Mass Movement in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn
is an exceptionally intriguing and informative book, which builds for
readers a vivid picture of the Chinese revolution, its early
achievements and the problems it faced regarding land reform, through
the microcosm of life in one small Chinese village.
Observers and participants, friends and comrades
The
authors, David and Isabel Crook, experienced at first hand the
momentous events of the Chinese revolution and stayed to raise their
own family in China, despite any and all hardships, giving joyfully of
their energy and knowledge to the land, people and political system
that they came to identify with completely.
David Crook, a
Londoner, was born on 14 August 1910. He was wounded while serving with
the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and later went
to China to teach English at Saint John’s University, Shanghai, where
he also carried out work for the international communist movement. It
was here that he met Isabel Brown, the daughter of Canadian
missionaries.
Isabel, although classed as Canadian because her
parents had come from there, had actually been born in Chengdu, in
China’s Sichuan Province, on 15 December 1915 and had spent her whole
childhood there.
In 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet
Union, David decided to return to England, reactivating his membership
of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and joining the RAF. His
new wife Isabel went with him, and she too became an active member of
the party, organising workers in the Finsbury Park factory where she
worked during the war. Both Crooks were actively involved in the
struggle against the revisionist elements who had begun to gain
strength in the party immediately following the war.
After the
war and a brief period of study at the University of London, the Crooks
headed back to China in 1947 to observe and write about the land reform
that was taking place in some of China’s liberated zones. With an
introduction from the CPGB, the couple was able to settle in Shilidian
(Ten Mile Inn) – a village in the communist-controlled northern border
region. They became deeply involved with the ongoing struggles of the
Chinese people for their emancipation, and in 1949 they entered Beijing
with the victorious communist soldiers.
For the next 40 years,
the Crooks immersed themselves in all parts of Chinese social life
while teaching at the Peking First Foreign Languages Institute (now the
Beijing Foreign Studies University), which Isabel helped to set up in
1950, in which she worked until her retirement and on whose campus she
still lives.
Both David and Isabel were subject to false charges
during the cultural revolution. In this tumultuous and often confused
period, many foreign and Chinese comrades experienced such turmoil.
David was imprisoned from 1967 to 1973, accused of being a spy. This
did not shake or diminish his or Isabel’s loyalty to the Chinese
communist party or the Chinese people in the slightest, however, and he
continued to work at the university until his death on 1 November 2000.
As Isabel told a Chinese journalist in 2010: “He was well aware
that ‘revolution is not a dinner party’ so he never blamed China for
his lengthy stay in Qincheng prison ... David’s life and that of our
whole family has been immeasurably enriched by our participation in
China's great, but tortuous, revolution.”
For her part, Isabel
was sent to work with the peasants in the fields, but she always
insists that it was for her a rewarding time, working alongside the
people she loves.
Speaking of Isabel, the university’s
president, Hao Ping, says that her “legendary life is so closely
related to China and the university ... she is a pioneer of the
country’s English education cause. And she has played a precious and
significant role in developing our school.” Comrade Isabel (as most of
her students referred to her) is also an anthropologist and a social
activist. Despite her advancing years, she still keeps up with the
current affairs of China and the world, and, as an “old friend of the
Chinese people and the Communist Party of China”, she is among a
handful of distinguished foreign experts who are invited to attend an
annual reception with the Chinese premier. She has even used these
occasions to share her thoughts with China’s modern-day leaders on how
conditions of life could be improved for rural people.
Isabel
has recently become a member of our own party, and at this year’s
congress was unanimously voted in as our Honorary President – providing
our young members in particular with a living link to the best
traditions of Britain’s communist movement.
Rural poverty and degradation
In
their book, which Isabel says they wrote in part in the hope that it
might also help the people of other poor countries such as India to
make revolution, and which has in fact become a handbook of experience
and technique for agricultural workers struggling to bring socialist
organisation to their own countries, Isabel and David summed up the
recent history of Ten Mile Inn, covering the ten-year period that
preceded their own arrival in the village.
They noted that, in 1937, “Practically everyone of the village’s 1,500 people depended for a livelihood on cultivating the 4,000 odd mu [about 660 acres, 1 square mile]
which then remained. The few exceptions were members of a handful of
landlord and rich peasant families whose income was derived wholly or
partly from rents, usury or business interests. But the overwhelming
majority had to eke out a livelihood by labouring on their tiny plots
of land. They engaged in back-breaking toil with simple tools whose
design had changed little in the course of a couple of thousand years.
