Chapter 23 19. Revolution and reform in a village in Shanxi

When Bill Hinton (Note: Han Ding in Chinese) went to China for the second time in 1945 to work for the US Office of Strategic Intelligence, he was a tall, cheerful young man who was not afraid of any right or left "isms".After graduating from Harvard University and Cornell University, he brought a collective fighting spirit and technical talent of fraternity to revolutionary China.It was with this spirit and talent that his mother, Camilleta Hinton, founded a progressive school in Putney, Vermont. In 1947, he went to China for the third time to work for the United Nations Relief Administration as a tractor technician. In the spring and summer of 1948, he accompanied a working group of the CCP to investigate the land reform in Shangzhongzhuang Village on the Loess Plateau, Wuxiang County, Shanxi Province, southwest of Beijing.

With the help of two translators, Hinton collected extensive information on the socioeconomic changes in the villagers under the leadership of the Communist Party.The villagers fought against the landlord gentry, the privileged class of landlords, to draw class status for everyone, and to divide the property in the village equally to create a new, more just society.When Hinton finally returned to the United States in 1953, the U.S. Customs Service and a congressional committee confiscated his notes for security reasons.It took Hinton five years and a hefty legal bill to get the notes back.He later published a book in 1966 entitled "Shen Fan: The Continued Revolution in a Chinese Village", which describes the most insider information about the Chinese peasant revolution that foreigners can learn.The book quotes the conversations of many people and gives vivid descriptions of the characters.

When Sino-American relations thawed in 1971, Beedo Hinton was a farmer in Pennsylvania.At the invitation of Premier Zhou Enlai, he returned to China for a seven-month visit in summer and autumn, including a visit to Zhongzhuang Village.As before, he was an observer on a working group of the Communist Party.But the difference is that this time it is his daughter Karma who assists him.Karma is very capable, innocent and lively.She was born in Beijing and grew up during the Cultural Revolution.Translated by his daughter, there are ten volumes of Bill Hinton's interview transcripts, and "many of them are contradictory."

Based on these notes, he wrote a voluminous work "Shen Fan".This book describes the lives of dozens of characters, their small plots, loves and hates, hopes and problems, etc., like a Victorian novel. "Turn over" means to turn to a new order; and "Shenfan" means "deep plowing", that is, the changes that occurred under the new order.Hinton's previous book had an optimistic tone, describing the villagers' struggle, victory and new life.However, the second book is more melancholy, describing how the villagers tried hard to solve the problems in the village, but they could not find solutions.It traces the history of the villagers of Zhongzhuang Village from 1947 to 1971. These 23 years include 4 consecutive revolutionary stages, each stage has a different impact on the villagers of Zhongzhuang Village. The first stage after 1948 was the period of collectivization. The land reform distributed the land equally to the peasants, but this move made the Communist Party face a common problem in the whole country: it allowed some courageous peasants to develop the rich peasant economy through their own efforts. What about, or let every peasant move towards egalitarian collectivization?Mao advocated collectivization.The collectivization movement was divided into three stages, including mutual aid groups, cooperatives (in cooperatives, farmers distributed income according to the input of land, livestock, farm implements and labor), until the final production team bought all the properties of farmers, and then Farmers are paid according to the work points they earn. After 1956, all land boundaries were removed, no one could recognize their land anymore, and the land became public property.The entire village of Zhongzhuang Village is a brigade, which is divided into 7 teams, of which 6 teams are engaged in agricultural production, and 1 team is engaged in sideline production. The grain output has almost doubled.At the same time, the state implements unified purchase and sales of grain, and prohibits immigration to cities.This move makes it easy for the state to purchase surplus grain and implement a planned supply of grain.

The agricultural collectivization movement in China in the 1950s aroused interest a generation later.The new "responsibility system" introduced by Deng Xiaoping, such as individual contracting and family farms, aims to stimulate people's enthusiasm for labor and improve production efficiency.However, now we have heard that when the villagers demolished the collective facilities, they also cut down the trees they had planted, and the doors and windows of the school were also stolen. The second stage of the revolution in Zhongzhuang Village was the Great Leap Forward in 1958.It was a mass movement to mobilize all manpower to industrialize the countryside.Hinton found that the villagers were excited about the Great Leap Forward.Although the Great Leap Forward didn't last, it was a truly remarkable movement for its time.This practice of mobilizing labor to build large-scale public facilities is not only an ancient tradition in China, but also an effort made by China to achieve modernization.Using this method requires the study of electricity and applied mechanics.

