece South District Co-op, almost never took on the management of mutual-aid teams (laodong huzhuzu); we are told that, in 1943, the South District's credit co-op provided a low-interest loan to a farming labor-exchange team, and that no other cooperative in the Border Region had "this kind of direct relationship with a mutual-aid team." 15 And even if, as is claimed, a number of co-ops supported farm teams through, for example, their transport, supply, marketing, and tool-making enterprises, the organizational split was still a wide one. The CCP did not conceal, or even lament, the split; it was tolerated as the inevitable consequence of backwardness. Simple mutualaid labor exchanges did not need a schooled leadership, and just small interventions by mobilizers resulted in a proliferation of mutual-aid teams at the village level. But selling shares and figuring the dividends to be paid on investments required administrative skills not typically found among Shaanbei villagers. For that reason, co-ops were managed by state-appointees based in township, district, or county offices and housed in government buildings. Shaan-Gan-Ning's cooperative movement was thus really two movements, and these movements were characterized by very different leadership styles, and different levels of popular involvement and autonomy. They had, as a consequence, different implications for reform initiatives in the areas of village reconstruction, rural democracy, and community rehabilitation, and, more generally, for the still fluid state-village relations in the northwest base area. A bifurcation of the cooperative road was the pattern in all of the Communist bases in the 1940's, and in Yanshu-even with its South District "comprehensive" model-as much as in Suide. As we have predicted, however, there were also differences between the two Shaanbei subregions; the Party tried to forge a cooperative road through areas with markedly different sociopolitical predispositions for cooperation. In a sense, then, the Shaanbei movement divides into four. Labor mutual-aid and cooperative societies took different forms and produced different results in Yanshu and Suide. We will confine ourselves here to the developments in the cooperative society movement and then turn to the mutual-aid movement in Chapter Eight.

192 Cooperative Societies COOPERATIVE SOCIETIES IN YANSHU AND SUIDE

Communist reformers found little precedent in the Shaanbei folk tradition for the kind of cooperative societies they wanted to organize. This is the first and, perhaps, critical, difference between the mutualaid farming and co-op movements. Even so, the rectification of cooperative work that began in 1942 represents an official determination to establish co-ops as popular organizations with roots in local communities. The push to ruralize-to decentralize-co-op management, the liberalization of stockholding regulations, the broadening of co-op membership eligibility (merchants and gentry investments were now welcomed), and a diversification of co-op activities all promised more space for grass-roots initiative. A reorientation away from commercial retailing (consumer co-ops) and toward sideline work (production co-ops) was intended to increase self-sufficiency in the localities. It is certainly true that the radical reduction of state funding of co-ops was more a matter of expediency than of principle. But if the government was going to rely on voluntary community fund raising rather than on the old practice of imposing "co-op levies" on all taxpayers, it would have to concede to local investors a degree of freedom in the area of co-op management and business venturing. As things turned out, it proved very difficult to keep the state out of cooperative societies. This was not because the state insistently pushed its way into them, but because it could not easily in 1942 pull out of established co-ops and because new ventures needed skilled leadership. In the Yanshu counties the biggest area of co-op growth in the 1943-44 period was transport teamwork, and that related directly to government priorities. The Border Region's primitive communications system was judged to be a major impediment to economic development}6 and the blockade after 1938 created an urgent need for the efficient movement of produce, raw materials, and merchandise, often over long and dangerous distances. The production-drive strategists made long-distant hauling a priority, with particular emphasis on the transport of salt. Through most of the war years, salt was one of the region's most valuable export items,I? and getting it from the northwestern fields entailed a two- to three-week round trip for a Yan'an donkey or mule team. The regional government, in late 1942, allocated some 2,ooo,ooo yuan to cart-road repairs, made funds available to cooperatives for the purchase of pack animals, fodder, and equipment,

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and appealed to people to pool their labor and livestock in an organized team-transport effort. This effort to expand transport work came at a ti~e when farming had become profitable enough in Yanshu to shrink the pool of landless laborers who were willing to work as professional porters.18 We have touched on one early solution to that problem: commandeering farmers with livestock to do short-term hauling jobs. Farmers in some places killed their animals to avoid what was regarded as extremely dangerous work, and Party leaders subsequently criticized the "big mobilizations" and coercive practices of the 1937-42 period.19 In 1941, soon after the state tacked on the burdensome "salt transport" duty to the corvee obligations of able-bodied males, the South District Co-op hit on a way for local people to at once pay their way out of the duty and make money: it got investors to contribute equivalent amounts to equip and expand a co-op transport team that collected both "public salt" and goods (including salt) for private trading. Some of the profits from en-route buying and selling were distributed to investors and the rest invested in the co-op.Z0 The authorities hailed the South District 1941 experiment as an innovation that advanced both state and private interests and, after several other places had tried it, formally recommended in October 1943 that it be adopted everywhere as a means of developing folk transport cooperatives.21 The subsequent rapid expansion of transport teamwork is attributed to the fact that "salt tax substitutes" (gongyan daijin) gave co-ops enough short-term capital to organize a trip to the salt fields and trade profitably along the route there and back. In 1944 special provision was made for delayed deliveries of public salt to government stores so that salt tax payments to co-ops early in the year, well before payment to the government was due, could be used to organize or expand transport teams. The government made cheap loans available to any groups that pooled livestock and undertook salt trips, and a 1o,ooo,ooo-yuan loan fund was established in late 1943 to support cooperative transport.22 Other forms of preferential treatment for salt haulers included the provision of cheap animal fodder, veterinary care for livestock, accident insurance, and compensation when falls in the salt price damaged the private trade.23 As long as transport co-ops met the state's salt quotas, they could buy and sell what they liked and keep the after-tax profits. The teams rode the tide of an agricultural upturn and market expansion in Shaan-Gan-Ning that they themselves helped to stimulate. Transport cooperatives grew more

194 Cooperative Societies rapidly than any of the other nonfarming cooperative enterprises.24 By mid-1944 this was, according to government reports, the most important of the businesses run by cooperative societies.25 In some respects the organization of transport teamwork after 1942 had a populist flavor. To begin with, rectification officially ended the practice of commandeering men and livestock for government hauling jobs; mobilizers were now told that draft animals could not be used during the farmers' busy seasons or without the owners' consent. As far as possible, transport work was to be done by teams of professionals and managed by cooperatives. Co-ops were free to work out their own methods of attracting investments, of labor deployment, of dividend and salary payments; their own management methods and membership privileges; and so on. They were urged to combine the resources of families that ran full-time porterage businesses (changjiaohu) with those of people who did hauling jobs in the slack seasons (duanjiaohu) and farming families willing to invest some cash, produce, livestock, or labor.Z 6 Ideally a core of professional porters would undertake the long hauling trips, and farmers would be left free to get on with their farming; even if their co-op shares did not earn dividends, they could be grateful for the marketing services and relief from corvee duty provided by the transport team. The porters, for their part, could be allocated some cropland and have it farmed for them by a local mutual-aid teamP In this way they would be integrated into farming communities without moving out of the increasingly profitable porterage business. The reformers recommended that co-ops build on the local custom of friendly neighbors pooling livestock and labor to make marketing trips (known as pengbarig in Shaanbei). These groups had usually been ad hoc and small. The reformed teams were to be bigger and more formally organized, but could begin as groupings of people who were accustomed to portering together. Liu Yongxiang was an experienced porter who had been invited to work for the South District Co-op by Director Liu Jianzhang, his former team boss. Porter Liu coordinated the South District's big salt transport effort in 1941; of the 18 teams he organized, ten were recruited through his own family and friendship networks. Xue Zhiren was Ganquan county's "transport hero"; the big township team he organized to make nine trips to the salt fields during 1942 was made up of porters who had worked together at various times, but never all at once before. With a brother serving as township head, Xue, like Liu Yongxiang, was well connected.Z8

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We can say, therefore, that a certain amount of popular goodwill, energy, and resourcefulness invigorated the Border Region's cooperative transport enterprise. Even so, the new transport teams usually depended on considerable help from the government to get organized and, then, to survive the hazards of the long-distance hauling business, particularly the frequent and costly livestock losses caused by road accidents and disease. Gao Zili, noting the region's still inadequate transport force after almost a year of the big production effort, insisted that the government could not afford to take a laissez-faire approach to the problem. He pointed out that all existing transport cooperatives, whether folk (minjian) co-ops or public-private syndicates, were the product of Party-state initiatives, and that a further development of transport cooperatives required direct government action. As the Party saw it, there were just two organizational options: either "unified leadership and dispersed management" or "unified leadership and unified management." 29 In keeping with the spirit of rectification, Gao gave priority to the first option. But the heavy hands-on leadership he now specified hardly accords with his March 1942 advice that "the government should let go of the reins and allow [co-ops] to do things for themselves." 30 Take the South District Co-op's transport brigade (which had expanded to 27 teams by 1944), for example. Private merchants funded that enterprise to the tune of 6.6 million yuan, almost half the brigade's capital assets in late 1943, and the sale of shares raised another 5·7 million yuan; this compared with an investment of just 2.5 million yuan by public companies (including the salt company).31 But for all this, the brigade was put under the state's "unified management." This move cannot be faulted in one respect: that management's impressive energy. The brigade built up reserve mule teams to cover emergencies, set up inns and fodder stores along the route to the Dingbian salt fields, ran a veterinary clinic, supervised the repair and maintenance of saddlery, fodder bags, tents, and so on. And it had a staff of 270 cadres! 32 The scale of the South District operation was of course exceptional, but it illustrates a trend that was becoming general. The special importance of transport work and the initial costliness of team building made it difficult to keep the government out of even private transport organizations. Village and township teams were progressively absorbed into district brigades. By 1944 the idea of using salt taxes to finance team building was adopted by county governments, and they now took on the management of the district teams.33 In other

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words, accompanying the growth of transport cooperation was a process of centralization and bureaucratization. Village people were fairly well served by the big teams, but they did not own and manage them. State interventions in other cooperative enterprises were not as forceful. But because transport cooperation was hailed by the Party as particularly successful, the trends there are instructive. Did the same trends characterize the movement in the Suide subregion? Information about cooperatives in the northeastern counties is sparse-evidence in itself of more feeble cooperative achievements there. Three interesting developments are nevertheless discernible. First, there was, in the immediate aftermath of successful rent reform (late 1943), a burgeoning of small cooperative ventures in the villages. Second, when the Party's "class enemies" showed too much interest in the new coops, the authorities were prompt to flex socialist muscle, closing down those in which "private interests" were deemed to be too strong. And finally, despite the generally weaker development of cooperation in this countryside, investigators reported the appearance of a significant number of comprehensive cooperatives. But "comprehensive" here could mean anything from a co-op that managed just two businesses to big units modeled on Yan'an's South District Co-op; the former briefly offered promise of a new community resourcefulness and solidarity in the northeastern subregion; the latter were always the product of an assertive statism, of top-down model building. The Suide tenants' rush to buy land after the successful rent reduction struggles of 1942-43 had the CCP's blessing and backing. These purchases, however, often used up all of the buyers' ready cash, both their rent refunds and their 1943 incomes, leaving them without winter and spring food for their families; many were worse off than when they had rented land.34 Grain credit cooperatives were an obvious solution to this problem. But having waged class war against the wealthier villagers, to whom could the organizers turn to fund granaries? In Mizhi county the sale of village properties (such as temple land) provided an initial injection of funds, and some tenants, we are told, "voluntarily bought shares in the co-ops with their rent refunds." In addition a regular source of income was created by incorporating sideline work, particularly home spinning and weaving, as a cooperative enterprise. The co-ops that were established in this way were, it is said, a response to "the Party's call to build cooperatives" and were the creation of rural cadres and activists. As such they had more the character of public welfare granaries than popularly managed cooperatives. Even

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so the strategy of linking public welfare to cooperative self-help economic activities was a significant step forward; it signaled a new approach to, and created new possibilities for, community rehabilitation in this conflict-riven countryside. As it turned out, these small village co-ops were mainly a shortterm emergency device to tide people through the 1943-44 winter. Rent reform had brought the already serious rural credit problem in Suide to crisis point, and the credit cooperatives were a quick response to that crisis, a stop-gap measure. The Communist reformers had bigger, more ambitious development strategies in mind. They recognized that, however poverty-stricken, most peasants could not be induced to "go south," but that the people were on the whole responsive to initiatives aimed at expanding nonfarm industries. The Party-state had moved quickly in 1940 to revitalize and expand the subregion's urban manufacturing and commercial businesses. In the villages, reconstruction work after rent reform gave special attention to the development of sideline work, and to the cottage textile industry in particular. As with transport work in Yanshu, however, the urgent need for an expansion of cloth and garment manufacturing in blockaded ShaanGan-Ning meant that the industry at all levels attracted government investment and strong managerial inputs. To an increasing extent, therefore, the textile "cooperatives" that flourished in 1943 and 1944 were government enterprises, whose cadres, from township, district, or county offices, coordinated the piecework yarn and cloth production of village women. Co-op cadres delivered raw cotton to the homes of women spinners, collected and paid for the spun yarn, issued bonuses for good work, and so on. Spinners who were co-op shareholders might also get dividends on their shares. But insistence on cooperative procedures was often token. If production quotas were being filled, an increasingly centralized management was disinclined to insist on the purchase of shares by poor families. Similarly, though the co-op cadres might have preferred that village women work collectively at their spinning task, if that bothered their husbands too much, the work could be let out individually. There was even heavier pressure to centralize cloth making. Homemade cloth filled the needs of village families but did not sell well at markets. So though reformers did not totally ignore the supply needs of subsistence producers, they gave priority to the equipping of textile workshops and small factories. 35 We are offered the example of a "popularly managed" cotton and woollen goods cooperative in Mizhi.

198 Cooperative Societies It began as a county government workshop in 1940 and became a co-

operative after selling more than 25o,ooo yuan's worth of shares to the public in 1943· It operated a workshop staffed by about 20 people and manufactured a range of woven and knitted products. It also supported the local cottage spinning industry by supplying raw cotton to, and buying yarn from, up to Boo households.36 Arrangements similar to this characterized the folk-spinning and weaving movement in all parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning. The women who were the movement's backbone mostly continued to work at home. Their supply and marketing needs were met by state companies based in the subregional capitals or by "cooperatives" managed by local governments. Any cooperation was upward through a vertical hierarchy; the organizers required little cooperation within communities and between households. Again, like Yanshu's transport teams, Suide's village co-ops were usually absorbed by bigger organizations at the township level or higher and lost, in the process, their identity as community organizations. Amalgamations, in the reformers' view, saved the weak co-ops from collapsing and enabled the profitable enterprises to expand and flourish further. Another factor reinforced the centralization trend in Suide. Canny merchants were quick to buy into the co-ops that were prospering, and this threatened the still tenuous victories achieved by poor peasants in the subregion's recent class war. Mao Zedong made the point in December 1942 that, in the thoroughly reformed and secure Yan'an area, merchant involvement could not hinder "the leadership of the cooperatives by the Communist Party." 37 In translation this meant that cooperatives in Yanshu could be opened up to former "class enemies" V\.'ithout any limits on share purchases. In Suide the Communists were bent in any case on merchant-landlords taking their money out of rural areas and investing it in urban businesses. In their efforts to keep monied merchants out, they were much quicker to abandon "democratic" management than their counterparts in Yanshu. As it happened, some Suide local officials obviously did not resist the temptation to consort with merchants. A 1948 report prepared by Shaan-Gan-Ning's Indusco Office blamed merchant takeovers for the demise of the small co-ops that had mushroomed in the wake of tenancy reform in Suide and Mizhi counties.* But what had made that possible were the "think big" officials who, because they disdained *The Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (CIC) movement established an office in Yan'an in 1939· It was quickly absorbed into the Shaan-Gan-Ning bureaucracy andretained only fragile links with the ere organization (to the extent that the movement survived) in other parts of China.

199

Cooperative Societies TABLE 11

Cooperative Societies in Yanshu and Suide, 1944 Suide

Yanshu

Counties

Yan'an Ansai Ganquan Zhidan Fuxian Gulin Yanchuan Zichang Yanchang TOTAL

Number"

Counties

Number

Branches

Total

114

Suide Mizhi Jiaxian Qingjian Zizhou Wubao

41

12 117

146

TOTAL

115

79 75 39 26 23 17 12

29

53 15

14 12 11 8

12 11 8

130

245

11

396

SOURCES: Yanshu, SGN [12], p. 86; Suide, "Suide fenqu hezuoshe gongzuo zongjie" [Summary of cooperative work in the Suide subregion], 1944, in CZJJSL, 7: 111. NOTE: The data on co-ops vary widely by sources. The Yanshu source, for example, puts the Suide total at only 6o. Subtracting the 130 branch co-ops from the Suide source's 245 still leaves a wide gap. a Does not include small workships and road inns run by cooperatives.

small co-ops, abolished or amalgamated them and who, because they disdained small investors, did not struggle hard enough against the merchant monopolists. Merchant monopolies, the authors charged, "changed the nature of cooperatives, and we [the Communists] had no way of controlling them." 38 The considerable discrepancies in the available data on cooperatives in Shaan-Gan-Ning make it difficult to draw conclusions about the scale and reach of the movement. The figures for Suide, in particular, vary markedly; the swift rise and fall of the small co-ops and differences of opinion over what constituted a cooperative possibly account for this. We can confidently say, at any rate, that Yan'an county had much more than its fair share of cooperative societies, and that the movement generally was much stronger in the Yanshu subregion than anywhere else (Table 11). And there is enough consistency in the figures to suggest that cooperatives were much larger in Suide than in Yanshu (750 members on average in Suide, compared with 211 in Yanshu); 39 this holds true even if we add in Sui de's 130 small "branch co-ops." As Tables 12 and 13 show, Suide also differed from the rest of the region in the nature of its cooperatives, with a substantial number in sideline enterprises and a higher proportion of credit associations. If the branch co-ops are added in, it also had a very high propor-

200

Cooperative Societies TABLE 12

Cooperative Societies in the Border Region by Type, 1944 Type

Consumer Production Transport

Number

369 398 275

Percent

31.3% 33.8 23.3

Type

Credit Health TOTAL

Number

86 51 1,179

Percent

7.3% 4.3 100

SGN [5], p. 82. SGN [12], p. 195, offers much lower figures for cooperatives in 1944: consumer, 281, transport, 233, production, 114, and credit, 6, for a total of 634. But those figures are hard to reconcile with the data we have for the Suide subregion (Tables 11, 13). SOURCE: NOTE:

tion of comprehensive co-ops.* The data, then, point up two important features of the 1943-44 cooperative movement in Suide: the brief burgeoning of multipurpose community organizations, which, if they had survived, might have provided a foundation for community integration and village democracy; and second, the organizing of people into large units, which, because of their size, required Party managers. The model comprehensive cooperatives in all parts of Shaan-GanNing were never the small dual- or multipurpose co-ops of the type that emerged in the villages of Suide and Mizhi counties in late 1943; all were large, ambitious district operations, which from the start were nurtured and cosseted by the Party-state. This was particularly true of Suide's "South District," Xuejiaping, in northern Suide. Its cooperative, under the leadership of a Party activist, Zhang Piyuan, developed rapidly in 1943, thanks to the community's investment of 7,ooo,ooo yuan. Labor heroes and New Year drama performances had "democratically" encouraged people to purchase shares, and quick, well-publicized payouts of dividends, we are told, raised public confidence in the co-op, prompting another round of share buying. For all practical purposes, however, public participation went no further than that. This is not to disparage an initiative that was, in many respects, innovative and progressive: the dozen or so small workshops and businesses the Xuejiaping co-op ran furnished essential services

•r assume that most, possibly all, of the 108 "comprehensive cooperatives" shown in Table 13 managed farm-sideline enterprises ("production co-ops"). Comparison with the regionwide pattern (Table 12) is made difficult by the omission of comprehensive co-ops in the Border Region source and its failure to break down the co-op categories as finely as the Suide source (for example, both production and credit co-ops could be buried in the Border Region figure for consumer cooperatives).

Cooperative Societies TABLE

201

13

Cooperative Societies in Suide by Type, 1944 Type

Number

Comprehensive Credit Consumer Production

108 48 28 23

Percent

44.1% 19.6 11.4 9.4

Type

Transport Textile Agricultural TOTAL

Number

20 15 3 245

Percent

8.2% 6.1 1.2 100

souRCE: See Table 11.

to farm families; some of these businesses provided for worker management and cooperative profit sharing; and such was the local enthusiasm for home spinning that the co-op was asked to establish three township branch co-ops to facilitate the efficient supply of raw cotton to village households. This "comprehensive co-op," however, was not really a cooperative; it was a bureaucratic organ that managed several important but, for the most part, uncoordinated small enterprises in different parts of a heavily populated district. Apart from the broadbased supply and marketing support for home clothmaking, the only co-op "service" that reached all families in the district was tax collection. Community initiative and decision making had no role in the founding or running of the organization.40 That was equally true, to be sure, of the district co-ops in Yanshu. But with the partial exception of transport co-ops, village organizational initiatives there had a better chance of surviving as community enterprises. The wasteland areas were places where the Party's authority was less likely to be challenged, where an economic recovery stimulated self-help confidence, and where migrant resettlement work called forth community resourcefulness. The very basic needs of new settlers- housing, food, seed-grain, cooking pots, and farm tools- invited cooperation among new settlers and between old and new families, and the authorities were generally willing to leave well alone any arrangements that reduced the need for government handouts. South District's population grew dramatically during the war years-from 1,733 people in 1937 to 7,)84 in 1943-thanks largely to migrations from the Suide-Yulin area.41 Hamlets that had consisted of just three or four households when the Communists secured the area in late 1936 were literally reconstituted and developed by migrant families. The South District Co-op, as the agent of a state bent on economic develop-

202

Cooperative Societies

ment, played a critical role in coordinating services that increased the self-reliance of local communities. It most certainly was not a grassroots cooperative, but it helped make village cooperation practicable in a district where large tracts of uncultivated land and new-settler loneliness made interhousehold cooperation necessary. Yet the cooperation that occurred most naturally and easily in Yanshu villages was farmwork mutual-aid and any other teamwork that required only minimal accounting and bookkeeping. So transport teams, for example, that were extensions of farming teams were likely to remain village organizations. But transport co-ops, like all other cooperatives that had to deal with the complexities of shares, dividends, full-time salaried workers, and so on, did not, could not, take root in the villages. The demands for a second thoroughgoing rectification of cooperative societies in late 1944 reflect an official disappointment with the progress of the societies to that date. And the Party analysts' rundowns of "deviations" that bedeviled the cooperative movement make very clear the great complexity of a project that attempted to integrate popular self-help and self-reliant organizations within a program of top-down state building. The strongest criticisms in 1944, and over the next several years, were leveled at the statists and the "think big" dreamers, the speedsters on the socialist road. The "popular management" principle that had been established as policy by the 1941-42 rectification movement now had to be emphatically restated; grassroots organizers were told that they had to keep more in step with the people.42 According to the Indusco Office's 1948 report, rectification in 1944 closed down more than half of Shaan-Gan-Ning's cooperative societies and left only 150,000 of a listed 26o,ooo shareholders as qualified members of cooperatives.43 The retrenchment in Suide county was particularly savage, with only one of 6o co-ops surviving the overhaul (the Indusco report judged that this cutback was, in fact, too severe, and that at least 30 could have been saved).44 The inspection teams sent to examine their ledgers put all aspects of co-op management under scrutiny. They refunded "compulsory" (tanpai) investments to the people on whom they had been levied and insisted that all overdue dividends be immediately issued to shareholders; these payouts bankrupted many co-ops. Corrupt co-op managers, people who pilfered, defrauded, embezzled, smuggled, and speculated, lost their jobs. Organizations that were judged to be the "tail of merchants" or were exclusively concerned with retailing and profit making were no longer

Cooperative Societies

203

allowed to call themselves cooperatives. Inflation had persistently threatened the economic viability of cooperative businesses through the early 1940's, one reason why investments in kind rather than cash were increasingly encouraged. With rectification came the suggestion that the payout of dividends should be secondary to the "services" that cooperatives provided to local communities-that shareholders were less concerned with earning dividends than with having their supply, marketing, and solvency problems efficiently handled, and that an excessive commercialism had up to now been corrupting the Border Region's cooperatives.45 Particularly significant is the CCP's waning enthusiasm for "comprehensive" cooperation. The South District Co-op remained firmly on its pedestal, but we now hear warnings against an indiscriminate emulation of privileged models.46 Most of the co-ops that had tried quickly and extravagantly to diversify their activities had overextended themselves and collapsed. Planners now criticized an "all in one basket" (yilanzi) mentality, the stuffing of too many enterprises and too many people, into one organization.47 The Indusco Office considered a coop that managed more than ten enterprises too big.48 It particularly deplored the 1943-44 fad for building district-wide cooperatives, collectivizing property (such as the livestock owned by professional porters), and seizing control of private enterprises: the people who hurried to expand, centralize, and collectivize failed to understand that, in an economy based on household farming, what the ordinary people needed were "small co-ops that organized production and solved their problems"; collectivization was for the future, not now.49 An earlier Party report chastised the reformers for forcing people into so-called progressive forms of cooperation, a step that had not only provoked a conservative reaction among them but, worse, stifled popular initiative, a willingness to be self-reliant. Villagers had reacted to officious organizing by outsiders by refusing even to take on responsibilities that were essentially the community's, making it necessary for township and district governments to move in and manage things.5° Most of the cooperative societies that were formed or reformed during the 1943-44 production drive measured up poorly against "popular management" criteria and certainly did not develop into "cooperative communities." The services provided by some of the district comprehensive cooperatives did facilitate interhousehold cooperation within villages, particularly in Yanshu. The Party defined the role

204

Cooperative Societies

of these district co-ops as a "bridge" between government and the people/1 in reality, however, they were arms of the central government, characterized by "a unified leadership and management" that left little room for popular input. For all that the mobilizers tried to stimulate local entrepreneurism, and despite a pragmatic commitment to the goal of local self-reliance, powerful centripetal pressures took initiative away from local people and absorbed their organizations into bigger units. Rectification tried, but essentially failed, to prevent coop management from gravitating toward administrative centers. The complexities of co-op management contributed to this trend; so, too, did the instinctive statism of nationalistic socialists. The big district coops on the South District model were not community organizations in any sense. One of the services they usually performed for villages was collecting taxes for the Yan'an government.