Many peasants farmed widely scattered plots at a distance of over a
mile from both the village and each other.”
At that time,
the area suffered (like all rural China) from intermittent famines,
which were accepted as an inevitable part of the lot of the poor: “The
twenty richest families averaged nearly two-and-a-half times as much
land per head as the middle peasant families and nearly seven times as
much per head as the families of the poor peasants and hired labourers.
It was the members of these poor families who died or emigrated first
in times of famine; who were forced by poverty to kill or sell their
children; who were driven by hunger to join the warlord and bandit
armies; who were imprisoned for non-payment of taxes or lost their
meagre property by default for non-payment of debts. Differences of
class were a matter of life and death.”
The position of women prior to the revolution was shockingly low: “In
the old days the men used to talk about village affairs on the street,
but we never dared take part. And when someone came to the door and
called out, ‘Is anyone at home?’ we women ourselves would answer, ‘No,
there’s nobody home.’ Women didn’t count as human beings.”
Hierarchical
feudal clans and temples were also arenas of struggle and compromise
between landlords, with rich peasants weighing heavily on the poor
peasants and, to a lesser extent, the middle peasants too. Isabel and
David revealed the intricacies of all these matters in a very readable
and interesting way that brings the time vividly to life.
All
this was changing, however. As the Chinese communists fought to push
out the Japanese invaders they also organised in the areas under their
control, in particular by introducing peasants’ unions to defend the
poor peasantry and help them to organise against the oppression that
made their lives so burdensome.
Of course, those areas that
were neither staggering under the brutal yoke of Japanese imperialism
nor lifting themselves up with the help of the communist liberators had
to suffer the rule of bandits or Kuomintang forces (virtually the same
thing).
“By the end of 1937 the Japanese had not only
seized the Peking–Hankow railway. They had penetrated deep into the
plain through which it ran, with its rich trading centres and farmland.
Some of the bandits and warlords and Kuomintang forces who had depended
for their livelihood on this area immediately capitulated and became
Japanese puppets.
“Other armed forces, including part of
the Kuomintang’s Fifty-third Army, moved westwards to Wu An and
adjacent counties of the T’aihang foothills, occupying the small area
between the Japanese in the plain to the east and the communist-led
guerrillas in the T’aihang mountains to the west. Here they battened on
the people, eating their grain, seizing their animals, invading their
homes, raping their women. They even demanded a steady supply of opium
and heroin, which the Japanese were systematically pouring into the
region as a means of undermining its power of resistance.”
And
this was the position in Ten Mile Inn. But as hard as the Kuomintang
forces were on the peasants of the village, as soon as the Japanese
came near they retreated in total disorder with their commanders
leading the way. The Japanese garrisoned the townlet of P’aihui, seven
miles down the valley from Ten Mile Inn, and established an outpost at
another townlet, Yeht’ao, less than three miles to the south-west.
Although Ten Mile Inn itself was never directly occupied by the
Japanese, the imperial forces did pass through the village, burning
some of the houses and killing ten villagers who had tried to hide from
the invaders.
The destabilising and disastrous effects of the
Kuomintang forces’ behaviour – both their oppression and their
cowardice – on the villagers is summed up in the book as follows:
“The
communist forces in the area at this time were small and their
operations were on a limited scale. But they were of a vital nature.
They were laying the foundations for arousing the mass of the peasants
to take part in the struggle against the Japanese invaders, who from
their stronghold in the county-town made systematic and regular sorties
into the villages to supply themselves with two of their most urgent
needs – grain and women.
The greatest obstacle which the
communists encountered in organising resistance was that the peasants’
spirit had been almost completely shattered by the abuses and ruinous
exactions of the Kuomintang troops. The latter’s extortions had in the
end become so great that the peasants thought bitterly that the
Japanese could hardly be worse; and that perhaps they might even be
better.”
Arrival of the communists
When the
communist soldiers of the advancing Eighth Route Army arrived in Ten
Mile Inn, they set about patiently organising the people into
anti-Japanese militias – but not before they had helped them to build
cave defences and hiding places in the mountains to protect their
families and make sure no vital foodstuffs fell into Japanese hands.
