Notes on William Hinton’s Fanshen

Table of Contents – Links to chapter notes.
List of Characters – People mentioned in the book.

Chapter	Page
✅ Acknowledgments	vi
✅ Preface	ix
Prologue	3
Part I Sowing the Wind
✅ 1. Long Bow Village	17
✅ 2. Can the Sun Rise in the West	26
✅ 3. Eating Bitterness	37
✅ 4. Three Pillars of Heaven	46
✅ 5. The Teaching of the Lord of Heaven	58
✅ 6. Invasion	69
✅ 7. Collaborators	73
✅ 8. Seeds of Change	82
✅ 9. The Whirlwind	96
Part II Sunrise in the West: The Year of Expropriation
✅ 10. Which Road?	103
✅ 11. Beat the Dog’s Leg	107
12. Find the Leaders	118
13. Dig Out the Rotten Root of Feudalism	128
14. Wang Lai-hsun Is Next	139
15. The Fruits of Struggle	147
16. Half of China	157
17. Counter Measures	161
18. Founding the Village Communist Party Branch	168
19. Peasants or Workers?	179
20. Contradictions, Internal and External	188
21. All Out War—Retreat	198
22. Organizing Production	210
23. Abuses of Power	222
24. The Blackmail of Wang Yu-lai	232
III The Search for the Poor and Hired
25. Cosmic Wei Ch’i	243
26. To the Village	251
27. The Work Team	259
28. Those with Merit Will Get Some Those without Merit Will Get Some	269
29. Self Report, Public Appraisal	275
30. Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggarman, Thief	280
31. The Revolutionary Heat	288
32. Brothers	297
33. A Curved Road	303
34. Drama in the Fields	312
Part IV Who Will Educate the Educators?
35. Confrontation at the Gate	319
36. The Village Leader Bows his Head	332
37. “I Dare Not Say I Have Finished”	341
38. Days and Nights	350
39. A Summing Up	360
40. The Lucheng Road	367
41. In the Dragon Hall	373
✅ 42. When Poverty Outranked Heaven	378
✅ 43. Unity Through Struggle	388
✅ 44. When I Get My Share	396
✅ 45. Unite Real Friends, Attack Real Enemies	400
Part V Recapitulation
✅ 46. The Native’s Return	419
✅ 47. Both Ends Sun Unseen	428
✅ 48. Class Differentiation Repeated	434
✅ 49. It Is Too Slow!	442
✅ 50. Who Dares Man the Second Gate?	446
✅ 51. A Young Bride Leads the Way	454
✅ 52. The Gate in the Church	461
✅ 53. Upgrading	473
Part VI Drastic Reappraisal
✅ 54. On the Eve of Victory	479
✅ 55. We Tried to Be God!	488
✅ 56. Who Is to Blame?	495
Part VII Untying the Knot
✅ 57. Disaster	511
✅ 58. Revolutionary Steeling	518
✅ 59. Mutual Aid	528
✅ 60. The Village People’s Congress	535
✅ 61. A Final Determination	548
✅ 62. The Midnight Raid	551
✅ 63. Hsueh-chen Dissents	560
✅ 64. “Illegal Fruits” Returned	566
✅ 65. Arrests and Restitutions	578
✅ 66. “Self Report, Public Appraisal” Solves the Tax Question	593
✅ 67. Long Bow Tsai Chien	601