CHAPTER

8

Farmwork Mutual Aid, 1943-1944

of 1943-44 represents the climax of the Yan'an period and epitomizes the two fundamental elements of rural reconstruction on which this study has focused: community building and state making. For the Communists, the production movement promised to solve two basic problems: the problem of the "people's livelihood" and the problem of "government finances." 1 In other words it was designed to build for the state a solid and stable revenue base while at the same time honoring the revolution's promise that poor people would prosper under Party government. In the end the productivity increases in 1943-44 did not make much of a dent in the government's budget deficit} but they did represent important progress in the development of Shaan-Gan-Ning's agricultural economy. The successes in this area are usually attributed to the populist (or, at least, participatory) organizational strategies that, by 1943, generally characterized the CCP's mass campaign work. But we must also give credit to the vigorous infrastructural repair and development initiatives undertaken during the six preceding years. Economic and sociopolitical change over that time had extended well beyond a rehabilitation of the region's traditional economy and social system. In Yanshu, in particular, the repopulation strategy and rapid cropland expansion had made possible a swift turnaround and growth in agriculture. Land revolution had given destitute farmers a betterthan-even chance of making substantial gains in an expanding economy. Civil peace, political reform, and the rule of Party law promised unprecedented social security for poor families. And substantial THE BIG PRODUCTION DRIVE

206 Farmwork Mutual Aid dollops of aid for things like road repair, farm loans, and market development helped to make farmers much less inclined to uproot their families and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Changes of this magnitude represented a significant assault on the "culture of destitution" that had prevailed in 1930's Shaanbei, a place where demoralized farmers had "scratch[ed] an existence from scabby patches of grain ... from which they were lucky to bring in three or four bushels an acre," and had housed their underfed, half-clothed families in "tumble-down caves infested with rats and flies." 3 Once the Communists' promise of tax justice was seen to be honored in the autumn of 1942, the big production campaign organizers could rely on a significant upturn in morale and effort. In the Party's view heightened expectations and enthusiasm among producers, and the ecological transformation that was then in process, made possible (and legitimate) an extension of traditional mutual-aid practices in the direction of "collective farming." Ecological and economic change had been much less dramatic in Suide. The almost complete lack of arable wasteland, an overpopulated countryside, fragmented landownership, and united-front constraints on a radical reordering of land tenure precluded the possibility of swift agricultural recovery and development in that subregion. And because the civil war still sputtered on there as late as 1940, Suide would in any case have started well behind Yanshu when the big production drive got under way three years later. By 1944 tenancy reform had made substantial differences to poor peasants in many places, and there is little doubt that this produced a "rise in production morale" to a degree that facilitated many cooperative initiatives. But as long as there was fierce competition for land among peasants and only minimal consolidation of fragmented farm properties, the scope for broadening labor exchanges beyond two or three families was very limited. Underemployment on farms was endemic in this countryside, and efficient mutual-aid teams just exacerbated that problem. Suide was not without redeeming features. Its commercial infrastructure, although decayed and debilitated in the 1930's, provided a foundation for economic development that Yanshu could not match. The resources of Suide's manufacturers and merchants, both rural and urban, became critical to Shaan-Gan-Ning's struggle for survival against the GMD blockade that had been tightening since 1939. As the Communists set about rehabilitating markets and industries, they pointed with approval to the well-developed traditions of farm side-

Farmwork Mutual Aid

207

lines and to the numbers of skilled craftspeople in Suide relative to Yanshu. In fact the folk spinning and weaving movement, which is one of the enduring symbols of the Yan'an period, relied in Yanshu villages on the expertise of migrant women from Suide. As we have seen, however, the somewhat haphazard attempts to cooperativize sideline work in both Yanshu and Suide usually produced state-run shops and businesses rather than community-based cooperatives. For the most part Suide's revived and newly developed industries served cooperativization in the subregion by sopping up surplus farm labor, leaving a shrinking labor pool that encouraged the development of teamwork on small farms. THE FIRST PHASE OF THE MUTUAL-AID MOVEMENT,

1943

The farmwork mutual-aid movement in both subregions was impelled by broadly the same policy rhythms and rectification impulses as the movement to build cooperative societies. Rectification in 1942 said that popular teams could not be created by "administrative decree," and that farmers must no longer be mustered into large teams.4 Some Party strategists claimed that the use of "wasteland reclamation shock troops" in Yanshu that spring had given people a distaste for collective labor (although Mao Zedong was still, in December 1942, applauding that initiative).5 Not only that, while farmers were working in teams to clear wasteland, their own land fell to waste, and the rate of land reclamation in the Yanshu counties was outpacing population growth.6 A more rational organization of labor was needed to keep all cropland under cultivation, and more humane, democratic organizational methods were needed if cooperation between village families was to work as a development strategy. Opponents of the 1942 "shock troops" strategy recommended that "comprehensive use be made of the people's traditional forms of labor mutual aid" and that, rather than forcibly conscripting farmers, grassroots organizers use "encouragement and propaganda" to popularize teamwork? The Northwest Bureau's report on the traditional cooperative practices in Shaanbei was studied in rural cadre training classes throughout Shaan-Gan-Ning. In January 1943 a Liberation Daily editorial explained to readers the new approach to agricultural development, and argued that if the traditional labor exchanges (biangong)

208

Farmwork Mutual Aid

and contract labor (zhagong) methods were "effectively utilized and directed, and organized and led in a planned way, then they can be transformed into organizations for developing productivity and raising production." 8 The starting point, however, had to be the "existing level of the peasants' political consciousness." 9 Investigators claimed that economic recovery and development since 1936 had resulted in the reemergence of traditional forms of mutual aid in the Shaan-Gan-Ning countryside, and that, by 1940, more contract-labor teams were operating in the Yan'an and Ansai area than before the civil war.10 The reformers saw their task as reviving and further popularizing the old customs, and then infusing them with "new content." Though the Party's publicists always gave prominence to the "new" mutual-aid teams-teams that had broadened their memberships beyond kin circles, that worked through four seasons, and that had branched out into sideline activities-the oldtype teams played a more important role in the movement than they were usually given public credit for. In both Yanshu and Suide small, kin-based, and seasonal farming teams were in the great majority, especially in 1943.11 As we might expect, there were differences between the two subregions in the style of team building and in the level of popular management. These differences show up less in 1943 than in 1944, a year in which the push for bigger, more ambitious teams gathered momentum.

Yanshu In the Yanshu counties we can point without hesitation to two state programs, a farmers' loan scheme and the coordination of "farmhousehold plans" (nonghu jihua), as the reasons why cooperativization in its first phase moved more in the direction of small, personalized groups than toward the heralded "new" big multitasked teams. The regional government could not make the same financial commitment to Suide, could not supply enough aid to make a real difference in that densely populated subregion. Government policy explicitly restricted loan grants for livestock and farm tools to farmers in the wasteland districtsP That area was also favored in the granting of "spring hunger" loans; people migrating into Yanshu had a much better chance of receiving food-grain loans than hungry Suide farmers who balked at moving south. Obviously, we will have to look for other factors to explain the upsurge in small-scale, casual labor exchanges in Suide in 1943.

Farmwork Mutual Aid

209

The agricultural loans program was premised on farmer cooperation from start to finish. The money was granted only to groups of households (the minimum was three in 1943, as against five in 1941)P So a would-be borrower had to find people who would form an "agricultural loan group" with him before he could register as an eligible applicant with the village or township government. Though the other members of the group served, first, as guarantors of the loan, they were expected to coordinate their farming and to work cooperatively. In fact mutual aid between the families was one of the loan conditions,14 and the loan tended to spur balanced cooperation by equalizing the resources of the participating families. The joint purchase of livestock by all members of a team was specifically encouraged/5 although private purchases, with the help of team-guaranteed loans, were probably much more common. The regulations specified that loans were to be repaid one month after the autumn harvest in the loan year, at which point the teams could disband. As it was, loan repayment was notoriously tardy, but it is unlikely that this impinged on teamwork one way or another. By effecting a leveling of a few households at a time, the loan scheme enabled numerous poor families to engage in small-scale, easily managed, profitable teamwork. With a wasteland grant and a small grain loan, people who began with nothing could make considerable progress in their first year or two of farming. Loans for livestock or equipment purchases usually went to second-year immigrants; and these farmers, still finding their feet, could easily enough be persuaded that cooperation with other newcomers was sensible. "Loan groups" were most often formed by related households or friendly migrant families, people who cooperated easily (especially when bank loans helped remove the economic disparities between them). In any case the amounts were often so small that recipients had no choice but to enter into cooperative arrangements. Recall, for instance, the three immigrant farmers who received so paltry a sum to buy an ox that they ended up having to borrow one in return for team-farming the owner's land. This example is typical of the migrant resettlement experience and illustrates how a droplet of state aid, the CCP's guiding hand, and a measure of cooperation ensured that newcomers put down roots in their adopted villages. More broadly, we can see how the floods of migrants into Yanshu, in combination with the government's selective lending policy, produced a quick and unprecedented expansion of small group labor-exchanges in the resettlement districts. In a comment on Mao's "Get Organized" appeal to labor heroes/ 6

210

Farmwork Mutual Aid

the head of the Shaan-Gan-Ning government, Lin Boqu, argued that "farm-household plans" were, together with mutual-aid teams, the embodiment of the government's rural organization driveP The ultimate goal was to have village mutual-aid teams design, coordinate, and manage their own production plans.18 But until such teams were up and running, planning and organization were to be based in the individual household. Production cadres would map out the plans for the year's target by doing the rounds of each household to discuss cropping patterns, seed selection, fertilizer use, manpower and livestock deployment, farmland repair and improvement, sidelines planning, tax budgeting, and so on.19 Once all this was decided at a family meeting by means of "democratic discussion," the plans would be written up by the visiting cadre and displayed on a wall of the family's home. Teamwork often did not figure in this system, but it promised to push villagers in that direction. The plans imposed pressures to improve work performance in much the same way teamwork did. The coordinated growing of crops, the rationalization of labor use, the economies and resourcefulness that were encouraged by the plans, were also the goals of organized labor teams. Planners could arrange "adjustments" between families to catch up slack resources and to help out the very poor, and they could nominate the specially needy as candidates for agricultural loans. And plans could be used as a means of adjudicating the team and village competitions that helped to fuel the big production drive and that demanded "mutual surveillance" between competitors. Predictably cadres in charge of household plans were commissioned to agitate for formal teamwork and to subsume individual household plans under unified team programs.20 But when common sense prevailed, they confined their first experiments with cooperative farming to equalizing "adjustments" of manpower, animals, and tools between just a few families. Where systematic efforts were made to draw up and oversee practicable production plans for peasant households, it is likely that small-scale, informal cooperation between poor families was the norm and was much more widespread than in the past. The "farming-household plans" project was a bold idea, but one that made little progress in Shaan-Gan-Ning in the war years. Official criticisms of the project identify some of the predictable difficulties. Even if a cadre had enough literacy to put plans on paper, there was still the problem of making written plans comprehensible to farmers. Using standardized forms was criticized as "formalism," and over-

Farmwork Mutual Aid

211

generalized, unspecific planning as laziness.21 Regular checks and inspections were required if farmers were to take the plans that had been drawn up for them in the spring seriously, and the Party-state in the early 194o's did not have the resources to reach into the villages to this depth. Only a few families in any one village got this kind of attention in most places where the household plans were promoted; the easy targets were "vagrants" (erliuzi) and labor heroes.22 Villages close to county seats, and to Yan'an city in particular, were more likely to be visited by conscientious production cadres than more remote settlements. The detailed production plan produced by Wu Manyou, labor hero extraordinaire, was published in the region's newspapers as a challenge to all farmers in the Yan'an area to match Wu's effort?3 The responding challenges from the county's other labor heroes, Tian Erhong and Shen Changlin (both of whom served as village heads in places close to Yan'an city), made headline news in the spring of 1944?4 The same emulation and competition strategies were used right across the Border Region. But the level of supervised and sustained planning of organized production that occurred in the Yan'an city districts was rarely matched in other parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning. The entrepreneurism and growing prosperity of Wu, Tian, and Shen were reason enough to make them the focus of privileged attention. But the Party also looked to them to be pace-setters in the area of farmwork cooperation. By the end of 1944 all three were managing big village-based teams, but it is important to note how modest their first efforts were. Village head Shen Changlin, for example, first teamed up with his two brothers and his tenant (huozi) in 1943 and allowed the other 21 families in Majiagou (southeast of Yan'an city) "to seek out their own partners." 25 Apart from four unrelated families, each with one ox, who chose to group together so they could pair their oxen, all found partners among their own kinsmen (including, in one case, a father-in-law in a neighboring village). And all the groups were small; the largest consisted of just five men. A team of four laborers, probably newly arrived migrants, worked without draft animals.26 During 1943 teamwork in this village was seasonal only, and the various groups cooperated with each other only sporadically, forming big hoeing teams for summer weeding, for example. At harvest time the Majiagou farmers abandoned mutual aid altogether. The Party laid this collapse of cooperation in the autumn to three things: the area had a tradition of "a scythe per person" for the urgent harvesting work; husbands could not be persuaded to let their wives work in the fields

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alongside strange men; and no farmer was willing to delay harvesting his own crop to work elsewhere?7 Team formation in Wu Manyou's home village followed a similar pattern. Wu took the lead in February 1943 by cooperating for plowing with his brother, a nephew, and his huozi. Then he borrowed mattocks from the South District Cooperative to help out two new migrant families, and he arranged "mutual adjustments" between other households in ways that ironed out the disparities that might have hindered mutual aid.28 As noted earlier, most of the 18 households in this village eventually joined one of three teams based on place of origin and length of residence in Wujiazaoyuan. Peizhuang township in the western district of Yan'an municipality also had a large migrant population, and the labor hero Tian Erhong (head of Yaoxianwan village) saw to it that newcomers were speedily equipped with tools so that they could begin growing food for themselves. There was the example, cited earlier, of the way in which Tian helped three migrant families (each from different parts of Suide) to acquire the use of an ox and in the upshot, to team-farm one another's land. When the same three heard that Tian Erhong was waging a production competition against Wu Manyou, they decided that they themselves would compete with the migrant hero Ma Pi'en (from Mizhi county). They wrote to Ma, introduced themselves as fellow northerners, congratulated him on the prize he was awarded at the Labor Heroes Congress, and issued their challenge: they were going to work together as a yearlong biangong team on the 51 mu they had cleared; they would plow the land to a depth of eight inches, weed their crops twice, and adhere to strict schedules; and they would produce a year's food and clothing for all of their families. Ma Pi' en had made good in one year, and so could they. This story is no doubt stretched or contrived. As a propaganda piece, however, it usefully illustrates the government's quite modest expectations in relation to cooperativization, especially where immigrants were concerned. A team of just three families that aimed simply to earn a basic subsistence was trumpeted as a model to the farmers of Yan'an county. Moreover, impressive asTian Erhong's feat was in getting all but two laborers into mutual-aid teams in his home village, much lower participation rates in Peizhuang township as a whole were allowed to be a good achievement. Just 15 percent of the township's total labor force had worked in teams for spring plowing, 52 percent for summer weeding, and 22 percent at harvest time. Tian's job as hero

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was to achieve a substantial increase in cooperative farming in 1944 by getting neighboring villages to emulate his own. Suide

The special conditions favoring farmer teamwork dissipated the farther one traveled from Yan'an city in any direction, but most particularly northeastward toward heavily populated Suide. Government financial aid was offered to Suide farmers who agreed to move out of the northeast to Yanshu or Guanzhong, and almost never to those who stayed put. Teamwork in Suide could not earn for participants a share of cleared wasteland as it often did in Yanshu. Rent reform had reduced social differentiation in the villages, but not to nearly the same extent as land revolution had worked in Yanshu. And though it is true that Communist reforms were squeezing, even destroying, the farm businesses of the prosperous families, old-elite power persisted, even if weakly, in many parts of the subregion. Problems such as these retarded development projects in general, and they certainly impeded any "spontaneous" cooperation among farmers. Apart from the fragmentation of pitifully small holdings over distances of as much as two or three kilometers and the endemic feuding over land claims, the subsistence farmers' need to grow as many as ten different crops on their tiny plots greatly limited the chances of efficient farmwork cooperation in most parts of the northeastern counties.29 This is not to say that agricultural cooperation was unworkable in Suide. There, as elsewhere, poor families had traditionally used a range of cooperative strategies to fill the dangerous resource gaps created by their dire poverty. Very small farmholdings meant that draft animals were used efficiently only when shared, so there was a sturdy tradition of ad hoc seasonal exchanges (huobian) of labor, livestock, and tools between two or three neighboring households. This arrangement was usually restricted to spring plowing; farm sizes did not warrant teamwork for weeding or harvesting. Three-season exchanges typically occurred only when farmers "pooled" their land (bingdi) with that of their neighbors, usually their kinsmen, and took jobs elsewhere?0 The Communists were to seize on this practice as a method of redeploying smallholders to other enterprises or to the southern wasteland districts, and of achieving an expansion of farmwork cooperation on the subregion's farms. Party authorities recognized the serious obstacles to building large

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yearlong mutual-aid teams in Suide but, whether out of conviction or expedience, they told production cadres that Party leadership in the villages was all that was needed to make labor exchanges work. Organizers were advised to keep teams small but to work at persuading them to carry on through the autumn and even the winter. Time saved by efficient teamwork could be spent on land improvements and more intensive farming. Team harvesting, for example, would leave time before the freeze for a late-autumn plowing of croplands. And in early spring, at a time when mutual-aid teams in the southern counties were clearing wasteland, Suide's teams might achieve some small extension of farmland by terracing the hill slopes, reducing the width of embankments (or, in fact, farming them), and filling in crevices gouged by torrential rain. There was, however, only limited scope for an intensification of farming on overmanned farms, and many of the new jobs the cadres thought up did not necessarily command teamwork. In any case this program did not touch on the real hindrance to cooperation: fragmentation and an outsized farming population. Some attempt was made to arrange "land exchanges" (duidi or huandi) between farm families with a view to consolidating farms or leaseholds as single units (or, at least, reducing the travel time between plots).31 Tenancy reform, insofar as it got landlords out of the villages and gave tenants more secure leaseholds on larger farms, was also a means to this end. The expansion of cottage industries was another. And the planned movements of Suide farm families into the Yanshu wastelands was tactically linked to the cooperativization effort; cadres tried to comfort migrants with the promise that their farm plots would be cared for by mutual-aid teams. The organization of cooperative teams eventually became a formal component of the migration program in some places. Before 1944, however, the typical targets of the "go south" mobilizers were extended families with enough members to allow team farming both at home and in the south. A publicity example was made of the five Hou brothers of Liujiaqu village (in the model Haojiaqiao area). Three of the brothers moved south in 1943 to clear and plant a wasteland grant; the two who stayed in Suide did what had once been the work of five men; and the women spun and wove for the township co-op. At the end of the year, the brothers divided the total take according to each person's labor input. This worked so well, we are told, that all the stayat-homes agreed to migrate south the following year.32 Party mobilizers used similar methods to systematize and make

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more equitable the old ad hoc exchanges and the sideline work of underemployed subsistence farmers. They claimed that their first-step interventions resulted in the care of crops that would once have fallen waste while the owner was away odd-jobbing or working off the loan of a draft animal. In the past a poor peasant who had borrowed a draft animal in the spring (and with it usually a plowman, since few owners would entrust so valuable a resource to just anyone) often had to repay the loan in the summer with weeding work (at a rate of three or four days for one day's use of the animal), leaving his own crops to go to weed. This was why many poor peasants in these counties had "bad memories of mutual-aid." 33 To erase these "bad memories," the Communist reformers developed government livestock depots. Access to cheap loans of donkeys and oxen, it was hoped, would promote cooperation between poor peasants and, if cadres were not corrupt, squeeze the richer peasants out of the exchange market.34 A stickier problem was getting the farmers working away from home to accept small teams of outsiders to do their summer hoeing, a task most had been willing to entrust only to kinsmen in the past. Convincing unrelated farm families that they would not lose out in such teams depended on the Party cadres asserting a moral authority and firm leadership; it also required some shrewd grouping of exchange partners. Official advice was generally to make the teams no larger than three or four poor farmers, and preferably of kinsmen who were used to working together.35 Haojiaqiao village was developed as the Suide subregion's prime model of organizational efficiency and production energy. Located close to Suide city in Shatanping district, it was an administrative village (consisting of six natural villages) and the seat of the township government. Tenancy rates there were exceptionally high, but there were no resident landlords in the early 194o's, and rent reform put effective limits on absentee-landlord interference in village affairs. Hence there was more scope there for radical reform initiatives than in many other parts of Suide. Despite a strong Party presence and the example of Liu Yuhou, who formed a five-man team with his two younger brothers, a cousin, and a brother-in-law, to share three donkeys and an ox, mutual aid in Haojiaqiao did not develop beyond customary exchanges of draft animals in the spring of 1943.36 A dedicated Party member, Liu was hailed for resisting the temptation to "poach land" from other tenants and spare himself the nuisance of farming inconveniently located plots.37 Because of the long distances between

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the team members' plots, they sometimes had to split into two groups. Nevertheless, the five held together for all three farming seasons. Meanwhile, with the encouragement of township officials, Liu had induced 124 farmers (about two-thirds of the village's adult males) to team up for summer weeding that year. They formed 26 small groups based on the location of their plots (as far as possible all the farmland of any one group was on the same hill). These efforts, as later critics pointed out, were not entirely successful. Many of the hoeing groups, with five men, had still been too large and had proved unworkable. Moreover, because of the failure to mobilize children and old people to help with the harvesting, all cooperative work had virtually ceased in the autumn.38 It is not clear whether or not the extra weedings made possible by mutual aid achieved higher yields for Liu and his kinsmen in 1943, but the time saved through teamwork had released him for government work and enabled his partners to do extra odd-jobbing that year.39 All poor families in the land-scarce counties relied on sideline earnings to keep themselves afloat, so any long-term teaming up for farmwork could not be allowed to hinder, and ideally should advance, those businesses. The CCP encouraged the traditional practice of livestock "secondments" (choushengkou), in which farmers entrusted their unripened crops to kinsmen and used their kinsmen's donkeys for charcoal- or salt-hauling. The family connection between crop grower and hauler minimized any quarrelling over the division of different kinds of income in the autumn. The Communists conceded the difficulty of cultivating such practices outside of kinship circles, and it was really not until 1944 that they made a deliberate attempt to encourage this kind of division of labor among unrelated families. 40 Most Party reports on cooperativization in Suide made much of the farmland improvement work and intensive farming practices that increased the chance of higher crop yields. If it was true, however, that mutual aid resulted in the speedy completion of jobs (and the planners insisted that it did), then a second consequence of teamwork would be the creation of yet more surplus labor in a place where underemployment was already chronic. Failing a big outward migration movement and a rapid proliferation of new cottage or urban industries, an immediate option for the Communists was to organize and systematize the odd-jobbing of underemployed farmers. An important first step was to organize, for example, five poor farmers who, during most busy seasons, hired themselves out as short-term laborers,

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assigning three to team-farm all the land they owned and rented, and arranging regular long-term work for the other two.41 A rationalization of the labor supply was the only way in which the government could improve wages for hired farmhands in Suide, and any measures that reduced the numbers of job-seekers, then organized the rest, were a useful means to this end. The complexity of the task (a feature of which was convincing poor farmers that the new method would earn them better, more secure incomes) must have limited its application in 1943. An interesting development in a "model village," Qilimiao near Mizhi city, that year saw the formation of contract labor teams similar to the zhagong teams common in Yanshu: teams hired themselves out to work other people's land after the members' own crops had been seen to.42 Whether or not rich peasants were willing to employ these teams and pay them government-fixed wages depended on the extent to which the Communist government had cornered the labor market in any one district. There were a few instances of large-scale teamwork mobilizations in Suide in 1943· One was in Yihe district, a place where, because soviet-period land reform had mostly held firm, rent reform in 1943 was less urgent than elsewhere.43 But the Yihe initiative was subsequently criticized as "formalistic" and far too unwieldy. "Mutual-aid brigades" had been constituted at township level and then divided in turn into platoons (pai), teams (ban), and, finally, small groups (xiaozu).44 The operation, fairly clearly, was military in style and along the lines of, for example, Yan'an county's big wasteland reclamation drive in 1942; it was not one whit spontaneous or popular. In other instances the members of township assemblies, elected by popular vote in 1942, were told to set an example and to get involved in mutual-aid arrangements. This often resulted in unworkable combinations of farm families, people who had no good economic reason to cooperate.45 In summary, then, we can say of both Yanshu and Suide that what farmwork cooperatives there were that year were small in size, were quite modest in ambition, and were always the fruit of Party initiative. State interventions at the village level in Yanshu were, in the main, indirect; farm-family cooperation was encouraged and facilitated more than it was contrived and directed. In Suide, however, the state engineered, often quite artfully, most of the farmwork teams that helped motor the 1943 production drive there. And, as with any social engineering, a degree of coercion was inevitable. The CCP in this period tried to minimize coercion by finding the lines of least resistance. Even