The
communists also introduced a new tax system, under which those who
possessed wealth were expected to pay taxes in money, but those who
didn’t were asked instead to give labour for projects such as helping
to build fortifications or carrying wounded soldiers away to rear
positions by stretcher. And all the while, education classes were being
run to help the villagers manage their own affairs.
Another
total break with the past was the organisation of a women’s league
under the slogan of full equality for women. In these ways, the spirits
of the people were lifted and their desire to resist the Japanese
strengthened as they started to feel that they had a new future to
fight for rather than going back to the oppression and corruption of
the Chiang Kai-shek period.
The work of the Women’s League was
slow to start but through the education of those who most wanted to go
forward – those who could most clearly see that the old way was no good
– it was able to get started.
“The major task was to teach
the women to spin and weave. Money for the raw materials and equipment
came from government loans (administered through the new village
cooperative which was set up at this time).” This may not seem very revolutionary now, but these patient, well thought-out steps were laying a strong foundation.
The women organised themselves into groups for the spinning and weaving of cloth for the army: “Each
group elected one woman to act as a supervisor whose duty it was to see
that army shoes, uniforms and quilts conformed to standard. All the
women from 16 to 50 were eligible to do this service and received
payment for it.”
This in turn meant that “the women of
Ten Mile Inn, who in the past had been forced into unemployment by lack
of capital and by urban machine competition, were able to earn money.
This improvement of their economic position was the most powerful
factor in the beginning of the emancipation of the women of Ten Mile
Inn. Perhaps the chief characteristic of the women’s work at this
period, however, was that it was in the nature of an offensive on all
fronts at once. It called for equal rights for women, freedom of
marriage, no beating by husbands or parents-in-law, increased
production of all sorts (including farm work, but especially spinning
and weaving), economic support for the front through rear service
(making shoes, uniforms, etc), and besides all this, literacy classes,
bobbing of hair, unbinding of feet and opposition to face-saving.”
The
book is full of such examples of the Chinese communists’ skill in using
slow but steady practical steps to carry the masses forward. It also
underlines the necessity of looking at the history and context of
things in order to understand them properly. It was this dialectical
method that David and Isabel used to trace the very real gains that
were made in pushing forward land reform during the early days of the
Chinese revolution.
By the beginning of 1942, “almost two
years of communist influence and reforms had considerably improved the
economic position of the labourers and tenants. This had greatly
strengthened their bargaining position and had given them a new
confidence in themselves. The result was that some forty of the poorest
families in the village, all of them either tenants or farm-labourers
or both at the same time, organised a union. These were the people to
whom the communists’ wartime policy of reduction of rent and interest
was a vital issue. Besides having little or no land of their own, they
were all more or less heavily in debt. Double reduction could be put
into effect only if these villagers were well organised and courageous
enough to demand it. Unlike the village government and the
co-operative, the peasant union was one institution which the landlords
and rich peasants could not dominate.”
And further on the role of the union: “The
main purpose of the communists, who set about organising it in the
first place, was to make the union a training-ground for the
development of a capacity for leadership and for independent organised
action on the part of the masses themselves. Little by little a dual
power was to be established in the village. And though at the outset
the peasant union was to be only the shadow or secondary organisation,
its objective was to produce leaders who would take over the village
government itself.”
The struggle continues
The
book proceeds to tell the story of the rise of the communist party in
the village, the problems it encountered and the solutions that its
local members came up with, including how they coped with betrayals,
lies and intrigues of the rich peasants and landlords who were trying
desperately to keep their grip over the rising poor, who had for so
long been the biddable source of all their wealth.
In telling
this seemingly small part of China’s story, the Crooks were also able
to demonstrate the struggle to raise standards in all fields that led
eventually to the popular communist rule of this vast, multinational
country.
As vibrant today as it was when it was written, this
is a book that any student of China, or of communism in general, will
find fascinating. In June 1949, a few months after the Crooks had
arrived in Beijing with the liberating communist forces, Comrade Mao
Zedong gave a speech at an event celebrating the party’s 28th birthday.
Much to the surprise of many, he declared that “the victory is just the
first step of a long march of 10,000 miles”, and added: “building
socialism will take a long time”.
Looking back at that time
recently, Isabel commented: “David and I both thought Chairman Mao was
too modest in saying that, but now I see he is right. Ninety years have
passed since the founding of the party, and the long march is not ended
yet. There are still a lot of things that need to be done.” |