People

Chang Ch’un-hsi, a Communist (m)
Chang Hsin-fa, a Communist (m)
Chang Huan-ch’ao, blacksmith (m)
Chang Kuei-ts’ai, Communist (m)
Chao C’uan-e, Communist (f)
Secretary Ch’en (m)
Ch’eng A-lien, Communist (f)
Chin-chu, village cuckold (m)
Little Ch’uer
Fan Pu-tau, landlord #2 (m)
Hou Chin-ming (m)
Hou Pao-pei – Team Leader Hou (m)
Hsiao Wen-hsu, alienated (m)
Hu Hsueh-chen, leader (f)
Kuo Ch’ung-wang, landlord (m)
Kuo Cheng-k’uan, chairman of People’s Congress (m)
Kuo Fu-kuei, collaborator (m)
Kuo Fu-wang (m)
Kuo Yuan-lung (m)
Liang Chi-hu
Li Ho-jen, Catholic (m)
Li Hsin-ai (f)
Li Hung-er, rascal (m)
Li Lao-szu, mason (m)
Li P’an-ming, wagonner (m)
Li Pao-yu, “merchant” (m)
Li Sung-lin, Little Li (m)
Pu-ch’ao (no surname given) (f)
Shang Ching-ho, landlord #1 (m)
Shen Ch’uan-te, Catholic (m)
Shen Hsien-e, beauty, aged 17 (f)
Shih Ts’ai’yuan, of army (m)
T’ai-shan’s mother (f)
Old Lady Wang (f)
Wang Ch’ang-yi, local veterinarian (m)
Wang Ch’ung-lai’s wife (f)
Wang Hua-nan (m)
Wang Man-hsi, bully (m)
Wang pen-ping, “basic element” (m)
Wang Wen-te, rascal (m)
Wang Yu-lai, rascal’s dad (m)
Wen Tui-chin, “Old Tui-chin” (m)
Wu-k’uei (no surname) (m)
Yu Pu-ho, rich widow (f)

Aknowledgments

People Thanked:

Communist Party and Lucheng County government
President Fan Wen-lan (范文澜) of Northern University
Ch’i Yun – interpreter
Hsieh Hung – interpeter
Long Bow work team and peasants
Milton H. Friedman – for “legal virtuosity”
Carmelita Hinton, Corliss Lamont – financial aid to help recover his material from U.S. Customs and Senator Eastland’s Committee on Internal Security
Carmelita Hinton and Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation – help with drafts
Susan Warren – for editing and consultation
Nell Salm – of Monthly Review for “editorial innovations and preparation of final draft” and
Others: Angus Cameron, Ida Pruitt, Adele and Allyn Rickett, wife Joanne Raiford

Preface

Notes:

Hinton introduces his role in the book as an observer attached to the work team visiting “Long Bow” in Lucheng County, Shanxi (Shansi) province during the spring and summer of 1948.
Parts I and II are to offer a history of the book.
Hinton talks about how the book’s account is put together: “This history was not easily assembled. The past was reviewed for me by a multiple of people whose membories of what had happened differed somewhat and whose stories contained both contradictions and gaps. Where contradictions could not be resolved or gaps filled in through careful checking and cross-checking, I have had to adopt such interpretations and solutions as seemed most consistent with other known facts. If the history that has thus emerged is not accurate in every detail, its main content and spirit nevertheless portray the truth about Long Bow.” (ix)
Is Long Bow’s experience universal or unique? Something of both (x)
Long Bow was different in that it had a sizeable Catholic minority; had many wihtout ancestral roots in the region, so weak clan structure (x)
Long Bow was occupied by the Japanese during the war so was not a centre for wartime resistance and democratic rule
As a result, postwar changes highly compressed in time
“At least a dozen people were beaten to death by angry crowds; some hard-working small holders were wrongly dispossessed; revolutionary leaders rode roughshod over their followers. When the land reform team to which I was attached came to the village in 1948, its main job turned out to be righting the wrongs of the immediate past.” (xi)
“This book, by reflecting this concentration [on what was wrong with past policies], gives crimes, mistakes, detours and discouragement more weight than they deserve in any over-all evaluation of Long Bow’s development.” (xi)
“I have written a book of considerable length. Along the way I borrowed from the literary arsenal of the novelist, the journalist, the social scientist, and the historian. What I have produced, finally, seems to me to resemble, in spirit and in context, a documentary film. I call it, then, a documentary of revolution in a Chinese village.”
Hinton acknowledges the important contribution of hist two interpreters: “The language spoken in Southern Shansi is not pure Mandarin but a dialect. In addition to pronouncing most words in their own local way, Shansi peasants use many words that do not appear in any Chinese dictionary. Even interpreters well versed in Chinese dialects often find themselves at a loss to decipher the details of conversations between peasants. Thus, though I had a working knowledge of Chinese, it would have been impossible for me to follow the meetings without help.” (xii)
The book is timely because what happened in China can happen elsewhere, “Land reform is on the agenda of mankind.” (xiii)
Preface dated May, 1966.