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so, the relocations and redeployments within the Suide workforce required a very firm state hand in village affairs. What made the big Yanshu-Suide difference was land. Yanshu had plenty of it, Suide had much too little. In Yanshu cooperation could result in more land for the cooperators. In Suide cooperation was made possible only by shifting some people off of their farmland. THE SECOND PHASE OF THE MUTUAL-AID MOVEMENT,

1944

The regionwide drive to overhaul traditional teams escalated in 1944And as teams became bigger and more complex, the issue of team leadership became more critical. Authoritative and politically shrewd leaders were needed to hold together teams composed, for example, of seven or eight men of unequal laboring ability, whose landholdings varied in size, soil quality, and accessibility; who contributed draft animals of varying strength; whose wives prepared midday meals of varying quality; and who, because there was not much kindredship among them, were wont to protest loudly at the least hint of lopsidedness. Keeping everyone satisfied was all the more difficult when cooperation was extended across all three farming seasons, even beyond, and required a division of labor based on different skills. A leader had to win the solid trust of the men under him if he was to convince them that free-riding was impossible, that oxen and donkeys would not be mistreated, or that the occasional poor quality luncheon was of less importance than the cheap access to tools, animals, and grain loans, not to say the bigger harvests, that could result from mutual aid. Once teams were larger than three or four men and were not kinbased, the sharing of draft animals loomed as a big problem. Teams could not be advertised as prosperous and as the backbone of farming communities if they did not use animals for plowing. However, prudence and thrift (virtues the Communists aimed to foster) dictated that farmers be ungenerous with their livestock; to allow an ox to be used by a careless handler was a stupidity. It was for this reason that the Communists always had great difficulty persuading animal-owning middle and rich peasants to join poor peasants in mutual-aid teams. Even in model Wujiazaoyuan village, springtime teamwork in 1943 was for wasteland clearance only, not plowing. That village's mutualaid organization was subsequently judged to be flawed because it did

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not include draft animals.46 A number of strategies were used to try to persuade animal owners to enter into exchanges with nonowners. The ones that worked best were providing loans so poor peasants could bring livestock of their own to the deal and loaning out oxen reared by government livestock stations to teams (or individuals in teams). When cadres simply could not arrange equal animal contributions from all team members, they were counseled to be satisfied with halfdays of mutual aid in the plowing season. Farmers could plow their own land in the mornings and, leaving their animals to rest, join teams for wasteland reclamation work in the afternoons.47 The push in 1944 for the inclusion of livestock in mutual-aid exchanges and, by corollary, the participation of more prosperous families, reflected the Communists' determination to transform what had once been an emergency, stop-gap measure used by the very poor into a development strategy. The basic rationale of teamwork, as argued by Party theorists, was that increased productivity would not only enrich all participants, but yield surpluses of a size to support agricultural and industrial development.* And a striking feature of the new mutual-aid teams that appeared in some parts of Yanshu was that they were initiated and led by new-rich farmers, men who had made good under Party rule and, in 1943, were honored as "heroes." These men led, moreover, large teams made up of people from different economic classes. Despite the Communists' claim that land revolution had radically leveled classes in Yanshu, that most of 1935's poor farmers were, in the 1940's, "becoming prosperous," and that "feudal class relations" no longer operated, class differences still existed in the villages. But the quite rapid upward mobility of a significant number of families in the land-abundant areas under Communist control since 1936, and the openings created by a growing and expanding economy, helped to remove some of the old obstacles to farmwork cooperation. The trust and goodwill on which the traditional exchanges were based could no longer be presumed in larger teams premised on efficiency, planned production, and a rational division of labor. Cadres were explicitly instructed to counter the tendency among some team members "to be [so] carried away by their feelings for each other" (jiyu qingjian) that they were content to accept a slapdash accounting *Publicity promotions of mutual-aid teamwork always emphasized the gains in income to be made. Cadres were told that the only way to keep teams intact was to ensure that cooperation resulted in increased productivity. See, for example, NBIR [10], p. 244; and "Yan'anxian Nianzhuang biangongdui."

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of work contributions.48 Conscientious and accurate bookkeeping was a must to forestall disquiet within teams over unequal inputs of manpower and resources. As the composition and activities of the groups changed, organizers tended to devise ever-more-complex work remuneration schemes for the teams. Indeed the workpoints systems that some developed (to take into account, for example, job performance) were fully as elaborate as those used in the 1950's.49 For the most part, however, teams worked best when accounting was kept simple and not too exact. The recording of workpoints was used as a means of adjusting and equalizing the contributions of team members, and the aim was to have the books balanced by the time the autumn harvest was in. It was very rare for harvests to be divided up according to workpoints; each family kept the crops grown on its own land. Members might settle their work debts with a cash or kind payment to the team's kitty or by odd-jobbing for a family with credit points. Attempts to assign values to workpoints according to market prices at a time when inflation was rampant in Shaan-Gan-Ning could result in bitter quarrelling within teams,S0 another important reason for sticking with work-for-work exchanges whenever possible. Some teams evaluated the "labor power" of members on a scale of one to ten, put different values on different jobs (the first summer weeding scored more points than the third, for example), and assigned workpoints accordingly. 51 Usually, however, laboring capacity was assessed simply as "whole" or "half," workers who were perceived as lazy freeloaders were expelled,S2 and all agricultural tasks were valued equally. Managing big teams for farm plots that were of all shapes and sizes and near and far required a careful planning of work schedules and clever coordination. On the large expanding farms in Yanshu, full teams were suitable for clearing and plowing work but not for planting, weeding, and harvesting. The recommended formula was to "break the whole into parts, merge the parts into the whole" (huazhengweiling, hualingweizheng).53 The ideal was a group of small teams that could be congregated under a village leader as a village brigade (dadui) for certain tasks.54 The obvious examples were the village teams led by the new-rich farmers Wu Manyou, Tian Erhong, and Shen Changlin. Small groups were essential at times when a delay put a crop at risk. No sensible farmer would willingly participate in teamwork if it prevented him from properly tending his own crops. In this and later periods, teams that were overlarge or given rigid, impractical, or unpopular work assignments, often collapsed. Shaan-Gan-Ning's short

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growing season and the ever-present threat of weather damage to crops meant that the need for prompt and timely work was fairly constant. Teamwork had to be demonstrably faster if farmers were to be convinced that it was better than working alone, and it is obvious that many of them were unconvinced. Peasants sometimes feigned illness, even destroyed their tools and livestock, to avoid joining teams.55 Many local cadres who failed to hold teams together kept investigators at bay by submitting phony team-membership lists to their superiors. In some villages that served as township or district headquarters, resident officials devised another ruse: they staged early morning musters of team members with bugle calls and shouts of "mutual-aid team-to the hills, to the hills!" and then allowed the farmers to go their separate ways.56 So far as the Party was concerned, most team failures were due to leadership inadequacies and, in particular, to the mismanagement of exchange accounting, work rosters, internal organization, and team discipline, not to peasant "individualism" or "selfishness." Those qualities might or might not be "innate," but they were not, in any case, insuperable obstacles to cooperation.57 The need to both harmonize "particular" (or individual) interests with the "common good" and accommodate individual interests in collective enterprises was, by the end of the resistance-war period, a well-established theme in Party writings.58 It was a team leader's task to ensure that there was no contradiction between "self-interest" (zili) and the interests of others (renli), to make "mutual interests" consonant with private needs (the huli zili principle).59 Cadres were told that once peasants saw how mutual-aid teamwork resulted in more secure livelihoods for the participating families, they would prefer cooperative farming to working alone. But the key thing was to maintain tight discipline and prevent any individualistic behavior that could disrupt, even halt, team activities. Team rules and regulations, formulated through "democratic discussion" and often ratified through village or team "covenants" (gongyue) sealed by the burning of incense, the swearing of oaths, and feasts of meat dishes and wine/ 0 dealt above all with labor discipline. They specified the times for starting and stopping work, the length of work breaks, the procedures for requesting leaves of absence, the sanctions against indiscipline and poor work, and so on.* The covenants also *This village convenant (here called a "production pact") for Shishanzi village in Yanchi county (Sanbian subregion) is typical: "(1) millet and similar crops will be weeded twice; (z) when hoeing, not one seedling will be damaged, nor will one weed be left in the ground; (3) at autumn harvest time, not one grain of millet or wheat will be lost;

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concretely defined for peasants the qualities of the "righteous and expert farmer." In this respect they echoed the Confucian morality of the old xiangyue (village covenants). But infused as they were with populist values and development goals, they were also quite novel.

Yanshu As we have seen, the most admired and publicized examples of expansive and inclusive cooperation in Yanshu were those in which a farmer-hero formed a vanguard group with kinsmen and even a tenant or two, and then persuaded other villagers to form similar groups. In the case of Wu Manyou's Wujiazaoyuan, the grouping of families by place of origin and length of residence resulted in cooperation between people who had "close hometown or family feelings for each other," whose "economic circumstances were more or less the same," and who "shared the same customs and work skills." 61 When it was found that two men in Wu's team were not as strong as the others, he ruled that they should be classified as "8o percent laborers." Unhappy with that decision, the two left the team and joined the Henan immigrants, the poorest of the village's three groups. The Wujiazaoyuan example illustrates best of all the way in which small-scale teamwork in 1943 laid the foundation for a bigger cooperative effort the next year. Labor exchanges in this village had begun with springtime wasteland reclamation work in 1943. Some persuasion and prodding were needed at first, but eventually 420 mu were cleared, double the assigned task. Such was the enthusiasm for the project that a contract-labor (zhagong) team of 14 men from a neighboring township was later employed to help with the task. The bulk of the work, however, was done by the Wujiazaoyuan villagers themselves. There was almost no team plowing or planting that year, but collective wasteland work continued whenever time allowed, right up to the end of April. Between May and early July the three teams weeded most of the village's croplands at least twice. Contracting the zhagong team for four days' work probably helped reduce anxieties about late work on bottom-of-the-roster cropland; in any event "not one shang fell waste." There was a break from teamwork as farmers

(4) the crops of soldiers' families will be weeded twice free of charge, without provision [by those families] of meals for the weeders; (5) vagrants will be supervised and urged to work hard, thus speeding up their transformation." "Gecun huzhu laodong chucao."

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turned to their summer plowing and to allow time for new immigrants to earn some extra income by chopping and peddling firewood. Mutual-aid exchanges resumed in the autumn. Harvesting teams included the women and children, and a job that had previously taken four weeks was, this year, completed in two. Wu Manyou told the November 1943 Labor Heroes Congress that thanks to the three-team village brigade's reclamation work, Wujiazaoyuan's grain production had increased 8o percent that year. Furthermore, because the village's grain tax levy was only a smidgeon (40 kg) more than the 1942 levy, peasant families had kept almost all of that increase. As a result, each of Wujiazaoyuan's 18 households had an average of two years' worth of stored grain at the beginning of 1944· Moreover, the immigrant Jia Kerning, who had come from Hengshan in 1942, was able to buy a pair of oxen with his 1943 profits and now, as a properly equipped farmer, stood a chance of qualifying for one of the village's better-resourced mutual-aid teams in 1944. Wu spoke of the "new atmosphere" in his village. He also said that "villagers understood that the government had the common people's interest at heart when calling for teamwork," and that they were begging him to organize teams again in 1944· Wu Manyou, Tian Erhong, and Shen Changlin, poor peasants in 1935, were big landowners in 1943. Wu owned 327 mu, and he included the hired hands who helped him farm it in the team he organized that year. When he took charge of coordinating the work of all three village teams, Wu left the leadership of his own team to his tenant, an immigrant who rented 90 mu on a sharecropping contract. Similarly, five of the ten laborers on Tian Erhong's team, one of two in Yaoxianwan village, were employed on his farm of 249 mu. The only villagers there who refused to join either of the teams were two "former landlords"; both owned oxen and had adequate labor power in their families, and "were not willing to pitch in with poor people." 62 Shen Changlin and his two brothers owned one-third (318 mu) of all Majiagou village land. A man who rented 90 mu from Shen teamed up with the three brothers for "mutual aid." 63 We do not know how far inequities may have diluted cooperation in teams like these, with their mixes of poor and prosperous farmers. From the Party's point of view, the important thing was that rich peasants should be seen to be taking the lead in cooperative farming ventures that were profitable for their own families and helped out the less fortunate, whether kinfolk or not. Despite some similarities, the mutual-aid groups formed by Wu,

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Tian, and Shen were not zhagong teams of the old stripe. For one thing most of the members were landowners; after 1942 any teams composed mainly of landless laborers were likely to have been organized as a temporary expedient by government cadres. Second, the nonlaboring managers of zhagong teams could no longer take a cut from team earnings, and this removed profiteering middlemen from the contract-labor market. The Communist reformers preferred that team farming take the form of biangong, work cooperation between owner-cultivators, but encouraged in this period a flexible mix of zhagong and biangong methods.64 For example, mutual-aid teams with time left after attending to their own needs would contract for work on the land of nonmembers; what had once been a fallback for poor peasants now came to be common practice among teams of prospering farmers. 65 "Crash jobs" done by zhagong teams in the Yan'an area could be pivotally important to the success of biangong teams. The Wujiazaoyuan example demonstrates how zhagong came to the rescue when rotated work rosters could not get cropland tilled fast enough. There are other examples in which personnel from government offices organized themselves as zhagong brigades for urgent farmwork on both government and privately owned land in the busy seasons. A June 1944 report applauded a nine-man team from Yanchang county's fourth district office, which had gone out to harvest wheat for four days, had done the work for most villagers at only half the going rate, and had charged poor families nothing at all.66 At a township meeting of Party members to discuss the 1944 spring plowing offensive, Shen Changlin got each man to promise he would organize and lead a zhagong team that season.67 The chance of acquiring more land must have lured many farmers into early-spring reclamation teams, particularly if, as was likely after 1942, new land grants were made only to people who participated in teamwork. There is the example in Yan'an's Liulin district of Comrade Ji Shenghua who, in early 1944, organized a team to clear wasteland for a share based on the workpoints earned; it was only after this that he was able to get farmers to team up for plowing and planting work.68 Inevitably the success of collective reclamation work sometimes suggested to the Communists the idea of collective ownership of newly opened land. Immigrant teams traveling south from Suide, for example, were encouraged to adopt on a larger scale the cooperative methods that had traditionally been used by small groups of immigrant kinsmen-that is, to pool their few assets and work as a col-

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lective on their wasteland grants. Wide publicity was given to the joint-farming experiment of Wang Piying and his band of 224 migrants, who left Sishilipu, just north of Suide city, in February 19440n reaching the Yan'an area, Wang and 20 of his companions teamed up as a "small brigade" and set about clearing 480 mu of wasteland. The group "lived together" and shared the harvest from the crops they grew collectively.69 But this sort of thing probably did not happen very often. New immigrants needed substantial help from either the government or local communities in their first year and, for all but showcase examples, the preferred method was to assimilate small immigrant groups into established communities. There was considerable official interest in a teamwork initiative taken by none other than the Yan'an county magistrate, Liu Bingwen. Liu's team, straddling three natural villages (Nianzhuang administrative village), was composed of six families with 12 laborers and six oxen; four of the families were related to each other. All six of the family farms they worked in 1943 were said to have achieved much higher harvests than the village average?0 Not only that, the team collectively cleared 480 mu of wasteland (the village total was 489 mu) and shared the harvests on that land according to workpoints; all new cropland became team property. Party authorities admired the fact that collective work on a large land area made possible the "equitable and regulated use of land." Planting and crop rotation plans, they said, could "completely disregard land boundaries" and eliminated the problem of members "vying to have their land tended first." 71 The practice of "dividing harvests according to labor contributions" gained some currency in parts of the Longdong subregion; the teams that did so were known as "Liu Bingwen-type mutual-aid teams." 72 The practice did not catch on in the Yan'an area, however, and Liu's experiment was soon being exposed as flawed. Because team members attended to their own farms first, work on the collectively owned land was often late and done badly. Free-riding when that land was being tilled was also a problem. In 1944 the land jointly owned by the Nianzhuang team was divided up among the six families, and cooperation was now exclusively a matter of work exchanges on private land?3 The mistake, Party analysts said, lay in trying to accommodate to the backward conditions in Shaan-Gan-Ning by mixing public and private landownership. Liu Bingwen's idea would have its day when modern agricultural techniques could be generally applied and when peasants, seeing how this kind of mutual aid could "raise productive forces sev-

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eral times over," would lose their "private ownership mentality" and recognize that collective land management was a "necessity." 74

Suide In Suide Communist organizers were always to find it difficult to make voluntary farmwork cooperation anything more than a survival strategy for the poor. As late as 1944 they still had to contend with a stratum of better-off farmers who did not thank the Party for their prosperity and whom the Party regarded as potential class enemies. Most of the Party's friends in the villages were the recently enfranchised, still very poor reform activists and production heroes. Liu Yuhou, for example, the subregion's preeminent labor hero, was a landless tenant who, even in early 1943, merely had "the potential to climb to middle peasant status." 75 Poor heroes like Liu, and the classstruggle activists who emerged from the rent reduction campaigns, assumed leadership positions only in those villages where the authority of old elites had been thoroughly undermined. These were villages in which Party cells were particularly strong and where the state provided solid, visible support to the local hero. In Yanshu too, of course, Party branches and local members played a pivotal role in building successful mutual-aid organizations, but a grass-roots movement, for reasons I have described, had a much better chance of success there. In Suide the organization of new teams was almost always imposed from the top down, and only the heavy hand of government mobilizers could keep them intact and functioning. The 1943 initiatives of Suide's two foremost labor heroes, Liu Yuhou and Wang Depiao, are represented in CCP reports as a grass-roots, popular style of mutual-aid organization. But it is clear enough even from official accounts that traditional labor-exchange groups could not be turned into larger, more permanent teams without rigid regimentation. The casual (huobian) work exchanges that Liu Yuhou had prodded into being in Haojiaqiao in the summer of 1943 soon gave way to a formal and fixed structure for regular cooperation. In early 1944 the administrative village was designated as a "brigade," and 88 percent of all the able-bodied men were enrolled as members. The brigade was divided into eight teams, and then 34 small groups. 76 At about the same time, a similar reorganization was undertaken in Wangjiaping village (in the far north of Suide county). Wang Depiao, fresh from the county Labor Heroes Congress, con-

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vened a village meeting and announced the formalizing of the previous year's casual exchanges into yearlong mutual-aid teams. All 38 of the village's menfolk were put into a brigade, which split into nine teams for spring plowing and then six teams for summer weeding. At harvest time the village's 13 donkeys were mustered for a "grain-grinding team/' and 13 children were formed into a "firewoodchopping group." 77 Soon all important aspects of community lifemaintaining the welfare granary, well digging, education, hygiene work, and even tax collection-were organized as collective activities?8 Wangjiaping and Haojiaqiao villages were fanfared as the subregion's top models of political health and production vigor from 1944 onward. Both villages had strong Party branches, and Liu and Wang were, of course, Party members?9 Indeed a particular issue was made of the fact that, consistently over six or seven years, Wangjiaping had benefited from the tight, competent, and loyal leadership of a "core" of nine people, including the xiang head, the village head, and Labor Hero Wang.80 To make the Party's reforms, particularly large workexchange teams on overmanned farms, effective in Suide, exceptional management skills were needed. Every new mutual-aid team in Suide was solidly stamped with the CCP's imprint. Did successful tenancy reform in 1943 facilitate the organization of farming mutual aid in Suide? The authorities expected that it would, and, as noted earlier, recommended that tenants associations be reorganized as mutual-aid teams once "the fruits of struggle were secure." 81 We are told that Wang Depiao had been a rent reform activist and the head of his village's peasant association.82 And in 1942 (before he was "discovered as a labor hero"), Liu Yuhou had served on Haojiaqiao's rent reduction inspection committee.83 Even in the model villages, however, there is no evidence of an organizational continuity between the rent reform campaign and cooperative farming. This is not surprising if the tenants associations were, as I have argued, quasiofficial organizations with little natural cohesiveness and if mutual-aid teams were, in contrast, genuinely popular and free groupings of peasant families. We can believe the Communists when they tell us that the many rent refunds at the end of 1943 lifted tenants' morale and made them more tolerant of (or less hostile to) the government's organizing intrusions. And, by delivering a final blow to landlord or rich peasant dominance in many villages, the rent reformers made possible the formation of new organizations in these villages. The fact that Liu and Wang managed to muster almost all able-bodied men in their vil-

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lages into work teams is a demonstration of this political change. The constant factor in all this, however, was the Party's presence and authority. Durable rent reform was achieved where the Party was strong, and where the Party was strong, it was able to organize peasants for more efficient farming. The organization of teams of more than two or three men almost always required deploying some members to other enterprises. As I pointed out earlier, the 1944 springtime campaign in Suide to organize teams for plowing and planting tasks was closely linked to the year's "go south" campaign. Faced with the job of finding s,ooo emigrants, cadres did not always use gentle methods in filling their assigned quotas, though most local governments at least accepted responsibility for the safety of the family members and property that conscripts left behind. A widespread practice in February 1944 was first to organize large mutual-aid teams and then to select candidates for migration from among their members. This achieved a clever balancing of group pressure on the migrants to go graciously and moral pressure from migrants on the mutual-aid group to take care of things at home. Up to half the migrant recruits from some Mizhi districts are said to have been enlisted in this way in 1944.84 As we know, the "go south" movement did not solve Suide's surplus labor problem, and the cadres' resourcefulness was often stretched to the limit finding ways to keep mutual-aid teams gainfully employed. An expanded use of the traditional "livestock secondment" method, together with organized odd-jobbing (by individual farmers or teams), was the most common strategy. In Mizhi county's Qilimiao village, for example, the organization of almost all the 40 stay-at-home laborers (14 men had migrated) and 21 donkeys for teamwork resulted in the release of several farmers and seven donkeys for full-time coal-hauling work. Ten other team members worked away from the village as seasonal laborers for a total of 29 days.85 Income from transport work and odd-jobbing was pooled, and the team accountant's job was to distribute this money in accord with each man's labor and animal contributions. In this model village some of the team earnings went into a kitty for the purchase of fertilizer the following spring.86 Shifting some people into sidelines, by the Party's account, had decided advantages. For example, four team members in Mizhi's Mengjiaping village, relieved of their own farmwork, were able to set up and operate a carpentry workshop, thereby providing a service to farmers long unavailable in that district.87 Similarly some mutual-aid

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teams released men for work in coal mines and were able to supplement the teams' farm incomes with sales from the coal-supply depots they set up.88 Many teams assigned men to full-time marketing and peddling work, bringing welcome new earnings into the team coffers. Even the women's collective preparation of midday means for mutualaid teams, we are told, gave them much more time for spinning and weaving. In Suide's model township and villages, team farming was sometimes organizationally linked to cooperative societies. But as we saw in the last chapter, most teams were village-based, and the co-ops were not, so the two tended to remain separate. Agricultural practices were another area of vaunted success in CCP analyses. We are told that, where Suide's mutual-aid teams were tightly organized, land was plowed more deeply than before, crops were weeded up to five or six times, pathways were scoured for every last donkey dropping, water-logged land was drained and restored, grain-crop stubble was dug up before the freeze and used as fuel, new water wells were sunk, water-storage facilities were repaired and made sanitary, heavy erosion caused by torrential rain was promptly dealt with, simple irrigation systems were constructed, and farmland acreages were extended and added to by whatever means could be thought up. In Suide, more than in Yanshu, heavy emphasis was put on "scientific" skills in such matters as seed selection and planting methods. As a consequence there was likely to be within mutualaid teams a division of labor based on skills and farming experience. All village families could now benefit from the expertise of the village's most successful farmers, but more than that, it was expected that teamwork would result in a widespread dissemination of skilled techniques.89 Almost as famous as Liu Yuhou was another Haojiaqiao villager, fifty-year-old Wang Dexiang. He was the subregion's preeminent agronomist, his advice about farming techniques was broadcast in newspapers, booklets, and production exhibitions throughout Suide, and he was appointed "farming methods director" of Haojiaqiao's mutual-aid brigade at the beginning of 1944.90 The terms of "production competitions" waged between mutual-aid teams in Suide invariably included the emulation, even the improving, of Wang Dexiang's careful and clever work methods. Mutual-aid teams in which there were divisions of labor for skilled and less-skilled work, or for farm and nonfarm tasks, required very firm leadership and shrewd management. Moreover, jobs that were not directly related to crop growing would have looked like corvee

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to many peasant participants, and their participation must have often been grudging. Given time and demonstrated proof that benefits from land-management projects would accrue to everyone (and not just to the team bosses), some of those peasants might well have chosen the path of mutual aid in 1943 and 1944. For the most part, however, the organization of farm teams in Suide during the last few years of the resistance war occurred only when there were powerful Party cadres who were unfazed by peasant doubts and foot-dragging. The subregion had plenty of local heroes, and Suide farmers were no less cooperative, adaptable, and entrepreneurial than their Yanshu neighbors. The cooperative farming movement in Suide was slower, somewhat more regimented, and more often unpopular simply because, for ecological and sociopolitical reasons, teamwork was much more difficult to organize and less obviously profitable than in Yanshu. COOPERATIVES AND VILLAGE COMMUNITY

Model villages were used to advertise throughout the Border Region the ideal of year-round teamwork for all village undertakings, not just farmwork. The models demonstrated that all villagers, not just able-bodied males, should be members of teams, and that centralized village management of the means of production, especially of draft animals, was much more efficient than household management. In the models a village brigade of small teams was supervised and directed by a headman who was both an entrepreneurial farmer and a loyal servant of the Party. The small teams served as the organizational units for all the village's political and cultural activities and functioned, therefore, as the grass-roots cells for public security administration. Ideally, as we have seen, a village had a "comprehensive cooperative," which coordinated every aspect of community life, from health care and education to production work, both farming and sidelines; and all village households held, and earned dividends on, shares in the coop. Not surprisingly, despite special funding and the assignment of skilled organizers to model or "keypoint" (zhongdian) villages, no one place fully measured up to the ideal. Indeed it was policy to let different model villages demonstrate specific and limited goals rather than demand that they aim for "perfection." 91 The point was to persuade peasants that the CCP's innovations were, one or two at a time, feasible and useful. Since cooperativization in Suide was, in almost every respect, more

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retarded than in most parts of Yanshu, it is interesting that the subregion's most publicized model villages, Haojiaqiao and Wangjiaping, are depicted in the literature as achieving heights rarely matched by Yanshu's models. There are at least three good reasons for this. First, the urgent need to promote farming sidelines in the northern subregion resulted in a push to cooperativize cottage industries there more than in the south. Second, the literacy and hygiene campaigns launched in mid-1944 caught on more easily in places where there were village schools and a traditional enthusiasm for education. Farming teams often served as the organizational units through which "new culture" was introduced to villagers, and well-organized teams in Suide were expected to become pacesetters of village "progress." Finally, given the authoritarian, regimented, and heavily supervised complexion of the Suide movement, it is not surprising that the model villages there were moved more swiftly toward the "cooperative village" ideal than their counterparts in Yanshu, where interventions were on the whole less forceful and local heroes were allowed to set the pace of change.*

Farm Sidelines The Party's model villages, as we have noted, were not meant to be perfect, but should not a sideline co-op or two have been a minimum requirement for model status? In fact it was not. Even though all the models in both Yanshu and Suide had farmwork mutual-aid teams, not all boasted cooperative sidelines, and the crucial functions of marketing and supply work, apart from hauling, were usually coordinated by township and district governments. Once again, however, there is a significant Yanshu-Suide difference. In none of the Yanshu model villages do we find the range of cooperative activities of which Suide's two most publicized models boasted. In Haojiaqiao village a total of 199 women, aged from twelve to over sixty years old, were organized into nine "spinning and weaving small groups." These groups waged "production competitions" with one another, and there were "mutual-aid exchanges" between spinners and weavers (three kg of yarn exchanged for 16.5 m of woven fabric).92 The prefectural government provided funds for a township textile coopera*Wangjiaping villagers could see trouble coming when Wang Debiao suggested in Feb. 1944 that they make theirs a model village. They told him that a model village is a "bothersome village" (mafan cun).