The Great Leap Forward failed because some practices went too far.The violent "communist style" makes people blindly pursue egalitarianism, while completely ignoring vested interests or the principle of mutual benefit.Wild pomp is seen as a colossal victory, and bureaucrats in the government inflate statistics to the point of absurdity.To make matters worse, leading cadres have become dazed and disconnected from reality.They propose plans and demand that others follow them, but in reality these plans only lead to failure.Conflicting instructions and over-motivation leave farmers exhausted.In the end, they lost all confidence. "From a long-term point of view, the greatest disaster is nonsense." Agricultural failure and semi-starvation ensued.

Since then, the revolution in Zhongzhuang Village has gone through the "Siqing" Movement and the "Socialist Education Movement" in the 1960s, trying to publicize "class struggle" as an indispensable higher stage of the revolution, but this approach failed to gain traction. Mass support.On the whole, the masses accepted continued class divisions and the inheritance of "rights" by children.However, the criteria for dividing the components are very unclear, so they cannot be accurately implemented.These rectification campaigns gave rise to personal grievances rooted in local feuds and other issues of a non-economic nature.

The last stage was the so-called Cultural Revolution launched by Chairman Mao in 1966.As the "class struggle" against the new bureaucrats failed at the top, Mao used teenage Red Guards to "start the revolution" at the bottom. "Shen Fan" describes the situation of faction fighting during the Cultural Revolution in Zhongzhuang Village, Shanxi Province and the southeastern plateau. While Mao called for the "bombarding of the headquarters" and the seizure of power by the revolutionary rebels, the bureaucrats were also mobilizing the Red Guards and deploying their forces to protect themselves, like Mao Hangheng.As party and government leaders were ousted and new figures came to power, the methods of struggle gradually escalated from demonstrations and rallies to punching and kicking, and even the use of weapons.

All-out civil war broke out in many areas, and then the military meddled in politics and, to some extent, lost its neutrality.A cynical and opportunistic leadership team emerged in Zhongzhuang Village, which soon became corrupt and overbearing.By 1971, when the Xintunga task force attempted to reverse the situation, the Cultural Revolution seemed to be dying. While attending a meeting of the Working Group, Bill Hinton reflected on the question of continuity and discontinuity of the revolution.The newly created party and government apparatus once again separated the bureaucracy from the ordinary people.People are now free to express their opinions, but this right must be subordinated to the overriding and paramount interests of the collective, and ultimately the interests of the nation represented by the party.Hinton also notes a deep-rooted tendency toward condemnation, outrage, and intolerance.These tendencies led to factionalism, which led to disaster in the Cultural Revolution.Hinton was surprised and perplexed that whenever there was a movement, some small organizations would unite to form two opposing organizations.As in the case in , these organizations are based on personal relationships and allegiance to faction leaders.One faction always called the other counter-revolutionaries, which was their rallying cry and a pretext for the execution of those considered counter-revolutionaries.At the same time, people face a huge pressure of blind obedience, and it is very difficult not to get involved in any faction.But it makes no sense ideologically to engage in any just struggle of one faction against another.Historically, of course, such factional struggles stemmed from the traditional resentment between villages in Chinese peasant life.Meanwhile, bureaucracy continues to make demands.For example, they ordered that the trenches be dug wider and that wheat and cotton be interplanted.Bill Hinton, an experienced farmer, did not appreciate this practice.Intercropping means that neither tractors nor carts can enter the crop fields.In this way, the farmer has to shoulder the manure to the field, thus trampling the ground again and having to hoe several times.This is a great waste of manpower.

Another strategy requested by higher-level cadres is to let every household raise pigs, a policy that consumes a lot of food.For a while, sideline production such as pig raising was denounced as "the tail of rural capitalism", and orders were issued from above to kill all pigs.Pompous and ignorant cadres, despite their lack of experience in agriculture, issued orders about plowing, planting, seeds, and farmers, leading to endless disasters.Bureaucracy threatens collectivization. Today, however, Bill Hinton remains concerned that the renaissance of family farms and the collective co-operation that has dismantled the toil of farmers will suit China's future needs.

"In the past, I thought that the traditional Chinese state institutions served and protected the interests of the landlord class. Now it is clear that this old state institution has been transformed into an autonomous entity... The Chinese revolution in the 20th century was completely rooted in the In addition to the landlords ... but regenerated the grassroots bureaucracy, can not help but remind people of the feudal dynasty of the past." All in all, China has certainly grown tremendously, but not as much as you might think. This review is William Hinton's "Deep Flip: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village" (New York, Random House, 1983), published in the Boston Sunday Globe on May 15, 1983.

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