Prologue

Part I Sowing the Wind

1. Long Bow Village

Period: Historical background
Notes:

Fields were barren, brown and desolate in winter, while in summer they were green, yellow and clothed with diverse crops (p17-18)
Replacement of troops of the Imperial Garrison by conscripts of Yen Hsi-shan, warlord governor of Shansi (p20)
Population varied drastically in size (p21)
Foot binding was a practice even in 1945 (p24)

Quotes:

‘Certainly for hundreds of years, any tired travelers who paused to rest at the crest of the hill and
looked out over the flat to the north saw substantially the same sight – a complex of adobe walls
under a canopy of trees set in the middle of a large expanse of fields.’ (p17)

Tags: #traditions
People: Yen Hsi-shan (governor of Shansi)

2. Can the Sun Rise in the West

Period: 1940s
Notes:

Tenants rendered up many of their crops in taxes and rent (p27)
Concentration of land ownership in Long Bow was not as nearly as high as other parts in
China in 1940s (p27-28)
Proportion of land (and draft animals) that landlords, rich peasants, clan associations, middle
peasants etc. each held (p28-31)
Soldiers and officers relationship with the people (bad) and with Ching-ho (good) (p32)
Descriptions of how the rich borrowed money to others and drove them to various degrees
of bankruptcy (p32-34)
Famine years of 1942-43 (p34)

Quotes:

‘When anyone mentioned change, the gentry asked confident: “can the sun rise in the west?” This confidence of stability of the land system and the culture it endangered – a system and a culture that had survived and often flourished since before the time of Christ.’ (p27)

Tags: #landsystem, #landownership, #debt
People: Sheng Ching-ho (head of richest family in Long Bow, member of KMT); K’ung Tzu Tao (Confucian Association); Han-sheng (old man); Shih Szu-har (middle peasant); Shen (poor peasant); Pei Ho-Yi; Fan Pu-tzu, Kuo Fu-wang, Kuo Ch’ung-wang (rich peasants); Ho-P’ang (peasant)

3. Eating Bitterness

Period: Historical background
Notes:

Education disparity between the rich and poor (p38)
Each family were weary of each other in the midst of poverty and hunger (p38)
Depiction of slavery at the Wang household, where even after become Ch’ung-lai’s wife, she
was beaten by several members of the household (p39-41)
Descriptions (allegedly by peasants themselves) of their living situations (p43)
Decline, which the author attributes to economic dislocations, social disorders, and war
(p44)
Inter-generational poverty (p44-45)

Quotes:

‘For weeks at a time almost half the population of every community lodged overnight in the fields, each family keeping an eye on all the rest. Thus both prosperous and poor peasants were forced to expend their often exhausted energies on a guard duty that was sheer waste from the point of view of society, but that meant the difference between life and death to every cropper.” (p38)
‘People said, “the debts of the poor begin at birth. When a boy is a month old the family wishes to celebrate; they have to borrow money in order to make dumplings and so, before the child can sit up, he is already in debt to the landlord. As he grows the interest mounts until the burden is too great to bear.”’ (p44-45)

Tags: #education, #slavery, #intergenerationalpoverty, #gender
People: Shen Fa-liang, Wang Ch’ung-lai

4. Three Pillars of Heaven

Period: 1930s-40s
Notes:

Certain notoriety in 1920s due to “Eight Squires” who cooperated with foreign priests in an effort to make converts to Catholicism (p47)
Belief in magical influence of burial grounds (p48)
In later years, Catholic Church became a most stalwart bulwark against social change (p48)
Description of the structure of government (p48-49)
Quarrels among the peasants over several issues (like ownership of trees, possession of
women (p50)
Gentry held power of life and death over peasants and carried out punitive measures, driving
peasants off the land or beat them if necessary (p51-52)
Many young peasants were driven into gangster-type secret societies such as the Red Rifles
(p53)
Many peasants seized and killed in Lucheng County (p54)
All-pervading individualism, lack of vision as weaknesses in economy (p55)