232 Farmwork Mutual Aid tive, where the Haojiaqiao women were able to buy cotton cheaply and market their cloth.93 Haojiaqiao also participated with other villagers in the township transport co-op, made up of five donkeys and their owners plus two donkeys contributed by the government.94 Boys from the 19 Haojiaqiao households that owned sheep formed a "shepherd's mutual-aid team." Only eight were needed to tend the sheep, and the others were organized to collect sheep droppings, chop firewood, deliver food to laborers, carry water, and till the vegetable plots.95 We have, in Wangjiaping village, the unusual example of a locally initiated consumer cooperative. It originated, we are told, from a dustup over a peddler who came to town and grossly overcharged women shoppers. When the husbands arrived home and learned of their wives' improvidence, there was a good deal of "domestic disharmony." So Wang Debiao convened a meeting of the village women and, despite the opposition of some husbands, got them to invest 12o,ooo yuan (mostly in the form of silver jewelry) in his proposed consumer cooperative. The venture was so successful, the claim goes, that investors were earning profits within four months, and there were plans to develop it into a supply cooperative for the whole village in 1945.96 Most of the Wangjiaping village women knew how to use spindles and were formed into four "spinning and weaving groups." They produced enough fabric in 1944 to supply all the village households and turn a surplus that was marketed for more than one dan of fine grain.97 Organizing textile co-ops was relatively easy in an area where clothmaking had been an essential part of subsistence livelihoods and where despite the collapse of the market for homemade cloth, most peasant women still had spindles and looms and were practiced in the arts of spinning and weaving. But in most parts of Yanshu, the government had to start pretty much from scratch when it launched its drive for a radical increase in local textile production. Though the campaign to make the region self-sufficient in cotton cloth is usually regarded as one of Shaan-Gan-Ning's greatest successes and an indelible feature of the Yan'an period, the drive to involve women in production work in Yanshu took the form of involving them first of all in farmwork, and in textile production to a much lesser extent. Of the three women in Wu Manyou's household, only one did any spinning in 1943· Fewer than half of the 20 Wujiazaoyuan village women could use a spindle, and there does not seem to have been any cooperative clothmaking in the village even after others received training in 1944.98 Not a single woman in Shen Changlin's village in 1943 knew how to spin cotton.

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And after two women took the trouble to learn, they had difficulty finding supplies of cotton lint.99 Tian Erhong's 1944 production plan for his village called for mobilizing 67 of the village women to grow melons and vegetables, feed the livestock, thresh and mill the grain, and deliver meals out to the menfolk working in the hills; there was no mention of clothmaking.100 The preoccupation in all the wasteland districts was opening up new farmland and mobilizing all available laborers to keep it under cultivation. Cultural Reconstruction

A 1944 "new culture movement" in Shaan-Gan-Ning aimed at combating "the enemies inside people's minds," the chief of which, said Mao, were illiteracy and superstition (especially those superstitions that blocked scientific health care).101 And because a "new culture" for China's masses was, by Marxian definition, to be based in the people's work life, it was altogether logical to link the literacy and hygiene campaigns into the big production drive. The integration of things economic and "cultural" was the guiding principle of the "eleven points movement" (shiyi yundong) launched in the autumn of 1944· The movement took its name from the set of production, educational, health, and reforestation goals that were to be achieved in graduated steps over ten years.102 The events of 1945 changed the CCP's priorities before this movement had gathered much momentum, but the "new culture" push into Shaan-Gan-Ning's villages by education and hygiene reformers in 1944 did bring, if not literacy, some "new learning" to peasants. Of interest to us here is the extent to which cooperative farming teams, by now well organized in many villages, were integral to the dissemination of that "new learning." Education cadres were explicitly instructed to make use of "production organizations" in the villages when arranging literacy classes, and we have several examples of mutual-aid teams that committed members to learn a few characters each week, perhaps only with the aim of allowing them to recognize one another's names in print or, more ambitiously, to read the team regulations and village covenants.103 Most farmwork teams, however, acquired the "new learning" from the already literate through the medium of newspaper readings. Haojiaqiao village, as usual, showed the way by scheduling regular reading sessions for four "newspaper reading groups" (dubaozu) every five days. The work was coordinated by a "study group" composed

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of the administrative village's headman, two cadres from the township cooperative, and the village schoolteacher. When the subregion's newspaper (Resistance War News) arrived, the "study group" first read and discussed the contents, and then dispersed to lead the sessions for the four farmer groups.104 Political education and garnering support for the war effort were important but not the only purposes behind these readings. They were deliberately designed to serve production goals and to stir competition between villages. For example, after Haojiaqiao villagers had listened to a report about "mutual-aid tree planting" in Wangjiaping village, they decided to set up a "tree-planting committee" charged with seeing that every person in Haojiaqiao planted a tree.105 Wangjiaping itself had one "newspaper reading group," composed of representatives from the village's mutual-aid teams and spinning groups. Readings were held every ten days (so that farmwork would not be interrupted) and ranged across all sorts of topics, from the perfidies of Chiang Kai-shek to new methods of pest control; the representatives were to pass these news items on to their groups. Funds were found to pay for a teacher to run midday and evening literacy classes, and Wangjiaping's 13 shepherd children were organized as the village's "literacy group." 106 Despite a wealth of educated personnel in Yan'an city, the education movement seems to have made less progress in Yanshu than in many parts of Suide. Suide of course started with a relatively large pool of potential schoolteachers, the products of the small regular or winter schools that had long operated in most of the villages of the core area.* But beyond that, Yanshu farmers were simply not under the same compulsion as their Suide counterparts to spend their free time on "book learning." Residents of Suide's model villages, in particular, did not have much say in the matter; they were to be swept up in the region's "cultural high tide" whether they liked it or not.107 The appallingly high mortality rate in all parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning, and among children in particular/ 08 should have meant that the health and sanitation drives would be well received by villagers. Access to *One of the goals the "eleven points movement" was to have a minban primary school in every township in the Border Region; we can be sure that Suide started well ahead of Yanshu here. It no doubt also had a head start in the desiderata that Mao set out for every village: "irregular" schools, newspaper reading groups, literacy groups, night schools, etc. "Shiyi yundong"; Mao [3], p. 185.

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peasant "minds," however, was often blocked by the local shamans (wushen), of whom there were more than 2,ooo in the region in 1944.109 A big anti-shaman drive was launched in the Yan'an area in the summer of 1944, and public demonstrations by "reformed shamans" of the sham behind their "magic tricks" were aimed at winning people over to "modern medicine." 110 This still left the much greater problem of a dearth of competent health-care workers. For this reason the Communists were compelled to recruit any folk healers who were willing to foreswear magic into the hygiene campaign and to settle for a synthesizing of Chinese traditional and Western medical knowledge. The "eleven points movement" called for the establishment of a health cooperative in every district, a doctor in every township, a midwife in every village, a clean water well in every village, and a cesspool for every household.111 We can be certain that none but the most advanced districts achieved the first two or three of these goals, but where there was some good organization, villages were probably made cleaner and more sanitary. The hygiene campaigns of late 1944 were able to ride on a wave of rising expectations of a "better life" and to use, as "crack troops," the labor teams charged with building that better life. The comparison I have been drawing between Yanshu teams preoccupied with things agricultural and the more multifunctioned Suide teams does not necessarily hold up in the case of health-care work. It is true that Suide teams were more likely than their Yanshu counterparts to be mobilized for unremunerated work on village projects and made paragons of hygiene and scrubbed cleanliness. But once Yanshu farmers were convinced of the value of disease-prevention measures, they must have been glad of team help with, for example, cleaning out filthy animal pens. Villagers were pointedly reminded that there were "two aspects to production: the production of food and clothing and the production of people," and that hygiene work was, therefore, production work.112 Sanitation drives in slack farming periods were organized in all parts of the Border Region in 1944, and mutual-aid teams were expected to spend the winter scrubbing cave rooms, constructing airtight flues, sweeping courtyards, sinking water wells, enlarging windows, digging cesspools, fixing up livestock yards, and separating human and animal living areas.113 That the 1944 hygiene campaign did take off in many places is testimony to the existence, albeit fragile, of a new organizational energy in the villages of Shaan-Gan-Ning and a strengthening of community bonds.

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Social Welfare and Insurance Schemes For poor peasants who had tried to make a living in pre-Communist Shaanbei, "liberation" meant growing enough of a surplus, on their own or rented land, to keep them from going under in a famine year. In a countryside where crops were likely to fail every three years, that meant an annual surplus of at least 33 percent. Activists promoted mutual-aid teamwork in the villages with the argument that it was far and away the best method for achieving this hedge-against-famine amount. A team's minimum aim, accordingly, was to produce a 33 percent surplus (geng san yu yi) for each and every member. In Yanshu in 1944 the target was more frequently a 50 percent surplus (geng er yu yi). Wujiazaoyuan's 1943 achievement of two years' grain supply from one year's work was used to show local people what was possible with good organization, especially when organization resulted in sizable increases in the land area under cultivation. One of the main tasks of cadres who supervised "farm household plans" was to ensure that each family not only planned for a surplus but also stored at least some of it. In many parts of Suide, however, even the relatively modest goal of 33 percent was very often a reach, and other methods had to be taken to ensure livelihoods against famine years.114 In the model villages famine-insurance work was taken very seriously. Village leaders organized families to prepare for famine by growing potatoes, turnips, squash, and other preservable items, made sure that preserving methods were taught to the improvident, and supervised the safe storage of food. In both Yanshu and Suide mutual-aid teams were often given the responsibility of farming areas of village commons (yitian or gongtian), maintaining welfare granaries, and distributing loans or handouts from the public grain store. The decision to mark out an area of common land in Wangjiaping grew out of villager grumblings about being constantly forced to house and feed soldiers who passed through on their way to the war front. The idea was to build a guest house for soldiers and to supply it with grain from the common land. Despite protests from the older folk, Hero Wang Debiao went ahead with organizing the collective clearing of 30 mu of cemetery land (the old people were told that their ancestors were being disturbed, anyway, by the sheep and goats that trampled the graves). As it turned out, this land produced far more grain than was needed for the soldiers; the surplus was used to pay

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the village teacher, to finance the sinking of a well, and to provide stores for the public granary. As a further precaution, Wang asked all families to contribute some quantity of "rough foods" (potatoes, chaff, sorghum, and millet) to those stores. Rough food it might have been, but "the people of Wangjiaping regarded it as precious" because "it would save lives if there was a famine." 115 Wherever mutual-aid teams were working well, and especially when they had time to spare, the temptation for cadres was to get them to do unremunerated work for army households, immigrants, and even for cadre households- work that, before 1942, had invariably been done by "substitute farming teams" (daigengdui) and was, in fact, conscripted corvee labor. The difference after 1942 was that cadres made a point of doing exchange deals with teams; and even if the deals were sometimes lopsided, they still helped to ensure that welfare work was done less grudgingly than in the past. It often happened, especially in the Yanshu area, that army families could contribute draft animals to a mutual-aid team, and this more than compensated for their failure to contribute laborers. In other instances teams were content to do the spring and summer work for their immigrant members on the promise of later repayment. Another way in which welfare work could be "fairly" (in peasant eyes) negotiated is illustrated in the story of Old Mother Wang, a widow whose farmland was tended by a mutual-aid team. Her farmwork debt to the team was shouldered by the local consumer cooperative, for which the old lady regularly sewed cotton shoesY6 "Welfare work," then, is perhaps truly apt only when teams were used by local governments for every job that needed doing, and for tax collection to boot; 117 such teams were heading in the direction of the cooperative societies and becoming state agencies. They were of an altogether different stripe from the local community teams in which labor was exchanged on a strict quid pro quo basis. There was nothing particularly new about the standards of fairness applied by village teams. But they now operated in a context in which fair dealing, outside as well as inside kinship circles, could be made to prevail. The Party's leveling revolution that destroyed the old rural elite class was one important reason for that change. And it helped, of course, that the new Party-state made a virtue of fairness. In all the rear-area bases, farming teams almost always doubled as village self-defense militia (ziweidui), and they played a real role in protecting villages close to the region's borders against incursions by

238 Farmwork Mutual Aid Nationalist forces. But the main threat in Yanshu's wasteland districts, even in the repopulated areas, was a resurgence of banditry, and the Communists were loathe to rearm a population that, in the late 1930's, they had taken considerable trouble to disarm. In that subregion, consequently, giving self-defense militia status to village mutual-aid teams was mostly symbolic, and the CCP, we might suppose, made less of a point of the connection between "organization, work, and war" in its grass-roots organizing there than in other base areas.118 As we have noted, some of Suide's tenants associations reconstituted themselves as self-defense militia in 1943 and took part in the anti-traitor campaign that, whatever its meaning elsewhere,119 complemented and extended the rent reform class struggle against old elites there. By 1944, however, the most important village organizations by far were mutual-aid teams. A village mutual-aid brigade was, more or less by definition, the village militia and, as such, could be called on by local governments for public surveillance and security work. And because public security was always a more urgent matter in the Suide counties, and because Party cadres in densely populated districts were hard put to find gainful employment for the teams they organized, militia work was much more a feature of mutual-aid teamwork in Suide than in Yanshu. The scale and depth of cooperativization in Shaan-Gan-Ning in 1943 and 1944 are difficult to gauge. Different sources are inconsistent, and few differentiate between the various kinds of farming teams. On balance, however, it seems reasonable to allow that about 25 percent of Shaan-Gan-Ning's labor force participated in some form of organized teamwork for at least one season in each of the three years after 1942, and that the figure of 46 percent for 1944 is either an exaggeration or an indication of "commandist" mobilizations in that year.120 If "rectification" in 1945 did away with most teams that had not been working well and willingly, and if what participation there still was (reportedly at least 28 percent of the work force) was more or less voluntary, then cooperativization can fairly be said to have made considerable progress in Shaan-Gan-Ning by the end of the resistance war.121 There is no question that so sharp a break with local work-exchange traditions required special direction and management. At issue is the extent to which the participants in new mutual-aid teams were coerced, and this, in essence, depended on the degree to which peasants could be convinced that cooperation worked for them. The aim of this

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chapter has been to show that, because cooperation tended to be the most sensible option for the farmers of Yanshu's vast wastelands, it was easier for local leaders to build cooperative farming teams there than in the populous Suide countryside. As a consequence, it was possible to keep Party supervision unobtrusive and allow some leeway in team management and methods. There, with just a little government help, traditional work-exchange practices were rapidly revived, transformed, and expanded. And there, where new, larger, mixedmembership teams were improving things for all members, economic disparities between teammates were not an insurmountable obstacle to cooperation. This is not to suggest that the mutual-aid teams in Suide were uniformly composed of reluctant participants. Where the Communists managed to organize poor peasants in ways that improved their livelihoods, even marginally, and strengthened their bargaining power in dealings with old elites, any resistance to the new organizations was probably easily enough overcome. Suide's poor families, despite their numbers, could not, without a strong Party presence in their villages, sustain effective challenges to old-elite authority. Suide's mutual-aid teams, therefore, were typically organized and led by Party mobilizers, and were composed exclusively of poor farmers. Whereas a class of new-rich peasants and Party activists emerged to take the lead in Yanshu, it was very rare for even middle peasants to be members of the Suide teams. And because teamwork in the context of agricultural underemployment made no economic sense, there was a need for assertive leadership by central planners. They could not rely on villagers to manage the complex divisions of labor and deployments of surplus workers required for efficient teamwork on overmanned farms. Leaders like Liu Yuhou and Wang Debiao were almost certainly front men for Party planners, or more so, anyway, than Wu Manyou, Tian Erhong, and Shen Changlin. The contrast between the styles of team building in Yanshu and Suide should not be too starkly drawn. We know that there was sometimes heavy Party direction, regimentation, and "commandism" in the experiments undertaken in the Yanshu counties. For one thing the deliberate creation of models was one of the CCP's key reform strategies, and the Yan'an area was an obvious place for testing models. And where local farmers did not take the lead in organizing farmwork, we can be sure that cadres moved in to take command. Conversely, there had to be some reliance on local initiative and some tolerance of local

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autonomy in Suide; state resources could not stretch across all villages in the subregion. Moreover, if the influx of new immigrants into Yanshu made cooperation both practicable and advisable in many villages, the departure south of breadwinners made it a necessity for the families they left behind. Nevertheless the important differences remain. Mutual-aid teamwork in most villages in the Suide subregion usually achieved just a "better adjusted poverty" between members rather than, as in Yanshu, providing a leg up the economic ladder both for new immigrants and for prospering middle and rich peasants. And while a degree of local initiative, an expansion of neighborliness, increased economic interdependence among farmers, and local "selfreliance" characterized at least some of the village teams in Yanshu, the old patterns of vertical patronage and dependence, noblesse oblige and fealty, paternalism and obedience, plainly characterized most of the farmer cooperatives in Suide.

Conclusion

r HAVE SET OUT, in this study, to demonstrate the importance of structural factors in shaping the Chinese Communist revolution. This is not to assert the primacy of these factors, but, rather, to correct what I judge to be an overemphasis on ideology, political cultures, and feats of "human will" in many scholarly analyses, both Chinese and Western, of the Communist movement, and particularly in studies of the Yan'an period. The history of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region bears out the wisdom of Philip Huang's advice-that instead of seeing structure and agency as either "completely consistent or completely opposed," we should view them as "separate and interactive." 1 The construction of the Yan'an Way in its Yanshu homeland was a process of creative adaptation by Party agents to an environment that, though inhospitable and very difficult to change, was still pliable. To a remarkable extent the reformers tamed and transformed that environment. But the product of what had been an adaptive, fluid interaction between structure and agency in the Yanshu wastelands was reified as a model. As the model was transposed to other environments during the war years, and particularly after 1949, we see a widening distance between structure and agency, not an interaction. And at least part of the reason for this was the Communists' swelling confidence, fueled by feats of survival against formidable odds, in the power of people over nature, of mind over matter. In the early and middle Yan'an period, of course, the Party's survival was by no means assured, and ideology was much more flexibly

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responsive to objective realities than in later years. Furthermore, the tension between a centrism that is innate to state strengthening and the ideal of "local self-government" (the essential meaning of "democracy" for May Fourth veterans) contributed to an opaqueness in the Communists' vision at a time when ideology was malleable. Over time, Party ideology was progressively sharpened and "clarified," and a critical moment in this process was the far-reaching rectification movement of 1941-42. Rectification required, among other things, the tightening of ideological discipline and a stepped-up centralization of authority. The Party did not, however, discard the "self-government" ideal. On the contrary, "local autonomy" was pursued very deliberately as a means of strengthening state control over society. The CCP, with its energetic "minban" experiments in the later Yan'an period, revealed itself as inheritor of the "fengjian" tradition. Like all other local self-government reformers in the Republican period, it tried to adapt the fengjian principle to the new needs of nation building and to drive a social mobilization that would serve its state-building ambitions. On the whole the Communists had no more success than any of their fengjian-inspired predecessors in effecting a dynamic and productive interplay between local autonomy and state control in the 194o's. One place was an exception: the Yan'an area. The special ecological and social conditions in the Yanshu wastelands made the enactment of "democratic centralism" there both democratic and centralist. The subregion's village reconstruction project featured a remarkable degree of cooperation between the state and villagers; it was also characterized by community self-reliance, communitarianism, and local governance in the hands of farmer-officials, in short, a new kind of state-peasant intercourse. These community-building achievements cannot, in the main, be attributed to the "populist strain" in Party ideology, as Selden has argued, but must be ascribed to structural factors specific to one locality. Examining the concurrent developments in the Suide subregion helps to underscore the special circumstances in which the Yan'an Way was constructed. Suide was much more typical of the Party's other base areas, and particularly in its shortage of farmland and underemployed rural population. In addition, this was an area where a remnant gentry class continued to be sustained by land rents, usury, and tax farming well after the five counties were incorporated into the ShaanGan-Ning Border Region. Despite a vigorous Party reforming thrust into those counties after 1940, few Suide villages ever matched the

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243

wasteland villages in economic self-sufficiency, organizational cohesion, and indigenous leadership. The Suide subregion had its share of model villages, but they were much more the product of central initiatives, state funding, and close supervision than their counterparts in the south were. The paradox exposed by the Yanshu-Suide contrast is that the Chinese Communists came closest to achieving their goals for peasant revolution in an atypical countryside, a place where land was plentiful, and in villages with exceptional histories. Furthermore, indifference, if not outright resistance, to reforms in villages that were not in the Yanshu mold invited government interventions that were always authoritarian, and that were totalitarian to the degree that the Party center could command the loyalty of grass-roots leaders and had the resources to sustain the intervention. That varied, of course, over place and time. And the interventions were not necessarily resented by villagers. It is fair to assume that in those parts of Suide where Communist penetration was shallow, old elites continued to exert an influence, and that peasants there were worse off as a result. The history of rent reduction in the northern subregion (and, indeed, in the unreformed districts in all of the base areas) shows that tenants welcomed the reforms, but only if they were forceful and eliminated all threat of landlord retaliation. By the same token, to say that innovation and "progress" in the Yanshu counties more frequently came "from the bottom up" is not to claim that there was no cadre heavy-handedness there, and certainly not to suggest the Party had forsworn its centralist goals. Nevertheless, a government faced with wartime crises, scarce resources, and a paucity of skilled leadership was more than ready to welcome and reward any local initiatives that looked progressive. And there was much more scope for local initiative in the less-stratified, land-abundant Yanshu countryside than in the overcrowded, socially diverse, and recently secured Suide counties. Two broad conclusions can accordingly be asserted. The first is that the Yan'an Way was not transposable from the Yanshu wastelands to other parts of China. And the second is that, in the attempt to relocate that model away from its birthplace, the Communists adapted it in ways that stripped it of its essential features; if it was not creatively adapted, the results were often disastrous (the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61 is an obvious example). For all this, the Yan'an experience does provide insights that can inform our understanding of some broad issues and problems related to

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China's rural revolution. In particular my study has attempted to address five issues: the relative roles of peasants and the Party in these early years; the function of village cooperatives in rural development and revolution; the thorny problem of "democracy" in rural China; the state-village nexus as it evolved during a period of revolutionary upheaval; and, finally, the impact of revolution and modernization on "peasant consciousness." In the pages that follow, I review the central themes of this study and draw from the 1937-45 history of two northern Shaanxi subregions some tentative conclusions relating to those themes. PEASANTS AND THE PARTY

The 1935-45 decade was a highly experimental period of Party history, and one in which rural reconstruction was impelled by short-term goals related to the war. Pragmatism did not make the effects of reconstruction work any the less revolutionary, but it did mean that revolution was improvised, made "on the run," and owed little to formulated theories of peasant revolution. By the same token the uncertainties and crises of wartime often meant that village reconstruction was incomplete and insecure. In other words ideology and policy interacted with forces over which the Party had no control, and it had to settle for all kinds of compromises. And to the small extent that constraints on Party power gave peasants a say in revolution making, the revolution was not entirely of the Party's making. Dissonance between the peasants' visions of a better world and the vision of state-making revolutionaries characterized the Chinese Communist movement in· all of its phases. Added to this were contradictions within the Party's vision itself. A product of the century-old "self-strengthening" tradition, the Chinese Communists gave powerful expression to that tradition's nationalistic centrism and to its fengjian belief that local autonomy could serve the strengthening of central authority. But even though in fengjian theory there is no contradiction between local autonomy and strong central government, in twentiethcentury political practice in China there almost always was. Any genuine attempts by local reformers to build "self-governments" and grow democracy from the bottom up ran directly counter to the centralizing and hegemonizing ambitions of warlord, Nationalist, Japanese, and Communist regimes. In the case of the Communists, imported Western ideas compounded an ideological ambivalence about the meaning

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245

of democracy. Anarchism had encouraged them to dream of a radical democracy built from the bottom up through the agency of the "small group" and based on cooperative self-help.* But then Leninism tried to shatter that dream with a forceful insistence on the supremacy of the vanguard Party and a tight centralization of authority. Leninism hardened the Party's self-strengthening determination to build a "strong nation" from the top down. A residual anarchism nurtured the democratic strain in the fengjian tradition and kept alive the ideal of "popular sovereignty." The tension between the Communist Party's state-strengthening goals and its democratic promises is a striking feature of the Communist movement throughout the Yan'an period. And that tension is, in my argument, very markedly manifest in the Party's cooperative movement in Shaanbei during 1943-44, and more specifically in the farming side of that movement. By one ideal, villagers would be brought up economically by uniting in self-reliant mutual-aid teams. But the Party also expected these "self-reliant" organizations to be quickly obedient to state demands and saw them as agencies for full state control of village communities. The goals of local self-reliance and thoroughgoing centralization were not necessarily in conflict. When a restorationist state collaborated closely with farmers in an agricultural development project that served both sides, the distance between state and farmer narrowed appreciably. Not only that, to the extent that community building made villages less dependent on state aid, it contributed to the process of state building as well. To be sure, to solidify a community was to strengthen it, but that accorded perfectly well with the fengjian understanding of state strengthening. Accordingly, in the context of both restoration and nation building, the growth of community power could be perceived as contributing to, and not as a threat to, the new state power. Party and peasants had a common interest in community healing, in the development of cohesion, solidarity, and harmony, in the achievement of family integrity and rootedness, in economic development; and they both worked to those ends. The years from 1936 to 1940, identified by Party historians as Shaan-Gan-Ning's "recuperate *Most of the founders and pioneering members of the CCP had had close encounters with anarchism before they became committed to Marxian communism. For a strong analysis of the anarchist origins of Chinese communism, see Dirlik, Origins of Chinese Communism.

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Conclusion

and multiply" phase, were the Yanshu subregion's restoration years, the period in which the migrant resettlement and wasteland reclamation programs laid the foundation for the big production drive of the later Yan'an period. During the production drive itself, we see an unprecedented cooperation between state builders and peasant entrepreneurs; with restoration behind them, the Communists were able to persuade Yanshu peasants to look forward to a once unimaginable future- "modernization." THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT AND RURAL REVOLUTION

Revolution for the Shaanbei peasants of the early 194o's meant land to farm, equality of opportunity, a rise in living standards, and a level of economic security that had been unimaginable before the Communist reforms. But there was more to come. The reforms that gave land and a degree of equality to poor farmers also laid the foundation for the region's "second revolution." That second revolution, cooperativization, had far more radical implications than the first one and, where it worked, must have been experienced by the peasants as radical in several ways. Farmwork mutual-aid teams, for example, taught peasants that they no longer had to resign themselves to a fickle nature and the loss of an entire year's work or worse. Team leaders were trained to persuade farmers to plan for the long term and, in particular, to diversify crops and store food as a hedge against failed harvests-a strategy crucial to the consolidation and expansion of agriculture in this region. Teams that worked on a year-round basis, that more fully utilized slack resources and found more useful work in the slack seasons, that strengthened themselves by job specialization and an efficient division of labor-such teams, with their energy and busyness, represented a significant change from the sluggish, wasteful, and disorganized approach to farming that had once characterized Shaanbei's peasant economy. Mutual-aid teams also had the capacity to effect radical political and social changes in the region's villages. By inducing people from different families to accept what had once been exclusively a kin-group practice, the Communists were giving a new meaning to neighborliness. In the Suide counties the teaming up of poor peasants to achieve more secure, self-sufficient livelihoods could serve as a means of con-

Conclusion

24 7

tinuing the struggle against landlords and unfriendly rich peasants. In the Yanshu counties cooperation between immigrant farmers could facilitate the integration of newly arrived families into village communities and help reduce the disparities of income between households. It was also an efficient way to open up acreage for the landless. In Suide the pooling of draft animals and the efficient supply, through exchanges or loans of seed- and food-grain, fertilizer, tools, and carts served to compensate tenants for the withdrawal of landlord "patronage." Cooperation enabled poor farmers to undertake the once out-ofreach repairs and improvements that would increase the productivity of their cropland; it helped rationalize sideline work and, because risks were shared, provided incentives for members to venture into new areas. Teams that managed welfare granaries and helped maintain army-family cropland were making their villages "self-reliant" and were the foundation on which atomized households (especially the habitual migrants) were integrated as village communities. And if land revolution had jumbled social classes and achieved an economic leveling, mutual-aid teams served to consolidate the new order, particularly when most village families participated in teamwork. Farmers who willingly joined mutual-aid teams in 1943 had not necessarily moved beyond "familism" and embraced cooperativism. I have argued that a major achievement of the Party's first cooperativization drive was the proliferation of small mutual-aid groups composed, usually, of two or three households. Government loans to immigrants were a stimulus to this project in the Yanshu subregion, but it also took off in Suide after the 1942-43 rent reforms. That, however, was as far as most Suide peasants were willing to go. It so happened that in the wasteland districts farmers could be easily persuaded that there were very good reasons for cooperation between unrelated families, and often in teams as large as seven or eight households. The differences in local leadership under Party rule in Yanshu and Suide further emphasize the contrast I have been drawing. Party intervention was an intrinsic, indispensable feature of cooperativization in all parts of Shaan-Gan-Ning. An important difference in Yanshu was that a period of economic recovery and growth had produced newrich peasant "heroes," people who were indebted to the Party for their change of fortune and whose entrepreneurism particularly qualified them to undertake the leadership of "new" mutual-aid teams. These were people who had "risen up from the masses," who were unambiguously loyal to the Party but who were best left to their own devices

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Conclusion

as far as possible; they had already proved themselves to be skilled managers and organizers. Suide also had its peasant heroes, to be sure, veterans of the land and rent reform movements. But these were not the self-starting rich peasants on the rise of the Yanshu mold; Suide's hero-leaders were still extremely poor in 1943. Moreover, what "rich peasants" there were in their villages were likely to be the hostile victims of the Communists' rent and tax policies. So even if the "heroes" who were put in charge of mutual-aid teams in the northern counties could have afforded to carry out "government business" without recompense, and none of them could, they needed Party help in protecting their teams from rich peasant sabotage. RURAL DEMOCRACY

Is there any sense in which the Communists "democratized" Shaanbei rural society in this period? That depends, of course, on what we mean by democratization. I have argued that the Party's understanding of democracy, although ambiguous and shifting, most frequently expressed the fengjian principles of local self-government, popular participation in national affairs, and harmony between the state and the people. In other words the cultivation of popular democracy was intended to strengthen, not diminish, the Party-state's control of the localities. Many scholars view the CCP's hegemonic state building and intolerance of "disunity" as a retreat from the May Fourth meaning of "democracy" and a reassertion of Confucian authoritarianism. But that is to misunderstand both May Fourth democracy and the rationale of much of the Party's village reconstruction work. When May Fourth social democracy meant anything more than a vaguely understood "liberty," it meant the "autonomy" that in the Confucian understanding was not incompatible with strong state control. It is this understanding that infused much of the CCP's "democratization" of rural society. In Party analyses democracy began in the villages with the struggles against, and the eventual elimination of, the old power elite; popular participation in those struggles and "power reversals" enfranchised the majority poor; and democracy was consolidated once the new rural power brokers had learned to be unambiguously loyal to the new state. The history of Suide's model Wangjiaping village illustrates this process. That village's land revolution in the soviet period had produced activists who, by the late 1940's, constituted the village and township leadership. The good relations between these men ensured

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249

that village and township affairs were tightly coordinated, and this healthy state of affairs had lasted for six years and more. Cooperative relationships within the village were also strong. So Wangjiaping was feted in 1946 as an "embryo of rural self-government." As a place in which Party power was consolidated, and where villagers were solidly behind their leaders, it did not invite the central interventions needed in less loyal villages.Z In the Party's understanding, therefore, democracy helped to foster communal harmony; it gave "freedom" to groups, and never to the individual. And this is why grass-roots organizational work was so fundamental to any kind of democratic reconstruction in the countryside. Before 1943, however, the progress of organization building in Shaan-Gan-Ning was less than spectacular. My study of rural Shaanbei in the 1935-42 period produced little evidence to show that peasant associations formed for land revolution (and, later, rent reform) stirred any political fervor among the populace once landlords were, in one way or another, defeated. Neither did the "anti-Japanese mass associations," for that matter. Even the election movements did not result in the active participation of most peasants in "democratic organs" or in practical politics in general. This is not to say that the Party had failed to achieve its important organizational goals in the early and middle Yan'an years. Through the election movements of 1941 and 1942, the annual tax collection campaigns, and the rent reduction campaigns, the Party-state deepened its penetration of rural Shaan-Gan-Ning and also progressively refined its organizational strategies in the direction of small, "fraternal," and tightly led groupings for specific projects. Deepening rural penetration also relied on the cultivation of loyalists among farmers, the creation of farmer-officials, and the reorientation of the business of government to include production, welfare, and educational concerns. Though by 1943 the new government's demonstrated backing for farmers and farming had plainly won it considerable moral authority and a good deal of leverage in the villages, this leverage was, for the most part, wielded without the help of strong village organizations forged through new cross-kin bondings between peasant households. Viewed from the top, the peasants still looked like "scattered grains of sand," a condition that made them easily exploitable (by both local elites and governments) but also made them a weak production force. The Communists' dogged quest for an organizational formula that would work in the villages was undoubtedly motivated by the Leninist

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Conclusion

expectation that new organizations, especially when they undermined the power of old elites, would make peasants more loyal, disciplined, and obedient. In Shaan-Gan-Ning in the 1940's, however, the severe shortage of cadres capable of goading the peasants into producing sufficient surpluses to meet the urgent wartime needs and a firm conviction that team farming would produce higher yields were the most powerful reasons for a promotion of farmer cooperation. At the same time there was a long-held commitment among Party leaders, most of them May Fourthers, to the ideals of citizen self-help, of village selfgovernment and communitarianism, and of "small group" democracy. And they had not forgotten the revolution's promise to China's peasant masses-land to farm and better living standards. The Yan'an government's image was severely damaged by the soaring taxes of the 1939-41 years. A massive effort had to be made in 1942 to convince the population that this was still the benevolent state that had initiated a restorationist program back in 1937. The 1943-44 production drive was a strategy for increasing state revenue and for increasing farm-family incomes. It was underwritten by the minban and local self-reliance policies and was based on a concerted effort to organize cooperatives in the villages. Evidence of this strategy's success is found in the growth and relative prosperity of a chain of "new villages," and, if we accept the Party definitions of democracy, by communities that experienced democracy in the 1940's. The new villages were almost exclusively in the Yanshu subregion. VILLAGES AND THE PARTY-STATE

The CCP's reconstruction and organizational work very clearly resulted in a reintegration and invigoration of village communities. It rehabilitated settlements that had been radically depopulated, or were full of friction, or were rendered unstable by constant migratory movements. By the time of the 1943 production drive, numerous hamlet settlements in Yanshu had become flourishing communities of freeholding farmers. The immigration program had explicitly encouraged migrants to settle in villages where they had kinsmen or hometown connections, and re-migration was strongly discouraged. Party cadres made a point of finding wives for lone men, and women seeking divorces were told to go home to their husbands, to cease their quarrelling, and to build families. Resettlement difficulties were eased by

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mutual-aid exchanges, and community was progressively consolidated by the expansion of cooperative teamwork. Once class struggle in Suide had cowed old elites, the most urgent task confronting local administrators was to turn a peasantry habitually torn by conflict to a consensual mode of thinking. "Land to the tiller" here was not just a pandering to peasant prejudices but was basic to the rebuilding of village communities and the cultivation of a rootedness among atomized populations. The Party's preference for rootedness and communal harmony hardly needs explaining. What is less clear is whether that would ultimately work against the political modernization needed for nation building. Did the deliberate cultivation of "familism" and local loyalties in fact function to limit the new state's influence in the villages? It certainly slowed the pace of change, and it meant that Party access to villages was often indirect. Nevertheless, the Yanshu-Suide contrast has shown that where the intrusions of outside revolutionaries were somewhat less direct (or less forceful) and where local initiatives were given space to develop with minimal intervention, village society was quite radically changed. My argument here leans on the "backwards towards revolution" idea, but not as it is applied by most moral economists. John Berger explains the so-called "conservatism" of peasantries in terms of the indispensability of "constants" for people who "live with change hourly, daily, yearly, from generation to generation. There is scarcely a constant given to their lives except the constant necessity to work." For this reason the "rituals, routines and habits" that peasants create in order to "wrest some meaning and continuity from a cycle of remorseless change" have a more profound importance than in the case of urban dwellers, for example.3 Viewed from this perspective, getting new groupings of very poor farm families in 194o's Shaanbei to "recover" rituals, routines, and habits was, in itself, a revolutionary step. It might also be argued that, insofar as the Party's economic initiatives reduced subsistence insecurity for Shaan-Gan-Ning farmers and made change more predictable, less fickle, the Communists could legitimately ask peasants to modify their rituals, routines, and habits-especially if the recommended work routines could further reduce insecurity. The new village communities of the Yanshu wasteland districts were often left to their own devices (especially when "reliance on the people" came to be promoted as the chief means of immigrant resettlement). But

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the Communists were always ready with advice and instructions, and people who "owed their new lives to the Party" were particularly receptive to its messages and persuasion. Peasants here did not recover their lost cultures, but rebuilt cultural traditions, and with help from outside that was not necessarily resented. PEASANT CONSCIOUSNESS

When scholars who analyze the Chinese Communist movement turn to the question of "peasant consciousness," they are usually asking why peasants rebel and whether revolutionary ideas can be attributed to rebellious peasants. Lucien Bianco's answers to those questions are broadly endorsed by research on peasant protests in different parts of the world: that traditional peasants typically have a low level of class consciousness, that they rebel in order to recover what they had lost rather than to win new rights or to better their condition, and that their behavior is therefore "a far cry from revolutionary action, which implies an all-embracing or overarching ambition and an offensive strategy." 4 The early encounters between Party guerrilla fighters and peasants in northern Shaanxi reflect the broad patterns and trends that characterized the early Communist movement in other parts of China. In particular they bear out Bianco's argument that there was "a huge distance between what the peasants could do spontaneously and what the Communists made it possible for them to do." 5 My study is concerned with the Party-peasant relationship in the middle period, between the early years of insurrection and the later years of state consolidation after the Party leadership had returned to the cities. My questions, therefore, are about the degree to which peasants were prepared or willing to cooperate with the Communists' rural reconstruction campaign. My first conclusion endorses Bianco's view-that, on their own, peasants would not have designed and participated in the new institutions that attempted to restructure village life along horizontal, egalitarian lines. But then there is the question of whether the peasants followed willingly in the direction in which the Party led them. And whether their political consciousness was raised as a consequence. Party theorists in the early 194o's pondered questions about consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and objective structures. In particular they asked whether cooperative farming could

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be developed in a "small peasant economy." Mao Zedong, when calling on farmers in 1943 to "get organized," was disputing the orthodox view that any form of cooperative farming needed to await the collectivization of land and agricultural mechanization. Mao's critics see that as a typical example of the voluntarism, the disregard for "objective realities," that impelled the rush to collectivization in 1955 and the Great Leap catastrophe. There is a crucial difference, however, between the "utopian" experiments of the late 1950's and Shaan-GanNing's cooperative movement after 1942, namely, that the latter, at least in the Yanshu subregion, took the form of a flexible adaptation to the local environment. The special conditions that prevailed in the wasteland districts of the Yan'an area made mutual-aid teamwork a logical option for both destitute families struggling to start farms and new-rich farmers with expanding businesses. Moreover only minimal Party intervention was required to persuade farmers to work in bigger and more formal teams than custom called for. Most important, there was more land than could be farmed without resort to cooperative teamwork. Suide was a tougher case. Party organizers there had to try to reduce farming populations and to provide a variety of alternative employment opportunities before teamwork could have any logic and be seen by farmers to be practicable. Wherever it worked, cooperative farming was the result of vigorous outside intervention. Even so, where organizers managed to adjust things in ways that made cooperation worthwhile, farmers probably joined teams willingly enough. The obstacles to cooperation were essentially structural; they derived from ecological and demographic factors that, in turn, determined not just farming patterns, but levels of social differentiation and political alignments. It is certainly true that the more "spontaneous" teams that proliferated in the Yanshu countryside were smaller and much less ambitious in scope than the producer cooperatives of the mid-1950's, but the history of their development does at least demonstrate that there is no innate resistance to innovative forms of cooperative farming among small farm proprietors.

REFERENCE MATTER

APPENDIX

A

The Mizhi Landlord Ma Weixin's Rental Arrangements, 1920-1941

THE MA CLAN was the most prosperous and powerful landowning family in all of northern Shaanxi in the early twentieth century. It traced its origins to Ma Jiale, a Suide city businessman whose moneylending, property speculation, land-letting, and commercial enterprises had earned him a tidy fortune by the mid-18oo's. His sons moved the Ma business headquarters to rural Yangjiagou, in Mizhi county, and continued to build the family's fortunes in much the same way as their father had done. By the late 1930's their extensive property holdings included 90 percent of all Yangjiagou village land. When the Communists at last won firm control of the Suide area, they dealt with the Ma landlords in much the same way as they dealt with politically powerful elites in other places. While making a show of the political cooperation of "enlightened gentrymen" who were willing to join three-thirds governments, they worked at white-anting the economic foundations of the gentry's power. So even as members of the Ma clan served in various capacities in local government (Ma Kechen in fact represented Mizhi county at the Border Region Assembly convened in late 1941), Zhang Wentian, Russian-trained and former general-secretary of the CCP, was making an exhaustive survey of the entire Ma business empire. That survey, the source for the data in the following table, provided the Party with ammunition to use against the wealthy Ma when it got serious about going after big propertyholders. Since Ma Weixin was the wealthiest member of the family in 1940, details of his various business enterprises figure prominently in Zhang Wentian's report. Thanks to that, we have a yearly breakdown of the land rents he was owed and collected over the period 1920-41.

258 Ma Weixin s Rental Arrangements Rmts per shang

Year

1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928" 1929" 1930b

Amount owed (in dou)

Amount paid (in dou)

2.84 2.84 2.97 3.01 3.14 3.10 3.14 3.17 3.18 3.18 3.18

1.47 3.44 3.66 3.43 1.42 4.00 3.71 3.98 0.53 0.70 5.00

Rents per shang

Share of contracted Year

Amount owed (in dou)

Amount paid (in dou)

1931 1932 1933 1934c 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940d 1941

3.18 3.20 3.20 3.20 3.20 3.20 3.30 3.30 3.31 3.31 3.31

3.72 3.73 4.41 1.20 3.03 2.18 2.90 3.71 1.97

amount

(percent)

52% 121 121 114 45 137 118 126 17 22 157

1.26

2.34

Share of contracted amount (percent)

117% 117 138 38 95 68 88 112 60 38 71

Zhang Wentian, pp. 90-91. NoTE: The percentages in col. 3 are rounded up. a Great Northwest Famine year. b Bumper harvest year. c The Communist menace began to loom large for Mizhi landlords this year. That probably explains why, from then until1937 (when Commissioner He Shaonan's counterrevolution was in train), the amounts collected were less than the contracted amounts. d The Communists finally consolidated their control of the Suide area at the beginning of 1940, and Ma Weixin's home Hecha district now came under Shaan-Gan-Ning administration. The low rent amounts collected in this and the previous year reflect the landlord's uncertainties about his fate under the new regime. SOVRCE:

APPENDIX

B

Immigrant Experience of 157 Families, Fourth Township, Liulin District, 1943

just south of Yan'an city, was one of Yan'an county's important migrant resettlement areas. And because it received some privileged government assistance with migrant resettlement work, it was also closely watched. A 1943 survey of the district's Fourth Township collected information about the tenants and hired laborers who were among the 157 new settlers in the township between 1940 and 1943. The data set out below show that, with wastelands to open and government loans, most immigrants to this district were able to move out of tenancy or hired work after a year or two and take up independent farming. We have no information about the families that fell outside the "anzhuangjia" (sharecropper) and "diaofenzi" (hired laborer) categories. Presumably they fended for themselves as owner-cultivators on a wasteland grant, and with help from settled kinfolk who lived nearby. LIULIN DISTRICT,

260

Immigrant Experience in Liulin District Category

1940

1941

1942

1943

3 13% 114

5 21% 249

2 9% 117

3 13% 195 11

4 17% 444 17

4% 685.5 28

890 30

13 23% 507

15 27% 519

15 27% 410

16 29% 1,095 7

5 9% 2,718 33

23 FAMILIES IN 4TH YEAR

Anzhuangjia tenants Families Percent of 1940 arrivals Land sharecropped Diaofenzi workers Families Percent of 1940 arrivals Total landholdings a Total stock b

2 9% 26 0

56 FAMILIES IN 3D YEAR

Anzhuangjia tenants Families Percent of 1941 arrivals Land sharecropped Diaofenzi workers Families Percent of 1941 arrivals Total landholdings a Total stock b

0 4,392 52

37 FAMILIES IN 2D YEAR

Anzhuangjia tenants Families Percent of 1942 arrivals Land sharecropped Diaofenzi workers Families Percent of 1942 arrivals Total landholdings a Total stock b

15 41% 507

9 24% 306

2 5% 225 14

3% 627 11c

41 FAMILIES IN lST YEAR

Anzhuangjia tenants Families Percent of 1943 arrivals Land sharecropped Diaofenzi workers Families Percent of 1943 arrivals Total landholdings a Total stock b SOURCE: NBIR [4], pp. 648-49. NOTE: All figures are rounded up.

11 27% 483

2% 468 9

The land unit is mu. of being cleared and land under cultivation.

a Includes both wasteland in the process b Donkeys, oxen only. c Families lost 3 donkeys that year.