Quotes:

‘The extreme and often misdirected violence of peasant uprisings in China was an indication of certain basic weaknesses in the peasants as a political force, weaknesses which were cultivated anew in each generation by the very nature of the fragmented, small-holding, peddlers’ economy in which they were all reared.’ (p54)
‘Only a new set of social and productive relations could break through the vicious circle, release China’s productive power, and open the road to a prosperous future. But of new sets of social relations, of other modes of production, the peasants knew nothing, could imagine nothing, and hence had no beacons to guide them in any search for liberation. They were in the position of a man trying to survey the sky while imprisoned at the bottom of a well.’ (p55)

Tags: #catholicism, #religion, #geomancy, #government, #corruption, #favouritism, #secretsocieties,
#capitalism
People: Eight Squires (Yang, Li, Wang, Kao, Sheng, Liu and two Fans); Shih, Ch’eng, Kuo (from powerful families in 1940s); Li Pao-yu (middle peasant), Hsiao-tseng (neighbour); Hou Yu-fu (from Sand Bank Village), Hou (poor peasant); Fan Tung-hsi, Fan Pu-tzu
Locations: Lucheng County

5. The Teaching of the Lord of Heaven

Period: 1900s-1940s
Notes:

Large Gothic-style church built in 1916 under the direction of Catholic missionaries (p58)
Church reinforced the landlord tenant relationship through its teachings – and became a landholder in its own right (p56)
Shansi Province as a storm center of the Boxers’ Revolt, sacking churches, killing priests and
converts, and seizing property (p60)
Catholic missions came back after Peking was sacked (p60)
People did not dare to oppose the church and lived in fear of exposure to the priests (p61)
Charity and orphanage used to attract (force) new members (p61)
High interest rates on loans, by late 1930s, Christian charity societies owned lots of land (p62-63)
900 people waled to the Yamen at Lucheng to protest and petition for return of land to the village in 1925 (p65)

Quotes:

‘By disrupting and dividing the community, demanding special privileges for its converts, engendering cliques and counter-cliques, imposing humiliations on civil and religious leaders alike, it won for itself the bitter hatred of the majority outside the Church. Its influence, even after it disappeared as an organized force, was deep and lasting.’ (p58)

Tags: #boxers, #catholicism, #childabuse, #protest, #violence
People: Yu Hsien (Shansi governor); Wang Kuei-ching (manager of charity); Chang; Wang Ch’eng-yu
Locations: Lucheng County

6. Invasion

Period: Second Sino-Japanese War
Notes:

Lukuochiao Incident in 1937 (p70)
Japanese army garrisoned Lucheng, controlling the highway leading out to the county town of Changchih (p71-72)
Long Bow became the last permanently garrisoned outpost on the road to Yellow Mill and established as a fortified point (p72)
“Kill All, Burn All, Loot All” campaigns by the Japanese (p72)
Development of resistance and collaboration as political trends (p72)

Quotes:

‘In these times of terrible trial, every person and every human institution was put on the rack, and the quality of the metal from which they were made was ruthlessly tested. Under this stress two main political trends developed: resistance and collaboration.’ (p72)

Tags: #resistance, #japanese
People: Hu Hsueh-chen, Ch’ou-har
Locations: Lucheng County

7. Collaborators

Period: Second Sino-Japanese War
Notes:

Fort was built by conscript labor at the north end of Long Bow on the edge of no man’s land in 1943 (p75)
Incidental cruelties that accompanied the expropriation of the land on which the fort was built (p76)
Provincial armies retreated into the hinterland after crumbling before Japanese advance in 1937 (p77)
Almost a third of the people died of starvation in the famine year of 1942 (p78)
The group that Fan commanded defected after the killing of their leader (p79)
Advancement of Catholicism under the protection of foreign powers (p79)

Quotes:

‘The defection at Lucheng was by no means an isolated incident. In the later years of the Anti- Japanese War, years that were characterized by a stalemate on the regular battlefronts, the surrender to the Japanese of whole units intact with their arms was arranged over and over again by high ranking Nationalist officers.’ (p79)

Tags: #cruelties, #war. #defection
People: Wu-k’uei (poor peasant); Wen Tui-chin; Fan Tung-hsi (commander); Shih Jen-pao, Shen Chi-mei; Kuo Lo-ts’ai (leading priest);
Locations: Lucheng County

8. Seeds of Change

Period: Second Sino-Japanese War
Notes:

Execution of Shang Shih-t’ou (p82-83)
Beginning of the revolutionary transformation process in Long Bow (p84)
Political and military vacuum created by the Japanese driving Kuomintang bureaucracy and
army out of north China (p84)
Establishment and growth of the Eighth Route Army (p85-87)
Recruits in Lucheng County to the resistance army (p87-90)
Village leader of Ku-yi killed in 1943 (p93)

Quotes:

‘The execution of Shang Shih-t’ou redeemed the village not only in the eyes of its own inhabitants, but before the whole county, and with this act the process of revolutionary transformation in Long Bow began.’ (p83-84)
‘It is one of the great ironies of history that the warlords of Japan, who insisted ad nauseam that they were “intervening” in China only to build prosperity in “Greater East Asia” and save the Chinese people from a fate worse than death – Communism – greatly hastened by that very intervention the triumph of the Communist-led Revolution.’ (p84)

Tags: #occupation, #resistance
People: Shang Shih-t’ou (Puppet administration); Shih Ts’ai-yuan, Chao Yin-kuei (first recruits of Army); Chang T’ien-ming, Shen So-tzu, Kung Lai-pao, Shih Fu-yuan (underground resistance group)

9. The Whirlwind

Period: August, 1945
Notes:

Long Bow Village liberated August 14, 1945
Overview of the early postwar military and political context
KMT orders the Japanese military back into action (p97)
American involvement (p98)
Japanese have withdrawn from village blockhouse in July, 1945 but 100 men from “puppet Fourth Column” there, plus forces from the Ai Hisang Tuan (爱乡团 Love the Village Corps）of collaborators (p99)
T’ian-ming as a “Trojan horse” feeling out the weaknesses of the collaborationist forces, and their surrender (p99)
Militia surround Changchih (p100)

Quotes:

‘More than once American marines and ex-puppet Kuomintang forces conducted joint operations against the “red bandits” who were “disrupting communications.” No more damaging coalition of forces could possibly have been assembled in a planned and conscious effort to dissipate the “reservoir of goodwill” which American wartime policy had built up in China.’

Tags: #puppets
People: Chang T’ien-ming (“Trojan horse” infiltrating the Love the Village Corps)
Location: Long Bow Village, Changchih

Part II Sunrise in the West: The Year of Expropriation

10. Which Road?

Period: August, 1945

Notes:

Chapter continues with broad context of early postwar.
Fear, including among Communists that they could not withstand Chiang Kai-shek’s attack to come (p104) – fear of a possible “change of sky” (p106)
“Compromisers” such as landlords and middle-class who suppored the CCP during the National United Front but not ready for the break in that front to come (p104)
CCP dual policy: “serious efforts” for a peaceful settlement, on the one hand, and preparation for attack of liberated areas.

Quotes:

‘Mao Tse-tung compared the victory won by the people of the Liberated Areas to the liberation of a peach tree heavy with fruit. Who should be allowed to pick the fruit? Those who had tended and watered the three with their sweat and their blood, or those who had sat far away with folded arms? (p103)
‘”Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers.” This was Mao’s paraphrase, in August 1946, of Lenin’s famous dictum that imperialism is a colossus with feet of clay.’