Notes

For full authors' names, titles, and publication data on works cited in short form in these Notes, see the Bibliography, pp. 293-320. Clumps of ten or more entries beginning with the same word or words are cited by a key word or an abbreviation and a bracketed number (e.g., Bianqu [1], NBIR [1]). Other abbreviations used are:

BQB CYHWX

CZJJSL

JFRB NBIR SBKMG

SBZWX

Bianqu qunzhong baa [Border Region Masses News] Shaanganning bianqu canyihui wenxuan [Collected Documents of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region Assemblies] (SGN [1]) Kangri zhanzheng shiqi Shaanganning bianqu caizheng jingji shiliao zhaibian [Collection of historical materials on the finances and economy of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region during the resistance-war period] Jiefang ribao [Liberation Daily] CCP Northwest Bureau's Investigation and Research Dept. Shaanganning bianqu kangri minzhu genjudi: wenxian juan [The Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, an anti-Japanese democratic base area: collected documents] (SGN [8]) Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu wenjian xuanbian [Collection of Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region government documents] (SGN [25])

262

Notes to Pages 1-4

INTRODUCTION

1. Mao [4], p. 183. 2. This principle has guided much of the recent research on the Chinese Communist movement's first three decades. Elizabeth Perry's 1980 study, Rebels and Revolutionaries, was one of the first to demonstrate how local ecologies shaped both Party and peasant strategies. Other scholars who emphasize the importance of local factors and refute the idea of a monolithic movement include the contributors to the Single Sparks collection edited by Kathleen Hartford and Steve Goldstein (in particular, Gregor Benton, Hartford, David Paulson, and Steven Levine); Odoric Wou; and Joseph Esherick (especially in "Deconstructing the Construction of the Party-State"). Reviewing recent literature on the wartime Communist movement, Tony Saich observes that scholars who research this subject "are confronted by a decentralized revolutionary movement operating in a variety of localities, the ecology and particular history of which could greatly influence outcomes." Saich, "Introduction," p. 1001. 3· Saich, "Introduction," p. 1006. 4· Skinner, "Marketing"; Skinner, "Cities"; Duara, Culture; Shue, Reach of the State. 5· Scott, Moral Economy; Popkin, Rational Peasant. 6. Daniel Little offers a persuasive philosophic defense of theoretical eclecticism in Understanding Peasant China, pp. 27, 216. Works that have very effectively demonstrated the wisdom and value of a syncretic approach to the study of China's revolutionary history include Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries; Duara, Culture; P. Huang, Peasant Economy and Peasant Family; Odoric Wou; Friedman et al.; and Selden, "Epilogue," China in Revolution. 7- In Skinner's argument, "the Chinese peasant was a member of two communities: his village and the marketing system to which his village belonged." "Chinese Peasants," p. 272. Duara describes the wider community as a "cultural nexus of power," the boundaries of which were not necessarily coterminous with the marketing community. Culture, especially pp. 17-20. I use the term "local community" to refer to both the economic and the politicocultural networks within which villages were enmeshed. 8. Duara, Culture, p. 156. 9· For analyses of the transformation of rural leadership during the late 19th and early 2oth centuries, see ibid., especially chap. 8; P. Huang, Peasant Economy, chap. 14; Kuhn, Rebellion, pp. 211-25; Kuhn, "Local Self-Government"; and Alitto, "Rural Elites." 10. Perdue, p. 235. 11. See, especially, Friedman et al., p. 85. 12. This is not to say that scholars have neglected nationalism as a component of the Chinese Communist movement. Chalmers Johnson's important and controversial Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, first published in 1962, ensured that most subsequent scholarship on the resistance-war base areas addressed the issue. The debate over Johnson's "peasant nationalism"

Notes to Pages 5-9

263

thesis, however, tended to focus on the problem of the Communists' "appeals" to the peasantry and treated nationalism as an expedient, rather than as an essential part of the Party's "organizational weapon." For a useful overview of the "appeals" versus "organizational weapon" debates, see the editors' introduction to Hartford and Goldstein, pp. 3-33. 13. Duara, "State Involution," p. 132. 14. The contraction and eventual suffocation of the rural market, the progressive elimination of farm-family sidelines, and rationing based on the hukou (household registration) system were the main factors contributing to a gradual severing of intervillage linkages from the early 1950's onward. See Oi, p. 6; and Friedman et al., pp. 203, 271. 15. Skinner, "Chinese Peasants." 16. Kuhn, "Local Self-government:' p. 269. 17. I elaborate this argument in Keating, "Getting Peasants Organized." 18. For a discussion of the contradictions in Party ideology and double standards in Party practice relating to women, seeK. Johnson; Gilmartin, "Gender Politics" and "Politics of Gender"; Honig; Hua Chang-ming; Stacey; and Davin. 19. See, especially, Stranahan; Croll; K. Johnson; Stacey; and Hua Changming. 20. Philip Huang, Peasant Family, p. 314, points out that community organization was much stronger in the stratified North China villages he studied than in the relatively homogeneous, lineage-strong villages of the Yangzi delta. 21. Madsen, p. 192. 22. For a useful description of the optimally "corporate" village, a village whose residents share a "multitude of relationships," see Little, pp. 39-58. 23. A French study of cooperatives in the base areas laments the "rupturing of peasant communities" that resulted from the Party's organizing initiatives at the grass-roots level and the consequent insinuation of the Party's "totalizing ambitions and communitarian organization" into a rural society that had once been free of such interference. Aubert et al., pp. 421-22, 428. 24. Scott and Kerkvleit, "Politics of Survival," pp. 245-55. 25. See, for example, Chayanov; Fei Hsiao-t'ung, Chinese Village, pp. 6o-81; Wong, pp. 340-41; P. Huang, Peasant Economy, p. 161; and Myers, "Cooperation." 26. See, for example, Ding Dongfang, pp. 30-39 passim. 27. Recent studies that make an issue of the two (or multiple) agendas are Esherick, "Deconstructing"; Friedman et al.; and Selden, China, especially p. 250. See also Bianco, "Peasant Movements" and "Peasant Responses"; Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution; Kataoka; Perry; Sheel; and Thaxton, China. 28. Thaxton, more than Sheel, modifies the moral economy model to accommodate the special features of rural Chinese society, and he argues his case with flair. His evidence, however, does not always support his conclusions. 29. Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution; Kataoka, Resistance and Revolution; Bianco, "Peasant Movements" and "Peasant Responses."

264

Notes to Pages 9-14

30. Esherick, "Deconstructing," pp. 1070-1078. 31. Selden, Yenan Way, pp. 211-21. 32. Selden, China in Revolution, pp. 244, 251; Selden, "Yan'an Communism," pp. 29, 40. The article, published in Modern China in Jan. 1995, appears in slightly altered form as the Epilogue to China in Revolution, also published in 1995· 33· Selden, "Yan'an Communism," p. 34· Selden argues, however, that in other respects Chen's evidence does not significantly damage the Yan'an Way model. Selden did not claim in his 1971 study that the Yan'an Way mobilizations resulted in an economic breakthrough or regional economic selfsufficiency. Importantly, what Chen Yung-fa's research does is underline "the critical role of the market" in the Yan'an Way, and it brings home the fact that the Border Region's budget deficit would have been even larger, "perhaps insupportable," without the revenues from the opium trade. Selden, China, p. 248; Selden, "Yan'an Communism," p. 34· 34· Selden, China, p. 243; Selden, "Yan'an Communism," p. 28. 35· See Van Slyke, New Light and "Chinese Communist Movement." Theresearch of scholars like Benton, Chen Yung-fa, de Vido, Goodman, Hartford, Levine, Paulson, Thaxton, and Wou has been progressively filling out for us the histories of the rear-area bases. 36. Selden, China, p. 251; Selden, "Yan'an Communism," pp. 39-40. 37· Selden, China, p. 244; Selden, "Yan'an Communism," p. 29. 38. Selden notes that "the relationship between cooperation and democratic transitions [was] implied but not explored" in his Yenan Way. China in Revolution, p. 257, n. 52. 39· This line of reasoning is explicit in Friedman et al. See especially pp. 268-76. 40. See, for example, Bianco, "Peasant Responses," p. 185. 41. Selden, Yenan Way, p. 104. See also Meisner, Li Ta-chao, pp. 262-64, "Yenan Communism," pp. 265-97, and Mao's China, chap. 4· 42. Mao [3]. 43· This is Philip Huang's translation of shishi qiushi, usually rendered as "seek truth from facts." "Rural Class Struggle," p. 135. 44- Ibid., p. 139. Huang here analyzes the disjunction between Party representations of class (in order to justify class struggle) and existing class structures. The tensions that exploded into violence during the Cultural Revolution were, in Huang's argument, "engendered by the widening gap between representational and objective reality." CHAPTER ONE

1. The early Communist movement in central and northern Shaanxi is described in detail in Selden, Yenan Way, chap. 2. See also Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. 106o; and Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidoscope." Esherick identifies significant differences in the revolutionary strategies used in the Shaan-Gan

Notes to Pages

14-22

265

and Shaanbei soviets, a consequence of the quite different sociopolitical environments of the two areas. His research, therefore, underlines the importance of the Yanshu-Suide contrast to be developed in this chapter. 2. Xinminzhuyi, pp. 217-63. 3· Hsu, part 1, pp. 15-17. The debates over territory and population size are summarized in Hsti; and Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. 15-16. A 1948 ShaanGan-Ning government report gave a population estimate that more or less accords with Hsii's calculation, but said that the Border Region covered an area of 92,710 sq. km in 1944 and 126,200 sq. km in 1936. NBIR [1], 1: 15. 4· SGN [3]; Bianqu [7], p. 11. 5· "San nian qian shou, shi nian zao huang," cited in Uchida, p. 414; "San nian yi xiao zao, wu nian yi da zao," cited in Xie Juezai, "Zhengshou jiuguo gongliang," p. 116. 6. Cressey, p. 186; Jin Qiming and Li Wei, p. 24. 7· NBIR [1], 1: 17. 8. Chai Shufan et al., p. 4· 9· "Jian rniao yiban shou," in ibid., p. 5· 10. Yan'an municipality had county status. Yan'an county was a separate administrative unit. 11. The figures offered here are merely approximations. Migrations and frequent changes of both internal and external boundaries, combined with uncertain data collection procedures, make any estimates very rough indeedand accurate comparisons over time impossible. My 250,000 figure is based on the estimate of 223,000 in 1930 in Hsu, part 1, p. 21. The 1941 data are from Bianqu [6] and Bianqu [7]. The figures in these two sources differ slightly. 12. NBIR [1], 1: 15; Bianqu [7]. 13. "Guanyu bianqu." According to NBIR [1], 1: 15, the Sanbian, Longdong, Yanshu, Guanzhong, and Suide subregions had 5.4, 10.3, 16.o, 16.5, and 47·5 persons per sq. km, respectively, in 1944. The contrast with the Party's reararea bases is interesting. According to Qunzhong [The masses], 14: 4-5 (Feb. 4, 1947), the comparable figures were 24.2 for Jinsui, 50.2 for Jinchaji, 163.2 for Jinjiluyu, and 208.6 for Shandong. 14. These figures are calculated from data in the 1981 atlas, Shaanxisheng dituce, pp. 52, 54-58, 61-62, 70, 73-77. There have been adjustments to county boundaries since the 1930's, but these make little difference to the regional averages, and they are much less significant than the big land reclamation projects that radically increased cropland in the Yanshu area from the late 1930's onward. We can assume, therefore, that a good deal less than 10% of Yanshu land was being farmed in the early 1930's. 15. Shaanxisheng dituce, pp. 70, 73-77; Cihai, 2: 1808. 16. Shaanxisheng dituce, p. 74· 17. Skinner, "Cities," especially pp. 283-86. 18. Parsons, p. 4· 19. Shaanxi jiuza nongye shiliao jilu; Forman, p. 192; Hsu, part 1, p. 21.

266

Notes to Pages

22-28

20. Blunden and Elvin, p. 25; Hsu, part I, p. 2I; Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. I055· 21. Chu Wen-djang, p. vii, citing Zuo Zongtang. See also pp. I49-56 for details of the migration and resettlement of Shaanxi Muslims in Gansu. 22. Ho Ping-ti, Studies, p. 233. 23. Ibid., pp. 232, 255-56. 24. Parsons, p. 2. 25. Forman, p. I90. 26. Teichman, p. 64. 27. Keyte, p. 254. 28. Rawski, p. 255. 29. Wang Zhiyuan, pp. Io-n; Xinminzhuyi geming shiqi Shaanxi, pp. 45-47. 30. Myers, "Agrarian System," p. 24I. 31. Chai Shufan et al., p. n2; Guan Shan. 32. For writings in English on the Ma clan, see Rawski; and Selden, Yenan Way, pp. IO-I4. The major Chinese source is Zhang Wentian. Joseph Esherick's current research on Shaan-Gan-Ning includes a study of the Ma, based on interviews with Yangjiagou villagers and newly accessible archival material; for a work-in-progress paper, see Esherick, "Revolution." 33· Zhang Wentian, pp. 6-I7. 34· Ibid., pp. I33-34· ·35· Scholars disagree on the tenancy rates in the Republican period, but even the CCP's estimated average for North China was not as high as the tenancy rate in the Suide area. Ramon Myers's estimate for Hebei and Shandong in I936 is 20-25%. Buck estimated that in the winter wheat-millet area (of which most of Shaan-Gan-Ning is part), about 32% of farmers rented land, and at least 23% of these also owned some. A I942 CCP report claimed that 45% of all peasants in five North China provinces were tenants or semi-tenants (against a national average of 55%). Myers, Chinese Peasant Economy, p. 235; Buck, pp. I94-96; Huang Wei wen. 36. Calculated by Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 29. See Schran's summary of the Rural Reconstruction Commission's Suide survey, in ibid., pp. 253-62. See also Li Shui. 37· Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. 37, 253-54, 269. 38. Ibid., p. 257· 39· Chai Shufan et al., pp. I8-2I. 40. Ibid., p. I3. 41. Ibid., p. I3. It is difficult to calculate the proportion of nonfarm rural workers in all of Shaan-Gan-Ning. Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. I9-2I, classes 8% of the population as "idle" or "employment unknown," and most of his other "nonfarm" employment categories are town-based professions (manufacturing, public service, trade, etc.). Something over Io% seems reasonable. 42. Ideally, the neighbor was a kinsman, but poor people had limited choices, and there was also extensive cooperation between unrelated families. 43· This calculation was based on the estimate that a man with a donkey, working flat out, could plow 6o mu in a day. The two counties had I5o,ooo mu of farmland, providing employment for 25,000 able-bodied men, less than half the total population of 65,000 farmers.

Notes to Pages 28-36

267

44· NBIR [4]. 45· Hua Ziyang, "Bianqu renmin shenghuozhi jieshao." 46. Myrdal, p. 69. 47· SGN [13]. 48. Zhang Yang, p. 73- The CCP claimed that, before land reform, 85% of the Shaan-Gan-Ning population owned 50% of all farmland (so that 15% owned 50%), and that by 1938 the "equal share percentage" had dropped from 85 to 52. Xi Dixin (1942), cited in Hofheinz, "Ecology," p. 59· Since in Yanshu the confiscation of the estates of a few big landholders would have resulted in a radical equalization of landholdings, the 52% figure is at least plausible for that area. 49· For a discussion of the tenant as "bondservant" in the 16th century, and the change in the nature of tenancies during and after the early Qing period, see P. Huang, Peasant Economy, chap. 5; and Wiens. 50. Myrdal, p. 68. 51. Jia Tuofu, p. 246; "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi." 52. Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. 1054, calculates that, in 1935, Gulin had a population density of only 15 people per sq. km, the same as for Yanshu as a whole, and this despite a significant flow of migrants into the county over the previous decade. Gulin's population and settlement patterns were therefore typical of what I call the "Yanshu wastelands." 53· The survey does not indicate the number of tenant farmers, or even if they have been included in the tally of "poor peasants." The inference throughout the report, however, is that most of the people at the bottom of the poverty scale were recent arrivals. 54· Northwest Bureau, Propaganda Dept., p. 31. 55· Chai Shufan et al., p. 8. 56. Ibid., p. 19. 57· Ibid. 58. Chen Yung-fa, "Blooming Poppy." 59· Ibid., p. 276. 6o. Chen Yan, p. 64. 61. Chai Shufan et al., p. 5· 62. Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. 1055. 63. Chen Yung-fa, "Blooming Poppy," p. 298, n. 87. 64. Chai Shufan et al., p. 5· CHAPTER TWO

1. Duara, "State Involution," p. 132; Tilly, especially pp. 6-9. 2. Studies of the Communist movement that emphasize local leadership include Esherick, "Deconstructing"; Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution; Siu; and Levine, Anvil. Duara, Culture, establishes the centrality of this issue to an understanding of the rural transformation of China in the 2oth century. 3· Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," p. 7; Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. 1056.

268

Notes to Pages 37-43

4· Teichman, p. 75· 5· Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. 1056. See also Shaanxisheng Yan/m diqu dilizhi, pp. 196-210. 6. Esherick, "Deconstructing," p. 1057. 7· Ibid., p. 1056. 8. T'ang Leang-li, pp. 6-7, attributes to Sun Yatsen the story that, in order to retain command of his army, Zuo was forced to declare himself the "Great Dragon Head," the leader of the Gelaohui. 9· Lust, p. 186; Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," p. 25. 10. Chai Shufan et al., p. 27. 11. Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," p. 27. 12. Snow, p. 242. 13. Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," pp. 27-28; Billingsley, pp. 254-55. The Communist guerrillas' easy identification with the bandits and lumpen elements in hill country, and their assimilation of these outcast groups are described in studies of the Jiangxi Soviet. See, for example, Polachek; P. Huang, "Intellectuals"; and Bianco, "Peasants and Revolutions." 14. Teichman, pp. 74-75. 15. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries. 16. Zhang Wentian, p. 1; Shaanxisheng nongcun diaocha, p. 176. 17. Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," p. 6. 18. Zhang Wentian, pp. 6-17. 19. Mao [8]; Mao [7]. 20. Mao [9]. 21. Xiao Jingguang, "Guanyu jiaotu wenti." 22. Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," p. 17. 23. Wang Zhiyuan, pp. 234-35; Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," pp. 9-10. 24. See, for example, Bianco, "Peasant Movements"; 0. Wou, pp. 379-82; and P. Huang, "Rural Class Struggle," pp. 114-17. On patron-client structures in post-1949 China, see Oi. 25. On the basis of the number of jinshi degrees per million mean population over the Qing period, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces together ranked 16th among the 19 provinces. This compares with nth in the Ming period. Ho P'ing-ti, Ladder, p. 229. 26. See Rawski, fig. 8.1, for imperial degreeholders across five Ma generations. By the 2oth century Ma sons were studying at major educational institutions in Beijing and Shanghai and abroad. In Rawski's judgment, "the Ma had claims to provincial if not national elite status in the late Ch'ing and Republican China." Rawski, pp. 249, 253. 27. The figures cited here are from Zhang Wentian's 1942 report, pp. 1-2, 17-24. A 1946 CCP document cited in Esherick, "Revolution," p. 32, n. 6, reported 66 landlord families in Yangjiagou "out of 254 households." 28. Teichman, p. 53· 29. Jing Yuexi, Shaanbei's dominant warlord since 1913, maintained himself in Yulin with an army largely made of men from his native Pucheng, in the

Notes to Pages 43-48

269

Guanzhong region, who were locally regarded as "distinct outsiders." It was "an external force, and tended to behave in the ways that occupying armies do." Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," pp. 10-11. 30. A 1934 survey of officeholding in two Shaanxi counties (Weinan and Suide) found that the majority of officials at the district, township, and village level were merchants, and that all were landowners; in most cases, the higher the office, the more land they owned. Shaanxisheng nongcun diaocha, pp. 148-49. 31. A Liberation Daily article on tenancy practices in the Border Region calculated fixed rents as a percentage of annual harvest because of the variation in the measures used in different areas. We are warned that the figures are not precise. "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi," p. 231. See also Jia Tuofu, p. 244. 32. Jia Tuofu, p. 245; "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi," p. 231. 33· A local saying was "da chun bu lun di," which loosely translated means, "Once spring arrives, everything is settled; there should be no further discussion of tenancy arrangements." Chai Shufan et al., p. 45· 34· Suide [6]. 35· Other local terms for fixed rents were tiezu (iron rents) and sizu (dead rents). Fixed rents were so much the standard form of rental arrangements that the term zuzhong (land rental) was used synonymously with dingzu. "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi," p. 231. A sample of three wards in the Suide subregion showed that 8o% of the tenants paid fixed rents. Chai Shufan et al., pp. 48-52. There are no survey data for areas where land reform had been implemented before 1936; this includes almost all of Yanshu. 36. ZhangWentian, pp. 138-40. 37· Jia Tuofu, p. 245· 38. Chai Shufan et al., p. 47; Jia Tuofu, p. 246. 39· Chai Shufan et al., p. 43; "Zuzhong bianwei huozhong"; Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting. 40. "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi." 41. In the early 193o's, 32% of farmers in China's winter wheat-millet region were debtors, and 28% of their loans were for "unproductive" purposes. Almost all peasant families borrowed to pay for weddings and funerals. Other "unproductive" purposes could be travel, the costs of illness, litigation, etc. Buck, pp. 461-66. A much higher rate was revealed in a 1933 national survey of 850 counties, as cited in Huang Weiwen's 1942 CCP report. It found that 57% of all farmers in North China had cash debts, and that 39% of these also had grain debts. A figure slightly lower than CCP estimates but higher than Buck's is probably fair for Shaan-Gan-Ning. See Schran, Guerrilla Economy, chap. 2, for a discussion of the relative accuracy or usefulness of the Buck, CCP, GMD, and Japanese sources. 42. "Shehui zhengce"; Zhang Wentian, pp. 93-94. 43· Rawski, pp. 248-50. 44· "Jiezhe chi dazhe huan, Luzhe liuzhou guo genian." "Shehui zhengce." 45· All the material in this paragraph is from Chai Shufan et al., p. 44· 46. Border Region Bank, "Guanyu xinyong hezuoshe wenti cailiao."

270

Notes to Pages 48-55

47· NBIR [7]. 48. "Ansai Xihekou xinyongshe." 49· "Ansaixian jianzu jianxi xingshi," p. 254. 50. Border Region Bank, "Bianqu xinyong hezuode jiantao"; NBIR [6]. 51. Border Region Bank, "Bianqu xinyong hezuode jiantao." 52. Zhang Wentian, pp. 38-39· 53· "Zhi di jie qian." Ibid., p. 38. 54· Chai Shufan et al., pp. 8o-81. 55· The Yanjiagou investigators found that some of the Ma clan whose fortunes were in decline used a daodong tudi strategy to prevent further impoverishment. They sold a few shang of land, used the cash to make usurious loans, then used the interest they earned to buy a mortgage on some land and sold the mortgage when it was profitable to do so. Precisely why, given the rising inflation rate, this was a sensible strategy is not made clear. In any case the main point being made is that the Ma, rich and poor alike, were a bunch of shrewd and shifty operators. Zhang Wentian, p. 46. 56. Chai Shufan et al., pp. 8o-81. 57· Ibid., p. 86. 58. Ibid., p. n 5g. Ibid., p. 86. 6o. Li Shui; Guan Shan. 61. Zhang Wentian, pp. 33-36, 42. 62. Ibid., pp. 39-40. 63. Li Yining, p. 322; Border Region Bank, "Bianqu xinyong hezuode jiantao"; Border Region Bank, "Guanyu xinyong hezuoshe wenti cailiao." 64. Zhang Wentian, p. 58. The following paragraph is drawn from this source, pp. 58, 66, 84-88. 65. Shue, Peasant China, p. 152; P. Huang, Peasant Economy, pp. 159-61. 66. This report (NBIR [3]) has been translated into French by Charles Aubert and Cheng Ying as L'Entraide agricole dans Ia Chine du nord precommuniste and is summarized in detail in Keating, "Communist Perspectives." The 1944 booklet is NBIR [ro]. 67- NBIR [w], p. 247. 68. Ding Dongfang, pp. 40-41. 6g. NBIR [3], p. 444, suggests that plowing and sowing were best done by groups of two or three men, with one man plowing, a second following with seed and fertilizer, and perhaps a third to help them by back-filling or breaking the clods. According to P. Huang, Peasant Economy, pp. 145-46, Shajing village (Hebei) used four- or five-man teams, assigning one or two men to spread fertilizer. 70. NBIR [3], p. 444· 71. Ibid., p. 445· 72. Ibid. n Chai Shufan et al., p. g; NBIR [3], p. 446. 74· Ibid., p. 449· 75· Ibid., p. 450. 76. The example is given of a huozhong arrangement between an uncle and

Notes to Pages 55-62

271

nephew in Majiagou village of Panlong district, Yan'an county. Each family had 39 mu and one ox. The uncle, Hao Shengcai, tended the two oxen; his son and the nephew, Jing Zhanhai, jointly farmed the 78 mu; Jing's wife did the cooking for both families in the busy season; the families shared the one manure pit; and seed-grain was split between the two after the harvest. This arrangement had persisted for several years. Ibid., p. 452, n. 1. 77· Ibid., p. 452. 78. This section and the one that follows (on land exchanges) are based on ibid., pp. 454-61. 79· The boss of a five~man team received only half the amount paid to the other men. One who ran a 14- or 15-man team received half as much again as the others. A boss might have to use up to half of the konggongqian to provide meals for his workers on rainy days. At all other times the men were fed by the household for which they were working that day. The boss provided tools for laborers who did not have their own hoes, but he might insist that they be purchased from him. So. Some of the rules cited as examples in the CCP report were "no talking during work"; "singing is permitted while hoeing (but not at other times)"; "the boss will show his worker his place in line-changing one's place in the line will cause rain to fall"; "a person who jumps the food queue will eat on his knees"; and "it is forbidden for a worker to put his cap on the handle of his hoe." Ibid., p. 459· 81. These methods are discussed in Rawski, p. 265. 82. Nationalist government data on co-ops always need to be taken with a grain of salt. In the case of Chen Yan's 1936 data for Shaanbei, however, our credulity is hardly tested. In a list of 36 cooperatives claimed for Shaanxi province, only two were in Shaanbei counties: the "Unlimited Liability Peasant Movement Cooperative" of Suide and the "Unlimited Liability Credit Cooperative" of Fuxian. Chen claims there were 1t403 "mutual-aid societies" (huzhushe) in the province, but none were located in Shaanbei. Chen Yan, pp. 161-66. 83. Hsiao Kung-chuan, pp. 314-15. Generally a club was formed at a meeting of kinsmen convened by the person needing a loan. All the families contributed to what could become a floating fund, available as a loan at later dates to each of the families in turn. But these clubs operated under a variety of rules, sometimes even within one locale. Li Yining, pp. 322-26, for example, found two different practices in the Taodian district (Yan'an county). One, huahui, worked much as I have just described. In the other, jiehui, the loan did not float but was returned in installments to each creditor, and interest was paid in the form of a banquet for the gathered kinsmen. 84. Li Yining, p. 325. 85. Ibid., p. 324. 86. Chen Yan, p. 79· 87. Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," pp. 7-8.

272

Notes to Pages 62-73

88. NBIR [3], p. 453· 89. Perry draws the same conclusion from her study of Huaibei peasant society. Rebels and Revolutionaries, pp. 245-47. 90. Popkin, p. 27. CHAPTER THREE

1. Wang Zhiyuan, p. 51. 2. Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," p. 17. 3· Ibid., pp. 17-24. 4· Ren Zhonghe, p. 116; Shaanxisheng dituce, p. 5· Some of this territory was subsequently incorporated by the Jinsui Border Region and, between 1936 and 1941, GMD armies seized back substantial areas around Shaan-Gan-Ning's southern, western, and northern borders (Map 1). 5· See Selden, Yenan Way, pp. 62-72, for a discussion of the Party leadership struggles and debates over land policy in the mid-1930's, and Gao Gang's subsequent (1943) interpretation of these events. 6. Liu Bingwen. 7· A directive issued on July 22, 1936 ("Guanyu tudi zhengcede zhishi"), announced that land confiscations were to end. See Guo Dehong, pp. 359-61. That directive, however, was intended mainly for a national audience and did not function as an explicit instruction to cadres in the villages. A determined effort to stop confiscations was begun in mid-1937. The "Ten Great Policies" of Aug. 1937 (translated in Brandt et al., pp. 242-45) formalized the policy. 8. Xie Juezai and Zuo Jianzhi. The authors tell us that some returning landlords "used all kinds of threats and lures to get back their land," that some of them were successful, and that the authorities had to "put a firm stop to this kind of thing." Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu," makes a similar admission. A series of directives through the late 1930's attempted to set out in concrete terms the limited entitlements of former landlords. For example, "Guanyu chuli dizhu tudi wenti"; Bianqu [18]; and "Guanyu tudi shengchu liangshizhongde yixie wenti." 9· "Wang laohande 'chengfen.'" 10. Xie Juezai and Zuo Jianzhi. See also Xie Juezai, "Bianqu renmin shenghuo." 11. "Wu Manyou"; Friedman et al., pp. 93-94, 106; Myrdal, p. So. 12. Selden, Yenan Way, p. 82, discusses a 1939 CCP survey of a township in Yanchuan county that showed a shift of the "entire class balance" toward the center. As he says, a middle peasant livelihood was "still a life of severe poverty but [one] free from tenancy, debt and imminent starvation," and the rise to middle peasant status by large numbers of the poor "constituted the central economic achievement of the land revolution." 13. Northwest Bureau, Propaganda Dept., p. 7· 14. Ma Hong. 15. Mao [n], p. 353; "Guanyu Wu Manyoude fangxiang."

Notes to Pages 73-79

273

16. In the Yanchuan survey cited by Selden (see n. 12, above), the two families classified as landlords owned considerably less property than several families listed as "rich peasants." Yenan Way, p. 82. 17. Xie Juezai and Zuo Jianzhi. 18. Ibid. 19. Wu Yongli. 20. Xie Juezai and Zuo Jianzhi. 21. Ibid. 22. "Wu Manyou." 23. Ma Ning. Price estimates and comparisons are problematical for a period in which inflation was accelerating. Hsti Yung-ying puts the price of millet at 5.2 yuan per dou in June 1940-that is, about $U.S. 0.35 per kg. Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 184; Hsti, part 2, p. 18. 24. A 1940 directive specified that migrants could be given ownership rights to any publicly owned land they farmed. "Tudi xingzheng." Provision for such land grants was made in the land and tenancy regulations promulgated for all base areas on Jan. 28, 1942: "Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu kangri genjudi tudi zhengcede jueding jiqi fujian." 25. SGN [17]. 26. Bianqu [2], p. 26; Lin Boqu, Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu gongzuo baogao, pp. 41-43. Lin says the 1940 grain harvest was 2,6oo,ooo dan, a figure that included for the first time the Suide subregion's crop. The 1A}O,ooo dan estimate is from Li Zhengrui, p. 108. 27. Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu yinian gongzuo zongjie"; Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. 128-29. 28. Hsti, part 2, p. 53, n. 2, quotes a 1944 report from Zhidan county stating that the area of wasteland reclaimed there each year was equivalent to the area of cultivated land left idle. There is evidence to suggest that cadre enthusiasm to meet and exceed reclamation quotas very often resulted in farmland falling waste. Of course, peasants in places where land was abundant had the luxury of letting some fields lie fallow. Mao Zedong conceded that in such places it was easier to popularize the fallow method as a means of increasing yields than to try to introduce intensive farming practices. Mao [2], p. 73· 29. CYHWX, p. 283. 30. Lin Boqu, Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu gongzuo baogao, p. 26. 31. SGN [7], p. 63; Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu yinian gongzuo zongjie." 32. "Huanxian zhengfu jingji jianshe gongzuo baogao." 33· SGN [7]. 34· All subsequent CCP reports use this figure, and it is used in the tables of annual figures assembled by Hsti Yung-ying and Schran. Hsti, part 2, p. 54; Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 120. 35· Bianqu [13]. 36. Mao [2], p. 69. 37· Ibid., p. 77· 38. "Recuperating the financial resources of the people" (xiuyang minli) and "Recuperate and multiply" (xiuyang shengxi) were the slogans used by later

274

Notes to Pages 79-86

commentators to characterize the 1937-39 period. See, for example, Bianqu [2], pp. 30-31; and Ren Bishi. 39· Xie Juezai and Zuo Jianzhi. 40. Chen Yung-fa, "Blooming Poppy," p. 265. 41. NBIR [2]; "Biangongduide xin renwu." 42. Even Schran's figures for livestock, more modest than those in most CCP sources, indicate quite dramatic increases in the late 1930's. Guerrilla Economy, pp. 34-35, 123-24. See Mao [2], pp. 68-69; NBIR [2]; and Zhang Yang, p. 77· 43· The target for 1941 was 50,000 mu, but seed shortage and inadequate preparation, planning, and farmer education were blamed for the failure to reach that target. NBIR [13]. 44- For a summary and discussion of Shaan-Gan-Ning's industrial and commercial development in the late 193o's see Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. 13267. 45· KangDi. 46. Lin Zuhan and Gao Zili. 47· Hua Ziyang, using data from villages close to Yan'an city, reported the following annual average per capita incomes (in dan): 1938, 2.07; 1939, 2-46; 1940, 2.47; 1941, 2.24 (the year in which taxation peaked). In two villages the numbers of oxen and donkeys more than trebled between 1938 and 1941. One of the villages saw a tenfold increase in donkeys. Hua, "Bianqu renmin shenghuozhi jieshao." Schran is unwilling to draw firm conclusions from his data because, he says, it is not possible accurately to assess income from farmer sideline occupations. But he does not disallow the possibility of incremental increases in annual incomes for farm families during this period. Guerrilla Economy, pp. 221-27. Schran's Table 8.7 (pp. 224-25) shows income increases between 1937 and 1939 and then a big drop in 1940. Despite annual improvements after that, incomes tended to remain below the 1939 level through the 1940's. Two factors can explain the 1940 drop and the failure to recover: the incorporation of the Suide counties in 1940, which dragged down the region's averages, and the heavier taxation after 1939· 48. See Selden, Yenan Way, pp. 21-22; and Esherick, "Chinese Kaleidescope," PP· 6-7. 49· Suide [6]. Chai Shufan et al., chap. 2, divides the same history into "four stages." 50. Chai Shufan et al., p. 23. The rest of this paragraph and all of the next are based on this source, pp. 24-26. 51. Hsu, part 1, p. 7· 52. Wang Zhiyuan, p. 234. 53· Chai Shufan et al., p. 27. 54· Suide [6]. 55· Chai Shufan et al., p. 28. 56. Hsu, part 1, p. 7· 57· Chai Shufan et al., p. 31. 58. Ibid., p. 27. 59· Ibid., p. 38. 6o. Zhang Wentian, pp. 17-18. 61. Chai Shufan et al., pp. 36-37. 62. Ibid., p. 114. The rest of the paragraph is based on this source, pp. 113-15.

Notes to Pages 88-96 63. 65. 67. 68. 69.

275

Ibid., p. 104. 64. Ibid., p. 34· Ibid., p. 109. 66. Ibid. Mao [2], pp. 6g, 73Kangjiuhui is short for Kangri jiuguo weiyuanhui. Chai Shufan et al., p. 22.

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Mao [2], p. 234· 2. For a discussion of the inconsistent data on the size of the Nationalist subsidy, see Chen Yung-fa, "Blooming Poppy," pp. 268-69. Bianqu [3] estimates that the Nationalist subsidy constituted 77.2% of total revenue in 1937, 51.69% in 1938, 85.79% in 1939, and 70.5% in 1940. Chen Yung-fa, "The Blooming Poppy," p. 268, cites a 1944 Party source that indicates an even higher level of dependence. See also Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. 179-85; Hsii, Survey, part 2, p. 18; and Selden, Yenan Way, pp. 139-40, n. 1. 3· See, for example, Selden, Yenan Way (especially chaps. 5 and 6); Thaxton, China; Schram, "Introduction," pp. 18-23; and Jerome Chen, pp. 247-50. The assumption that there was a significant change in cadre behavior and approaches to policy implementation after the 1941-42 rectification movement is implicit or explicit in most Party reports of the mid and late 1940's. 4· Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 66. See also Watson, Mao, p. 1. 5· NBIR [4]. Though the terms "immigrant" (yimin) and "refugee" (nanmin) were often used interchangeably, the latter was more likely to be applied to people who came from famine areas and Japanese-occupied or Nationalist territories. 6. Stein, chap. 8. 7· See, for example, Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 98; and Hsii, part 2, p. 79· 8. "Daliang yimin." 9· SGN [11]. 10. This point is made by Hsii, part 2, pp. 78-79. 11. The only data I have for numbers of migrants from places other than Suide suggest an aggregate of about 21,000 people by the end of 1943, and my assumption is that this is a sizable underestimate. Famine victims from Henan province who, since the beginning of the Japanese war, had sought sanctuary in Shaan-Gan-Ning's southern counties totaled 11,889 in 1943· Migrants from GMD-controlled counties around the Shaan-Gan-Ning border numbered 9,095 during that same period. For a detailed breakdown of the figures, see NBIR [4], pp. 7-8. 12. Clause 17 of the 1943 regulations on the treatment of emigrants called for the weeding out and punishment of saboteurs who entered the Border Region pretending to be refugees. SGN [17], p. 639. After a visit to a refugee district in Fuxian, Liu Jingfan made a point of refuting rumors about the presence of "Guomindang reactionaries" among the new settlers there. Such rumors were obviously impeding resettlement work. "Liu Jingfan."

276

Notes to Pages 96-104

13. NBIR [4], p. 22. 14. Schran, Guerilla Economy, chap. 8, points out that it was the soldiers and workers in the public sector who were made to bear the brunt of the 1939-41 crisis, and that the living standards of those groups deteriorated significantly in this period. 15. "Baogao shishi zhenzai gaishu," p. 403. In Dec. 1943 one ox cost the equivalent of 4·5 dan of millet. In 1939 a dan of millet was worth 35 yuan. "Goumen xinyong hezuoshe diaocha," p. 351; Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 184. 16. Wu Yongli. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. "Yijiusiernian jingji jianshe gongzuo baogao," p. 69. 20. Mao [2], p. 81. 21. Ibid., p. 90. 22. Wu Yongli; Mao [2], p. 214. 23. "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu youdai wailai nanmin he pinminzhi jueding," issued in March 1940, was the first set of official regulations to deal specifically with immigrant resettlement. SGN [27]. Supplementary directives followed in April 1941, March 1942, and April 1942. These were all pulled together in March 1943 into a complete and definitive set of regulations: "Shaanganning bianqu youdai yimin nanmin kenhuang tiaoli." SGN [17]. 24. SGN [27], p. 393· 25. SGN [17], p. 397· 26. This was a provision of the April 1942 instruction: "Shaanganning bianqu youdai yimin shishi banfa buchong yaoxiang" [Supplement to the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region's methods for implementing special treatment for immigrants], cited in "Guanche youdai yimin zhengce." It was also endorsed in the 1943 regulations. See SGN [17], clause 4a. 27. Wu Yongli. 28. Mao [2], p. 81. 29. According to Wu Yongli, these 1,009 families all arrived between 1940 and 1942, and the total migration to Yan'an county in that period was 7,227 households. 30. See the examples in ibid. 31. Mao [2], pp. 214-15. 32. Ibid., p. 216. 33· Ma Pi'en contracted to work 159 mu, including 24 mu of wasteland, for the Nansalipu Border Region farm. "Mashi funii shengchan zhuozhu." 34· "Tian Erhong yu yi-nanmin." 35· Cai Jiude. 36. NBIR [1], p. 640. 37· Wu Yongli. 38. By clause 4a of the 1942 regulations (SGN [17]), rents were not to exceed 25% of the harvest, and crop shares could not exceed 40%. 39· "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi." 40. Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting, p. 394· 41. "Bianqude tudi zudian xingshi."

Notes to Pages 105-13

277

42. Mao [2], p. 81. 43· Wu Yongli. 44· NBIR [4], p. 25. 45· "Li Jiguan." 46. See, for example, "Xindao yimin nianqihu shoudao zhengfu bangzhu anju-leye"; Cai Jiude; "Guanzhong gedi ganbu." 47· "Guanzhong fenqude shengchan chengji." 48. NBIR [5]. 49· Lincoln Li, "Economics," pp. 15-16. 50. "Guanzhong fenqude shengchan chengji." 51. We are told that the labor hero Feng Yunpeng looked after the 170 refugee families "in coordination with the government." Ibid. 52. "Henan dengsheng nanmin fenlai bianqu." 53· Ibid.; NBIR [8]. 54· "Sisannian gezhuanshu jingjian zongjie cailiao," p. 402. 55· NBIR [g]. 56. NBIR [4], pp. 26-27; Cai Jiude. 57· "Wu Manyou." 58. Mao [2], pp. 77-78. 59· Ibid., pp. 77-78; "Dui 'jiti' kaihuang yijian." 6o. "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi." This report does not indicate which villagers were new settlers. 61. An ox sold for 5o,ooo yuan in Nov. 1943 in the Yan'an area and for double that amount in Dec. according to "Goumen," p. 355· Another source put the price at 40,000 yuan in Dec. 1943. CZJJSL, g: 833· 62. Bianqu [1g]. 63. We have comparative data for two years. In 1939, the year of a big regionwide wasteland reclamation drive, more than 40o,ooo mu of land was cleared in the Yanshu subregion, against only 27,000 mu in Guanzhong. In 1943, 341,645 mu was cleared in Yanshu and just 91,999 mu in Guanzhong. Northwest Bureau, Reconstruction Dept., "Yijiusanjiunian nongye shengchan zongjie baogao" [Summary report on agricultural production in 1939], Dec. 1939, in CZJJSL, 2: 572; Bianqu [13], p. 573· 64. Cai Jiude. 65. In one district of Xinning county, the local government took the Party's orders to heart. After laying on a welcoming banquet, it billeted the new arrivals in the homes of resident villagers, where they stayed until they had built their own dwellings. "Liangqianhu nanmin yidao Guanzhong." 66. In the end Wujiazaoyuan village had a total population of 57 people. The new households came in slowly but steadily: 2 arrived in 1938, 1 in 1939, 1 in 1940,4 in 1941, 4 in 1942, and 2 in 1943. One of these families had moved from Yan'an city. "Wu Manyou." 67. Wang Langchao, p. 120. 68. Myrdal, pp. 38-44, 71, So. 6g. "Feng Yunpeng"; "Yimin yingxiong Feng Yunpeng." 70. "Ganquan nongmin xincun."

278 Notes to Pages 114-20 TABLE TO NOTE 72 Place of Origin

Shaanbei GMD counties Yulin Hengshan Border Region counties Mizhi Suide Jia Other parts of Shaanxi Other provinces TOTAL

Households

People

Average family size

176 180

625 693

3.6 3.9

175 60 16 47 14 688

513 147 40 141 26 2,194

3.0 2.5 2.5 3.0 1.9

3.2

71. NBIR [4], p. 27. 72. Wu Yongli. For his breakdown of the 688 families' place of origin, see the accompanying table. 73· The 356 households from Yulin and Hengshan represented a total of 1,318 people, or an average of 3.8. This compares with just 2.8 for the 251 households from the Suide counties. Wu Yongli gives the following annual immigration figures for Xinmin township: 1939, 3 households (7 people); 1940, 45 households (190 people); 1941, 345 households (1,223 people); 1942, 204 households (561 people). 74· Out of 1,223 immigrants in 1941, 390 were able-bodied laborers. In 1942 there were 561 immigrants of whom 229 were laborers. Ibid. 75· Ibid. When county officials found people close to starvation, an immediate issue of 10 dan in relief grain was ordered. 76. "Bennian yiru nanmin wanyu." Some 8,875 mu were reportedly reclaimed in 1942, and the six administrative villages harvested 2-973·4 dan of grain. There were also impressive increases in the numbers of donkeys, oxen, sheep, pigs, horses, and bees. Wu Yongli. 77· NBIR [4], p. 29. 78. Wu Yongli. 79· This point is convincingly made and developed by Friedman et al.; see especially pp. 224-26 and the Conclusion. So. Wu Yongli. 81. Hsii, part 1, p. 21. 82. JFRB, Dec. 6, 1941; CYHWX, p. 378. 83. "Guanche youdai yimin zhengce"; NBIR [4], p. 18. 84. Ibid., p. 26.

Notes to Pages

120-26

279

85. Ibid., pp. 26-27; "Suizhuanshu taolun yimin gongzuo"; "Huading yiminqu." 86. Mao [2], p. 82. 87. "Jingqu pinmin yiken neidi"; "Gonggu nanxiade." 88. "Jiaxian." 8g. "Sui-Mi zongjie yimin gongzuo." go. "Jingqu pinmin yiken neidi." 91. "Shatanpingqu yimin dadui." 92. "Sui-Mi zongjie yimin gongzuo." 93· NBIR [4], p. 22. 94· "Sui-Mi zongjie yimin gongzuo." g6. "Gonggu nanxiade." 95· "Shatanpingqu yimin dadui." g8. "Shatanpingqu yimin dadui." 97· "Xia nanlu qu!" 99· "Sui-Mi zongjie yimin gongzuo." 100. "Daliang yimin." 101. "Jingqu pinmin yiken neidi"; "Daliang yimin." 102. "Jingqu pinmin yiken neidi." 103. "Sui-Mi zongjie yimin gongzuo." 104. "Jiaxian." 105. Bianqu [13]. But according to NBIR [4], p. 5, laborers constituted only 45% of all migrants in 1943. 106. "Sui-Mi zongjie yimin gongzuo." 107. "Mizhi minfengqu, nonghui jiejue yimin kunnan." 108. The role assigned to the local cadres is discussed in "Gonggu nanxiade." 110. "Wang Piying." 109. NBIR [4], pp. 22-23. 112. Ibid., p. 31. 111. NBIR [4], p. 25. 113. "Suizhuanshu taolun yimin gongzuo." As we have seen, families from Hengshan and Yulin constituted a significant proportion of the new settlers in Xinmin township. For the precise figures, seen. 72. 114. This estimate is based on the Suide data in Table 7 and assumes about 2.2 able-bodied workers per family. 115. NBIR [4], p. 6. 116. Ibid., p. 6; Bianqu [13]. More than 18,300 laborers migrated to ShaanGan-Ning's four underpopulated subregions in the three years from 1941 to 1943. NBIR [4], p. 6. 117. There are no significant differences between the figures offered by Peter Schran and Zhang Yang. Very approximately we can say that, between 1939 and 1943, oxen increased by 46%, donkeys by 36%, and sheep by 75%. Schran, Guerrilla Economy, p. 123; Zhang Yang, p. 77· 118. Some of these people would have found work in the manufacturing industries that grew rapidly in the Yan'an area during the war years, but there is little information about the urban employment of immigrants. We may suppose that a textile plant in Liulin district was known as the "Immigrants Factory" for good cause.

280

Notes to Pages IJO-JS

CHAPTER FIVE

1. Selden, "Yan'an Communism," p. 40; Selden, China in Revolution, p. 251; Friedman et al., Chinese Village, especially chap. 4· 2. Selden, China, p. 239· 3· 0. Wou, p. 270. 4· For Chen Yung-fa's definition of "controlled polarization," see his Making Revolution, pp. 11-12. The rural election movements in the base areas he studied, as recounted in chap. 4, are a very good illustration of that process. 5· Kuhn, "Local Self-Government," pp. 268-75. See my Introduction for a brief outline of Kuhn's argument. 6. SGN [4]. 7· See Selden's summary of the 1937 election movement in Yenan Way, pp. 127-36. Details of the 1937 election law, subsequent revisions, and election procedures are detailed in Hsii, part 1, pp. 26-62. 8. Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution, chap. 8. 9· The Party's official directive on the "three-thirds system" was made in a statement attributed to Mao Zedong (Mao [12], p. 418; Mar. 6, 1940). The purposes and many meanings of the system have long been debated by scholars. See Selden, Yenan Way, pp. 161-67, and his list on p. 162, n. 72, of some of the major English- and Chinese-language discussions of the subject. See also Shum; Kataoka, pp. 240-46; Van Slyke, Enemies, pp. 142-53; and Apter and Saich, pp. 210-17. 10. "Zhonggong Shaanganning bianqu zhongyangju guanyu chedi shixing 'sansanzhi'de xuanju yundong gei geji dangwei de zhishi." 11. The Liberation Daily gave prominent coverage to the delegation's tour of the Yan'an area. See Selden, Yenan Way, p. 164. 12. Xie Juezai, "Sansan zhidude lilun yu shiji." 13. Liu Bingwen. 14. Xie Juezai, "Sansan zhidude lilun yu shiji," p. 202. 15. "Suideshi canyihuiyuan quanbu xuanchu." Seventy of the 88 representatives were formal members, 13 were alternates, and 5 were government appointees. 16. Suide [2]. This article reports that 25% of the 2,889 elected representatives were Party members. 17. Xie Juezai, "Sansan zhidude lilun yu shiji," p. 201. 18. Ibid. 19. Esherick, "Revolution," p. 11. 20. Bianqu [12]. 21. "Xiangshi xuanju yundong shengli." 22. Kataoka, p. 244. By "the higher stage," Kataoka means the stage equivalent to the 1933 land investigation movement in the Jiangxi Soviet. 23. Zhang Wentian, p. 32; Esherick, "Revolution," p. 10. 24. "Wei shenmo gaixuan."

Notes to Pages 138-46

281

25. "Tan xiangxuan." Emphasis added. 26. See, for example, ibid.; and Xie Juezai, "Zenyang jinxing," p. 190. See also "Xiangshi xuanju zhuyide jidian." 27. Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution, pp. 224-25, points out that because the GMD failed in its attempt to shift the responsibility for social welfare services (such as mediation, famine relief, and education) to village governments, peasants were still forced to depend on "rural elites outside the bureaucracy" for them in the 193o's, and that unpopular, very venal, and unscrupulous people still held official positions at the township level under early CCP governments. See alsoP. Huang, Peasant Economy, chap. 15. 28. "Xiangxuanzhong liangge wenti"; "Wancheng xiangxuan." Rectification required that urban youth go to the villages not as cadres but as servants of the people. 29. "Ba xiangxuan bande geng haoxie." 30. "Mizhi jinxing xiangji." 31. "Jinnian xiangshi xuanju gongzuo gangyao." 32. "Heshui piaoxuanzhong faxian quedian." 33· SGN [4], sec. 4, clause 8, pp. 121-22. The only variation allowed here was in the towns (shi) that served as district (qu) headquarters and had large populations. Here residents groups of 6o to 250 voters were to elect a representative to the shi assembly (clause 8, part 2). 34· Xie Juezai, "Zenyang jinxing," pp. 188-89. 35· Placing a bean in the bowl of one's chosen candidate (shudoufa) became a standard voting method in CCP-run rural elections. See, for example, Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution, p. 249; and Hinton, pp. 329-31. Burning a: hole in a paper ballot against a candidate's name (shaokulong) still of course meant secondhand voting for the mostly illiterate peasants. 36. "Mizhi jinxing xiangji." 37· "Xiangshi xuanju zhuyide jidian." 38. "Mizhi jinxing xiangji." 39· Ibid.; Suide [9]. 40. "Xiangxuan kaishi." 41. "Shifu yizhiyuande husheng." 42. Ibid. 43· "Xiangshi xuanju zhuyide jidian." 44· Ibid.; Xie Juezai, "Zenyang jinxing." 45· "Mizhi jinxing xiangji." 46. "Fayang minzhu gaijin xiangfu gongzuo." 47· Xie Juezai, "Zenyang jinxing." 48. "Wei shenmo gaixuan." 49· Xie Juezai, "Sansan zhidude lilun yu shiji." 50. Duara, Culture, p. 254. 51. This point is made by a number of commentators. See, for example, Selden, Yenan Way, pp. 160-61; Hartford, "Step by Step," pp. 188-204; and Paulson, "War," pp. 155-58. 52. "Jiuguo gongliang zhengshou tiaoli." Families with incomes of less than 300 jin (1 dan) were not obliged to pay tax. The tax rate for incomes of 300-

282

Notes to Pages 147-53

450 jin was 1%; for 451-750 jin, 2%; for 751-1,050 jin, 3%; for 1,051-1,500 jin, 4%; and for more than 1,500 jin, 5%. 53· Mao [2], p. 246. 54· SGN [24]. The "Tax Table" included in these regulations lists all 26 tax brackets. The scale, in broad outline, was as follows: less than 150 jin (0.5 dan), no tax; 150 jin, 5%; 300 jin, 10%; 450 jin, 15%; 900 jin, 30%. 55· SGN [2]; Bianqu [15]. 56. Bianqu [10], [u]; "Gexian zhengliang shumu queding." 57· Chai Shufan et al., pp. 122-23. 58. Bianqu [1]. 59· Chai Shufan et al., p. 122. 6o. Hsii, part 2, p. 27; Bianqu [15]. 61. SGN [9], p. 479· 62. SGN [18]. 63. SGN [9], p. 484. 64. Ibid., p. 487. 65. SGN [2], p. 279· This ruling was emphatically restated in a number of pronouncements and decrees in the course of 1942. 66. Bianqu [u], p. 140. 67. Bianqu [14], p. 96. 68. Ibid., p. 97· 69. Northwest Bureau, Finance and Economics Office. 70. Bianqu [14], p. 96. It is clear that the purchase of bonds, whether by individuals or by co-ops acting on behalf of their shareholders, was usually compulsory. In mid-1941 the government bond was said to have been oversubscribed by more than a million yuan, but in Dec. finance authorities pointed out that a large proportion of the committed contributions had not reached the granaries. Bianqu [5]. Hsii, part 2, p. 27, claims that the 2oo,ooo-dan tax quota was not filled in the first attempt to collect autumn grain in 1941, and that only through additional levies in 1942 was the target reached. It is possible that the 13,200-dan Dec. tax referred to here was one such levy. Bianqu [14], p. 96. 71. See, for example, Northwest Bureau, "Guanyu 1941 nian zhengliang zhengcao"; Bianqu [15]; "Yijiusiernian jingji jianshe gongzuo baogao." 72. Chen Yung-fa, "The Blooming Poppy." 73· Ibid.; Selden, "Yan'an Communism," p. 34; Selden, China, p. 248. 74· Xie Juezai, "Zhengshou jiuguo gongliang," p. 121; Bianqu [4]. 75· Xie Juezai, "Zhengshou jiuguo gongliang," p. 119. 76. Bianqu [u], p. 141. 77· Chai Shufan et al., p. 130; Bianqu [16], pp. 111-14; "Zhengliang yihou." 78. "Zhengliang gongzuotuan zai Suide." 79· Wubao county is not mentioned. Presumably the Jia or Suide county team took care of the work there. So. Suide [13]; "Gexian zhengliang shumu queding." 81. Suide [u]. 82. "Qingjian xiang"; "Zhengliang yundong zhankai." 83. Bianqu [15], p. 97· 84. Bianqu [14]; Bianqu [3], pp. 194-95.