Tags: #civilwar #changeofsky
People: None mentioned
Location: Long Bow

11. Beat the Dog’s Leg

Period: 1945

Notes:

Anti-traitor (反奸清算运动) meeting. First public meeting in Long Bow for 20 years. (p107)
Puppet village head Kuo Te-yu brought forward bound.
Kuo Huang-kou asks Chang T’ien-ming to be village chairman, turns it down asks to continue as public security officer (p110)
First postwar campaign had slogans, “Down with Traitors, Down with Kuomintang Agents, Down with Local Despots”, “Liquidate the Bloody Eight Years’ Debt”, and “Beat Down the Dog’s Legs to Find his Head; Beat Down the Little Fellows to Find the Leaders” (pp111-2)
People’s Government now located at Lucheng County in the Yamen of county seat
young cadres and militia men introduced to the village, their identities as cadres revealed.
Public meeting to try Kuo Te-yu, attempt to hold a “speak bitterness” session, but few join. Kuei-ts’ai beats Kuo. Meeting called off meeting, which failed to get voices condemning him, and agreed to find people to speak up. (p114)
Landlords and KMT spread rumors that Yen Hsi-shan and Japanese are coming and have list of revolutionaries (p114)
T’ien-ming and Kuei-ts’ai call together small groups to find out what is holding people back (p114)
Organization of a small group of “activists” (积极分子) (p115)
Next meeting goes better.
Another public meeting trial with 190 peasants from around the district, many accusations emerge (p116)
Two executions at edge of village. Third prisoner handed over to County Court at Lucheng but escaped and later caught and killed.
Militia leads thousands of people on hunt for looted property (p117)

Quotes:

‘If the political and military vacuum left by the surrender of the garrison and the collapse of the puppet village government was not quickly filled by the resistance forces, the gentry would fill it themselves by reshuffling their old political machine and varnishing it with a resounding new title such as “Anti-Japanese Patriotic Government.”‘ (p110)
‘The young men asked nobody’s permission. They were not elected or appointed. They took power on the assumption that the underground work of their key leaders had earned them the right to administer the liberated village.’ (p111)
‘Let us speak out the bitter memories of the past. Let us see that the blood debt is repaid.’ (p112)
‘When we beat down the traitors, we can stand up. We can divide the fruits of their corruption and start a new life.’ (p113)
‘Along with these threats went a campaign to discredit the resistance movement; rumors were spread that women were nationalized in the Liberated Areas, ancestral graves violated, and all peasants forced to eat ta kuo fan or “food out of one big pot.” (大锅饭) The other side of this coin was the claim that collaboration had really been resistance, that by bending temporarily to Japan’s will the puppets had worked for national salvation along a curved path.’ (曲线救国)
‘The mobilization of the population could spread only slowly and in concentric circles like the waves on the surface of a pond when a stone was thrown in. The stone in this case was the small group of chi chi fen-tse or “activists” as the cadres of the new administration and the core of its militia were called. (积极分子)

Tags: #antitraitormovement
People:

Shen Chi-mei (head of Fifth District police, executed)
Wen Ch’i-yung (commander of puppet garrison, executed)
Sheng Ching-ho (richest man in Long Bow)
Chou Mei-sheng (“chief of staff”), Kuo Te-yu (puppet village head)
Shang Shih-t’ou (former pupet village head, executed)
Chang T’ien-ming (leads meeting, public security officer)
Kuo Huang-kou (“Yellow Dog Kuo”, underground district leader)
Kuei-ts’ai (becomes village vice-chairman)
Chang San-ch’ing (becomes secretary, former clerk in drug shop in occupied Taiyuan)
Chang Chiang-tzu (appointed captain of militia)
Shih Fu-yuan (underground activist, missed first meeting)
Wang En-pao (son of Carry-On Society chairman, leading KMT figure)
Wang Kuei-ching (Carry-On Society chairman)
Yen Hsi-shan (warlord), Roshiro Sumita (Japanese general in Shanxi)
So-tzu (died in war), Lai-pao (died in war), Fu-yuan (suffered beating in war)
Shih-Jen-pao (escaped puppet from Fourth Column)
Ch’ing T’ien-hsing (assistant to Shen Chi-mei, escaped, then caught and executed)
Chin-mao (thrown in well, killed by wartime police)
Shen Ch’uan-te (accused puppets of guilty of death of her brother)
Wang Lai-hsun (landlord, looted property found at his property)

Location: Long Bow, Lucheng