Notes to Pages 153-59

283

85. SGN [26]. 86. "Jinru zheng jieduan." 87. SGN [26], clauses 19-24, pp. 190-91; "Caiting Nan." 88. Zhao Yiwen, p. 137. 89. "Zhengliang yihou." 90. Ibid.; "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi. 91. SGN [23]. 92. Liberation Daily, reports of Apr. 30 and June 2, 1942, translated in Mao [2], pp. 229-32. 93· Ibid., p. 231, Apr. 30 report. We are not told, however, how much income Wu made from farm sidelines. 94· Ibid. 95· "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi." 96. Mao [2], p. 232. 97· SGN [16]. 98. Ibid., pp. 196-97. 99· Calculations of taxable capital (shuiben) were based on the number of "standard mu" farmed. A "standard mu" was an area of land that yielded 8 dou in a normal year. The "standard mu" measurements were translated into fuli (lit., wealth-power) by a table that discriminated in favor of the poor. A simplified outline of how the tax worked is shown in the accompanying table. TABLE TO NOTE

99

Fuli

Holdings in standard mu a

10 30 60 90 SOURCE:

SGN

Propertyb

Average annual incomec

Per capita income

Tax level

7.7 25.0 54.5 90.0

4 12 24 36

2.93 37.0 14.63 31.50

2 4 5 9

Tax rate(%)

1.1% 1.3 1.4 1.8

[12].

a The table assumes a household of four people. b1 ' 1

fuJi = 300 yuan. fuJi = 6o yuan.

100. Zhonggong Yan'an xianwei, "Yi-nanmin banjia wentide diaocha cailiao." Though the title of this piece identifies the people moving away as immigrants and refugees who had recently come to the Border Region, that is not indicated in the text. 101. Bianqu [4]. 102. Ibid. [13], p. 162. 104. Ibid., p. 169; [1], p. 158. 103. UGAT research group. 105. An investigation into the 1941 grain tax's effect on farmers in the fourth township of Hezhuang district, Yan'an county, claimed that, though some

284

Notes to Pages 159-71

families paid up to 40% of their income in taxes (the average for the xiang was 27%), farmers were still left with surplus grain with which they could expand their businesses in 1942. "Jiuguo gongliang zhengshou yihou." 106. A production exhibition mounted in Suide city in 1943 featured wall charts that contrasted taxation in bordering GMD and CCP villages. Yang Heting; Suide [5]; Hua Ziyang, "Shengchan dayundong." 107. Bianqu [4], p. 154· 108. Chai Shufan et al., p. 114. 109. Ibid., pp. 122, 124, 129-30. 110. Bianqu [10]. 111. Chai Shufan et al., p. 124. 112. Nan Hanchen. 113. Clause 20 of the 1941 regulations; clause 23 of the 1942 regulations. 114. As early as 1942, Chai Shufan's team reported that the presence and power of landlords in unreformed rural areas of Suide and Mizhi were declining as a result of the "indirect influence of the land revolution" (that is, frightened landlords fled to the towns or left the region). Also, "since the outbreak of the resistance war, taxes have been fairly heavy. But the implementation of rent reduction has been especially significant." Chai Shufan et al., p. 113. CHAPTER SIX

1. Chai Shufan et al., p. 53· 2. Ibid., pp. 54-56. 3· Jia Tuofu, pp. 218-21.

4· "Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu kangri genjudi tudi zhengcede jueding ji qi fujian," in Brandt et al., pp. 276-85. 5· The GMD's "Political Platform" of 1926 announced a 25% rent reduction rate. On the assumption that a tenant generally paid half his annual harvest in rent, a 25% reduction would mean that in future he paid only 37.5% of his main crop. A 37.5% rent ceiling is specified in clause 170 of the Nationalist government's 1930 Land Law. The ceiling was redefined as 8% of rental land value in the revised Land Law of 1936. See Hsieh, Kuomintang, p. 131; Yang Zhenya; and Chen Hanchang, pp. 241-86. 6. Jia Tuofu, p. 221. 7· Ibid. 8. "Guanyu jianzu jianxi," p. 306. 9· Suide [6], p. 363. 10. Huozu, or sharecropping, as we saw in Chap. 2, was quite different from "joint-farming" or a "partnership" (huozhong). Because sharecropping did not oblige the landlord to contribute tools, draft animals, seed, etc., and huozhong did, the Communists considered the distinction important. 11. Zhang Wentian, p. 143· 12. "Mizhi Minfengqu sanxiangde jianzu douzheng." 13. Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting. 14. Chai Shufan et al., p. 53· 15. "Zuzhong bianwei huozhong." 16. Chai Shufan, "Jianzuzhongde dianquan wenti." 17. SGN [15L pp. 274-76. 18. Ibid., art 8, pp. 271-72. 19. "She jianzu jianxi jianchahui." 20. "Jianzu yu shengchan."

Notes to Pages 171-78

285

21. Suide [1]. 22. Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting, p. 395; Jia Tuofu, p. 366. 23. The classic accounts are Hinton, Fanshen (see, for example, chaps. 1114, 36-39); and Crook and Crook, Ten Mile Inn, chap. 10. In these accounts of the struggles following on land reform, the targets were more often Party and village officials than landlords. 24. See, for examples, "Jianzuhui kaimeile"; "Baijiacen jianzu yundong"; and "Guanyu jianzu jianxi yu jiaozu jiaoxide wenti," p. 370. 25. Bianqu [9]. 26. "Guanche jianzu"; Jia Tuofu, pp. 366-67; "Jianzu yu shengchan." 27. Chai Shufan et al., pp. 211-12. 28. "Duniugou jianzu douzheng"; Du Siyao. 29. "Guanyu jianzu jianxi," pp. 317-19. 30. Ibid., p. 314. 31. The Dec. 18 meeting was the lead story in the Liberation Daily of Jan. 20, 1944. "Relie juxing jianzuhui." 32. See examples in Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting; "Yaoqiu jianzude ren"; and "Baijiacen jianzu yundong." 33· Suide [w]; Bianqu [9]. 34· Suide [6]. See also "Qunzhong fenfen jihui." 35· Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting. 36. "Yaoqiu jianzude ren"; "Baohu dianhu quanyi." 37· "Qunzhong fenfen jihui"; Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting. 38. "Baijiacen jianzu yundong." 39· Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting. 40. Ibid.; "Longdong fenqu jianzu gongzuo zongbaogao." 41. SGN [14]. 42. "Guanyu jianzu jianxi," p. 334· 43· Ibid., p. 318. 44· SGN [14]. 45· Ibid.; Bianqu [9]. 46. Jia Tuofu, p. 348. 47· Hua Ziyang, "Shengchan dayundong." 48. Jia Tuofu, p. 348. 49· Party analyses of China's "land problem" in the 193o's tend to assert, rather than demonstrate, a process of land concentration and a consequent rise in the number of landless farmers. But as we saw in Chap. 2, both the 1933 GMD investigation of four Suide townships and the 1941-42 CCP survey of Suide and Mizhi counties confirm that this was indeed the case in those places during the years following the Great Northwest Famine. 50. Bianqu [9]. 51. Jia Tuofu, p. 344· 52- Ibid. 53· "Mizhi Yinchengshi." 54· Ibid., pp. 353-54. 55· See, for example, Jia Tuofu, p. 348. 56. Ibid., p. 344· 57· "Zhengfu ge fuze tongzhi yu waiguo jizhe tanhua." 58. See Schran, Guerrilla Economy, pp. 92-93. 59· Cited by Kong Yongsong, p. 389.

286

Notes to Pages 179-90

6o. "Jianzuhui kaimeile"; Yuan Renyuan and Yang Heting; "Suixi Miaojiapingqu." 61. "Qunzhong fenfen jihui." 62. The annulment of all pre-1940 rental debts removed a huge burden from the backs of almost all tenants and greatly increased their bargaining power with landlords. 63. "Guanyu jianzu jianxi," p. 333· 64. "Xibeiju guanyu jinyibu." 65. "Guanyu jianzu jianxi," p. 332; "Guanche jianzu." 66. "Xibeiju guanyu jinyibu"; "Qingjian zhengfu sanshierniandu jianzu gongzuo zongjie baogao." See Seybolt, "Terror and Conformity," for a discussion of the "counterespionage campaigns" in Shaan-Gan-Ning. To the extent that the campaigns reached into the villages, they were extensions of the class struggle initiated by the election and rent reduction movements. 67. In Duniugou and Majiaqu villages, places developed as models of rent reform, we find examples of tenant associations that extended their activities to production and social welfare work. "Guangyu jianzu jianxi," p. 317. 68. Ibid., pp. 312, 327; "Jianzu yu shengchan"; NBIR [u]. 69. SGN [14]. 70. Ibid. Because of Suide's strategic position and large population, establishing CCP authority at all administrative levels there was a priority of the Yan'an government. The level of press coverage of reform initiatives in the northern counties indicates that Suide was the focus of a special rent reform effort. 71. "Xibeiju guanyu jinyibu," p. 278. 72. Data from 14 or so districts in the subregion were said to show that 1,842.73 dan of grain were refunded to tenants in those places in 1943, and 37,732.82 dan of rental debts were canceled. SGN [14]. 73· Several scholars make this point forcefully. See, for example, Shue, Reach of the State; Oi; and Esherick, "Deconstructing." 74· Suide [6]. CHAPTER SEVEN

1. CCP Central Committee; "Guanyu chungeng yundongde jueding." 2. "Zhongyang suwei'ai gongheguo." 3· "Ba chungengde zhandou renwu." 4· NBIR [u], p. 213. 5· See, for example, Ding Dongfang, p. 30; and Mao [1], pp. 153-61. 6. "Xibeiju guanyu guanche hezuoshe lianxihui jueyide jueding." 7· Mao [2], p. 120; Northwest Bureau, Reconstruction Dept., "Hezuo gongzuo zongjie." 8. Gao Zili, "Hezuoshe lianxi huiyi," p. 66. 9· SGN [6], p. 370.

Notes to Pages

190-201

287

10. Northwest Bureau, Reconstruction Dept., "Muqian bianqu hezuo fangzhen," p. 459· 11. "Xibeiju guanyu hezuoshe lianxihui jueyide jueding." 12. SGN [6], pp. 75, 371. 13. Gao Zili, "Hezuoshe lianxi huiyi," p. 369. 14. A late 1943 report said that only 11% of Shaang-Gan-Ning's co-ops imitated the South District model. "Hezuo gongzuo zongjie," p. 365. 15. NBIR [10], p. 247· 16. Northwest Bureau, Reconstruction Dept., "Sanshiyiniandu jiaotong yunshu gongzuo jihua." 17. Party strategists of the early 1940's saw a big expansion of salt production and trade as one of the solutions to the Yan'an government's balance-ofpayment problems. Mao [2], chap. 6, pp. 135-44, discusses the importance of salt production and transport work. Chen Yung-fa argues that because the salt trade, together with tax increases and the printing of money, failed to make a dent in the government deficit, the CCP from 1941 resorted to opium production and trafficking. "Blooming Poppy," especially pp. 272-73. 18. Wang Yaohua. 19. SGN [19], p. 252; Mao [2], p. 136. 20. Mao [2], p. n8; NBIR [7]. 21. SGN [22]. 22. SGN [19], pp. 258-59. 23. SGN [2o], p. 275. 24. The available statistical information for the cooperative movement is inconsistent and sometimes contradictory. Putting monetary values on co-op assets was a hit-and-miss business at best and was made even more inaccurate by fluctuating prices, regional variations, and hyperinflation. If we accept the reported percentage values, however, then there was clearly a big expansion of transport teamwork after 1942. For collections of statistical information about Shaan-Gan-Ning's cooperatives, see SGN [5]; Gao Zili, "Hezuoshe lianxi huiyi"; and SGN [21]. 25. SGN [1g], p. 258. 26. SGN [22]. 27. "Yunshu guanli wenti." 28. "Yan'an yunshuduizhang Liu Yongxiang tongzhi"; Hua Ming; Bianqu [8].

29. 30. 31. 32. 33· 34· 22. 35· 37· 39· 41.

Gao Zili, "Yunshu hezuo jiantao." Gao Zili, "Gonggu guangda hezuo shiyede guanjian." NBIR [7], p. 300. Ibid., p. 301. Nan Hanchen. This paragraph is based on "Sui-Mi xiaoxing hezuoshe zongjie," pp. 121"Mizhi Yincheng." 36. Ren Chu. Mao [2], p. 117. 38. SGN [5], p. 84. SGN [21], p. 87. 40. Suide [12]. The district boundaries were also expanded during this period to incor-

288

Notes to Pages

202-8

porate two other townships (making five townships in all). But the population growth was much more a result of migrations than of the boundary change. Jieshao Nanqu hezuoshe, p. 2. 42. "Zuofeng wenti." 43· According to the Indusco Office, 370 of 691 cooperative societies were closed down and the number of co-op-run enterprises dropped from 1,280 to 532. SGN [5], p. 84. 44· Ibid., p. 85 . 45· Northwest Bureau, Reconstruction Dept., "Muqian bianqu hezuoshede fangzhen" and "Muqian bianqu hezuo fangzhen." 46. Ibid., "Muqian bianqu hezuoshede fangzhen." 47· Ibid., p. 470; SGN [5], p. 84. 48. SGN [5], p. 83. 49· Ibid., p. 468. Emphasis added. 50. "Zuofeng wenti," p. 479· 51. Mao [2], p. 111. CHAPTER EIGHT

1. "Zhonggong gongyang zhengzhiju," p. 1. 2. Chen Yung-fa, "Blooming Poppy," p. 271, vigorously argues that the 194344 production movement's failure to make the border region economically self-reliant (by solving the government's budget deficit problem) is evidence that the "Yan'an Way" was not the "magic formula," as Selden claimed in 1971. Selden, in reply, says that his understanding was never that the "Yan'an Way" produced an "economic breakthrough" in Shaan-Gan-Ning in the 1940's: "The Yenan Way's narrower claim was rather that the combination of rent and tax reform, mutual aid, the market, and attempts at self-reliance bolstered the war effort. It further hinted at the value of these approaches for subsequent development efforts." "Yan'an Communism," p. 35· See also Selden, China, p. 248. My approach is close to Selden's here. The production movement should be evaluated as a developmental initiative, economic and social, in the context of the agricultural economy and society of northern Shaanxi in the early 194o's, and in conjunction with the CCP's other reconstruction initiatives before and during the 1943-44 movement. 3· Snow, Other Side, pp. 477-78. 4· NBIR [10], p. 213. 5· "Dui 'jiti' kaihuang yijian"; Mao [2], pp. 77-78. Both had reference to a huge reclamation drive in early 1942, which saw some s,ooo laborers conscripted into teams to open up 8o,ooo mu of wasteland. 6. "Dui 'jiti' kaihuang yijian"; NBIR [10], p. 213. 7- "Dui 'jiti' kaihuang yijian." 8. "Ba laodongli zuzhiqilai." 9· Ding Dongfang, p. 49· 10. NBIR [10], p. 213. 11. Mao Zedong claimed in Oct. 1943 that just 10% of Yan'an county's ablebodied men were members of regular biangong and zhagong teams, but that 70% participated in seasonal teams. Mao [4], in CCRM reprint, p. 183. 12. SGN [10].

Notes to Pages

209-20

289

13. Ibid., p. 411; "Nongye shengchan huzhu xiaozu zanxing zuzhi tiaoli,"

p. 425. 14. Clause 8 of the "Provisional organization methods for agricultural loan groups (or production groups)" reads as follows: "For production work, each group member has the duty to engage in labor exchanges and other mutualaid cooperation." SGN [10], p. 411. 15. Border Region Bank, "Yijiusiernian bianqu nongdaide chubu zongjie." 16. The "Get Organized" speech (Mao [1]) was made at the first Border Region Labor Heroes Congress in Nov. 1943. 17. Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu yinian gongzuo zongjie." 18. See, for example, "Mizhi Yindoude." 19. "Nonghu jihua" (1946?); "Jieshao Shaanganning bianqu zuo nonghu jihuade jingyan." 20. "Jieshao Shaanganning bianqu zuo nonghu jihua de jingyan." 21. Ibid.; "Nonghu jihua" (1944? and 1946?). 22. "Zenyang ding nonghu shengchan jihua." 23. JFRB, Nov. 29, 1943. 24. See, for example, JFRB, Jan. 28, Feb. 2, and Mar. 23, 1944· 25. "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi." 26. "Yige dangyuan lingdao yige zhagong." 27. "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi." 28. "Wu Manyou." 29. NBIR [10], p. 239. 30. "Suidexian biangong gaikuang"; "Mizhixian yijiusisinian chungeng biangong; NBIR [3], p. 450. 31. NBIR [w], p. 240; NBIR [3], pp. 460-61. 32. "Yimin wenti." 33· Chai Shufan et al., pp. 9, 118. 34· "Guanyu kaizhan shengchan yundongde zhishi." 35· "Mizhi Yindoude." 36. "Liu Yuhou." 37· "Mofan dangyuan laodong yingxiong Suide Liu Yuhou shoujiang." 38. "Liu Yuhou." 39· Ibid. 40. NBIR [10], p. 247; "Mizhi Yindoude"; Ding Dongfang, p. 34; "Mizhixian yijiusisinian chungeng biangong." 42. "Mizhi Qilimiaode." 41. Ding Dongfang, p. 34· 44· "Suidexian biangong gaikuang." 43· Wang Siping, p. 122. 46. NBIR [10], p. 236. 45· Ibid. 47· Zhan Wu and Yun Tian. 48. "Cedi huzhu yundong jieshao," in SGN [28], p. 27. 49· For details of the workpoints systems used in the 195o's, see Shue, Peasant China, pp. 161-76. Advice to local cadres about the remuneration systems to be used by labor-exchange teams in Shaan-Gan-Ning is given in, for example, Zhan Wu and Yun Tian; NBIR [10], p. 218; and Ding Dongfang, p. 48.

290

Notes to Pages

220-28

51. "Gedi huzhu yundong jieshao." 50. Zhan Wu and Yun Tian. 53· Ibid. 52. Zhan Wu and Yun Tian. 55· Zhan Wu and Yun Tian. 54· NBIR [10], pp. 238-41. 56. "Yan'anxiande kaihuang renwu." 57· For detailed discussions of the Party's understanding of "peasant individualism," see Hazard, Peasant Organization, pp. 14-18, 36-37, 158, 263-65; Shue, "Peasant Culture," pp. 310-11; and Shue, Peasant China, pp. 335-36. The Party's expectation was that individualistic attitudes and behavior would change after appropriate infrastructural adjustments. But my materials do not reflect so optimistic an outlook for this transformation as Hazard and Shue found in connection with the 195o's cooperative movements. 58. See, for example, "Qunzhong tuantide xingzhi he renwu"; Zhan Wu and Yun Tian; and NBIR [w], p. 238. 59· "Guanyu huzhu laodongzhongde jige wenti." 6o. Zhan Wu and Yun Tian. 61. "Wu Manyou." The account that follows is based on this report. 62. "Tian Erhong chuangzao mofan xiang." 63. "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi." 64. The Party wanted the labor-exchange teams to emulate the speed, efficiency, tight organization, and discipline of zhagong teams without being tainted with their boss-employee relationships. NBIR [3], p. 458. 65. In Majiagou the village's one zhagong team was composed of well-off peasants and one hired worker. Both of the Yaoxianwan mutual-aid teams hired out at weeding time. 66. "Zuzhi zhagongdui bangzhu qunzhong gemai." 67. "Yige dangyuan lingdao yige zhagong." 68. "Yan'anxiande kaihuang renwu." 69. "Wang Yiping zuzhi nian ren." 70. "Yan'an Liu xianzhang qinzi lingdao biangongdui"; "Yan'anxian Nianzhuang biangongdui." 71. NBIR [w], p. 237. 72. Ibid., p. 237. 73· "Mofan dangyuan laodong yinxiong Suide Liu Yuhou shoujiang." 74- NBIR [10], p. 238. 75· "Mofan dangyuan laodong yingxiong Suide Liu Yuhou shoujiang." 77· "Xin yingxiongde chuxian." 76. Suide [7]. 79· "Liu Yuhou"; Suide [3]. 78. Bianqu [17]. So. Bianqu [17]. 81. NBIR [10], p. 215; Lin Boqu, "Shaanganning bianqu zhengfu yinian gongzuo zongjie." 82. Suide [3]. 83. "Liu Yuhou." 84. "Mizhixian yijiusisinian chungeng biangong." 85. "Mizhi Qilimiaode mofan biangongdui." 86. NBIR [10], p. 230.

Notes to Pages 228-38

291

"Mizhixian yijiusisinian chungeng biangong." Ibid. Ibid. Suide [71. "Guanyu chuangzao mofan cunde jige wenti." Suide [71. 93· "Liu Yuhou." Ibid. 95· Suide [71. 96. "Xin yingxiongde chuxian"; Suide [3]. 97· "Xin yingxiongde chuxian." 98. "Wu Manyou." 99· "Mofan dangyuan he laodong yingxiong Shen Changlin tongzhi." 100. "Tian Erhong chuangzao mofan xiang." 101. Mao [13], p. 185. 102. "Shiyi yundong." 103. "Wenjiao gongzuode fangxiang"; Suide [4]. 104. Suide [41. 105. Ibid. 106. "Xin yingxiongde chuxian"; Suide [31. 107. "Xin yingxionde chuxian." 108. Suide county was said to have a child mortality rate of 42% in 1942. This compares with a general mortality rate of 5% for the whole of the Border Region two years later, in 1944. Suide [81; "Biangongduide xin renwu." 109. "Wenjiao gongzuode fangxiang." 110. "Jieshu yumei mixinde shenghuo." 111. "Shiyi yundong." 112. "Biangongduide xin renwu." 113. Ibid. 114. The plan to make a model of Shatanping district's first township (where Haojiaqiao village was located) contemplated a grain surplus of 50% in 1944. Though the hope was that farmers would raise their grain yields .007 dan per mu, the plan called for profits of 540 dan from a stepped-up spinning and weaving drive among the women and 400 dan from a newly established flour mill. "Liu Yuhou." 115. "Xin yingxiongde chuxian." 116. "Gedi huzhu yundong jieshao," p. 17. 117. Party reporters cited with pride an example from Ansai county, where the whole of Weijiata village became, at tax time, a "hulling and grain taxpaying mutual-aid team." NBIR [10], p. 222. 118. I am referring here to Schurmann's argument that the Communists' "penetration of the natural village" (the "great achievement of the Yenan period") was achieved by linking "various social forms of cooperation" with "military forms of organization." Schurmann, Ideology and Organization, p. 427. 119. For a discussion of the 1943 anti-traitor campaign as an extension of the "thought rectification" movement in Yan'an, see Seybolt, "Terror and Conformity"; and Apter and Saich, pp. 288-92. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 94·

292

Notes to Pages 238-52

120. Many of the figures we have for participation rates in mutual-aid teams in Shaan-Gan-Ning are probably very inflated. Among the most modest and most frequently quoted percentages (in both Chinese and Western sources) are 1943, 24%, and 1945, 28%-50%. The first is from Lin Boqu, "Shaanganing bianqu zhengfu yinian gongzuo zongjie," and the second from "Ba bianqu jianshede geng fushu fanrong." The 1948 report that offers the 46% figure for 1944 does say that it included teams with "poor leadership," which were therefore "teams in name only." NBIR [1], 2: 420-21. 121. The 28% figure is the minimum given in the 1945 Liberation Daily report cited in the preceding note ("Ba bianqu ..."). CONCLUSION

P. Huang, "Paradigmatic Crisis," p. 326. Bianqu [17]. 3· Berger, Pig Earth, pp. 206-7. 4· Bianco, "Peasant Responses," pp. 176-77. 5· Bianco, "Peasant Movements," p. 170. 1.

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